Cleaving

The last essay ended with a word. Behind all the doctrines of the Kabbalah, the sefirot and the hidden God, the exile of the Shekhinah and the shattered vessels, there was a single aim, and the Kabbalists had a name for it: devekut, cleaving. This essay is about that aim. The cosmology of the earlier essays describes the world as the Kabbalists saw it; devekut describes what they hoped would happen to a human being who saw it truly.

The word comes from a Hebrew verb, davak, that means to cling or to stick fast. It is an ordinary word, used of things that adhere: in the Bible a tongue cleaves to the roof of the mouth, and a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. It is used of Ruth, who will not leave her mother-in-law Naomi when everyone else turns back, but clings to her and says that where Naomi goes she will go. And it is used, several times in the book of Deuteronomy, of Israel and God. Moses tells the people that they who cleaved to the Lord their God are alive, every one of them, this day; he commands them to love God, to walk in his ways and to cleave to him. The image is not of vision or knowledge but of attachment: of something held so closely that it cannot be pulled away.

How can one cleave to a fire?§

The rabbis of the Talmud saw the difficulty at once. The same book of Deuteronomy says that God is a consuming fire. How can a human being cleave to fire? Their answer, given in more than one place, turned the command outward. To cleave to God, said one teacher, is to walk in God’s ways: as God clothed the naked, when he made garments for Adam and Eve, so clothe the naked; as God visited the sick, so visit the sick; as God comforted mourners and buried the dead, so do the same. Another passage answers that one cleaves to God by cleaving to the wise, by serving and supporting those who study God’s teaching.

This is worth noticing before the mystics take the word further, because they never wholly left it behind. Devekut began as a word for loyalty and for conduct. The God of the Bible is not reached by escaping from the world but by imitating him in it, and the first meaning of cleaving is to do what God does. Every later Jewish account of mystical nearness had to come to terms with this one.

The philosopher and the kiss§

In the twelfth century Moses Maimonides gave the word a different weight. In the last chapters of his Guide of the Perplexed he describes the highest worship as the love of God that follows from knowing him, and the highest human state as one in which the mind is fixed on God continually, even while the body is busy with the affairs of the world(Maimonides 1904, III.51). Such, he says, were the patriarchs and Moses: they managed households, flocks and nations, and their minds did not leave God. Maimonides goes on to an old rabbinic tradition about the deaths of Moses, Aaron and Miriam. The Bible says that Moses died by the mouth of the Lord, and the rabbis read this as a kiss. For Maimonides it meant that the mind of the perfected person, at the moment of death, passes into the delight of knowing God; the soul leaves the body in a kiss.

A century later the great Catalan teacher Nachmanides, one of the first to give the Kabbalah standing among the rabbis, explained the command to cleave in a similar way. It means, he wrote in his commentary on the Torah, to remember God and his love always, so that one’s thought is never separated from him, even when one is speaking with others with mouth and tongue. The heart is elsewhere. Those who reach this, he says, are already in this life bound up in the bond of eternal life.

The Zohar, written in these same decades in Castile, sets cleaving in the language of love. Ginsburg gives a passage on the two feelings that bind the soul to God, fear and love. The service that comes from fear, it says, is real service, and leads to love; but “There is only one degree which is higher than fear: it is love. In love is the mystery of the divine unity.” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.52) The soul, as Ginsburg summarises the doctrine, was sent into the world to return to its source, and “This destiny of man—i.e., the reunion with the Deity from which he emanated—is the constant desire both of God and man” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.51). The desire runs both ways. God longs for the soul as the soul longs for God.

Abulafia and the letters of the Name§

The most daring of the medieval masters of devekut was Abraham Abulafia, born in Saragossa in 1240. He studied the Bible, the Talmud, philosophy and medicine, and was a close reader of Maimonides’ Guide, which he taught. Ginsburg, who had little sympathy for him, says that “Finding no comfort in philosophy, he gave himself entirely to the mysteries of the Kabbalah in their most fantastic extremes” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.19). Modern scholars, above all Moshe Idel, have read him very differently: as the founder of what they call ecstatic or prophetic Kabbalah, a path concerned less with the structure of the sefirot than with the transformation of the one who meditates.

