Safed

The last essay ended in Castile, in the 1280s, with the appearance of the Zohar. The next great turn in the story took place nearly three hundred years later, about two thousand miles to the southeast, in a small hill town in Galilee. Safed was not an obvious place for it. It had no great academy and no famous library. But in the sixteenth century it filled with exiles. After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal a few years later, many of those who made their way eastward found their way to the Ottoman lands, and some of them to Galilee, where the tombs of the ancient sages, and above all the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai at nearby Meron, drew them.

In one generation Safed held a codifier of Jewish law, Joseph Karo, whose Shulḥan ʿArukh became the standard guide to Jewish practice; a poet, Solomon Alkabetz, who wrote the hymn that welcomes the Sabbath; and two of the greatest Kabbalists who ever lived: Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. This essay follows them. Its subject is the story Luria told, the most daring in the history of Kabbalah: a story of how the world came to be broken, and of what human beings are for.

Cordovero: God as knowing, knower and known§

Moses Cordovero, born in 1522 and called the Remak from the initials of his name, was the great systematiser. Ginsburg, whose 1865 essay in the Library’s reader gives a brief account of the Safed masters, describes the two as founders of rival schools, and says Cordovero “is chiefly occupied with the scientific speculations of the Kabbalah” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.52). His great work, The Garden of Pomegranates, takes the Kabbalah of the Zohar and the earlier schools and arranges it as a whole: the sefirot, the divine names, the meaning of the letters (Ginsburg 1865, 3.51). For many readers it is the clearest account of the Kabbalah before Luria.

Ginsburg gives a passage in which Cordovero reflects on how God knows. It belongs in this series, because it says something about unitive knowledge that few other texts say so cleanly. “The knowledge of the Creator is different from that of the creature, since in the case of the latter, knowledge and the thing known are distinct”. Our knowing divides: there is the one who thinks, the thought, and what is thought about. But “the Creator is himself knowledge, knowing and the known object”. God does not look outward at things apart from himself. In knowing himself he knows everything: “There is nothing which is not united with him, and which he does not find in his own substance.” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.52) And creatures are perfect in proportion to their union with their source, and fall, as Cordovero says, in proportion to their separation from it.

This is a philosopher’s statement, and a distant cousin of what Aristotle said of the divine mind and what Plotinus said of the Intellect, in which knower and known are one. It also describes the goal the contemplatives seek: to know as God knows, not by standing apart from what is known but by being united with it. Cordovero belongs to the Kabbalists who held that the way to this knowledge is study, prayer and moral discipline, and that the sefirot are God’s own life, which a person can imitate. He died in 1570, at forty-eight.

The Lion§

In that very year a young man arrived in Safed who would eclipse him. Isaac Luria was born in Jerusalem in 1534, and, as Ginsburg tells it, lost his father early and was taken by his mother to Cairo, where a rich uncle had him educated. He studied the Talmud, then lived for years in seclusion on the Nile, reading and meditating on the Zohar. In 1570, at thirty-six, he came to Safed ¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 3.53: “1534–1572. The opposite to this school is the one founded by Isaac Luria or Loria, also called Ari = ‏אר״י‎ from the initials of his name ‏האשכנזי ר׳ יצחק‎ R. Isaac Ashkanazi. He was born at Jerusalem 1534, and, having lost his father when very young, was taken by his mother to Kahira, where he was put by his rich …” Read in context Ginsburg’s account of Luria is dated: he takes the disciples’ stories of visions and miracles at face value and calls Luria’s teaching the “wonder-working” Kabbalah. The essay sets those aside for what Luria taught.

He was known as the Ari, “the Lion”, from the initials of his name and title. He taught for only about two years, and he died in an epidemic in 1572, at thirty-eight. In that time he gathered around him a small circle of disciples, most of them already scholars, and formed them into something like a monastic fellowship, bound by vows of friendship and by shared practices of prayer and penitence. They called themselves the companions. Luria’s own teaching, as Ginsburg notes, was delivered by word of mouth, because he himself wrote almost nothing.

It was left to his disciple Ḥayyim Vital to gather the record of those two years. Vital laboured over it for thirty years, and the result was a vast work called the Tree of Life, which circulated in manuscript under strict conditions: every disciple had to promise not to let a copy leave the Holy Land (Ginsburg 1865, 3.54). When the Zohar was printed, Ginsburg notes, it and Luria’s Tree of Life came to be called “these two Bibles of the Kabbalah” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.55). Not all of what Vital recorded would be recognised by Luria; later scholars have shown how much was shaped by the disciples who wrote it down. But the system that bears Luria’s name is one of the most original structures in the history of religious thought.

