by Harold Bloom
The word “Kabbalah” means “reception” or “tradition” and initially was used for the entire Oral Law. The narrower signification, from about the year 1200 on, is to a movement of spiritual reflection that began among some rabbis of Provence and Catalonia in the early thirteenth century.
“Began” requires qualification: scholars agree on neither the ultimate origins of Kabbalah, nor the extent of its antiquity. Arbitrarily, you can say the pragmatic inauguration was the sage known as Ravad (Rabbi Abraham ben David) in twelfth-century Provence. His son, Isaac the Blind, composed the initial texts of Kabbalah proper, commentaries upon Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation). That curious work may go back to the third century but exists only in tenth-century versions. Sefer Yetzirah tells us that Yahweh created the cosmos with ten Sefirot and the Hebrew alphabet of twenty-two letters.
The Sefirot even now are the staple of popular Kabbalah: “Sefirah,” the singular form, derives from the Hebrew sappir (“sapphire”), and presumably pertains to divine radiance. These, however, are not the archaic entities of Sefer Yetzirah but of the Bahir—meaning “Clarity,” by one interpretation—which was possibly composed early in the thirteenth century.
The Bahir’s crucial passage is an extraordinary reading of the ten utterances with which the world was called into being. These are transposed into the ten Sefirot (for which see the diagram illustrating this chapter). Of these emanations, I note that the three on the left side are female, the three on the right male, and the center column is essentially androgynous. Keter, or the Crown, has an aspect of nothingness, and Tiferet has a component of compassion alongside the male force of the sun. Yesod, a phallic foundation, is balanced by Malkhut, or the Kingdom, at once the presence of the Shekhinah, Muse of the Kabbalah, and of the male assembly of Israel, yet also the Queen, Rachel, oscillating with David the King.
Kabbalah is hardly unique in the West or the East as an erotic esotericism, though its obsessive sexuality may be its salient quality. The definitive study is Kabbalah and Eros (2005) by Moshe Idel, the major scholar in the field since Scholem. Idel speaks of Kabbalah as the “culture of eros,” since it regards marital intercourse as redemptive, both of individuals and of the cosmos. At my age, I am at once bemused and oddly comforted by so idealistic a beholding. I think of Coventry Patmore, the friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who celebrated a High Victorian Catholic erotic esotericism in his odes, but scarcely had the audacity to attribute redemptive ecstasy to the sexual life of God. Yet precisely such daring is central to Kabbalah, where Yahweh, under the masking term Ein Sof (Limitless), is the husband of Shekhinah, the tenth and final Sefirah, at once his divine presence and also the object of his fulfilled sexual desire.
That vision of Yahweh might have repelled Isaiah of Jerusalem and the other prophets, major and minor, but would have been congenial to the great Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, second-century C.E. founder of normative Judaism, as still we know it. Evidently, Akiba persuaded his fellow sages to keep the Song of Songs in the canon, proclaiming that the blessed in the hereafter would chant it endlessly.
Famously, there is a sense of dark secret love in the Song of Songs, wonderfully caught in The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross. A concealed eros hints at an illicit desire, though God’s passion for the Shekhinah is perhaps his most positive aspect. She is a magnificently metamorphic trope: both bride and daughter, a diadem, an influence, a spark, dwelling place, comfort-in-exile, princess and wise woman, mother and wife, the Jewish people, and on it goes.
Gershom Scholem happily regarded the Shekhinah as a Gnostic vision that subtly infiltrated rabbinic Judaism and then flowered in Kabbalah. For Scholem, the misfortune of Kabbalah was the Neoplatonic structure of emanations (the Sefirot), and he welcomed every heterodox element he could uncover. I recall Hans Jonas and Scholem, in conversations that I absorbed as best I could, stubbornly disputing the compatibility of Gnosticism and any stance ultimately founded upon the Hebrew Bible. Against fatal necessity, Jonas set the Judaic sense of contingency, and he found irreconcilable the world of Yahweh and Athenian intellect. But Scholem, rather like his later revisionist Moshe Idel, argued that second-century C.E. Christian Gnosticism had crucial Jewish origins.
Everything about Gnosticism is disputable; some recent scholars wish to abrogate the term. From a literary critic’s perspective, that is not a useful view. A working definition, necessarily rough, is that Gnosticism was and is a tendency or speculation that makes Creation and the Fall of humankind, and of the cosmos, a single event. The Godhead splits into two components, a Demiurge or bungling artisan, and a true divinity-in-exile, wandering far out in the interstellar spaces. A spark or breath of that exiled being is buried deep in the rock of each of us, to be known only fitfully. The Kabbalistic Shekhinah is a version of that flickering breath.
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Zohar, even in the skilled new rendering by Daniel Matt, perpetually disconcerts me. It is a quasi-library of tracts by a circle of esoteric enthusiasts in Castile, and can be dated at about 1300. Though it purports to be Midrash on Tanakh, Zohar is the wild child of Judaic exegetical tradition. Think that you are attending an erotic picnic, to which these Castilian fantasists bring the words, while you provide the meanings.
