The Zohar and the Shekhinah

The first three essays in this series followed Kabbalah from its roots to its summit: the chariot and the Book of Creation, the Tree of the ten sefirot, and the Endless beyond the Tree. All of that was the work of generations of teachers across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly in Provence and Catalonia, mostly in the terse Hebrew of the schools. In the last decades of the thirteenth century, in the Castilian towns of Guadalajara and Ávila, something different appeared: a book. It was long, strange, beautiful and written in Aramaic. It presented itself as the secret teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, a sage of the second century who hid from the Romans in a cave. It was called Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Radiance, and for most of the next seven hundred years it would be the central text of Kabbalah.

This essay is about the Zohar. It asks what kind of book it is, who wrote it, and how it reads scripture. And it follows the image that, more than any other, made the Zohar beloved: the Shekhinah, the presence of God in the world, imagined as a bride, a queen and a mother, exiled with her people and longing to be reunited with the God she belongs to.

A book of radiance§

The name means radiance or splendour, the word Daniel uses for the brightness of the sky. Ginsburg, in the 1865 essay in our reader, says that the main body of the work was first called the Midrash “Let there be Light”, from the verse in Genesis, “because the real Midrash begins with the exposition of this verse”, and that the name Zohar was given afterwards (Ginsburg 1865, 2.44). It is in form a commentary on the Five Books of Moses, following the weekly Sabbath readings, but a commentary of an unusual kind.

It is not a treatise, with arguments proceeding in order. It is a tissue of homilies, dialogues, stories and visions. A group of sages, led by Rabbi Shimon, travels the roads of Galilee, meeting along the way a donkey-driver, a child, an old man, a stranger, any of whom may turn out to hold a teaching that astonishes them. They stop beneath a tree and read a verse of the Torah, and one of them opens it and the verse opens like a door. Certain sections stand out and have their own names, among them the Idra Rabba, the Great Assembly, in which Shimon gathers his disciples to disclose the structure of the divine body, and the Idra Zuta, the Small Assembly, which describes his death.

Ginsburg, who took no sympathy with mysticism, nevertheless saw exactly why the book had power. He wrote that the Zohar “does not propound a regular Kabbalistic system”, but is “more a collection of homilies or rhapsodies”, and that this was the very reason it became the treasury of the Kabbalah: “Its diversity became its charm.” He singles out the way it describes the divine “under tender forms of human relationships”, such as “father, mother, primeval man, matron, bride”, so that, he says, readers could lose themselves in rapturous embraces with the Deity (Ginsburg 1865, 2.56). The remark is meant as a criticism and has the ring of an accurate description.

Who wrote it?§

The book says plainly who wrote it. It claims to record the teachings of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai and his companions in the second century. Tradition tells of the light and the fire that filled the cave where he died. The disciples, it says, wrote down what they heard, and the book was lost to the world until the time was ripe.

Almost from the first, some readers doubted it. Ginsburg collects the evidence with the energy of a prosecutor, and it is worth hearing, because the questions he asks have not gone away. The Zohar, he points out, discusses and explains the Hebrew vowel points, which were introduced centuries after Shimon lived (Ginsburg 1865, 2.59). It mentions the Crusades and the loss and recovery of Jerusalem (Ginsburg 1865, 2.66). It quotes lines from a Hebrew hymn by the eleventh-century Spanish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol (Ginsburg 1865, 2.60), and it dates the coming of the Messiah to a year in the early fourteenth century (Ginsburg 1865, 2.68). Its doctrine of Ein Sof and the sefirot, he argues, was not known in Shimon’s age but belongs to the Middle Ages (Ginsburg 1865, 2.69). And the first Kabbalists to mention the book, he notes, either had not heard of it or did not trust it (Ginsburg 1865, 2.70).

Ginsburg then gives the story that most convinced him. It comes from a Hebrew chronicle of the sixteenth century, the Book Juchassin. Isaac of Akko, a Kabbalist from the Holy Land who came to Spain after the fall of Acre in 1291, wished to see the original manuscript of the Zohar, and asked Moses de León, the man who was circulating it. De León swore that he had the original in Ávila, but he died in 1305 on the road before he could produce it. Two men of Ávila, suspicious, went to his widow and daughter and offered a handsome dowry for the original. They answered that there was no original and never had been: that Moses de León had written the book himself, from his own head, and when his wife asked him why he published his own work under another man’s name, he said that no one would buy it under his own.¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 2.72: “12. That Moses de Leon, who first published and sold the Sohar, as the production of R. Simon b. Jochai, was himself the author of it, was admitted by his own wife and daughter, as will be seen from the following account in the Book Juchassin, (p.p. 88, 89, 95, ed. Filipowski, London, 1857), which we give in an abridged …” Read in context

Ginsburg concluded that the Zohar was a pseudograph of the thirteenth century, and that its author was Moses de León.