Where did the broken worlds go?§

Luria’s story builds on a hint in the Zohar. Ginsburg gives it, and it is a startling passage. The Zohar says that before the present world God made other worlds, and that they did not last: “There were old worlds,” the Sohar tells us, “which perished as soon as they came into existence: were formless, and they were called sparks.” The image is of a smith at his anvil, letting sparks fly from the hot iron. These worlds, the Zohar says, “could not continue, because the Sacred Aged had not as yet assumed his form”. They were attempts, in some sense, that could not stand. But the Zohar adds that nothing is wholly lost: “Nothing perisheth in this world, not even the breath which issues from the mouth, for this, like everything else, has its place and destination” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.35).

The Zohar leaves it there, as an image and not a doctrine. Why would God make worlds that could not stand? What happened to them? And what, if anything, does this have to do with the world we live in, which is so plainly not perfect? Luria took up the image and made of it a drama in three acts. He called the acts the withdrawal, the shattering and the repair.

The withdrawal§

The third essay ended with a question the doctrine of Ein Sof raises: if the Infinite fills everything, where is there room for a world? Luria’s answer was to say that the Infinite made room. Before anything else existed, he taught, Ein Sof withdrew into itself, contracting its light to leave an empty space: tzimtzum, the contraction. A trace of light remained in the void, and into it, from the Infinite, a single ray was then drawn, to begin the work of forming worlds.

It is a reversal of almost everything the older picture of creation suggested. Creation, in the Bible and in most religious thought, is an act of giving: God speaks, and a world appears. Luria begins with an act of holding back. The first movement of God towards a world is not an outpouring but a withdrawal, a making of room. Readers have often put it in human terms: a parent who wishes a child to grow must step back. And the contraction has a consequence that the rest of the story depends on. For the first time there is a place where the Infinite does not appear to be, a place where something other than God can exist, and, in that place, be free.

Later thinkers argued about what this means. Some took it literally, as a real withdrawal of God from a space. Others, notably the Hasidic masters of the Ḥabad school, held that the contraction is only a concealment from our point of view, and that in truth nothing exists apart from God. Both agreed that it is a sacred paradox: the world is both within God and, in some sense, given its own place.

The shattering§

Into the empty space, Luria taught, the divine light was poured, and it took form in vessels, the sefirot, built to receive it. The first vessels were stronger and received the light well. But the lower ones could not bear it. They broke: the shattering of the vessels, shevirat ha-kelim. The light spilled, and the broken pieces fell, and with them fell sparks of holy light. Those sparks became trapped in the shards, which the Kabbalists called the shells, qelippot, the husks that surround and imprison what is holy in them.

That is the cosmic catastrophe in Luria’s story, and it has a startling consequence. The world we live in is not the perfect work of a God who made everything well and was then disobeyed. It is a world that was broken before it began, a world in which sparks of the divine are scattered through everything, lost among the husks, and in exile. This is why things are not as they should be. It is why, in the Zohar’s language, the Shekhinah, the divine presence the fourth essay described, is in exile with her people. The exile is not only a historical misfortune. It is the condition of the whole of creation, which the Kabbalists called the breaking.

It is hard to overstate what this meant for readers in the sixteenth century. The Jews of Safed were refugees. Many of them had lost homes, wealth and families in the expulsion from Spain, or were the children of those who had. A teaching that told them the world itself was in exile, that their suffering was part of a larger brokenness, and that the divine was in exile with them, was not an abstraction. It gave their pain a cosmic setting, and so a meaning. Scholem, who made this argument in the twentieth century, saw Lurianic Kabbalah as the response of a people who had experienced the world as broken to the question of what such a world could be for.

The repair§

And that is the third act, and the heart of the whole teaching. If the worlds were broken before they began, then the task is not merely to wait for them to be made right. The task is to repair them: tikkun, mending. The sparks must be found and lifted from the husks, the exile of the Shekhinah ended, the vessels restored. God begins this work, but, Luria taught, God does not complete it. Human beings do.