Abulafia’s method was the combination of letters. The Book of Creation, which the first essay in this series read, says that God made the world by combining the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Abulafia drew the practical conclusion: the letters, and above all the letters of the divine names, are the way back. Ginsburg describes the practice. The meditator prepares by “retiring into a quiet closet, by dressing oneself in white apparel, by putting on the fringed garment and the phylacteries”, and then by “pronouncing the letters composing the divine name with certain modulations of the voice and divine pauses”, with movements of the head and body, until the voice and the heart are overwhelmed. When that state is reached, in Ginsburg’s words, “the soul then unites itself with the divine soul in a kiss, and prophetic revelations follow as a matter of course” ¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 3.19: “1. Abulafia, the founder of it, who was born at Saragossa in 1240, and died circa 1292. For thirty years he devoted himself to the study of the Bible, the Talmud, philology, philosophy, and medicine, making himself master of the philosophical writings of Saadia, Bachja b. Joseph, Maimonides, and Antoli, as well as of the Kabbalistic works which were then …” Read in context Ginsburg’s summary, from 1865, is hostile, and he describes the practice from a distance. The kiss is the same image that Maimonides used for the death of Moses.

Abulafia’s own account of the goal, which Ginsburg translates from his reply to his great opponent Solomon ben Adret of Barcelona, is more striking still. The second and higher part of the Kabbalah, he says, seeks God by means of the twenty-two letters and the divine names combined from them, which raise the Kabbalist to prophecy, “drawing out their spirit, and causing it to be united with God and to become one with the Deity” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.22). The letters are a ladder. By them the initiate may “concentrate all his powers direct to one point to God, and unite himself with the Deity” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.23). This is the language of union, and it is rare in Jewish writing.

His life was as bold as his teaching. He believed himself a prophet and, for a time, the Messiah. He travelled to Rome intending to speak with the pope; Ginsburg, following older historians, says he was thrown into prison and narrowly escaped burning (Ginsburg 1865, 3.20), though modern historians tell the story differently: the pope he sought died before Abulafia could see him, and he was held only briefly. Solomon ben Adret, the leading rabbi of his age, condemned his claims, and Abulafia spent his last years in exile on a small island near Malta. Most of his many books remained in manuscript for centuries. Yet his influence ran underground, through his students and through those who copied his manuals, into Safed and beyond.

Readers of this site will recognise the shape of Abulafia’s method from other traditions: the repetition of a sacred name, the regulation of breath and posture, the gathering of attention to one point. The essays on the practice of attention described the Sufi dhikr, the Hindu japa and the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern Christian monks. Some scholars have suggested that Sufi practice was known in the circles that followed Abulafia; others doubt any direct borrowing. The likeness is real either way. Wherever human beings have sought to cleave to God, they have found that a single word held in the heart is one of the ways.

Equanimity and solitude§

Later masters added two conditions that the earlier sources only hint at. The first was equanimity. A story attributed to Isaac of Acre, a Kabbalist of the generation after Abulafia, tells of a seeker who came to a master of solitary meditation and asked to be taught. The master asked whether he had attained equanimity: whether praise and insult were the same to him. The seeker said he felt pleasure at praise and pain at insult, though he did not seek revenge. Then go, said the master, until you have become equanimous; a mind still moved by honour cannot be joined to God. The story could be told, with small changes, in the Bhagavad Gītā or among the desert fathers.

The second was solitude, hitbodedut, which meant both physical withdrawal and the inner gathering of the mind. In sixteenth-century Safed, the Kabbalists practised it as a discipline. Cordovero wrote a short book, The Palm Tree of Deborah, that takes the thirteen attributes of mercy that God revealed to Moses and asks the reader to practise each of them, returning to the Talmud’s answer: to cleave to God is to become like him in conduct. Ḥayyim Vital, Luria’s disciple, wrote a manual on how the holy spirit could still be reached, by purification, solitude and the concentrated intention of prayer. Luria taught his companions meditations called unifications, practised sometimes at the graves of the ancient sages, in which the mind joined the letters of divine names and, the Kabbalists believed, joined the soul to the souls of the righteous who had gone before.

In the same circles a short prayer came into use before the performance of a commandment, declaring its intention. Ginsburg quotes a form of it: “For the re-union of the Holy One, blessed be his name, and his Shechinah, I do this in love and fear, in fear and love” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.53). Every act of obedience became an act of union, both of the divine powers with one another and of the worshipper with God. The prayer is still printed in many prayer books.

The Baal Shem Tov§

For most of its history devekut was the aim of a few: scholars, ascetics and companions living under strict discipline. In eighteenth-century Podolia, in what is now western Ukraine, it became the aim of a popular movement. Israel ben Eliezer, born around 1700 and known as the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, was a healer and teacher who lived in the small town of Medzhybizh and died there in 1760. He wrote almost nothing. What we know of him comes from his disciples’ books and from a collection of stories, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, printed more than fifty years after his death. Modern historians have worked to separate the man from the legends, and have found a figure more rooted in his town’s ordinary life than the stories suggest, but no less remarkable.