Ginsburg himself, to his credit, does not leave the opposite view unheard. He quotes an English contemporary who thought the case for forgery weaker, and who held that the book was not Shimon’s own composition but “the fruit and result of his personal instructions, and of the studies of his immediate disciples” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.73), and then disagrees. It is a position that Kabbalists themselves have often taken in other forms: that the teaching was received, and the book is a record of reception.

What attribution means§

It is tempting to read the question of authorship as a question of fraud, and for a modern reader, brought up to value originality, a book published under a false name can seem like a lie. But the world in which the Zohar appeared did not think of books quite that way. Attributing a teaching to an ancient master was a common and widely understood practice, one the Jewish tradition shared with Greek, Indian, Christian and Islamic writers. It claimed, not that the author’s own hand held the pen, but that the teaching belonged to a lineage and could be traced to a source.

And here we meet again the idea this series began with. Kabbalah means receiving. A teaching that was received is by definition older than whoever delivers it. For the author of the Zohar, writing in the person of Shimon bar Yoḥai may have been less a disguise than a form of humility: the speaker is not the one who invented these things, but one who has received them, and Shimon, the sage who spent twelve years hidden in a cave in contemplation, was the figure in whom the tradition of reception was most vividly embodied. Whether we call the practice authorship or inspiration or both, the book’s own claim is the one the Kabbalah always makes. It does not say, “this is what I think”. It says, “this is what was given”.

The Torah as a living body§

Whoever wrote it, the Zohar is above all a reading of scripture, and its way of reading shaped the whole later tradition. The rabbis had long distinguished several levels at which the Torah can be read. The Kabbalists, as the first essay noted, summed them up in the word pardes, the garden: the plain sense, the allusion, the homily and the secret. The Zohar presses the distinction further, in an image that its readers have never forgotten. The stories of the Torah, it says, are the garment of the Torah; the commandments are its body; and its hidden meaning is its soul. Woe to the person, it says in effect, who sees only the garment and thinks it a mere tale of kings and battles. A fool looks at the garment; a wiser person at the body; the wise, those who stand at Sinai, at the soul.

So every verse becomes a door. A story of Jacob’s sons is a story of the sefirot; a battle is a battle among the powers of the divine and the demonic; the names of the patriarchs’ wives are the names of aspects of God. This is not allegory in the ordinary sense, in which the story is swapped for a meaning and thrown away. The Zohar insists the story is true and the commandments must be kept. The garment is not discarded, because the soul needs it. But to read only the garment is to miss that scripture is the speech of God, and that God’s speech has depths no human life can exhaust.

The King and the Queen§

In the Zohar the sefirot, which the second essay described as ten powers, become persons. Ginsburg explains that they are grouped into higher units that are given royal titles. Beauty, the sixth sefirah, which unites Love and Justice, is called the Holy King, or the King. Kingdom, the tenth, which gathers all the powers and gives them to the world, is called “the Queen” or “the Matron” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.31). The Zohar thus pictures the life of God as a royal household. The King is the principle of the divine that gives; the Queen is the principle that receives and brings forth into the world. Ginsburg quotes the Kabbalists as saying that the world was born from the union of this King and Queen (Ginsburg 1865, 1.33).

It is easy to hear this as crude mythology, and critics of the Kabbalah, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, have often done so. The Kabbalists replied that the images are symbols, not claims about divine bodies, and that the Torah itself speaks in this way: it calls God a father, a king, a husband, a shepherd, and Israel a bride, a daughter, a flock. The Zohar goes further in the same direction and makes the most of what the tradition already said. But it matters what the image is for. The union of King and Queen is a picture of the way the one God holds together giving and receiving, power and presence, transcendence and nearness. The Endless, which the third essay described, does not divide. But in turning towards the world it shows itself as two, and the two long for one another.

