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JEWISH MYSTICISM

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EDITOR'S PREFACE

GENERAL and special studies on Christian
mysticism are numerous enough; but it is
somewhat remarkable that, in their intro
ductory pages, authors, who have much
to say of Plotinus and Neoplatonism, have
nothing or very little on the still more
cognate subject of Jewish mysticism. This
is not, however, so very surprising, for,
truth to tell, there is a singular dearth of
anything like an adequate introduction to
the study of Jewish mysticism itself. The
impression left with the general reader is
that there is little of a mystical nature
in the legitimate tradition of Jewish re
ligion, and that the Kabbalah is simply a
morbid and late growth, fed entirely by
elements foreign to the genius of Israel.
How ill-founded is the former view, and
how extreme the latter, may be seen in the
following pages. In an able summary, that

vi EDITOR'S PREFACE

may well serve as an introduction to the
general study of Jewish mysticism, Dr.
Abelson makes accessible to the general
reader, in simple terms, the results of his
careful inquiry, based on the researches of
the best Jewish scholars, and reinforced
by his own wide acquaintance with Tal-
mudic and Rabbinical literature. To write
profitably on Jewish mysticism, it is neces
sary to have, not only a discriminating
sympathy with the mystical standpoint,
but also a first-hand knowledge of Jewish
religious literature, the peculiar genius of
which, perhaps, no one but a member of
the race that has produced it can ade
quately appreciate and interpret. In addi
tion to this, Dr. Abelson comes well prepared
for his task, as he has already opened up
a new field of research by his valuable
critical study on The Immanence of God in
Rabbinical Literature, a subject which is the
indispensable presupposition of all Jewish
mysticism.

PREFACE

THE following pages are designed to give
the reader a bird's-eye view of the salient
features in Jewish mysticism rather than a
solid presentation of the subject as a whole.
The reason for this will be apparent when
one thinks of the many centuries of varie
gated thought that have had to be packed
within the small number of pages allotted to
the book. It is this very fact, too, that will
possibly give the present treatment of the sub
ject a fragmentary and tentative appearance.
Thus Chapter V. follows immediately upon
the contents of Chapter IV., without the least
attempt to show any of the numerous inter
vening stages of development. Similarly,
Chapter VI., dealing with the Zohar, should
have been preceded by an exposition of the
evolution of Jewish theological thought in
the many centuries which divide that
chapter from the matter contained in the

vii

viii PREFACE

previous chapter. But lack of space made
these omissions inevitable. Should the reader
be stimulated to a deeper study of the
subject, he will be easily led to the missing
parts by the aid of the bibliography at the
end of the book.

I should add that the translated extracts
from the Zohar are only in some cases made
by me from the original Hebrew- Aramaic. I
owe many of them to the French and German
translations to be found in the works of the
scholars from whom I have drawn much of
my material.

J. ABELSON.

ARIA COLLEGE, PORTSMOUTH.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ... 1

CHAP.

I. SOME EARLY ELEMENTS: ESSENISM . .16

II. THE MERKABAH (CHARIOT) MYSTICISM . 33

III. PHILO: METATRON : WISDOM . . .52

IV. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN : FELLOWSHIP: SHECHINAH 79
V. THE BOOK <YETSIRAH' . . . .98

VI. SOME GENERAL FEATURES OF THE <ZOHAR'

MYSTICISM . . . .117

VII. THE TEN SEFIROT . . . .136

VIII. THE SOUL . . . . .155

CONCLUDING NOTE . . . .174

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . .177

INDEX . 181

JEWISH MYSTICISM

INTRODUCTION

IT might strike the average reader as ex
ceedingly odd that any attempt should be
made at writing a book on Jewish mysticism.
The prevailing opinion — among theologians
as well as in the mind of the ordinary man-
seems to be that Judaism and mysticism
stand at the opposite poles of thought, and
that, therefore, such a phrase as Jewish
mysticism is a glaring and indefensible
contradiction in terms. It is to be hoped that
the contents of this little book will show the
utter falsity of this view.

What is this view, in the main, based
upon ? It is based upon the gratuitous
assumption that the Old Testament, and all
the theological and religious literature pro
duced by Jews in subsequent ages, as well as
the general synagogue ritual, the public and
private religious worship of the Jew — that
all these are grounded on the unquestioning
assumption of an exclusively transcendent
God. The Jews, it is said, never got any

2 JEWISH MYSTICISM

higher than the notion of the old Jehovah
whose abode was in the highest of the seven
heavens and whose existence, although very
very real to the Jew, was yet of a kind so
immeasurably far away from the scenes of
earth that it could not possibly have that
significance for the Jew which the God of
Christianity has for the Christian. The Jew,
it is said, could not possibly have that inward
experience of God which was made possible
to the Christian by the life of Jesus and the
teaching of Paul.

This is one erroneous assumption. A
second is the following : The Pauline anti
thesis of law and faith has falsely stamped
Judaism as a religion of unrelieved legalism ;
and mysticism is the irreconcileable enemy
of legalism. The God of the Jew, it is said,
is a lawgiver pure and simple. The loyal
and conscientious Jew is he who lives in the
throes of an uninterrupted obedience to a
string of laws which hedge him round on all
sides. Religion is thus a mere outward
mechanical and burdensome routine. It is
one long bondage to a Master whom no one
has at any time seen or experienced. All
spirituality is wanting. God is, as it were, a
fixture, static. He never goes out of His
impenetrable isolation. Hence He can have
no bond of union with any one here below.
Hence, further, He must be a stranger to the
idea of Love. There can be no such thing as

INTRODUCTION 3

a self-manifestation of a loving God, no move
ment of the Divine Spirit towards the human
spirit and no return movement of the human
spirit to the Divine Spirit. There can be
no fellowship with God, no opportunity for
any immediate experiences by which the
human soul comes to partake of God, no
incoming of God into human life. And
where there is none of these, there can be no
mystical element.

A third false factor in the judgment of
Christian theologians upon Judaism is their
insistence upon the fact that the intense
and uncompromising national character of
Judaism must of necessity be fatal to the
mystical temperament. Mystical religion
does, of course, transcend all the barriers
which separate race from race and religion
from religion. The mystic is a cosmopolitan,
and, to him, the differences between the
demands and beliefs and observances of one
creed and those of another are entirely ob
literated in his one all-absorbing and all-
overshadowing passion for union with
Reality. It is therefore quite true that if
Judaism demands of its devotees that they
should shut up their God in one sequestered,
watertight compartment, it cannot at the
same time be favourable to the quest pursued
by the mystic.

But as against this, it must be urged that
Judaism in its evolution through the cen-

4 JEWISH MYSTICISM

turies has not been so hopelessly particularist
as is customarily imagined. The message
of the Old Testament on this head must be
judged by the condition of things prevailing
in the long epoch of its composition. The
message of the Rabbinical literature and of
much of the Jewish mediaeval literature must
similarly be judged. The Jew was the butt
of the world's scorn. He was outcast, de
graded, incapacitated, denied ever so many
of the innocent joys and advantages which
are the rightful heritage of all the children of
men, no matter what their distinctive race
or creed might be. He retaliated by de
claring (as a result of conviction), in his
literature and in his liturgy, that his God
could not, by any chance, be the God of the
authors of all these acts of wickedness and
treachery. Idolatry, immorality, impurity,
murder, persecution, hatred — the workers of
all these must perforce be shut out from the
Divine presence. Hence seeing that, in the
sight of the Jew, the nations were the per
sonification of these detestable vices, and
seeing that the Jew, in all the pride of a long
tradition, looked upon himself as invested
with a spirit of especial sanctity, as entrusted
with the mission of a holy and pure priest
hood, one can quite easily understand how
he came to regard the God of Truth and
Mercy as first and foremost his God and no
one else's.

