The Ten Sefirot

The Book of Creation, which the first essay in this series read, ends where the Kabbalah begins. It speaks of ten sefirot, ten numbers or depths of the cosmos, and of twenty-two letters from which all things are formed. It does not say that the ten are God. It does not give them names, or arrange them in a pattern, or tell its readers to pray through them. For something like a thousand years the book was studied as a work of cosmology, of grammar, even of medicine, and its ten sefirot remained the dimensions of the world.

Then, in the last decades of the twelfth century, in the south of France, they changed their meaning. In a small circle of scholars around the town of Lunel and the academy of Posquières, the ten sefirot became the ten powers of the divine life itself: the attributes by which the hidden God turns towards the world, and the stages through which the world, and the soul, can turn back towards God. This essay is about that change, and about the figure it produced, which has become the most famous image in all of Kabbalah: the Tree of Life.

A book of brightness§

The first text in which the new teaching appears is a strange, fragmentary book called Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Brightness, after a verse of Job about the light that is bright in the skies. It is short, disordered and written in the form of a rabbinic midrash, a commentary on scripture by sayings and parables, attributed to a sage of the first century, Neḥunya ben ha-Qanah. Almost certainly it was edited in Provence around 1180, though it may preserve older material, perhaps from the East.

The Bahir speaks of ten “sayings”, the ten utterances by which, the rabbis taught, the world was created, and treats them as powers within God. It tells parables about a king who has a treasury, a daughter, a garden, a tree. It speaks of a feminine power in God, likened to a princess, a bride, the moon. And it gives the image that would become central: all the divine powers, it says in one parable, are arranged one above another like a tree, which God planted so that the whole world might delight in it, and which is watered from above. Nothing here is systematic. But for the first time the ten are not simply numbers. They are the life of God, and they have a shape.

Isaac the Blind§

If the Bahir gave the sefirot their new meaning, the man who made them a path was Isaac, son of the Rabad, who lived from about 1160 to 1235 and is known to tradition as Isaac Sagi Nahor, “Isaac of much light”, a Hebrew euphemism for one who is blind. He wrote almost nothing that survives except a commentary on the Book of Creation and a few letters. Ginsburg, in the 1865 essay in our reader, calls him the Father of the Kabbalah and records the tradition that he could tell from a person’s face whether the soul was new or had lived before.¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 3.4: “1. Isaac the Blind (flour. 1190–1210), denominated the Father of the Kabbalah. His productions have become a prey to time, and only a few fragments have survived as quotations in other theosophic works. From these we learn that he espoused the despised doctrine of metempsychosis as an article of creed, and that from looking into a man’s face, he could …” Read in context

What we know of Isaac’s teaching suggests a contemplative more than a theorist. He seems to have taught that the sefirot are reached not by speculation but by kavanah, the intention or inward direction of prayer: that the words of the daily liturgy, said with the right attention, lead the mind up through the divine powers towards their hidden source, which he called the Thought, and beyond it to what thought cannot reach. The prayers that every Jew says every day became, in his circle, a ladder. The ten powers of the Bahir became the rungs.

From Provence the teaching passed across the Pyrenees to Gerona in Catalonia, where Isaac’s disciples Ezra and Azriel wrote the first systematic works of Kabbalah, and where the great legal scholar Moses ben Naḥman, Naḥmanides, gave it his authority. Azriel’s Commentary on the Ten Sefirot, written as questions and answers, sets out the doctrine almost as a philosopher would. Ginsburg reproduces an analysis of it in the form of Spinoza’s Ethics, by the scholar Adolf Jellinek, whose first proposition reads:²2 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 2.81: “i. Proposition.—The primary cause and governor of the world is the En Soph, who is both immanent and transcendent. (Answer 1.)” Read in context The infinite God, whom Azriel calls Ein Sof, “without end”, is the cause of the world and is both within it and beyond it. The sefirot are what stands between.

The ten§

By the middle of the thirteenth century the ten had settled into a pattern that, with many variations, has lasted ever since. Their names are taken from scripture, most from a verse in Chronicles in which David blesses God: yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power, the beauty, the victory and the majesty, for all that is in heaven and earth is yours; yours is the kingdom.

