APPENDIX 3
Theurgy and Augmentation in Hasidei Ashkenaz and Early Kabbalah
AS WE HAVE SEEN, by mystical prayer and kavanah in performance of the mitsvot, the kabbalists believed that they could affect the higher realms, even to augment their power and maintain them. For example, Moshe Idel explains that the kabbalists believed that if people fail to perform certain mitsvot, some of the divine power that is now dispersed among the sefirot, maintaining the higher realms and the creation, would retreat into the source of the pleroma, the “divine dynamis,” the Ayn-Sof, the Godhead. Thus sin diminishes the divine power manifested in the creation, and the performance of the mitsvot, such as study of Torah, increases it by drawing down the power from the Godhead into the realm of the sefirot.
This is an extension of the midrashic and talmudic concept that the divine power is dependent on man’s participation, and demonstrates the maxim that the Torah maintains the universe; and that the tsadik, as the one who understands and performs the commandments most adeptly, is the axis (or tree of life) who maintains the universe.524 What the kabbalists did is give a structure to the midrashic concept by injecting the symbolism of the sefirotic system. Thus, particular mitsvot would be performed, and prayers would be directed to particular sefirot, and this would result in maintaining the balance between them, sometimes correcting or changing the balance, and sometimes augmenting their power. Some kabbalists aimed to increase the power of mercy over judgment, in an attempt to improve the destiny of the Jewish people.525
Underlying this conception is the belief that God is not aloof from humanity, but he is affected by it most deeply. The reward and punishment he dispenses are affected by human acts.
Idel summarizes “the myth that underlies the augmentation theurgy” in the following terms:
Divine power is dependent upon human activity, which is able to strengthen or to diminish it; alternatively, the relationship between the divine attributes is a function of human deeds. The performance of the divine will via the commandments is therefore the means by which man participates in the divine process.… [Thus] theurgical activity [was regarded] as the main raison d’être of the commandments.526
According to Idel, the obligation to draw down the divine power from the concealed realm of the Godhead into the realm of creation, the realm of the sefirot, is the purpose of the mitsvot and a significant aspect of the kabbalists’ theurgical theory and practice. It presumed that when Adam perpetrated the primal sin, which humanity has emulated ever since by its continued sinning, it forced the Shekhinah, the immanent “indwelling presence” of God, to retreat to the Godhead. Thus the mitsvot are an antidote to sin: they are a means of drawing down the Shekhinah into the sefirotic realm and they facilitate its immanence in the creation. Other ancient and kabbalistic practices, such as the pronunciation of combinations of divine names, were intended to have the same theurgic drawing-down effect, according to Idel.
One of the underlying assumptions of all theurgic activity was the concept of the macrocosm and the microcosm – that man, as the microcosm of the higher structure, is integrally linked to it, and thus his actions would have an influence on the higher. Idel quotes kabbalist Meir ibn Gabbay (1626–1676), who comments on a midrash about the relationship between God and man:
In the Midrash, [we learn] that the Holy One, blessed be he, said to Moses: “God, tell Israel that my name is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh [I am what I am].” What is the meaning of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh? Just as you are present with me, so am I present with you. Likewise David said: “the Lord is thy shadow upon thy right hand.” What does “the Lord is thy shadow” mean? Like thy shadow: Just as thy shadow laughs back when you laugh to it, and weeps if you weep to it, and you show it an angry face or a pleasant face, so it returns, so is the Lord, the Holy one, blessed be he, thy shadow. Just as you are present with him, so is he present with you.527
“Man is the archetype of the revealed aspect of the Deity,” explains Idel. “No longer is the image of God understood as the basic archetype; now, the human image is regarded as the original, reflected by the divine structure.… As form, man possesses in his own being the archetypal structure of the Divine.”528 This also fits in very nicely with the paradigm of the cherub, the Shiur Komah seated on the divine Throne, who is also symbolized as the primal Adam, the Adam Kadmon, who is the macrocosm that contains the entire creation with him in potential. Rabbi Ezra of Gerona wrote: “Man is composed of all the spiritual entities [the sefirot].… Man is composed of all things and his soul is linked to the supernal soul.”529 Thus human activity would affect the form and size of the Shiur Komah figure itself.
In this vein, Idel quotes another passage from ibn Gabbay’s writings:
When the supernal luminary [God] watches men and sees their good and proper deeds, [then] in accordance with what they stir below, they stir above, and he opens his good storehouse and pours the fine oil upon the head [of the highest sefirah of keter (crown)] and from thence upon his other attributes.*
The good deeds of humanity, therefore, cause changes in the realm of the sefirot, and provoke the Godhead to release his “fine oil,” the flow of his divine power or essence, to keter, and from there to the lower sefirot or attributes. This means that the performance of good deeds stimulates the flow of the divine grace into the creation.
This concept is the reversal of what is usually taught by mystics, even by later kabbalists – that the human is the lower reflection of the Divine, and that everything that happens on the human level has already taken place on the “idea” or causal/archetypal level, in the mind of God, as it were. According to this kabbalistic concept, the Divine needs human help or power in order to restore the lost harmony of the sefirot. The kabbalist, comments Idel, becomes an arch-magician, “who seeks God’s redemption by human intervention,” rather than human salvation by the intervention of God.530 Man “is given unimaginable powers, to be used in order to repair the divine glory.”531 The entire cosmos depends on human action.