Recent scholars bravely attempt to find aesthetic value in the Zohar narrative, but, though picaresque enough, it cannot be rescued by such special pleading. Rabbi Moses de Leon and his friends were neither poets nor storytellers, even though Scholem wistfully hoped Zohar could be read as a novel. The common reader would hang himself if he searched Zohar in quest of story and character.
In no way do I wish to deprecate the only authentic masterwork in Jewish esoteric tradition, but the singular glory of Zohar is as an adventure in speculative consciousness. A new reality in the human awareness of the life within the Godhead breaks upon readers patient and open enough to encounter what initially may seem more fantasy than revelation.
Patience is necessary because the Zohar’s lens is always the Sefirot, ten evasive metaphors for the dynamics of God’s inner life. That life is language. Torah, the body of God’s language, is a breathing entity, male and female, consonant with the reality of Yahweh’s personhood.
Space considerations compel me not to expound the Sefirot here. Readers should consult Arthur Green’s lucid A Guide to the Zohar (2003), a condensed version of which serves as introduction to the first volume of Matt’s Zohar (2004). Green accurately emphasizes the linguistic strangeness of the Zohar, composed in an artificial literary Aramaic, rather than in Hebrew. Both Talmuds are largely in Aramaic, but in a spoken, live idiom. Zohar’s language is joyously secretive, addressed to initiates, as though delighting in its own singularity.
Daniel Matt’s Zohar is a marvel of surface clarity, however intricately obscure the original. The ongoing commentary, usefully printed below the text on every page, matches even Isaiah Tishby’s splendid Wisdom of the Zohar, translated in three volumes by David Goldstein (Oxford University Press, 1989). To sample, I give Matt, volume V, Zohar 2:95a:
Who is a beautiful maiden without eyes, her body hidden and revealed? She emerges in the morning and is concealed by day, adorning herself with adornments that are not.
In passage 2:99a, this riddle expands into a parable:
This may be compared to a beloved maiden, beautiful in form and appearance, concealed secretly in her palace. She has a single lover unknown to anyone—except her, concealedly. Out of the love that he feels for her, this lover passes by her gate constantly, lifting his eyes to every side. Knowing that her lover is constantly circling her gate, what does she do? She opens a little window in that secret palace where she is, reveals her face to her lover, and quickly withdraws, concealing herself. None of those near the lover sees or notices, only the lover, and his inner being and heart and soul follow her. He knows that out of love for him she revealed herself for a moment to arouse him.
At once Torah and Shekhinah, the maiden arouses and is aroused by the Kabbalists. As wine, in a jar, so is the Torah-Shekhinah concealed in her outer garments. These are composed of letters, words, stories, which the companions of the Zohar are urged to remove.
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Peter Cole, one of our era’s major poet-translators, whose work until now is best represented by his Hymns & Qualms (2017), returns Kabbalah to the Muse, in his massively annotated The Poetry of Kabbalah, a collection superbly rendered from the original Aramaic, Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish.
Cole is an increasingly vital American poet who lives in Jerusalem. Perhaps the first of a new kind of Jewish poet in American English, he composes in an idiom deeply informed by Kabbalah:
The Reluctant Kabbalist’s Sonnet
“It is known that ‘desire’ is, numerologically…‘the essence of speech.’ ”
Avraham Abulafia, The Treasures of the Hidden Eden
It’s hard to explain What was inside came
through what had been between, although it seems
that what had been within remained the same
Is that so hard to explain It took some time
Which was, in passing, made distinctly strange
As though the world without had been rearranged,
forcing us to change: what was beyond
suddenly lying within, and what had lain
deep inside—now…apparently gone
Words are seeds, like tastes on another’s tongue
Which doesn’t explain—how what’s inside comes
through what is always in between, that seam
of being For what’s within, within remains,
as though it had slipped across the lips of a dream
This subtle sonnet’s personal eroticism is masked by the avoidance of “I.” Nine initial lines suavely represent a conjugal coupling, modulating in the final five to the Kabbalistic “words are seeds.” “Seed” changes into “that seam / of being,” the border between even the most ardent of lovers. The assonance reverberates throughout: “inside,” “lying within,” “within / within,” and the changes rung upon “strange,” “rearranged,” “change,” “remains,” and the “slipped” / “lips” cognitive music of the close. Somewhere in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, a great Paterian reverie, W. B. Yeats utters a dirge for the perpetual virginity of the soul, however fervent the intercourse:
I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.
Cole relies upon Avraham Abulafia for the Kabbalistic link between desire and words. Abulafia was the outrageous scamp of Kabbalah, a kind of Jewish picaroon, who dismissed the Zohar with the remark that the Sefirot were even worse than the Trinity. Subject to astonishing visions, he went to Rome in 1280, having announced his intention to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. The Pontiff thoughtfully ordered a stake prepared to incinerate the insolent Kabbalist, but then expired just before this act of faith could be performed. Cast out by the Jewish community for messianic pretensions, Abulafia fled to an islet in the vicinity of Malta, where he composed his longish poem, The Book of the Sign, an apocalyptic chant anticipating William Blake. Here is an excerpt rendered with appropriate gusto by Cole:
And from
the bow of knowing they shot arrows of learning,
sending insight toward the target of wisdom,
for the power of the blood in the heart is signed and sealed,
and the heart of he who is wise at heart is whole,
knowing his blood is alive and the slime is dead
within him, and so—slime and blood are enclosed
inside his heart. More bitter than death is slime.