INTRODUCTION 5

But with all this, there are, in all branches
of Jewish literature, gleams of a far wider,
more tolerant, and universalist outlook. In
stances will be quoted later. The fact that
they existed shows that the germs of the
universalism implied in mysticism were there,
only they were crushed by the dead-weight
of a perverse worldly fate. The Jew cer
tainly did, and could, find God in his neigh
bour (a non-Jew) as well as in himself. And
this ability is, and always was, a strong point
of the mystics. Further, even if it be granted
that there are in Judaism elements of a
nationalism which can hardly be made to
square with a high spirituality, this is no
necessary bar to its possession of abiding and
deeply-ingrained mystical elements. Nation
alism is an integral and vital part of the
Judaism of the Old Testament and the
Rabbinical literature. It is bone of its bone,
spirit of its spirit. It is so interfused with
religion that it is itself religion. You cannot
take up the old Judaism and break it up into
pieces, saying : Here are its religious ele
ments ; there are its national elements.
The two are inextricably combined, warp
and woof of one texture. And thus it came
about that — strange as it may appear to the
modern mind — a halo of religious worth and
of strong spirituality was thrown over beliefs
and practices which, considered in and for
themselves, are nothing more than national

6 JEWISH MYSTICISM

sentiments, national memories, and national
aspirations. Such, then, being the case, the
relation of Judaism to Jewish nationalism is
the relation of a large circle to the smaller
circle inscribed within it. The larger em
braces the smaller.

To come now to mysticism ; the mystic
differs from the ordinary religionist in that
whereas the latter knows God through an
objective revelation whether in nature or as
embodied in the Bible (which is really only
second-hand knowledge, mediate, external,
the record of other people's visions and
experiences), the mystic knows God by con
tact of spirit with spirit ; cor ad cor
loquitur. He has the immediate vision ; he
hears the still small voice speaking clearly
to him in the silence of his soul. In this sense
the mystic stands quite outside the field of
all the great religions of the world. Religion
for him is merely his own individual religion,
his own lonely, isolated quest for truth. He
is solitary — a soul alone with God.

But when we examine the lives and works
of mystics, what do we usually find ? We
usually find that in spite of the intensely
individualistic type of their religion, they are
allied with some one particular religion of the
world's religions. Their mystical experiences
are coloured and moulded by some one
dominant faith. The specific forms of their
conceptions of God do not come from their

INTRODUCTION 7

own inner light only, but from the teachings
which they imbibe from the external and
traditional religion of their race or country.
Thus, Christian mysticism has characteristics
which are sui generis ; so has Mohammedan
mysticism ; so has Hindu mysticism ; and
likewise Jewish mysticism. The method,
the temperament, the spirit are very much
the same in all of them.. But the influence
wielded over them by the nature and trend
of each of the great dominant religions is a
decisive one, and stamps its features on them
in a degree which makes them most easily
distinguishable from one another. Thus
Judaism, whatever be its composition or
spiritual outlook, can certainly be a religion
of mysticism. Its mysticism may be of a
different order from that which we commonly
expect. But this we shall see into later.

I have thus far dealt with the misconstruc
tions put upon Judaism and its mysticism by
theologians outside the Jewish fold. I must
now say something about the erroneous
judgments passed upon the subject by some
Jewish theologians. Jewish mysticism is as
old as the Old Testament — nay, as old as
some of the oldest parts of the Old Testament.
It prevailed in varying degrees of intensity
throughout the centuries comprised in the
Old Testament history. The current flowed
on, uninterrupted, into the era covered by
the Rabbinic period. The religious and

8 JEWISH MYSTICISM

philosophical literature, ritual, worship, of
Jewish medievalism became heirs to it,
developing and ramifying its teachings and
implications in ways which it is the purport
of this book partially to tell.

Now, more than one Jewish writer has
categorically asserted that the origins of
Jewish mysticism date back not, as is the
fact, to the mists of antiquity, but to the
period of European-Jewish history beginning
with the 12th century. The German- Jewish
historian, H. Graetz (1817-1891), one of the
best-known upholders of this view, ascribes
the origin of Jewish mysticism to a French
Rabbi of the 12th and 13th centuries, by
name Isaac ben Abraham of Posquieres,
more generally known as Isaac the Blind.
He regards him as the father ' of the Kab
balah ' — the latter term being the general
name in Jewish literature for every kind or
school of mystical interpretation. Isaac is
the reputed author of the Hebrew mystical
treatise written in dialogue form and called
Bahir (' Brightness ') — the book which, more
than all its predecessors in this domain, anti
cipates the style and contents of the Zohar
(' Shining '), which is par excellence the
mediaeval text-book of Jewish mysticism,
and belongs to the 14th century. Graetz
regards the appearance of this mysticism as
some sudden, unexplained importation from
without, a plant of exotic origin, " a false

INTRODUCTION 9

doctrine which, although new, styled itself a
primitive inspiration ; although un-Jewish,
called itself a genuine teaching of Israel "
(History of the Jews, English Trans., vol. iii.
p. 565).

But a perusal of the Old Testament, the
New Testament (much of which is Hebraic
in thought and the work of Jews), and the
Rabbinic records will not, for one moment,
lend countenance to such a theory. It is
in these early monuments of Judaism that
the origins will be found. Of course, in
saying that the Old Testament holds elements
of mysticism — and in saying the same thing
of the New Testament — it must be under
stood that the mysticism is of an implicit
and unconscious kind and not the type of
religion historically known as ' mysticism.'
It is ever so far removed from the mysticism
of a Plotinus or an Eckhart or an Isaac
Luria (Jewish mystic, 1533-1572). But
taking mysticism in its broader connotation
as meaning religion in its most acute, intense,
and living stage (Rufus Jones, Studies in
Mystical Religion, p. xv.), an immediate and
first-hand experience of God, then the
ascription of mysticism to the Old and New
Testaments is perfectly correct. And, as
will be obvious from our coming pages, the
most highly-elaborated mystical doctrines of
Jews in all ages subsequent to the Old Testa
ment are, after allowing for certain extraneous

10 JEWISH MYSTICISM

additions, an offshoot of the latter's teach
ings.

Another type of ill-considered and unjust
judgment often passed on Jewish mysticism
by Jewish authorities, is to be found in the
sneering and condemnatory attitude they
adopt towards it in their writings. This,
of course, is a phenomenon by no means
confined to Jews. One need only think of
the hostility of men like Ritschl, Nordau,
and Harnack towards all mysticism, in
discriminately. The antagonism springs, in
all cases, from an inability to appreciate
the subjectivity and individualism of the
mystical temperament. While rationalism
attempts to solve the ultimate problems of
existence by the application of the intellect
and the imagination, mysticism takes account
of the cravings of the heart and of the great
fact of the soul. Pure philosophy will never
avail to give the final answer to the ques
tions, " what is above, what is below, what
is in front, what is behind " (Mishna,
Haggigah, ii. 1). The world, to man's pure
intellect, consists only of that which is seen
and which is temporal. But there is an
other world transcending it, a world in
visible, incomprehensible, but yet both
visible and comprehensible to the soul's
craving for communion with the Divine.
No ratiocination, no syllogism of logic, can
strip off the veil from this elusive world.

INTRODUCTION 11

The pathway to it lies through something
quite other than intellectuality or sense-
experience. It can be grasped only by those
inward indefinable movements of feeling or
emotion which, in their totality, constitute
the soul.