This is how the Lurianic Kabbalists understood the commandments. Each commandment fulfilled, each blessing said, each prayer offered with the right intention, lifts a spark and mends a fragment of the broken world. Nothing a person does is small. A meal eaten with gratitude, a Sabbath kept, a word of comfort given, can raise sparks that no one else can raise, for each person is placed among the particular sparks that only he or she can reach. The Messiah comes, in this picture, not as a rescuer who arrives from outside, but as the completion of a repair that all of us have been doing.

The disciples of Safed lived this out in practice, and the practices they developed shaped Jewish life for centuries. They rose at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Shekhinah. They fasted and confessed with a rigour that astonished their neighbours. They wandered in the fields around Safed on Friday afternoon to welcome the Sabbath as a bride, in the ritual that later became the Friday evening service in synagogues around the world. They prayed with elaborate meditations on the divine names, directing each word of the liturgy to its place in the cosmic repair. Many of these customs began among Luria’s circle and their neighbours, and they spread, in the next century, to the whole Jewish world.

Sparks in ordinary things§

The most far-reaching consequence of Luria’s story was also the simplest. If sparks of holy light are scattered through everything, then nothing is merely ordinary. The meal on the table, the road one travels, the tool in one’s hand, the stranger at the door: each holds a fragment of the divine, waiting to be raised. A person who eats with attention and thanks, who works honestly, who receives a guest with care, is doing the work of repair as surely as one who fasts or prays. The Lurianists wrote detailed meditations for these acts, and the idea became one of the most widely shared in later Jewish life.

The teaching had its risks, and the tradition knew them. A system in which every act carries cosmic weight can crush a sensitive person with scruple, and the severe penitential practices of Safed were not meant for everyone. The expectation of an imminent redemption, which the story of repair invited, fed the messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi in the 1660s, and its collapse was a catastrophe for the communities that had believed in it. The Hasidic masters of the next century took the same sparks and gave them a lighter reading, emphasising joy and the sanctity of the everyday over severity and calculation. That, too, is part of the story the next essay tells.

What is knowing, if the world is broken?§

It is worth asking what this means for the theme this series follows: knowledge that unites. Cordovero, as we saw, taught that God knows by being united with what he knows, and that creatures draw near to God by drawing near to their source. Luria adds a second kind of knowing, and a harder one. If the world is shattered, then knowledge cannot be mere vision of a whole that is already there. It must be a work of gathering. To know, in the Lurianic sense, is to find the sparks: to see in each broken thing the light that is trapped in it, and to lift it.

This sets the Kabbalah apart from some of the traditions this site has read, and it is better to say so plainly than to blur it. Advaita Vedānta, as an earlier essay described, teaches that the world’s multiplicity is a superimposition on the one reality and that knowing the one Self removes the illusion. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha speaks of seeing the world as the mind’s projection. In Luria’s Kabbalah the multiplicity is not an illusion. The world is real and really broken, and the way to the one is not to see through the many but to mend them. It is closer in feeling to the Gītā’s teaching of action without attachment, in which the world is the place where liberation is worked out, though the Gītā has no story of a shattering.

And some have found echoes in other traditions. A God who withdraws to make room for a world has been compared to the self-emptying, kenosis, that Christian thinkers have attributed to Christ. The idea of divine sparks trapped in matter has been compared to Gnostic and Manichaean myths, and scholars have debated how far Luria’s Kabbalah draws on older sources of the same kind. The resemblances are real, and so are the differences. Luria’s sparks are not to be escaped from matter. They are to be raised within it, by keeping the commandments of the Torah in the body, in the world, in the life of a people.

The Tree of the world§

The sixth essay turns from the drama of the cosmos to the path of the person. If the world is a broken vessel and the work of repair is ours, how does an individual soul draw near to God while doing it? The Kabbalists had a name for the nearness they sought: devekut, cleaving. It had been the subject of a very different school of Kabbalah, the school of Abraham Abulafia, who taught the meditation on the divine names as a way to union. And in the eighteenth century it would become the heart of the Hasidic movement, founded by the Baal Shem Tov, who took Luria’s sparks and found them everywhere, in every meal, every task and every conversation.

Safed itself did not stay at its height for long. Within a generation the fellowships had begun to disperse, and the town declined. But its teaching had begun to travel. Vital’s Tree of Life was copied and read in Italy, Poland and Germany. And the Kabbalah of Luria, in the seventeenth century, became for a time, as Scholem argued, the dominant theology of the Jewish world. That is a story for another essay, and one with a darker side. But its beginning is here, in a small town, among a few friends who believed that the world was broken, and that they could help mend it.