Receiving

Most mystical traditions name themselves after what they seek or what they do. Yoga means joining; Sufism is named, perhaps, for the wool its first ascetics wore; contemplation is a looking. The Jewish mystical tradition took a stranger name. Kabbalah comes from the Hebrew root qbl, to receive. It is not called the seeking or the vision or the union. It is called the receiving.

Christian Ginsburg, whose 1865 essay on the subject is in the Library’s reader, explains that the word “primarily denotes reception, and then a doctrine received by oral tradition” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.3). The tradition’s own account of itself, which he retells before he examines it, is a chain of receivers. God taught the doctrine to a school of angels in Paradise; the angels taught it to Adam after the fall, so that he might find his way back; it passed to Noah and to Abraham, who took it into Egypt; Moses was initiated into it there and studied it for forty years in the wilderness; David and Solomon knew it best of all; and no one wrote it down until Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, hiding in a cave from the Romans, was taught its secrets by the prophet Elijah.¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 1.2: “The Kabbalah was first taught by God himself to a select company of angels, who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the fall the angels most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity. From Adam it passed over to Noah, …” Read in context

No historian believes this story as it stands, and this series will not ask anyone to. The name Kabbalah was first given to Jewish mystical teaching in Provence and Catalonia in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the book that Shimon bar Yoḥai is said to have written, the Zohar, was composed in Castile in the late thirteenth century. In the older language of the rabbis, the phrase “words of kabbalah” meant something quite different: the books of the Prophets and the Writings, the parts of scripture received after Moses.

But the legend says something true about how this tradition understands knowledge, and it is worth staying with before the history begins. In most of the paths this site has followed, the seeker goes out to find. In Kabbalah, the seeker makes room to receive. The knowledge is not produced by the mind’s effort, though effort is required; it is given, by a teacher, by a text, and finally by God, and the whole discipline is to become someone able to take it in. This is the thread the series will follow, through seven essays, from the visions of late antiquity to the Hasidic masters of the eighteenth century, and finally to what became of the tradition when it passed into Christian and then occult hands.

We begin where the tradition itself begins to be visible: with two kinds of forbidden study that the rabbis of the first centuries named and fenced, and with a short and very strange book.

Two secrets: the chariot and the beginning§

The book of Ezekiel opens with the most elaborate vision in the Hebrew Bible. By the river Chebar in Babylonia, in exile, the priest Ezekiel sees a storm come out of the north, and in it four living creatures, each with four faces and four wings, and beside them wheels full of eyes, wheels within wheels, moving wherever the spirit goes. Above the creatures is a firmament like terrible crystal, and above the firmament the likeness of a throne, and on the throne a likeness as the appearance of a man, surrounded by fire and brightness like the rainbow. This, Ezekiel says, was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord, and when he saw it he fell on his face.

The rabbis called this vision the merkavah, the chariot, and its study the work of the chariot. They set beside it a second subject of the same kind: the work of the beginning, the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Both, they held, were dangerous. The Mishnah, the code of Jewish law edited around 200 CE, lays down in its tractate Ḥagigah that the work of the beginning may not be expounded before two students, and the chariot not even before one, unless he is wise and understands of his own knowledge. The second condition is the remarkable one. The teacher may only confirm what the student has already begun to see.

The same passage of the Mishnah adds a warning that has echoed through the tradition ever since. The anthology Hebraic Literature, also in the reader, gives it in the version the Talmud connects with the chariot:²2 The Babylonian Talmud, Hebraic Literature, passage 1: “Whosoever prieth into the four things in the matter of the chariot in Ezekiel's vision--what is above, what is beneath, what is before, or what is behind--it were better for him if he had never been born. The work or matter of the chariot, the Rabbinic term for the Vision of Ezekiel, ranks among the Arcana Judaica, which are not …” Read in context In the Mishnah (Ḥagigah 2:1) the warning stands as a general one, after the rule on the chariot; the Talmud discusses it on the pages the anthology cites. whoever looks into what is above, what is below, what was before and what will be after, it would have been better for him not to have come into the world.

It is easy to read this as simple prohibition, the reflex of a religion of law against the dangers of speculation. But the rabbis did not forbid these subjects; they restricted them, and the restriction is a description of what kind of knowledge they are. The work of the chariot is not information that can be handed on to anyone. It is knowledge that changes, and can destroy, the one who receives it, and so it can only be given to someone already prepared. The two forbidden studies, creation and the chariot, are the two roots of everything that Kabbalah later became: a teaching about how the world comes forth from God, and a path by which the soul returns to God.

Four entered the garden§

The most famous story about the chariot is told in the Talmud, in the discussion of that same passage of the Mishnah. It is very short, and it has been read in more ways than almost any other text in rabbinic literature.