His teaching made devekut available everywhere. The earlier masters had sought it in study, prayer and seclusion; the Baal Shem taught that God’s presence fills every place and that a person can cleave to God in eating, working, walking and speaking, if the act is done with awareness of the divine life hidden in it. His followers called this worship through the material world. He taught that sadness and anxious scruple were obstacles, and joy the condition of nearness. He taught that the stray thoughts that intrude on prayer should not be fought but raised to their root, because even they hold a spark of holiness. And he taught a way of praying in which the worshipper enters into the letters of the words, until the words themselves pray and the one who prays is no longer aware of himself.

A letter that has come down in his name describes an ascent of the soul on the New Year, in the 1740s, in which he reached the palace of the Messiah and asked when the Messiah would come. The answer, as the letter tells it, was that it would be when the Baal Shem’s teaching had spread and become known in the world. Whatever one makes of the vision, it shows how he understood his work: the cleaving that had belonged to a few was meant for all.

His successor, Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch, gave the teaching its sharpest form, in the language that the third essay of this series met. A person, he taught, must turn the something into nothing: the self that is full of itself, yesh, must become ayin, nothing, before the divine life can flow through it. Only one who has become nothing in his own eyes can become a vessel for what comes from the divine Nothing. The movement spread through Eastern Europe within a generation, and met fierce opposition from rabbis who feared it would undermine study and the law; in 1772 the Gaon of Vilna and his circle issued the first bans against it. Its masters went on teaching, and their stories, collected in the twentieth century by Martin Buber among others, are among the best-loved writings of the Jewish tradition.

In the next generation Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the Baal Shem’s great-grandson, gave his followers a practice that reaches back to the medieval masters of solitude and forward to anyone who prays alone. Every day, he taught, a person should go apart, ideally into the fields or woods at night, and speak to God in his own language, pouring out his heart as to a friend, for an hour. He also called it hitbodedut. The word that had meant the silent concentration of the mind on a divine name now meant a conversation.

Communion or union?§

Is devekut the union of the soul with God, or something less: a communion in which the soul draws as near as it can while remaining itself? Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern study of Kabbalah, argued that devekut was in general a communion, not a union. Jewish mystics, he wrote, rarely spoke of the soul merging with God; the distance between Creator and creature was kept even at the summit, and this restraint was one of the marks of Jewish mysticism. Moshe Idel, a generation later, answered that Scholem had underestimated the evidence. Abulafia, as Ginsburg’s quotations show, speaks of becoming one with the Deity, and so do later writers in his line and some of the Hasidic masters. Both scholars agree that the tradition holds both languages. They differ on which is the more characteristic.

The question is the one that this site’s Great Questions ask in general: whether union with God is identity or communion. In the Sufi tradition the same debate runs between those who speak of annihilation in God, fana, and those who insist on the subsistence of the servant before the Lord. In Christian mysticism it runs between the bold sayings of Eckhart and the careful distinctions of Teresa, whose soul in the seventh dwelling is married to God and remains herself. The Kabbalists do not settle it. Perhaps the word they chose does the best that a word can. To cleave is to be held so close that nothing can come between; it is not to cease to be.

What cleaving asks§

Set the many forms of devekut side by side and they share a shape. It begins in conduct: in walking in God’s ways, clothing the naked and comforting mourners, as the rabbis taught, and in the commandments performed with love and fear. It deepens in attention: in the mind held on God while the hands are busy, as Maimonides and Nachmanides described, and in the concentration of every power to one point, as Abulafia taught. It requires the ego to be quieted: by equanimity before praise and blame, and by the turning of something into nothing. And in its fullest form it does not withdraw from the world but finds God in it, in eating and walking and speaking, as the Baal Shem taught.

Ruth’s cleaving to Naomi is perhaps the best picture of it. It was not an ecstasy but a loyalty. She had every reason to turn back, and she would not. Where you go I will go, she said, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. The mystics of the Kabbalah took the word further than the story did, into the letters of the divine name and the nothing at the top of the Tree. But they never forgot that cleaving is, before anything else, a refusal to let go.

The last essay in this series follows the Kabbalah out of the Jewish world: into the hands of Christian scholars of the Renaissance, who read it as a key to their own faith, and of the occultists of the nineteenth century, who made it into the Hermetic Qabalah. It asks what was kept, and what was lost, when the tradition of receiving was received by strangers.