His power is sunken within it, and sweeter than honey
Is blood, and his spirit dwells in the heart’s shrine.
And the soul of every creature of mind must journey
From slime’s tent toward the tent of blood.
And from blood’s tent toward the shrine of the heart
Of heaven it travels, and there it dwells for all
The days of its life….
You can judge Abulafia a charlatan or a prophet. Either way, I find him both distasteful and invigorating. For me, he is a terrible crystal illuminating the paradox of Kabbalistic poetry: can a poem truly assume the burden of an esoteric speculation that purports to be absolute truth? Any poem necessarily is a fiction of duration. How can an unchanging fiction give pleasure? Cole struggles with this dilemma, as no one before him has done in just this way.
I have spent part of a lifetime trying to work out a pragmatic relationship between Kabbalah and literary criticism, but I have never written a poem. The oxymoronic nature of Kabbalistic poetry is a usefully extreme exemplar of the unresolvable difficulties of all devotional verse. The good and bad of eternity, Samuel Johnson observed, are too ponderous for the wings of wit. The mind sinks under sacred weight. Belief, however agitated, tends to the humility of adoration. Can that make a poem?
When we value John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or T. S. Eliot, our aesthetic pleasure has much to do with their skill at evading the mind-numbing consequences of mere dogma. Do the best of Cole’s poets manifest such adept powers of evasiveness?
I cannot answer that as yet, though Cole’s translations and commentaries provide much materia poetica for me. The early liturgical hymns, composed by Yannai and his pupil Kallir in Palestine, late sixth century, are rendered by Cole with remarkable eloquence, and may be crucial for pondering the aesthetic basis of Kabbalistic poetry. Legend delightfully recounts that Yannai, envious of the upstart’s prowess, poisoned Kallir by sneaking a scorpion into the quondam disciple’s sandal. We may call this the anxiety of having ceased to be an influence. Yannai, unknown until excavated from the sacred trash of the Cairo Genizah, inspires Cole to touch the mad Sublime:
Angel of Fire
And the angel of the Lord was revealed to him
(in the heart of the flame):
Angel of fire devouring fire
Fire Blazing through damp and drier
Fire Candescent in smoke and snow
Fire Drawn like a crouching lion
Fire Evolving through shade after shade
Fateful fire that will not expire
Gleaming fire that wanders far
Hissing fire that sends up sparks
Fire Infusing a swirling gale
Fire that Jolts to life without fuel
Fire that’s Kindled and kindles daily
Lambent fire unfanned by fire
Miraculous fire flashing through fronds
Notions of fire like lightning on high
Omens of fire in the chariots’ wind
[Pillars of fire in thunder and storm]
[Quarries of] fire wrapped in a fog
Raging fire that reaches Sheol
T[errible fire that Ushers in] cold
Fire’s Vortex like a Wilderness crow
Fire eXtending and Yet like a rainbow’s
Zone of color arching through sky.
One imagines a seventh-century Palestinian congregation together shouting this sacred jazz, exalting in its allusions to Exodus 3:1, Ezekiel 1:27–28, and Isaiah 66:15, and again Ezekiel 1:28. What makes it Kabbalah? The “fire wrapped in a fog” (line 17) is the Shekhinah, burning through mist. Under the fierce impact of Yannai-Cole, argument is forgotten and the fire raging in every line stuns us.
Poetry—Kabbalistic, Sufi, or Christian—tends to rejoice in heretical subversions of orthodoxy. Cole and his poets blaze into summi
ts of fire and light with these inventive departures. Something fiercely splendid surges into The Poetry of Kabbalah with the advent of the false Messiah Shabbatai Tzvi, for whom the enthusiasm of Gershom Scholem was unbounded, in conversations as in his writings. Cole also is kindled into a kind of ecstasy in his translations of the Ladino ballad “Meliselda,” which Shabbatai repeatedly sang to his followers:
Meliselda
I went to the mountain
and down to the river
and there I met Meliselda—
the King’s gentle daughter.
I saw that glorious girl
emerging from the water:
her brows were bows of night,
her face was a sword of light—
her lips were red as coral,
her milk-like flesh was white.
Historically, this lyric tracks to a Carolingian French ballad celebrating Charlemagne’s supposed daughter Melisenda (there are variations in the spelling of her name). Shabbatai’s “glorious girl” is both the Shekhinah and the personal Muse of his own heretical Kabbalah, teaching redemption through sin. The powerful Shabbatian hymn “On the Destruction of the Law” is a triumphal paean to the anarchism forced upon the Jewish world by the false Messiah and his brilliant prophet, Nathan of Gaza, whose Treatise on the Dragons had expounded the “thoughtless light” of a false Creation:
