Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [97]
37. Zohar 2:63a-b.
38. On the Kabbalistic side, see Tishby's detailed discussion, particularly regarding the latter strata of the Zohar, in his Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 246-251.
39. See my brief outlining of the sefirot in A Guide to the Zohar, pp. 28-59, as well as the fuller treatment in Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 269-308.
40. Patah Eliyahu, a passage from Tiqquney Zohar (Second Introduction), widely printed in prayer books. In Sephardic communities it serves as part of a daily early morning introduction to prayer; Hasidic Jews recite it on Friday afternoon, prior to receiving the Sabbath.
41. I discuss the history of this symbol in Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
42. For the origins of this phrase, incorporated by Alkabetz into his Lekha Dodi to refer to the shekhinah, see S. M. Stern, “The First in Thought Is the Last in Action: The History of a Saying Attributed to Aristotle,” Journal of Semitic Studies 7 (1962): 234-252.
43. In addition to A Guide to the Zohar I have written an introduction to the sefirot addressed to the contemporary seeker in Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2003), pp. 39-60.
44. Zohar 1:3b.
45. On Luria and his system, see Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
46. I skip over the bizarre and fascinating developments in Jewish theology that took place within the Sabbatian messianic movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both because this historical treatment has become rather long and because the movement had little lasting direct effect on later Judaism.
47. Hasidism, like the entirety of Jewish mysticism, tends to be quite exclusivist in its view of humanity. Jews are depicted as being essentially different from other humans, having greater spiritual capacities. This doctrine is technically not quite “racist,” since conversion to Judaism is possible, and thus the higher states of soul are a spiritually rather than a physically borne legacy, but the result is much the same. Any contemporary “neo-” approach to either Kabbalah or Hasidism has to deal honestly with this uncomfortable part of the tradition, shift its application to include other humans, and deal with the legitimacy of other faiths, something that premodern Judaism was seldom able to do.
48. Hasidism mostly subscribed to the school of Kabbalistic thought that considered keter, the first of the ten sefirot in most systems, to be so beyond human ken as not to be counted. The decad then began with hokhmah, with a third sefirah of da'at added to complete the ten.
49. Primarily the writings of R. Dov Baer of Miedzyrzec and his circle. For discussion see Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Ha-Hasidut ke-Mistiqah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1968).
50. Hasidic homilies subtly combine the rabbinic understanding of shekhinah as indwelling presence with the Kabbalistic legacy of shekhinah as the divine consort. Taken together they come to mean that this world, led by the human soul, enters into mystical (or coital) union with the transcendent God.
51. The most thorough academic presentation of their ideas is to be found in the writings of Rachel Elior, especially The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and more briefly her “Habad: The Contemplative Ascent to God,” in my collection Jewish Spirituality, vol. 1, 157-205. For a brief and somewhat more accessible guide to R. Aaron and his teachings, see Louis Jacobs's Seeker of Unity (New York: Basic Books, 1966).
52. For some key elements in this discussion, see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), index s.vv. Unio Mystica and Union with God, and his “Devekuth or Communion with God,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays (New York: Schocken, 1971); Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives