INTRODUCTION
Revelation and Concealment
THE HEBREW WORD OLAM, meaning “world,” is thought to derive from the same root as the word “to conceal” (le-ha’alim). Mystics are those who, while living in the olam, see through its illusion of substance to the eternal, divine reality it conceals. Like pearl divers who plunge to the depths of the ocean, they retrieve the pearl of pure spirituality and share their wisdom with humanity. Throughout the millennia of Jewish history, every generation has given birth to mystics who have sought the great spiritual treasure that is concealed within the revealed.
Mystical practice is like a fine thread that runs through the entire history of the Jewish people. From the earliest biblical accounts of the patriarchs conversing with God, to the prophets’ passionate commitment to their divine mission, to the merkavah mystic’s inner journeys to supernal realms*, to the kabbalists’ creation of complex meditation practices*, Judaism has always been enriched by these courageous souls, fired by longing for the divine, who let no obstacle stop them in their quest.
Through its 4,000-year history, Jewish mysticism has taken many different forms. At times it has been highly devotional and ecstatic; at other times it has been extremely intellectual. At times it was the solace of small groups of kabbalists who kept awake night after night in study and meditation; later it became the manifested joy of the hasidim who made it available to the entire Jewish community.* Additionally, because the Jewish people have lived as a minority among adherents of different religions and cultural traditions, the Jewish mystical experience reflects its exposure to these distinct influences. In Western Europe, Jews came in contact with Christian concepts of God, including its feminine aspect, the Virgin Mary, contributing to the development of the concept of the Shekhinah – the feminine, immanent aspect of God. Austere Christian monastic traditions also influenced Jewish mystics and practitioners in the Middle Ages. And when Jews came in contact with Muslims settled in Palestine, North Africa, and Spain, they absorbed elements of Neoplatonism and Sufi mystical practice, to the point where some Jewish writings are nearly indistinguishable from those written by Muslim mystics. Jewish mystics also traveled widely around the Mediterranean and influenced one another, creating a dynamic spiritual tradition.
Yet throughout this highly diverse and many-faceted history, certain themes and characteristics keep recurring. This book tells the story of Jewish mysticism in chronological order, each chapter focusing on a particular time and place, a particular group of mystics, a particular movement in the ever-evolving story of Jewish mysticism. Roughly, the themes that keep reappearing, in spite of vast cultural and historic differences, can be grouped as follows: the chain of transmission, divine unity, divine language, inner journey and mystic experience, and the theme that suffuses all aspects of Jewish mysticism – Revelation and Concealment.
The chain of transmission
From the time of antiquity, before there were written records that
attest to an historical lineage of mystics, we encounter many legends
and traditions about the biblical patriarchs which portray them as
spiritual masters – evolved beings in contact with the divine who
imparted their sacred knowledge to humanity. For example, several
legends about Adam symbolically tell the story of God bestowing upon him
the spiritual teaching in the form of a book, or as a gemstone, which he
later passed down through the generations. Eventually, as the legends
explain, this knowledge, this light, was shared with humanity through
the prophetic mission of Moses and his spiritual heirs – the Israelite
prophets.
After the period of the Bible, we have more distinct evidence that mystics continued in their quest to have the experience of God. The merkavah (chariot) mystics, active from the first to eighth centuries, would assemble discreetly in small groups to undertake their spiritual journey and lend support to one another. They were called chariot mystics because their mystical experiences were portrayed as a journey in a chariot. Their teachings were brought to Europe by ancient travelers around the Mediterranean basin. They spread from Palestine and Babylonia to Italy, from there to Germany, and later to France, Spain, and throughout Europe.
In many of these documents there are references to heavenly revelations and contact with the prophet Elijah and other supernatural beings. Yet there was always an emphasis on the transmission of the teachings from master to disciple. Beginning in medieval times, the kabbalists passed on their teachings in secrecy, and later more openly. The relationship of these mystic masters with their disciples was very intimate. They would assemble in small groups called hevras, or idras, their entire lives being devoted to adhering to their masters’ instructions with great sincerity and intensity.
It is with Hasidism, the movement that began in eighteenth-century Poland, that the teachings were spread to the general populace, the householders – no longer remaining the province of an elite group of mystics. And in Hasidism we find the most explicit emphasis on the importance of the spiritual master, the tsadik. He is described as descending from his high rung on the ladder of spirituality to the low level of ordinary people, and raising them to his level where they might experience the divine bliss and joy. Sometimes the master himself was considered the ladder, whose lowest rung was on earth and whose highest was in heaven – he could straddle both the worlds. His consciousness was in the physical as well as the spiritual realms, and thus his true spiritual nature was concealed by his physical body. One of the Habad hasidim said that the tsadik was “infinite substance garbed in flesh and blood.”2 By attaching oneself to such a master, individuals could ascend to the heights of divine experience.
The theme of concealment and revelation may also be found in the belief that there are true spiritual masters present among humanity, but they are disguised as ordinary persons. The example of the prophet Moses is often brought forth: Moses is depicted as an ordinary, somewhat clumsy person with a stutter, yet God chose him for the divine mission of saving his people. In the medieval Zohar, the most important text of the Kabbalah, there are poignant tales of a mule driver who is wiser than the renowned rabbis, and of a child who is the hidden spiritual master. Numerous stories have also been recorded about the hidden spirituality of the first hasidic master, the Ba’al Shem Tov, who concealed himself as an uneducated ignoramus and, ultimately, through his actions and pronouncements, revealed that he was the great master and liberator of souls. So the true seeker needs to be watchful and thoughtful, as one never knows where or when he will find his master.
Perhaps these stories are also a metaphor for the deep truth that all of us, who seem to be quite ordinary, are created in the image of God – that we, as we are, contain the potential for the greatest heights of spiritual achievement. Our soul is a spark, a particle of the divine essence, trapped in the physical world only temporarily, as we await liberation through the teachers he sends.
Divine unity
An important characteristic of Jewish mysticism is that, despite the
expression of the religion through a multiplicity of outer forms and
rituals, there is a sense that a single spiritual reality abides in and
underlies everything. To the mystics, the one God, who is the object of
prayer and the focus of religious practice, can be realized through
meditation as the singular creative power that gives life to the entire
creation. Without it, creation would disintegrate.
The most important prayer in Jewish life is a quote from the Bible: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). This oneness is taken by the mystics very literally. It is not just lip-service to a simplistic concept of “monotheism,” as taught to every school child in the Jewish world. The “one God” is the power, the divine presence that is experienced by the mystic as an abstract entity empowering everything, consciousness filling and encompassing the entire creation. And, from the practical human level, it allows one to accept that every event and condition of life, both pleasant and unpleasant, is an expression of the divine will, as there is nothing outside of God. As such, all of life is divine. As Samuel ben Kalonymus of Germany wrote in the twelfth century:
Everything is in You
and You are in everything
You fill everything and you encompass it all;
When everything was created,
You were in everything;
Before everything was created,
You were everything.3
The multiplicity of the material creation leads us to think that there truly is a diverse reality, but mystics know through personal experience that there is only one divine reality or substance flowing through all of creation. It is the only true reality, as the coarse outer covering of the material creation will perish in time, and only the divine truth or essence will remain. In contemporary terms one could call this a “nondual” approach to religion as it sees the one, rather than the many, in everything.
Kabbalist mystics in medieval times introduced the terms ayin (nothing) and yesh (substance) for these two opposites, ayin signifying the formless divine essence that pervades everything, and yesh the physical creation. The tension between the two poles also became the defining motif of Habad Hasidism in the nineteenth century, which emphasized the importance of looking beyond the revealed realm of yesh to come in touch with ayin – the concealed infinite.
From approximately the twelfth century, Jewish mystics developed a complex symbolism describing the spiritual realms and the process of creation. The literature describing this symbolism makes up the bulk of the texts of the Kabbalah. At its core was the need to explain how yesh – matter – could have been created by a God who is ayin – entirely abstract and without substance. The kabbalists taught that a series of divine qualities (midot) were emanated from the supreme God. These qualities were also called emanations (sefirot), and were generally visualized as flowing in a hierarchical order, each sefirah (emanation) a projection or reflection of the one above but existing at a lower vibratory level. Thus the light, the power, of the unitary Godhead, also called the Ayn-Sof (the infinite eternal, from the word ayin), which is beyond differentiation, flows downward through the sefirot, subtly dividing into positive and negative poles. Said another way, the primal divine light breaks apart, its sparks becoming separated from their source, imprisoned in the material creation. This is the realm of duality.
The symbolism of the sefirot was extended by each generation of mystics to interpretations of the narratives and personalities of the Hebrew Bible, each being identified with a particular sefirah. Thus the biblical stories were understood not simply as tales of human beings interacting with one another and with God, but also as metaphors for the relationship between the qualities of the divine and God himself, and as an allegory of the events of Jewish history.
With the contribution of numerous mystics following the spiritual path over hundreds of years, the symbolism of the Kabbalah has evolved into an elaborate interlinking set of symbols and metaphors with layer upon layer of meaning. Symbolism became the means of conveying several levels of reality at once. Each symbol is like a hypertext link to a multi-faceted reality concealed within a simple word or phrase.
Divine language
From the very beginning, Jewish mystics were engaged in meditation on
the “name” or “word” of God, as this divine power or spirit was most
often called in the Bible. Over and over we read that the prophets came
in contact with this name or word, which gave them the experience of the
ruah ha-kodesh (the holy spirit). They attest to being uplifted
and enveloped by this power. And through their devotion to it, they had
the courage to bring God’s message to the Israelites of antiquity – to
seek God within themselves and act towards each other lovingly and
morally. The prophets often stressed this type of personal spirituality
over the performance of sacrifices the people were accustomed to.
After the biblical period, calling on God’s “name” became something different, as the concept of the “name” was transformed from being a power, an unspoken ineffable essence, an expression of the holy spirit, into a spoken or written word. From the time of the merkavah mystics in late antiquity, throughout the entire history of Jewish spirituality, mystics have used a variety of “outer” name practices to attain spiritual experience. Their devotion to these practices resulted in an intense level of concentration which allowed their minds and souls to become free of the mundane concerns of the material realm and attain a consciousness of the presence of God.
Often the mystics would take particular names or passages from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and deconstruct them, creating more and more complex “names” of God that have no literal meaning, which they would repeat numerous times. By repeating these meaningless syllables, the mind would no longer focus on meanings; it could attach itself to the letters of the words as abstract symbols and, they believed, rise above the intellectual activity of the mind.
An underlying motivation of the mystics in interpreting and using the text of the Bible in their meditations came from the belief that its very language carries a divine significance. Mystics believed that God had uttered the entire Torah and thus it is an expression of his holiness, his will, his being. They mined the Torah to find the deeper, sacred meaning that lay concealed in its text. This approach was called pardes. The word pardes in Hebrew means “orchard,” and on one level it is used literally for the mythical Garden of Eden; it gives us the word “paradise” – a metaphor for the garden of perfection – a place, or time, of idealized eternal life. But the letters PRDS are also used as an acronym in Hebrew – signifying four levels at which one can understand the Bible: Pshat (simple, literal meaning), Remez (hint, inference based on the literal), Drash (allegorical interpretation), and Sod (hidden, secret, mystical). This meaning of PRDS gives us an insight into the techniques that the Jewish mystics and sages used in interpreting the Torah. So the Torah finally became an esoteric text, its literal meaning concealing and providing a hint to its inner, secret meaning.
This approach informs the way the Jewish mystics have viewed all events and circumstances of life, both on an individual and communal level: every situation or historical event was understood as concealing an inner, hidden, mystical meaning with which it corresponded.
Inner journey and mystical experience
The rich mystical literature of Judaism describes journeys to realms
of higher consciousness, spiritual realms where God and his qualities
(or angels) are experienced. Some metaphors were used consistently in
different periods for this process, such as the ascent to a mountaintop.
When the Bible says that the prophet Moses ascended Mount Sinai to
receive the revelation of God, it implies a spiritual ascent as well as
a physical climb up a mountain. Similarly, the prophet Isaiah urges the
congregation of Israel to join him in the ascent to the mountaintop. The
Jewish mystics recognized this dual level of meaning. Abraham Abulafia,
a thirteenth-century mystic, wrote that there are two levels to
understanding the ascent up Mount Sinai: the physical or revealed, and
the spiritual or hidden. He writes:
The ascent to the mountain is an allusion to spiritual ascent – that is, to prophecy, for Moses ascended to the mountain, and he also ascended to the divine level. That ascent is combined with a revealed matter, and with a matter which is hidden; the revealed is the ascent of the mountain, and the hidden is the level of prophecy.4
Other mystics used the image of a ladder to convey the spiritual ascent. The biblical patriarch Jacob saw, in his dream, a ladder stretching from earth to heaven and linking the two. Many centuries later, the hasidic mystics of eighteenth-century Poland wrote of the spiritual master himself as the ladder who straddles the physical and spiritual worlds. The master would descend from his heights in the supernal realms to the physical world in order to raise human consciousness to the divine. He would leave his high rung and descend to our lower rung in order to save us.