From all this it follows that scholars who,
whether congenitally or by mental training,
have no sympathy with the subjectivity of
the emotions, should be incapable of ap
preciating the paraphernalia of mysticism.

But in the case of Jewish theologians there
is something more to be said. As will be
seen in the course of our coming pages, mysti
cal speculation among the Jews clustered
largely round the cosmological sections of
the Bible. This is true of the earlier as well
as of the later mysticism. It is to be found
in the Enoch literature, a product of the
first pre-Christian century (see Charles, The
Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 1896, p. xxv.),
as well as in the Kabbalistic works produced
in France, Spain, Germany, and Poland
from the 12th to the 18th century. Com
bined with this cosmological speculation —
or rather as an outcome of it — there went
an anthropomorphism which cannot be de
scribed otherwise than as being gross. And,
in addition to this, a mysterious power was
ascribed to the permutations and combina
tions of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
By some of the most extraordinary feats

12 JEWISH MYSTICISM

of verbal jugglery these letters are made to
prove all sorts of things in heaven and
earth. They are purely fantastic, and no
one can possibly take them seriously.
The treatment of the question of the
soul, too, gave rise to many curious
beliefs about the transmigration of the
soul and the appearance of the soul of the
Messiah.

All these aspects of Jewish mysticism,
tainted as they undoubtedly are by many
unlovely characteristics, have been eagerly
seized upon by the critics in order to show
the unedifying nature of the whole teaching.
But it is really an unfair criticism, seeing
that it leaves totally out of account the
preponderating mass of true poetry and
spirituality which inhere in all parts of
Jewish mystical speculation. We shall have
occasion to give many illustrations of this
statement in pages to follow. Nowhere in
Jewish literature is the idea of prayer raised
to such a pitch of sublimity as it is in the
lives and writings of the Jewish mystics.
If it is true to say that Judaism here and
there suffers from too large an element of
formalism and legalism and externalism,
it is equally true to say that many of these
drawbacks are corrected, toned down, by
the contributions of mysticism. And al
though its treatment of the soul is in
many ways overwrought and far-fetched, it

INTRODUCTION 13

is good to know that there is a side of Juda
ism which laid stress not only on the im
portance of our securing happiness or reward
in this earthly life but also in the life beyond.
Jewish mysticism can congratulate itself
in having, at one momentous epoch of
Jewish history, achieved for Judaism a
boon, which Christian mysticism in quite
another way, but in an equally important
degree, achieved for Christianity. System
atic Christian mysticism began in the late
14th and early 15th centuries. Its fore
most exponent was Meister Eckhart, the
Dominican monk. What Eckhart and his
followers achieved may be summarised by
saying that they relieved Christendom of
the heavy load of arid scholasticism under
which it had for long been oppressed, and,
by introducing ideas of religion at once
more simple, more practical, more social,
and more spiritual, paved the way for the
New Learning — for the new discoveries
in science and philosophy which were to
revolutionise the world. In other words,
this Christian mysticism was the avenue
through which the subtle dark speculations
of an Albertus Magnus and a Thomas
Aquinas had necessarily to pass in order to
prepare coming ages for the light of a Newton,
a Kant, and a Darwin. Hence must modern
science come down from the pedestal of
her pomp and glory, and bow her acknow-

14 JEWISH MYSTICISM

ledgments to the services of many a humble
Christian mystic.

Jewish mysticism has a similar act of
homage to receive at the hands of every
lover of Jewish scholarship. In the 13th
century Judaism was in danger of becoming
devitalised through the theology of Moses
Maimonides — the great Spanish-Jewish the
ologian and author of the famous Guide
of the Perplexed — who looked upon reason
as the final arbiter of the Tightness or
wrongness of any Jewish dogma. Judaism
for him was a cult of the intellect and the
intellect only. The sole representative of
the intellect was Aristotle. Nearly every
thing in Judaism had by hook or by crook
to be harmonised with the tenets of
Aristotelianism. Thus, Jewish morality
must, to have validity, be shown to be in
consonance with Aristotle's four faculties
of the soul and with his theories of ' the
mean.' Judaism's teachings on the unity
of God must be brought into line with the
Aristotelian indivisible God, who is the
principal of all essences, the disposer of
the world. Just as intellectual perfection
is, to the Greek philosopher, the highest aim
of man, so must the teachings of Judaism
be interpreted in such a way as to show
that, according to the Torah, the life of the
saint is a life of the highest intellectuality.
Revelation — which is one of the corner-

INTRODUCTION 15

stones of the Jewish faith — must be in
accordance with reason. All the truths
enunciated by Plato and Aristotle are an
ticipated in the writings of the Prophets
and of some of the Talmudic sages. The
prophets, according to Maimonides, were
the recipients, orally, of a set of philosophical
doctrines which were handed on orally from
father to son, from generation to generation,
until the age of the Talmud. Philosophy
is an echo of them. What a fossilising,
deteriorating effect the spread of these
teachings must have wielded upon Judaism
had they been allowed to go on without
check !

The check came in the shape of mysticism.
It corrected the balance. It showed that
Judaism was a religion of the feelings as
well as of the intellect. It showed that the
Jew's eternal quest was not to be right
with Aristotle bat to be right with God.
It showed that Judaism has a place not only
for Reason but for Love too. It showed that
the ideal life of the Jew was, not a life of
outward harmony with rules and prescrip
tions, but a life of inward attachment to a
Divine Life which is immanent everywhere,
and that the crown and consummation of
all effort consists in finding a direct way to
the actual presence of God.

CHAPTER I

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS : ESSENISM

THE Old Testament is the fountain-head of
Judaism. Hence if it is true, as is contended
in a previous page, that the Old Testament
contains mystical elements, then the starting-
point in any treatment of Jewish mysticism
on historical, or even semi-historical, lines
must be the Old Testament. But this course
will not be adopted here. The Old Testament
will be omitted. And for a reason which has
already been hinted. The mysticism of the
Old Testament is of an elementary, naive,
and unconscious kind, whereas what this
book is intended to show is the consciously-
elaborated, professional mysticism of the
Jews. What we get in the Old Testament
are the ground-work and the scaffolding,
the indispensable beginnings of the edifice ;
but not the edifice itself.

Thus it has much to say about the Father
hood of God. Here we have a basic con
ception of all mysticism ; for the latter in all
its phases and stages assumes the possibility
of communion with some one who, while

16

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 17

greater and more powerful than ourselves, is
at the same time loving, and benevolent, and
personally interested in us. You can only
pray to one who hears ; you can only feel
love towards one who, you know, has loved
you first. The Old Testament scintillates
with sublime examples of men whose com
munion with God was a thing of intensest
reality to them, and whose conviction of the
' nearness ' of the Divine was beyond the
slightest cavil. The sudden and unexpected
inrushes of Divine inspiration which seized
the Old Testament prophets ; Isaiah's vision
of a God ' whose train filled the Temple ' — an
emblem of the All-inclusiveness of Deity,
of the presence and the working of an all-
embracing Spirit of Life ; the ecstasy of an
Ezekiel lifted from off his feet by the Spirit
and removed from one place to another ; the
fact of prophecy itself — the possession of a
spiritual endowment not vouchsafed to
ordinary men, the endowment of a higher
insight into the will of God; — all these re
present a stage of first-hand, living religion
to which the name of mysticism is rightly
and properly applied. But they are no more
than the preamble to the explicit, conscious,
and pronouncedly personal type of Jewish
mysticism which is the subject of the present
book.