The presence that dwells§

The Queen of the Zohar has an older name. Shekhinah comes from the Hebrew root shakhan, “to dwell”, and the rabbis of the Talmud used it for God’s presence in the world: in the Tabernacle in the wilderness and the Temple in Jerusalem, among the people of Israel, in the synagogue, and wherever two or three sit and study Torah. A rabbinic saying, which the Zohar took up with passion, taught that when Israel went into exile, the Shekhinah went with them. God did not remain safe in heaven while his people wandered. God was in exile too.

In the rabbinic writings the Shekhinah is not a separate being; it is God in God’s nearness. The word is grammatically feminine in Hebrew, but the rabbis did not much dwell on it. The Kabbalists did. They identified the Shekhinah with the tenth sefirah, Malkhut, the Kingdom, the Queen, and so with the feminine aspect of the divine: the aspect that dwells in the world, receives from above, and has nothing of her own. And they drew a conclusion that changed the meaning of the exile. If the Shekhinah is exiled with Israel, then there is an exile within God. The feminine presence is separated from the masculine source, the Queen from the King, the Kingdom from the powers above. The history of the Jewish people becomes the outer face of a rift in the divine life itself.

And so the purpose of the commandments is transformed. A person who keeps the Sabbath, says a blessing, gives to the poor, or prays with full intention is not only obeying a command. In the Zohar’s language, he or she is healing a wound in God: drawing the Queen back toward the King, the presence toward its source, the world toward the Endless. Later Kabbalists made this explicit in a short formula said before the performance of a commandment, declaring that it is done for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, and his Shekhinah. It is among the boldest ideas in the history of religion, that human beings, in their small daily acts, can help God be whole.

Marriage, kiss and Sabbath§

The language of union runs through the Zohar from beginning to end, and sometimes the images are bold. The sefirot are husband and wife, the letters of the divine name are a union of male and female, and the Sabbath is the night on which the King and Queen are joined. The Kabbalists did not shrink from the language of the body: they found that the Song of Songs, the Bible’s love poem, was the supreme key to the Torah, and the Zohar reads it as the dialogue of God and the Shekhinah, of the soul and its beloved.

The human soul shares in this. Ginsburg translates the Zohar’s teaching that before birth each soul is a union of male and female, and that when it descends into the world the two halves separate: “At the time of marriage, the Holy One, blessed be he, who knows all souls and spirits, unites them again as they were before, and they again constitute one body and one soul” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.46) Human marriage, in this picture, is a reflection of the union above, and a tikkun, a repair, of the division of the soul. It is for this reason that the Kabbalists spoke of the marriage of husband and wife on the Sabbath eve as a holy act.

At the end of the path, the Zohar speaks of a union that is the goal of all the rest. Ginsburg quotes it on the return of souls to their source, in a place called the Palace of Love: “There the profoundest mysteries are; there dwells the Heavenly King, blessed be he, with the holy souls, and is united with them by a loving kiss.” And then, the line he cites from a second passage: “This kiss is the union of the soul with the substance from which it emanated.” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.59) The kiss, in the Zohar, is the highest image of the knowledge this site calls unitive: not an idea about God, but a meeting in which the soul is joined to what it came from.

Two kinds of union§

Kabbalah offers more than one picture of union, and it is worth setting them side by side, because they answer different questions. The third essay described the union of the soul with the Nothing, the becoming-nothing that dissolves every claim of the self, and in this picture the self is a vessel emptied to be filled. The Zohar’s picture is of a different kind. It is union as marriage: two who remain two, and are one in love. The soul does not vanish into the Infinite. It is kissed.

Both are in the Kabbalah, and Kabbalists did not feel them as contradictory. The hidden God, Ein Sof, is one without a second. The God who turns towards the world is, as the Zohar says, a King and a Queen, a Father and a Mother, a Bridegroom and a Bride. The return of the soul to God passes through both: it must empty itself to receive, and it must love to be united. The contemplatives of other traditions will recognise the pair. Śaṅkara’s nondual Brahman and the personal love of the bhakti poets, the divine darkness of Dionysius and the bride of the Song of Songs in Bernard and John of the Cross: the highest teaching of nearly every tradition has both a silence and a song.

The next essay moves from the Zohar of Castile to the hill town of Safed in Galilee, where in the sixteenth century the Zohar became the foundation of a whole way of life. There Isaac Luria and his circle asked the question the Zohar raises but does not fully answer: if the Queen is in exile, how did the exile begin? Their answer, the contraction of the Infinite, the shattering of the vessels of light and the long work of repair, is the most dramatic story in all of Kabbalah.