As mentioned earlier, another important metaphor for the inner ascent that recurs in various periods – from the biblical to the modern – is that of the chariot (merkavah). In the Bible, Enoch and Elijah are described as having ascended to the heavens in a fiery chariot while still alive. The prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a chariot made of the wings of angels and supernatural creatures ascending to the heavens, accompanied by transcendent lights, colors, and the rushing of otherworldly sounds. So the merkavah mystics of antiquity took their terminology from these biblical accounts and commonly wrote of traveling to spiritual realms in the chariot of the body, eventually reaching the throne region of God – the body-chariot itself becoming transformed into the throne, signifying that each human being can be viewed as the throne of God, the place where God resides.
Some scholars attribute the mystics’ experiences to states of heightened imagination, or visions they had of ascending to the supernal realms. However, increasingly many students of Jewish mysticism are recognizing that these were meditative experiences, in which they took their attention within themselves and ascended to the higher levels of consciousness. Elliot Wolfson, an important modern scholar, brings the testimony of Hai Gaon in the tenth century. He wrote that the merkavah mystic’s purpose was to take his consciousness “into the innermost recesses of his heart.”5 These early practitioners “did not ascend on high but rather in the chamber of their heart they saw and contemplated like a person who sees and contemplates something clearly with his eyes, and they heard and spoke with a seeing eye by means of the holy spirit.”6 Clearly, this means that the mystics penetrated within themselves to a higher state of consciousness where they had the mystic vision of the divine.
Meditative experiences of inner light and sound are also recorded by many mystics in Jewish history: The medieval Jewish Sufis in Egypt and Palestine wrote of the nur batin (inner light) which they saw in their meditation, which they called hitbodedut (self-isolation). Isaac of Akko, a kabbalist mystic of the thirteenth century, wrote of being in a state between sleep and awakening, and seeing “a very sweet and pleasing light. And this light was not like the light that comes from the sun, but it was like the light of day, the light of dawn just before the sun shines.” 7 Many other kabbalists attest to their experiences of light in meditation; some, like Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century, also wrote of hearing the inner sound. The experiences of these past mystics hint at a variety of practices through which they entered the hidden realms of spirituality. While their practices may have differed at different times and places, the record of their experiences points toward the universal reality they discovered beyond the physical olam – the ineffable revelation concealed within the realm of yesh.
Conclusion
Because Judaism is a scripture-based religion, which emphasizes the
engagement of the intellect in spiritual practice, it had historically
been restricted to the elite and the male – women were forbidden to read
the scriptures or study Talmud. That is all changing, however. Parallel
to the growing acceptance of women as equal partners in Jewish religious
life, in the synagogue and the academy, there are many women scholars
doing important research about Jewish mystics of the past and teaching
meditation to contemporary seekers.
What is the appeal of Jewish mysticism, especially the Kabbalah, today in the twenty-first century? Perhaps its nonlinear and symbolic explanation of the creation and the relationship of the human with the divine resonates with deeper truths that have an eternal, timeless meaning. It is a call to enter territory uncharted by the mind and look at life in this world as one of many layers of reality. And perhaps there is a side of the human mind that still yearns for the power of myth to take it beyond the linear, the rational, and the predictable. It yearns to explore the spiritual core that links all humanity together in a common heritage of divine truth and unity.
We are at a crossroads in history, as many mystical manuscripts and books are being brought to light and translated for the first time. So the testimonies of mystics of the past are available to the contemporary seeker who is inspired to embark on his or her own path. As a result, this book can only be an interim study; new research is coming to light almost every day and it would be impossible to incorporate the latest discoveries. An example is the ground-breaking study by Eitan Fishbane about the kabbalist Isaac of Akko, titled As Light Becomes Dawn, published just as this work was in the final stages of editing. But books can only take us so far. The reader is encouraged to continue searching for the truth that is concealed within the revealed – and ultimately to go beyond reading to first-hand experience of the divine – to rise from the level of yesh to the fullness of ayin. The challenge of the search is to find what we are looking for: the experience of the eternal name or word of God, the ruah ha-kodesh. It is possible.