Four men entered the pardes, the garden or orchard: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aḥer and Rabbi Akiva. Akiva warned the others that when they came to the stones of pure marble, they must not cry out “Water! water!” Ben Azzai looked and died. Ben Zoma looked and was stricken, losing his mind. Aḥer, “the other one”, the rabbis’ name for the sage Elisha ben Abuyah, who left the faith, cut the shoots. Only Akiva entered in peace and went out in peace.³3 The Babylonian Talmud, Hebraic Literature, passage 2: “Four men entered Paradise--these are their names:--Ben Azai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva thus warned his companions: "When you come across pavements of pellucid marble, do not cry out 'Water! water!' for it is said (Ps. ci. 7), 'He that uttereth falsehood shall not dwell in my sight.'" Ben Azai looked and died; concerning him the Scripture …” Read in context

What happened in the garden? Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, took the story literally: the four ascended to heaven by means of the divine name. Maimonides, the philosopher, read it as an allegory of the most demanding kind of thought, the contemplation of God by the intellect; the garden was the retreat of deep meditation, and the fates of the sages were the fates of minds that went too far too fast. The anthology’s note sets both readings side by side. Later Kabbalists made the word pardes an acronym for the four levels at which scripture can be read: the plain sense, the hint, the homiletic sense and the secret.

Whatever one makes of the garden, the story is not about a technique that works. It is about a technique that kills. Three of four failed, and they were not fools: Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma were among the most respected scholars of their generation. The marble that looks like water is a perfect image of the illusion that waits on the threshold of every contemplative path, the moment when something seen is taken for something else, and the seer speaks too soon. Akiva survives not because he sees more but because he sees truly and keeps silent, and because he went in, as the tradition will put it, in peace: whole, prepared, held by a life of study and practice and community that did not depend on what he saw.

Every contemplative tradition knows these dangers, and most of them, as an earlier series on this site described, insist on purification, discernment and a teacher for exactly this reason. What is distinctive here is that the warning is placed at the very beginning, before anything is taught. The first thing the tradition says about its own secret is that it can kill you.

The Book of Creation§

The second root, the work of the beginning, produced the oldest book that the Kabbalists claimed as their own. It is very short, under two thousand words in its shorter version, and it is one of the most influential texts in the history of Jewish thought. It is called Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation or of Creation.

Ginsburg describes it as a monologue of the patriarch Abraham, setting out the contemplations that led him from the worship of the stars to the knowledge of the one God, in six chapters of brief, aphoristic sections (Ginsburg 1865, 2.12). It opens with a single sentence that contains, in compressed form, the whole of its doctrine. In the translation Ginsburg gives:

The sentence goes on to name three means of creation, using three Hebrew words built on the same root, s-p-r: sefer, sefar and sippur, which Ginsburg renders as numbers, phonetic language and writing. The world is made by counting, by speaking and by writing. The thirty-two paths are the ten primordial numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Here, for the first time, appears a word that will become the centre of the whole tradition. The ten numbers are called sefirot, from the same root as the words for counting. In Sefer Yetzirah they are not yet the ten attributes of God that the later Kabbalists will arrange on the Tree of Life. They are something stranger: ten dimensions, or depths, of a cosmos that is still taking shape. The book calls them ten sefirot belimah, a phrase that has been translated “ten sefirot of nothingness”, “ten sefirot without anything” and “ten closed sefirot”, and that no one is quite sure how to translate.

The first of them is the spirit of the living God. Ginsburg renders the passage: “One is the spirit of the living God, blessed be His name, who liveth for ever! voice, spirit, and word, this is the Holy Ghost.” (Ginsburg 1865, 2.14) “Holy Ghost” is his translation of ruaḥ ha-qodesh, the holy spirit, a common phrase in rabbinic Hebrew, and carries no Christian sense here. From this spirit the others proceed: air from spirit, water from air, fire from water, and then the six directions of space, height and depth and the four quarters, with what the book calls the holy palace at their centre, holding them in place.

A world made of letters§

If the ten sefirot are the framework, the twenty-two letters are the material. Sefer Yetzirah divides the Hebrew alphabet into three groups. There are three “mothers”, alef, mem and shin, corresponding to air, water and fire. There are seven “doubles”, the letters that in Hebrew can be pronounced in two ways, hard and soft, corresponding to the seven planets, the seven days and the seven gates of the senses in the face, and to the pairs of opposites through which human life moves: wisdom and folly, wealth and poverty, life and death, peace and war. And there are twelve “simple” letters, corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve months and the twelve chief organs and activities of the body.

Each letter, then, governs something in three domains at once: in the world, in the year and in the human being. The cosmos, time and the soul are written in the same alphabet. Ginsburg’s summary of the book calls these three domains the macrocosm, the revolution of time and the microcosm (Ginsburg 1865, 2.21). The idea that a human being is a small world, built on the same pattern as the great one, is found in many ancient philosophies. What Sefer Yetzirah adds is that the pattern is linguistic. Reality has the structure of a text.

How are all the things of the world made from so few letters? By combining them. God, the book says, drew, hewed, weighed, exchanged and combined the letters, and formed from them everything that has been formed. Two letters can be arranged in two ways, three in six, four in twenty-four. The book counts on and then stops, in one of its most beautiful sentences: “Two letters form two houses, three letters build six houses, four build twenty-four, five build a hundred and twenty houses, six build seven hundred and twenty houses; and from thenceforward go out and think what the mouth cannot utter and the ear cannot hear.” (Ginsburg 1865, 2.31)

The arithmetic is simple, and the turn at the end is not. The counting begins as a demonstration of how much can come from little, and it ends in what cannot be said or heard. The combinations of the letters, multiplied without limit, pass beyond speech. A text that begins by making the world out of language ends by pointing past language, to the source from which language comes. It is the same movement that the apophatic traditions make, and that the Kabbalists will later make explicit when they place, above all the sefirot, the infinite God of whom nothing can be said.