The earliest beginnings of this mysticism
are usually accredited, by modern Jewish

18 JEWISH MYSTICISM

scholars, to the Essenes. To say this, is to
put back Jewish mysticism to a very early
date, for according to the theory of Well-
hausen (Israelitische und jildische Geschichte,
1894, p. 261), the Essenes as well as the
Pharisees were offshoots of the Hasidim
(D^TDH = ' pious ones') of the pre-Macca-
bean age. But it is only a theory, and not
an established historical fact, seeing that the
religious tenets of the Jews during the three
centuries immediately preceding the birth
of Christianity are veiled in considerable
obscurity, and seeing also that the real mean
ing of the name ' Essenes ' as well as their
exact relations with the Pharisees are points
upon which there is anything but certainty.
What is certain, however, is that three out
standing literary sources belonging to the
first two or three Christian centuries — viz.
(a) Philo, (b) Josephus, (c) some older por
tions of the Babylonian and Palestinian
Talmuds — all have stray allusions, couched in
varying phraseology, to certain sects or parties
who differed in their mode of life from the
general body of the Jews, and who were in
possession of certain esoteric teachings of
which those outside their ranks were un
informed.

Thus Philo (Quod omnis probus liber, 12)
writes of them that they were " eminently

Worshippers of God (OepairevTal 6eov), not

in the sense that they sacrifice living

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 19

animals (like the priests in the Temple), but
that they are anxious to keep their minds in
a priestly state of holiness. They prefer to
live in villages, and avoid cities on account of
the habitual wickedness of those who in
habit them, knowing, as they do, that just as
foul air breeds disease, so there is danger of
contracting an incurable disease of the soul
from such bad associations."

Again, in another of his works (De Vita
contemplative!,, ed. Conybeare, pp. 53, 206),
Philo says : :( Of natural philosophy . . .
they study only that which pertains to the
existence of God and the beginning of all
things, otherwise they devote all their
attention to ethics, using as instructors the
law^s of their fathers, which, without the out
pouring of the Divine Spirit, the human mind
could not have devised . . . for, following
their ancient traditions, they obtain their
philosophy by means of allegorical inter
pretations. ... Of the love of God they
exhibit myriads of examples, inasmuch as
they strive for a continued uninterrupted life
of purity and holiness ; they avoid swearing
and falsehood, and they declare that God
causes only good and no evil whatsoever. . . .
No one possesses a house absolutely as his
own, one which does not at the same time
belong to all ; for, in addition to living
together in companies, their houses are open
also to their adherents coming from other

20 JEWISH MYSTICISM

quarters. They have one storehouse for all,
and the same diet ; their garments belong to
all in common, and their meals are taken in

common.'

Josephus speaks of the Essenes in similar
terms (see Antiquities, xvm. i. 2-6 ; also
De Bello Judaico, n. viii. 2-13).

The points to be noted in both the fore-
mentioned authors are : (a) the great stress
laid on fellowship, amounting to a kind of
communism ; (b) their removal from the
general people by reason of their higher
sanctity ; (c) their devotion to the know
ledge of the existence of God and the be
ginning of all things ; (d) their love of alle
gorical interpretation.

Although it is exceedingly difficult to know
what the Rabbinic term equivalent to ' Ess-
ene ' is, it is not hard to deduce, from names
andphrases scattered throughout theRabbinic
records, a theory that there existed as early
as the first Christian centuries either a distinct
sect of Jews, or individual Jews here and
there, who combined mystical speculation
with an ascetic mode of life.

A similar phenomenon is observable in
the history of the early Christian Church.
There was a life of primitive and austere
fellowship. A group here, a group there,
gathered together with no other motive than
that of gaining a greater hold on the spiritual
life than was prevalent in the ordinary circles

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 21

of the people : " And the multitude of them
that believed were of one heart and soul ;
and not one of them said that aught of the
things which he possessed was his own ; but
they had all things common. . . . For
neither were there among them any that
lacked : for as many as were possessors of
lands or houses sold them . . . and distri
bution was made unto each according as
any one had need " (Acts, iv. 32-35).

They seem to have lived on the border
land of an unusual ecstasy, experiencing
extraordinary invasions of the Divine, hear
ing mystic sounds and seeing mystic visions
which, to them, were the direct and immediate
revelations of the deepest and most sacred
truths.

Illustrations of similar experiences in the
bosom of the early synagogue, as presented in
the Rabbinic records, are the following :

There are several heterogeneous passages
which speak of the existence within the
ancient Temple at Jerusalem of a special
apartment, called the lishkdt hashdlm
(c chamber of the silent [or secret] ones ').
According to the statement of Tosefta
Shekalim, ii. 16, there were to be found in
some cities of Palestine and Babylon men
known as Hashdim, who reserved a special
room in their house for depositing in it a
charity-box into which money for the poor
could be put and withdrawn with the utmost

22 JEWISH MYSTICISM

silence. It was collected and distributed by
men appointed for the purpose by the
Hashdim, and, as it was all done with the
strictest secrecy, it looks as though there
was a kind of communism amongthe members
of the order. The special chamber in the
Temple, as mentioned above, was also a place
where gifts for the poor were deposited in
secret and withdrawn for distribution in
secret.

Two facts seem to demonstrate that these
Hashdim were a small mystical sect.

Firstly, they are given the special ap
pellation of yire-het, i.e. ' fearers of sin.'
They were thus marked off by an extra
sanctity from the body of the people — and
the student of the Rabbinic literature knows
that whenever a special title is accorded to
a group or sect on the grounds of special
holiness, this holiness is always of an ex
ceptionally high order. It is the holiness of
men in touch with the Divine. And, as has
just been remarked, their enthusiasm for
doing good seems to have been grounded on
a kind of austere fellowship that reigned
among them, impelling them to do their
work unseen by the madding crowd.

Secondly, the idea of silence or secrecy was
frequently employed by the early Rabbis
in their mystical exegesis of Scripture. A
typical illustration is the following passage
from the Midrash Rabba on Genesis iii. :

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 23

" R. Simeon son of Jehozedek asked R.
Samuel son of Nahman (two Palestinian
teachers of the beginning of the 3rd century
A.D.) and said unto him, Seeing that I have
heard concerning thee that thou art an adept
in the Haggadah,1 tell me whence the light
was created. He replied, It [i.e. the Hagga
dah] tells us that the Holy One (blessed be
He) enwrapped Himself in a garment, and the
brightness of His splendour lit up the uni
verse from end to end. He [i.e. the sage who
just replied] said this in a whisper, upon
which the other sage retorted, Why dost
thou tell this in a whisper, seeing that it is
taught clearly in a scriptural verse — ' who
coverest thyself with light as with a gar
ment ' ? (Psalm, civ. 2). Just as I have my
self had it whispered unto me, replied he,
even so have I whispered it unto thee."