At the top is Keter, the Crown, the first stirring of the hidden God towards manifestation, so close to its source that it is sometimes called Ayin, Nothing. Below it are two: Ḥokhmah, Wisdom, a first flash of undivided insight, called the Father; and Binah, Understanding, which receives that flash and unfolds it into distinctions, called the Mother. From their union come seven more. Ḥesed is Love or Lovingkindness, the outpouring of God’s goodness without limit. Gevurah or Din is Power or Judgment, the force that sets limits and says no. Between them is Tif’eret, Beauty, sometimes called Compassion, which holds love and judgment in balance and is the heart of the whole. Below these, Netzaḥ and Hod, Endurance and Splendour, are the channels through which love and judgment reach the world. Yesod, Foundation, gathers all the powers above it and passes them on. And at the bottom is Malkhut, Kingdom, the presence of God in the world, which the Kabbalists identified with the Shekhinah, and which receives from all the others and has nothing of its own.

Ginsburg’s English names for them are a little different: Crown, Wisdom, Intelligence, Love, Justice, Beauty, Firmness, Splendour, Foundation and Kingdom. Translators have never agreed, and each name is only a door into a cluster of images, biblical verses and divine names that the Kabbalists attached to each power. The Crown, for instance, is the point at which the infinite first becomes visible. Ginsburg quotes the Zohar on it: “When the Concealed of the Concealed wished to reveal himself, he first made a single point: the Infinite was entirely unknown, and diffused no light before this luminous point violently broke through into vision;” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.8)

Three pillars and a balance§

The ten are not a list. They are arranged, and the arrangement is the teaching. Set out on the page, they form three columns. On the right are Wisdom, Love and Endurance, the side of expansion and giving, called the Pillar of Mercy. On the left are Understanding, Judgment and Splendour, the side of limit and form, called the Pillar of Judgment. In the centre are Crown, Beauty, Foundation and Kingdom, the Middle Pillar, which reconciles the two (Ginsburg 1865, 1.30). The Zohar calls this pattern the Balance, comparing the two sides to the scales and the middle to the beam that holds them level (Ginsburg 1865, 1.11).

The point of the balance is that neither side is good alone. Love without limit drowns; it gives so much that nothing can stand on its own. Judgment without love destroys; it limits until nothing is left. The Kabbalists taught that evil itself arises when Judgment breaks away from Love and acts on its own. The world is sustained only in the middle, where the two are joined, and that middle is called Beauty: not a compromise between mercy and severity, but the harmony in which each makes the other possible.

And each sefirah, Ginsburg notes, is in turn threefold. “I, It has its own absolute character; II, It receives from above; and III, It communicates to what is below it.” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.30) This is the receiving of the first essay, now written into the structure of God. Nothing in the Tree holds what it has. Each power receives from the one above and gives to the one below, and is itself only in that receiving and giving. The highest, the Crown, receives from the infinite; the lowest, the Kingdom, receives from all and gives to the world. The life of God is a current of light that is never kept.

One light, many colours§

A teaching about ten powers in God raised an obvious objection, and the Kabbalists’ opponents were quick to make it. Judaism confesses one God: hear, O Israel, the Lord is one. What, then, are the ten? Isaac ben Sheshet, a fourteenth-century rabbi of Barcelona who ended his life in Algiers, reported with some alarm a philosopher’s jibe that the Christians believe in three and the Kabbalists in ten.

The Kabbalists answered that the sefirot are not ten gods, nor parts of God, but the ways in which the one God is turned towards us. They were not created, as the world was, but emanated, and emanation, Ginsburg explains, loses nothing of its source. The sefirot form a strict unity with each other and with the infinite, “just as the different rays which proceed from the light, and which appear different things to the eye, form only different manifestations of one and the same light.” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.18)

The Zohar gives the same answer in an image Ginsburg translates at length. “Whoso wishes to have an insight into the sacred unity, let him consider a flame rising from a burning coal or a burning lamp.” There is a white light above, which never changes; a darker, bluish light below it, which seems to be its seat and shifts in colour; and below that the burning matter that feeds them both. Each is distinct; and yet, the Zohar concludes, the whole is consumed and rises upward, “and thus everything merges into a single unity” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.39). Azriel had made the same point in the language of numbers: ten does not contradict the unity of the infinite, because one is the basis of every number.³3 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 2.91: “(a) Scholion.—The number ten does not contradict the absolute unity of the En Soph, as one is the basis of all numbers, plurality proceeds from unity, the germs contain the development, just as fire, flame, sparks and colour have one basis, though they differ from one another. (Answer 6.)” Read in context

The body of God§

There is a second way to draw the Tree, and it is bolder than the first. The ten sefirot together, the Kabbalists said, form the shape of a man: the Heavenly Man, as the Zohar calls it, or Adam Qadmon, the Primordial Man, as later Kabbalists would say. The Crown is the head, Wisdom and Understanding the brain and heart; Love and Judgment are the right and left arms; Beauty is the trunk; Endurance and Splendour the legs; Foundation the organ of generation; and Kingdom the whole, or the feet that stand on the earth (Ginsburg 1865, 1.19).

This is not crude anthropomorphism, as its critics charged. It is a reading of a single verse: God created the human being in his image. If the human being is the image of God, then God, as turned towards the world, has the shape of a human being, and the human body is a map of the divine powers. Ginsburg notes that this, for the Kabbalists, is the form the prophet Ezekiel saw in the chariot, the likeness as the appearance of a man upon the throne (Ginsburg 1865, 1.20). The work of the chariot, which the first essay found fenced off by the rabbis, is here opened: what Ezekiel saw was the shape of the sefirot.

And if the sefirot have the shape of a person, a person can take on the shape of the sefirot. The Kabbalists read the lives of the patriarchs this way. Abraham, who welcomed strangers into his tent, embodied Love; Isaac, bound on the altar, embodied Judgment; Jacob, who held both together, embodied Beauty; Moses and Aaron, Endurance and Splendour; Joseph, Foundation; and David, the king, Kingdom. “It is for this reason that the patriarchs are denominated the Chariot-throne of the Lord.” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.55) The phrase comes from the rabbis themselves, who said that the patriarchs are the chariot. A righteous person does not only see the chariot. He becomes it: the place on which the divine presence rides into the world.

A map of the soul§

This is why the Tree of Life is not only a diagram of God. It is a diagram of the human being, and of the path. Every soul, the Kabbalists taught, contains all ten powers, as the image contains the features of what it images. Every act a person performs either joins the powers or divides them: an act of love that is not tempered by judgment, or a judgment without love, separates the scales of the balance below, and, because the image and the original are bound together, above. A life of righteousness, by contrast, unites the powers in the soul and so unites them in God.

Later Kabbalists made this into an ethics. Moses Cordovero’s short book The Palm Tree of Deborah, written in Safed in the sixteenth century, takes each of the sefirot in turn and asks how a person might imitate it: how to be like Keter in patience and humility, like Ḥokhmah in a father’s care for every creature, like Ḥesed in love that asks nothing back. The imitation of God, which the rabbis had always taught, becomes the imitation of the ten. The Tree is climbed not by thought alone but by character.

It is also climbed in prayer. For the Kabbalists who followed Isaac the Blind, each word of the liturgy is directed to a particular sefirah, and the one who prays with the right intention binds the powers together and raises them towards their source. The daily prayers become a meditation that ascends the Tree and returns, receiving the light at each level and bringing it down, so that the one who prays is both a receiver and a channel. This is the beginning of what the sixth essay will follow: devekut, cleaving to God.

Seen in the light of the other traditions this site reads, the Tree has many cousins. The Neoplatonists, whom the Kabbalists may have known through Arabic and Jewish philosophy, described a descent from the One through Intellect and Soul to the world, and a return by the same steps. Christian writers spoke of the divine attributes and the ladder of ascent. Indian traditions map the subtle body as a column of centres through which consciousness rises. The Tree is not the same as any of these, and the differences matter: it is a map of a personal God’s relations, of love and judgment and kingship, not of impersonal levels of being. But it shares their deepest intuition: that the way up is the way in, and that the self, rightly ordered, is the image of what it seeks.

What lies above the Crown§

All of this, the Kabbalists insisted, concerns God only as God turns towards us. The Tree is a form, and above every form is what has none. Azriel defines the infinite as a being “without attributes, will, intention, desire, thought, word or deed.” (Ginsburg 1865, 2.79) The ten powers come from it and return to it, but it is not one of them, and it is not their sum. Of the infinite itself nothing can be said, not even that it is.

That is the subject of the next essay: Ein Sof, the Endless, and Ayin, the Nothing, which the Kabbalists placed at the very top of the Tree, or rather above it. If the sefirot are the face of God, Ein Sof is what the face both reveals and conceals. The Kabbalists, for all their maps, were in the end apophatic mystics, and the Tree of Life has its roots in what no one can see.