And the letters, though many, come from one. In another passage Ginsburg translates, the book says that as the twenty-two letters are combined each with each, “so all the formations and all that is spoken proceed from one name.” (Ginsburg 1865, 2.30) Every word, and every thing, is a combination of letters drawn from a single divine name. The multiplicity of the world is real; it is also, read rightly, the unfolding of one.

Making a man§

A book that describes how God made the world out of letters invites an obvious and dangerous thought: that someone who knew the letters well enough could do the same. The Talmud tells of two rabbis, Ḥanina and Oshaya, who studied the laws of creation every Sabbath eve, and created a calf, and ate it. It tells, too, of the sage Rava, who made a man and sent him to Rabbi Zeira; Zeira spoke to him, and when the man could not answer, said he must have been made by magic, and told him to return to dust.⁴4 The Babylonian Talmud, Hebraic Literature, passage 3: “Rabba once created a man (out of dust) and sent him to Rabbi Zira, who having addressed the figure and received no answer, said, "Thou art (made) by witchcraft; return to thy native dust." Rav Chaneanah and Rav Oshayah sat together every Sabbath-eve studying the book Yetzirah (i.e., the book of Creation), until they were able to create for themselves …” Read in context

The Talmud’s “laws of creation” may or may not be the book we have. But medieval readers connected them, and from these stories grew the legend of the golem, the figure of clay brought to life by the letters of the divine name, which became attached in early modern times to rabbis of Chełm and Prague. The legend is often told as a story of power. It is better read as a story of limits. Rava’s man cannot speak. The rabbis could imitate the forming of a body; they could not give it what the book calls the spirit of the living God, the first of the sefirot. Speech, the power by which the world was made, belongs to God, and in the human being to the soul that God breathes in.

This is the line that the whole tradition walks. On one side is a mysticism of union and knowledge: the contemplation of the letters and names as a way to the One from whom they come. On the other is what the tradition called practical Kabbalah, the use of names and letters for effect in the world. The Kabbalists themselves mostly distrusted the second, and many forbade it. But the two grow from the same root, and the history of Kabbalah, down to its afterlife in Western occultism, is partly the history of the tension between them.

How old is the receiving?§

When was Sefer Yetzirah written? Ginsburg, following the nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz, placed it in the period of the Geonim, the heads of the Babylonian academies, around the ninth century (Ginsburg 1865, 2.40). He also argued that it had nothing to do with the Kabbalah proper, since it says nothing of the infinite God or the sefirot as divine attributes, and that the Kabbalists had claimed it falsely (Ginsburg 1865, 2.39).

Later scholarship has mostly moved the book earlier. Scholem dated its core to somewhere between the third and sixth centuries, and while some scholars still argue for a later date, few now accept the ninth century. It is certainly older than the first commentaries on it, which were written in the tenth century, among them one by the great Saadia Gaon. Ginsburg was right that the Sefer Yetzirah is not yet Kabbalah in the sense of the Zohar. But he was wrong, we think, to treat that as a sign of fraud. The Kabbalists did not find their doctrine in the book; they received the book, and read their doctrine into and out of it, as every living tradition reads its scriptures. That is what the name Kabbalah means.(Scholem 1941)

What it means to receive§

Ginsburg distinguishes Kabbalah from a neighbouring word, Masorah, the tradition by which the text of scripture was handed down. Masorah means handing over; Kabbalah means receiving. And receiving, he says, in this sense “could only be on the part of one who has reached a certain period of life, as well as a certain state of sanctity, implying also a degree of secrecy” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.3). The weight falls on the receiver. Anyone can hand something over. Not everyone can take it in.

This is the first lesson of Kabbalah, and it is a lesson about unitive knowledge itself. The rabbis would only teach the chariot to one who already understood of his own knowledge. The garden admitted four and returned one whole. Sefer Yetzirah describes a world built of letters, but the letters are only the vessel; what fills them is the spirit of the living God, which cannot be manufactured, only received. In each case the knowledge is not a possession that can be transferred, but a capacity that must be formed.

The other contemplative traditions say the same thing in their own ways. The Upaniṣads are taught to the student who comes with fuel in hand and a quiet mind. The Buddha’s teaching is a raft, useless to the one who will not cross. Teresa’s castle has a door, and the door is prayer. What Kabbalah adds is the name. It calls its whole wisdom by the act of receiving it, and so makes receptivity, the emptied and prepared heart, not a step on the way but the very form of the knowledge. One does not know God by grasping. One knows God by being made able to receive.

In the next essay we follow the sefirot out of the Book of Creation and into the twelfth century, when, in the south of France, a short and obscure book called the Bahir and a blind sage called Isaac began to speak of them in a new way: not as the numbers of the world, but as the life of God. That is where the Tree of Life begins.