Another instance of what looks like a sect
of esoteric teachers among the Jews of the
first centuries is the Vatikln, i.e. ' men of
firm principles.' Their mysticism seems to
have clustered mostly round the sentiments
and outward conduct governing prayer.
Indeed, throughout Rabbinical literature the
true suppliant before God is in many cases a
mystic. Only the mystic mood is the true
prayerful mood. There is a discussion in the
Mishna of Berachoth, i. 2, as to what is the

1 Haggadah is the general name for the narrative or
fabular or philosophical sections of the Rabbinic literature.

24 JEWISH MYSTICISM

earliest moment in the dawn at which the
Shema' (the technical name for Deuteronomy,
vi. 4-9) may be read. Upon this the com
ment is made, in T.B. Berachoth, 9b, that
" the Vatikln arranged the time for prayer
in such a way as to enable them to finish the
reading of the Shema' at the exact moment
of sunrise." According to the great Rabbinic
commentator R. Solomon b. Isaac (llth
century), the Vatikln were " men who were
meek and carried out the commandment
from pure love." It must be borne in mind
that throughout Jewish theology, c meek
ness ' ('anavah) stands for something im
mensely higher than the moral connotation
which we customarily attribute to the virtue.
It signifies a level of religious devoutness
which it is not given to every one to reach.
To carry out a commandment from pure
love, means, in Jewish theology of all ages,
to attain a high stage of mystic elation which
can only be arrived at as the result of a long
preliminary series of arduous efforts in the
upward path. To recite the Shema' is, as
the Rabbis frequently say, " to take upon
one's self the yoke of the Kingdom of
Heaven," and the phrase ' Kingdom of
Heaven ' has decidedly mystical associations,
as we shall see later. Hence one may plaus
ibly conclude that the Vatikln were a
brotherhood whose dominant feature was a
simplicity of living combined with a degree

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 25

of earnest scrupulousness in prayer amounting
to an adoration, a love, of the Divine such as
is experienced by the mystics of all nations
and all times.

And a similar description might be applied
to the members of what apparently was
another esoteric order of those days — the
Zenuim, i.e. ' lowly, chaste ones.' As a
matter of fact the Rabbinic records are too
vague and disconnected to enable scholars
to say with any certainty whether these
Zenuim were an independent sect or whether
the word is merely another term denoting
either or both of the other fellowships already
alluded to. They bear the hall-mark of all
ancient and mediaeval Jewish mysticism in
respect of the emphasis laid by them on the
importance of the letters comprising the
Divine Name in Hebrew as well as upon cer
tain manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet
generally. The following passage occurs in
T.B. Kiddushin, 71a :

" R. Judah said in the name of Rab [i.e.
R. Abba Arika, a Babylonian teacher of the
3rd century A.D.] the Name of forty-two
letters can only be entrusted by us to him
who is modest [i.e. zenua'] and meek, in
the midway of life, not easily provoked to
anger, temperate, and free from vengeful
feelings. He who understands it, is cautious
with it and keeps it in purity, is loved above
and is liked here below. He is revered by his

26 JEWISH MYSTICISM

fellow-men ; he is heir to two worlds — this
world and the world to come."

It is interesting to quote here the com
ment on this Rabbinic passage made by the
Spanish-Hebrew philosopher Moses Maimoni-
des (1135-1204) in his great work The Guide
of the Perplexed. He says (part i. ch. Ixii. Eng.
Trans, by M. Friedlander, Routledge, 1906) :

:f There was also a name of forty-two letters
known among them. Every intelligent per
son knows that one word of forty-two letters is
impossible. But it was a phrase of several
words which had together forty -two letters.
There is no doubt that the words had such a
meaning as to convey a correct notion of the
essence of God, in the way we have stated.
. . . Many believe that the forty-two letters
are merely to be pronounced mechanically ;
that by the knowledge of these, without any
further interpretation, they can attain to
those exalted ends. . . . On the contrary it
is evident that all this exalted preparation
aims at a knowledge of metaphysics and
includes ideas which constitute ' the secrets
of the Law ' as we have explained."

Maimonides, it should be remembered, was
a rationalist and ant i- mystic ; and much of
the old Rabbinic cosmological mysticism
which was looked upon as serious mystical
speculation by many of his literary con
temporaries, was dubbed by him as meta
physics or physics.

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 27

But, to return to our subject, the best
insight into the origin and implication of
these forty-two letters is afforded us by the
Talmudic passage last quoted (T.B. Kiddie
shin, 71a), where we are told that in the last
days of the Temple the decadent priests were
deemed unworthy to pronounce the Divine
Name in their official benedictions, and a
name consisting of twelve letters was sub
stituted. What this name was is nowhere
given in the Rabbinic records. As time
went on, it was deemed inadvisable to entrust
even this twelve-lettered name to every priest.
It was taught only to an elect set among them,
who, when chanting the benedictions in the
general company of all the priests, used to
6 swallow ' its pronunciation (i.e. make it
inaudible) in order not to divulge it. The
forty-two-lettered name probably arose in
similar circumstances, but whether the secrets
of it were confided to a greater or a smaller
circle than that in which the twelve-lettered
name was known, is by no means apparent.
Let it only be said here — as it is a subject
to which we shall return later on — that in
the elaborated systems of the mediaeval
Kabbalists these many-lettered names of
God (not only forty-two, but also forty-five
and seventy-two letters) are the pivots on
which huge masses of most curious mystical
lore turn. The Ten Sefirot have close con
nections with these doctrines of letters —

28 JEWISH MYSTICISM

secret doctrines about the Divine nature,
about creation, about the relations subsisting
between God and the universe.

Reference must here be made to what
appears to be another order of Jewish
mystics in the opening centuries of the
Christian era. The Mishna (Tractate
Sukkah, v. 2) speaks of ' the Hasidim and
Anshe Ma'aseh ' (i.e. saints and miracle-
workers) who, at the joyous feast of the
water-drawing at the Temple during Taber
nacles, used to dance and perform certain
acrobatic feats with lighted torches. The
allusions are very vaguely worded, and it is
hazardous to deduce any hard - and - fast
theories. But so much may be said, viz.
that being mentioned together in the same
Mishna passage just quoted, and being
mentioned in close succession in another
old passage of the Mishna (Tractate Sotah,
ix. 15), it is more than probable that they
belonged to one and the same sect. Again
the phrase ' Anshe Ma'aseh ' (as well as
the singular form of the first word) is fre
quently used in Rabbinic to mean ' miracle-
worker,' although in the Biblical Hebrew
it would signify ' man of action.' There
is a passage in T.B. Berachoth, 18b, which
gives a weird description of the experience
of a ' IJasid ' who heard ' from behind the
curtain ' certain secrets hidden from ordinary
men. And the student of Rabbinics knows

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 29

how many a Rabbi of these early centuries,
gifted with the mystic temperament, wielded
a semi-miraculous power of foretelling the
future or of creating something out of
nothing (see on this, Volz's Der Geist Gottes,
Tubingen, 1910, pp. 115-118). The vast
literature of Rabbinic angelology and
demonology shows the same features — upon
which Conybeare (in The Jewish Quarterly
Review, xi. 1-45) has thrown considerable
light in his translation of The Testament
of Solomon.

It is a moot point as to whether these
Hasidim are the lineal descendants of the
saintly party known by that name in the
Maccabean epoch. The point, however,
which clearly emerges is, that a certain
esoteric wisdom and capacity for doing
things, unknown to the multitudes, was
vouchsafed to certain bodies of men, who by
the superior purity of their living, by their
unabated devotion to the things of the spirit,
and by their cultivation of a kind of brother
hood in which simplicity, single-mindedness,
and charity were the reigning virtues, were
enabled to enjoy a living in the world of the
unseen.