Man is therefore an extension of the Divine on earth; his form and soul not only reflect the Divine but also actually are divine, hence the interdiction against killing a person.… Destroying a person is tantamount to diminishing not only the divine form on earth but … divine power itself.532
According to the early kabbalists like Rabbi Ezra of Gerona, the original emerging of the sefirot from their divine source was not conceived as an act of gentle emanation, but rather a violent act of “uprooting these entities from their primeval preexistence in the bosom of the Godhead.”533 The logical result of this violent origin is the natural tendency of these divine emanations or entities to return to their source. This is understood as a negative tendency vis-à-vis the needs of humanity, as it diminishes the divine power’s activity in sustaining the earthly realms. The spiritual influence in the world becomes reabsorbed into its source, leaving a vacuum believed to be the source of evil. The kabbalists set about to neutralize this tendency and counteract the ascending movement of the divine influence through various prayers and rituals. Rabbi Ezra mentioned three prayers that would “counteract the upward movement by the drawing down of emanation upon the higher and lower sefirot.”534
The Torah as divine body
Idel summarizes the key concept at work in the kabbalists’ attitude
to ritual:
It is absolutely necessary continuously to perform the ritual that is intended to sustain the divine manifestations in their perfect state.… By the intentional performance of the Jewish ritual, the kabbalist directs his intention to God, causing His manifestation to man; this basic reciprocity is attained by the instrument revealed by the Divine: the Torah.535
The Torah, as the embodiment of the commandments, functioned as an intermediary and link between the human level and the divine. It links the human who performs the commandments with their source in God. The mitsvot act as a bridge and maintain the structure of the sefirot. Thus the kabbalist, whose objective is to obey God’s will by performing the commandments, becomes a partner in the divine activity by maintaining and even augmenting aspects of the activity of the sefirot.
The Torah was considered divine because it embodies God’s commandments. That is the exoteric level of understanding. But each letter of the Torah was also conceived esoterically as divine, as “shapes or forms of God,” the entire Torah being the “name” or “being” of God himself. Thus the copying or writing of the Torah, which had to be done perfectly and precisely for obvious reasons, was like “making God” and carried its own mystical weight, augmenting and sustaining the divine midot, the qualities or sefirot, just as the performance of the commandments did. The performance of the commandments leads to the creation of a “complete” Torah, and thus the creation of a “supernal” man – the God who sits on the throne. Menahem Recanti, a later kabbalist, explaining the views of the early kabbalists, wrote:
Each commandment is branch and limb of the supernal form, so that by the completion of the entire Torah the supernal man is completed, as each and every sefirah of the ten sefirot … make, by being linked, one form.536
Not only did performance of the commandments attain cosmic significance in the mind of the kabbalists. Even the permutation and combination of the letters and words of the Torah was viewed as a holy and divinely created technique by mystics such as the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Cohen brothers of Castile, and Abraham Abulafia, whose practices were aimed at drawing down the divine influx and ascending to divine knowledge.
Augmenting the relationship through prayer
A beautiful symbol that was developed over time by Jewish mystics was
the concept of the “ascent of the atarah,” the crown of God.
The Shiur Komah, seated on the Throne of Glory, was always depicted as
wearing a crown. There are also many descriptions of God as the king who
wears a crown. Many pages of the heikhalot texts focus on the ascent of
the prayers of the righteous. In the texts of the Talmud and Midrash
from the rabbinic period, as well as the heikhalot texts, the angel
Sandalfon (Metatron) is presented as forming crowns out of the words of
the prayers and binding them to God’s head. The crown is made of the
ineffable (unpronounced) divine name. If Israel neglects or omits its
prayers, the crown is diminished. The crown must be complete and perfect
for it to ascend to the divine realm. The crown, or atarah, is
identified with the “supernal demut” (astral or radiant form)
and the Shekhinah.
In the writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz this theme is explored, and then echoed and developed by the kabbalists. Eleazar of Worms wrote of the prayers of the faithful reaching the divine realm and augmenting it. Eleazar wrote that the prayer of Israel “ascends to the firmament above their heads and goes to sit on the head of the Holy One, and becomes a crown for him.… And so the prayers and the crowns which ascend to the throne are like a throne, and the throne is made of a sapphire stone.”537 (The sapphire is a biblical reference to the brilliant spiritual light of the higher regions. The throne is identified with the Godhead itself.)
In an early kabbalistic work, Sefer ha-navon (Book of the Wise), the symbol is developed with beautiful imagery:
Whoever answers “amen” to a blessing of the prayer, he [adds] a knot to the atarah of God; for if there is no knot, each and every letter, each and every word of the prayer would fall away from the atarah.538
When the atarah ascends to the head of the Divine, it becomes transformed into keter (crown), the highest sefirah, considered part of the divine pleroma, supernal source of the other sefirot.
With the development of Kabbalah, every human action took on symbolic, mystical, macrocosmic, divine significance. The life of the tsadik, the mystic, was conceived at its most mythic level as being the enactment and redemption of Adam’s mission in Paradise, the Garden of Eden. He was supposed to have maintained and cultivated the Garden, but he failed and was banished. It is up to humanity to reset the balance and keep the divine realms in harmony. Sin caused the contraction of the divine realms – the return of the sefirot to their source, their withdrawal from the human realm. The opportunity to correct this divine, cosmic imbalance was at the heart of more-and-more complex layers of symbolism and theurgic rituals that were created by Jewish mystics in the succeeding centuries. Kabbalist symbolism gives a new and profound level of meaning to the understanding of scripture and performance of mitsvot.