One further matter, in conclusion. The
interests of historical accuracy demand that,
as has been already pointed out, the student
should be in no hurry to say that these
esoteric sects whose beliefs are so vaguely

30 JEWISH MYSTICISM

and fragmentarily described in the Rabbinic
literature, are to be identified with the
Essenes described in the writings of Philo
and Josephus. Resemblances there cer
tainly are, but there are differences too ;
and the Rabbinic allusions are too disjointed
to enable one to form an impression — even
an inexact impression, leave alone an exact
one — of the lives and thoughts of these
mystic gatherings. Philo and Josephus
paint a complete picture. The Talmud and
Midrashim give but stray and elusive hints.
For one thing, the Essenes practised celibacy ;
marriage must necessarily dissolve the fellow
ship characterising the order. The Rabbinic
records give no hint of the duty of celibacy.
On the contrary, marriage was held to pro
mote a far higher sanctity than celibacy.
But the Rabbis tolerated some exceptional
cases of celibacy ; so that it is difficult
to speak categorically. Again, the centre of
gravity of Essenic religion seems to have
been the cultivation of the highest ethics.
They stressed inward religion as demanded
by the Mosaic code, but, with the exception
of a reverence for the holiness of the Sabbath,
they were comparatively unconcerned with
the outward religious duties incumbent upon
the Jews of that time. Thus, they made
little or nothing of the sacrifices — doubtless
a corollary of their emphasis on the alle
gorical interpretation of Scripture. But it

SOME EARLY ELEMENTS 31

was otherwise with the early mystics of the
Rabbinic literature. Although living in an
atmosphere of mystery and looking to the
Divine secret to unroll itself at any moment,
they yet never overlooked the claims of
institutional religion ; they never flouted
the ceremonial side of Judaism ; they were
inflexible upholders of the Law and its
associated traditions. The same pheno
menon is, of course, seen in the history of
Christian mysticism where the first-hand,
inward, individualised experiences of the
ground-truths of religion are conformed to
the prevailing and accredited dogmas of
Christianity.

There were mystics among the Pharisees
as w^ell as among the Essenes, and yet we
are told that the most spiritually-gifted
among the former (who constituted a
haburah, i.e. ' fellowship ') were they who
were most scrupulous about the giving
of the priestly dues — a purely external
religious duty based on the legalism of the
Pentateuch. Indeed this blending of
legalism with spirituality, this consistent
(and successful) interweaving of the formal
ism of tradition with the mysticism of the
individual, is an arresting feature of Jewish
theology in all ages.

In fine, as must be apparent from the
general trend and contents of this book,
the whole of Jewish mysticism is really

32 JEWISH MYSTICISM

nothing but a commentary on the Jewish
Bible, an attempt to pierce through to its
most intimate and truest meaning ; and
what is the Bible to the Jew but the ad-
monisher to be loyal to the traditions of
his fathers ? Only then will he find God
when he is convinced that He was found of
those of his race who sought Him in an
earlier day.

CHAPTER II

THE MERKABAH ( CHARIOT) MYSTICISM

THE first chapter of Ezekiel has played a
most fruitful part in the mystical specula
tions of the Jews. The lore of the heavenly
Throne-chariot in some one or other of its
multitudinous implications is everywhere
to be met with. Whence Ezekiel derived
these baffling conceptions of the Deity,
and what historical or theological truths he
meant to portray by means of them, are
themes with which the scholars of the Old
Testament have ever busied themselves.
But the Jewish mystic sought no rational
istic explanation of them. He took them
as they were, in all their mystery, in all
their strange and inexplicable fantasy, in
all their weird aloofness from the things
and ideas of the everyday life. He sought
no explanation of them because he was
assured that they stood for something which
did not need explaining. He felt instinct
ively that the Merkabah typified the human
longing for the sight of the Divine Presence
and companionship with it. To attain this
3

34 JEWISH MYSTICISM

end was, to him, the acme of all spiritual
life.

Ezekiel's image of Yahve riding upon
the chariot of the ' living creatures,' accom
panied by sights and voices, movements
and upheavals in earth and heaven, lying
outside the range of the deepest ecstatic
experiences of all other Old Testament
personages, was for the Jewish mystic a
real opening, an unveiling, of the innermost
and impenetrable secrets locked up in the
inter-relation of the human and the divine.
It was interpreted as a sort of Divine self-
opening, self-condescension to man. The
door is flung wide open so that man, at the
direct invitation of God, can come to the
secret for which he longs and seeks. This
idea is a supreme factor in the mystic life
of all religions. The soul is urged on to seek
union with God, only because it feels that
God has first gone out, on His own initiative
and uninvited, to seek union with it. The
human movement from within is but a
response to a larger Divine movement from
without. The call has come ; the answer
must come.

The Chariot (Merkabah) was thus a kind
of ' mystic way ' leading up to the final goal
of the soul. Or, more precisely, it was the
mystic ' instrument,' the vehicle by which
one was carried direct into the ' halls ' of the
unseen. It was the aim of the mystic to be

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 35

a * Merkabah-rider,' so that he might be
enabled, while still in the trammels of the
flesh, to mount up to his spiritual Eldorado.
Whether, as has been suggested, the uncanny
imagery of the Merkabah lore is to be sought,
for its origin, in the teachings of Mithraism,
or, as has also been suggested, in certain
branches of Mohammedan mysticism, one
can see quite clearly how its governing idea
is based on a conception general to all the
mystics, viz. that the quest for the ultimate
Reality is a kind of pilgrimage, and the
seeker is a traveller towards his home in
God.

It was remarked, on a previous page, that
the mystic neither asked, nor waited, for any
rationalistic explanation of the Merkabah
mysteries. He felt that they summarised
for him the highest pinnacle of being towards
the realisation of which he must bend his
energies without stint. But yet, from certain
stray and scattered Rabbinic remarks, one
takes leave to infer that there existed in the
early Christian centuries a small sect of
Jewish mystics — the elect of the elect — to
whom certain measures of instruction were
given in these recondite themes. There was
an esoteric science of the Merkabah. What
its content was we can only dimly guess —
from the Rabbinic sources. It appears to
have been a confused angelology, one famous
angel Metatron playing a conspicuous part.

36 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Much more is to be found in the early Enoch-
literature as well as — from quite other points
of view — in the mediaeval Kabbalah. Let us
give some illustrative sayings from the
Rabbinic literature.

In the Mishna, Haggigah, ii. 1, it is said :
" It is forbidden to explain the first chapters
of Genesis to two persons, but it is only to be
explained to one by himself. It is forbidden
to explain the Merkabah even to one by him
self unless he be a sage and of an original
turn of mind." In a passage in T.B.
Haggigah, 13a, the words are added : " but it
is permitted to divulge to him [i.e. to one in
the case of the first chapters of Genesis] the
first words of the chapters." In the same
passage another Rabbi (Ze'era) of the 3rd
century A.D. remarks, with a greater strin
gency : " We may not divulge even the first
words of the chapters [neither of Genesis nor
Ezekiel] unless it be to a ' chief of the Beth
Din ' l or to one whose heart is tempered by
age or responsibility."

Yet another teacher of the same century
declares in the same connection : " We may
not divulge the secrets of the Torah to any
but to him to whom the verse in Isaiah, iii. 3,
applies, viz. the captain of fifty and the
honourable man, and the counsellor and the
cunning artificer and the eloquent orator."

1 Literally ' House of Judgment,' the technical name for
a Jewish Court of Law.

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 37

(The Rabbis understood these terms to mean
distinction in a knowledge and practice of
the Torah.)

This insistence upon a high level of moral
and religious fitness as the indispensable
prelude to a knowledge of the Merkabah has
its counterpart in the mysticism of all
religions. The organic life, the self, conscious
and unconscious, must be moulded and de
veloped in certain ways ; there must be an
education, moral, physical, emotional ; a
psychological adjustment, by stages, of the
mental states which go to the make-up of the
full mystic consciousness. As Evelyn Under
bill (Mysticism, p. 107) says : " Mysticism
shows itself not merely as an attitude of
mind and heart, but as a form of organic
life. ... It is a remaking of the whole
character on high levels in the interests of
the transcendental life."

That the Rabbis were fully alive to the
importance of this self-discipline is seen by
a remark of theirs in T.B. Haggigah, 13a,
as follows : "A certain youth was once
explaining the Hashmal (Ezekiel, i. 27, trans
lated ' amber ' in the A.V.) when fire came
forth and consumed him." When the ques
tion is asked, Why was this ? the answer
is : '' His time had not yet come " (lav mdti
zimneh). This cannot but mean that his
youthful age had not given him the oppor
tunities for the mature self-culture necessary

38 JEWISH MYSTICISM

to the mystic apprehension. The Hashmal,
by the way, was interpreted by the Rabbis
as : (a) a shortened form of the full phrase
hdyot esh me-mdl-le-loth, i.e. ' the living
creatures of fire, speaking ' ; or (b) a short
ened form of 'ittim hdshoth ve-ittim me-mdl-
le-loth, i.e. ' they who at times were silent
and at times speaking.' In the literature of
the mediaeval Kabbalah, the Hashmal belongs
to the ' Yetsiratic ' world (i.e. the abode of
the angels, presided over by Metatron who
was changed into fire ; and the spirits of
men are there too).1 According to a modern
Bible commentator (the celebrated Russian
Hebraist, M. L. Malbim, 1809-1879) the word
signifies " the Hayot [i.e. ' living creatures '
of Ezekiel, i.] which are the abode [or camp]
of the Shechinah [i.e. Divine Presence] where
there is the ' still small voice.' It is they
[i.e. the Hayot] who receive the Divine
effluence from above and disseminate it to
the Hayot who are the movers of the
'wheels' [of Ezekiel's Chariot]."

Many more passages of a like kind might
be quoted in support of the view that the
attainment of a knowledge of the Merkabah
was a hard quest beset with ever so many
impediments ; that it pre-supposed, on the
one hand, an exceptional measure of self-
development, and, on the other, an extra-

1 There were four such ' worlds ' in the mediaeval Kabbalah.
They will be alluded to further on.

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 39

ordinary amount of self-repression and self-
renouncement.

But the mention of fire in the preceding
paragraph leads us to the consideration of an
aspect of the Merkabah which brings the
latter very much into line with the descrip
tion of mystical phenomena in literature
generally. Every one knows how the image
of fire dominates so much of the mysticism
of Dante. The mediaeval Christian mystics
— Ruysbroeck, Catherine of Genoa, Jacob
Boehme, and others — appeal constantly to
the same figure for the expression of their
deepest thoughts on the relations between
man and the Godhead. The choice of the
metaphor probably rests on the fact that
' fire ' can be adapted to symbolise either or
both of the following truths : (a) the bright
ness, illumination which comes when the
goal has been reached, when the quest for
the ultimate reality has at last been satis
fied ; (b) the all-penetrating, all-encompass
ing, self-diffusing force of fire is such a telling
picture of the mystic union of the soul and
God. The two are inter-penetrated, fused
into one state of being. The soul is red-hot
with God, who at the same time, like fire,
holds the soul in his grip, dwells in it.

Examples are the following : In the Mid-
rash Rabba on Canticles, i. 12, it is said :
" Ben 'Azzai [a famous Rabbi of the 2nd
century A.D.] was once sitting expounding the

40 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Torah. Fire surrounded him. They went
and told R. ' Akiba, saying, ' Oh ! Rabbi !
Ben 'Azzai is sitting expounding the Torah,
and fire is lighting him up on all sides'
Upon this, R. 'Akiba went to Ben ' Azzai and
said unto him, ' I hear that thou wert sitting
expounding the Torah, with the fire playing
round about theeS c Yes, that is so,' replied
he. ' Wert thou then,' retorted 'Akiba,
' engaged in unravelling the secret chambers
of the Merkabah ? ' ' No,' replied he." It
is not germane here to go into what the sage
said he really was engaged in doing. The
quotation sufficiently shows how in the 2nd
century A.D. the imagery of fire was tradition
ally associated with esoteric culture.

Here is another instance, in T.B. Succah,
28a. Hillel the Elder (30 B.c.-lO A.D.) had
eighty disciples. Thirty of them were
worthy enough for the Shechinah to rest
upon them. Thirty of them were worthy
enough for the sun to stand still at their
bidding. The other twenty were of average
character. The greatest among them all
was Jonathan son of Uziel (1st century A.D.) ;
the smallest among them all was Johanan
son of Zaccai (end of 1st century A.D.).
The latter, smallest though he was, was
acquainted with every conceivable branch
of both exoteric and esoteric lore. He knew
' the talk of the ministering angels and the
talk of the demons and the talk of the palm-

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 41

trees (dekdlim).' He knew also the lore
of the Merkabah. Such being the measure
of the knowledge possessed by ' the smallest,'
how great must have been the measure of
the knowledge possessed by 'the greatest,'
viz. Jonathan son of Uziel ! When the
latter was sitting and studying the Torah
(presumably the esoteric lore of the angels
and the Merkabah) every bird that flew above
him was burnt by fire. These latter words
are the description of the ecstatic state,
the moments of exaltation, the indescribable
peace and splendour which the soul of the
mystic experiences when, disentangling itself
from the darkness of illusion, it reaches the
Light of Reality, the condition so aptly
phrased by the Psalmist who said : " For
with thee is the fountain of life ; in thy
light shall we see light " (Psalm, xxxvi. 9).
The bird flying in the environment of this
unrestrained light, must inevitably be con
sumed by the fire of it.

The monument which Jonathan son of
Uziel has left us in perpetuation of his
mystical tendencies, is his usage of the term
Memra (' Word ') to denote certain phases
of Divine activity, in the Aramaic Paraphrase
to the Prophets which ancient Jewish tradi
tion assigned to his authorship, but which
modern research has shown to be but the
foundation on which the extant Aramaic
Paraphrase to the Prophets rests.

42 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Another illustration of the mystic vision
of light consequent on the rapture created
by an initiation into the Merkabah mys-
steries is related in T.B. Ifaggigah, 14b, as
follows :

" R. Johanan son of Zaccai was once riding
on an ass, and R. Eliezer son of Arach was
on an ass behind him. The latter Rabbi
said to the former, ' O master ! teach me a
chapter of the Merkabah mysteries.' ' No ! '
replied the master, ' Have I not already
informed thee that the Merkabah may not
be taught to any one man by himself unless
he be a sage and of an original turn of mind ? '
' Very well, then ! ' replied Eliezer son of
Arach. c Wilt thou give me leave to tell thee
a thing which thou hast taught me ? '
6 Yes ! ' replied Johanan son of Zaccai.
' Say it ! ' Forthwith the master dis
mounted from his ass, wrapped himself up
in a garment, and sat upon a stone beneath
an olive tree. c Why, O master, hast thou
dismounted from thy ass ? ' asked the dis
ciple. ' Is it possible,' replied he, ' that I
will ride upon my ass at the moment when
thou art expounding the mysteries of the
Merkabah, and the Shechinah is with us,
and the ministering angels are accompanying
us ? ' Forthwith R. Eliezer son of Arach
opened his discourse on the mysteries of the
Merkabah, and no sooner had he begun, than
fire came down from heaven and encompassed

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 43

all the trees of the field, which, with one
accord, burst into song. What song ? It
was ' Praise the Lord from the earth, ye
dragons and all deeps ; fruitful trees and all
cedars, praise ye the Lord5 (Psalm, cxlviii.
7, 9). Upon this, an angel cried out from
the fire, saying, ' Truly these, even these,
are the secrets of the Merkabah.' R.
Joljanan son of Zaccai then arose and
kissed his disciple upon the forehead, saying,
' Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel, who
hath given unto Abraham our father a son
who is able to understand, and search,
and discourse upon, the mysteries of the
Merkabah.' . . .

" When these things were told to R. Joshua
[another disciple of Johanan], the latter
said one day when walking with R. Jose
the Priest [another disciple of Johanan],
' Let us likewise discourse about the Merka
bah ! ' R. Joshua opened the discourse.
It was a day in the height of summer. The
heavens became a knot of thick clouds, and
something like a rainbow was seen in the
clouds, and the ministering angels came in
companies to listen as men do to hear
wedding music. R. Jose the Priest went
and told his master of it, who exclaimed,
' Happy are ye, happy is she that bare you !
Blessed are thy eyes that beheld these things !
Indeed I saw myself with you in a dream,
seated upon Mount Sinai, and I heard a

44 JEWISH MYSTICISM

heavenly voice exclaiming, Ascend hither !
Ascend hither ! large banqueting-halls and
fine couches are in readiness for you. You
and your disciples, and your disciples'
disciples, are destined to be in the third set '
[i.e. the third of the three classes of angels
who, as the Rabbis taught, stand continu
ally before the Shechinah, singing psalms
and anthems]."

There are several points which need
making clear in this remarkable passage.
The objection to discuss the Merkabah while
sitting on the animal's back, and the fact
of sitting upon a stone under an olive tree,
point to the necessary physical and tempera
mental self-discipline which is the sine qua
non of the mystic's equipment in all ages
and among all nations. He must not be
set high on the ass, lest his heart be lifted up
too. He must be cleansed of every vestige
of pride, lowly and of contrite spirit. It
has been mentioned in the previous chapter
how meekness was one of the unfailing
qualities of the Zeriuim. The proud man,
said the Rabbis, " crowds out the feet of the
Shechinah." " Whosoever is haughty will
finally fall into Gehinnom." Pride, to the
Rabbis, was the most terrible pitfall in the
path of the religious life. Its opposite,
humility, was the starting-point of all the
virtues. If such was the premium placed
upon meekness in so far as it concerned the

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 45

life of the ordinary Jew, how enormous
must have been its importance for the life
of the mystic — for him who aimed at knowing
Eternal Truth ? Everything that savours
of evil, of imperfection, of sin, must vanish.
The primary means of this self-purification
is the culture of humility.

The remark that 'the Shechinah is with
us and the ministering angels are accom
panying us ' emphasises two salient feat
ures of Rabbinic mysticism. Firstly, the
Shechinah is the transcendent-immanent God
of Israel ; Israel's environment was satur
ated with the Shechinah whose unfailing
companionship the Jew enjoyed in all the
lands of his dispersion. " Even at the time
when they are unclean does the Shechinah
dwell with them," runs a passage in T.B.
Yoma, 57 a. How unique, how surpassingly
vivid must have been the consciousness
of this accompanying Shechinah-Presence
to the Merkabah initiates, to those who had
raised themselves so high above the level
of the ordinary crowd by the pursuit of an
ideal standard of self-perfection ! Secondly,
the ' ministering angels ' play a large part
in all the Merkabah lore, as is seen from the
following Rabbinic comments.

Ezekiel, i. 15, says, ''Now as I beheld the
living creatures, behold one wheel upon the
earth by the living creatures, with his four
faces." R. Eliezer said, "There is one angel

46 JEWISH MYSTICISM

who stands upon earth but whose head reaches
to the ' living creatures ' ... his name is
Sandalphon. He is higher than his neigh
bour l to the extent of a five-hundred years'
journey. He stands behind the Merkabah
wreathing coronets for his Master " (T.B.
Haggigah, 13b).

Another passage reads : " Day by day
ministering angels are created from the stream
of fire. They sing a paean [to God] and then
pass away, as it is said, c They are new every
morning ; great is thy faithfulness ' (Lamen
tations, iii. 23). . . . From each word that
comes forth from the mouth of the Holy
One (blessed be He) there is created one angel,
as it is said, ' By the word of the Lord were
the heavens made and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth ' " (Psalm, xxxiii. 6).

The Rabbis obviously understood the
phrase c the host of them ' to refer, not as we
suppose, to the paraphernalia of the heavens,
i.e. the stars, planets, etc., but to the angelic
worlds. The idea of the Word of God be
coming transformed into an angel, and hence
accomplishing certain tangible tasks among
men, here on earth, bears strong resemblances
to the Logos of Philo as well as to the
Prologue of the Fourth Gospel.

The phrase to ' listen as men do to hear
wedding music ' (or literally ' the music of
bride and bridegroom ') is a reminiscence of

1 Sandalphon = Greek crvvd8e\(f)os = co-brother.

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 47

the large mass of Rabbinic mysticism clus
tering round the love overtures of bride and
bridegroom in the Book of Canticles. The
book, on the Rabbinic interpretation, teaches
the great truth of a c spiritual marriage '
between the human and the Divine, a be
trothal between God and Israel. " In ten
places in the Old Testament," says Canticles
Rabba, iv. 10, " are the Israelites designated as
a ' bride,5 six here [i.e. in the Book of Can
ticles] and four in the Prophets . . . and in
ten corresponding passages is God represented
as arrayed in garments [which display the
dignity of manhood in the ideal bridegroom]."

To the minds of the Rabbis, the super
abundant imagery of human love and marriage
which distinguishes Canticles from all other
books of the Old Testament, was the truest
symbol of the way in which human Israel and
his Divine Father were drawn near to one
another. The intimate and secret experi
ences of the soul of the Jew, the raptures of
its intercourse with God in senses which no
outsider could understand, were best re
flected in the language of that august and
indefinable passion which men call love.

The remark ' ascend hither ! ascend hither !
large banqueting halls and fine couches are
in readiness for you,' etc., points to another
prominent phase of Rabbinic mysticism. It
was strongly believed that the pious could,
by means of a life led on the highest plane,

48 JEWISH MYSTICISM

free themselves from the trammels that bind
the soul to the body and enter, living, into
the heavenly paradise. The idea was ob
viously a development of a branch of Old
Testament theology. But the latter gets no
further than the conception that heaven may
be reached without dying, the persons trans
lated thither having finished their earthly
career. The experiences of Enoch (Genesis,
v. 24) and of Elijah (2 Kings, ii. 11) are illus
trations. A development of the doctrine is
the thought that certain favoured saints of
history are, after death and when in heaven,
given instruction concerning the doings of
men and the general course of events here
below. The Apocalyptic literature (see
especially Apocalypse of Baruch, by Dr.
Charles) deals somewhat largely in this idea ;
and there are traces of it in the Rabbinical
literature. But these saints, however true
the teachings and revelations vouchsafed to
them may eventually have turned out to be,
are dead as far as the world is concerned.

A further development is seen in the theory
that certain pious men may temporarily
ascend into the unseen, and, having seen and
learnt the deepest mysteries, may return to
earth again. These were the mystics who,
by training themselves to a life of untarnished
holiness, were able to fit themselves for
entering a state of ecstasy, to behold visions
and hear voices which brought them into

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 49

direct contact with the Divine Life. They
were the students of the Merkabah who, as
a result of their peculiar physical and mental
make-up, were capable of reaching the goal of
their quest. " There were four men," says
the Talmud (Haggigah, 14b), " who entered
Paradise." They were R. 'Akiba (50-130 A.D.),
Ben 'Azzai (2nd century A.D.), Ben Zoma
(2nd century A.D.), and Elisha b. Abuyah (end
of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century
A.D.). Although this passage is one of the
puzzles of the Talmud, and is variously inter
preted, we may quite feasibly lay it down that
the reference here is to one of those waking
visits to the invisible world which fall within
the experiences of all mystics in all ages.

Fragments of what was a large mystic litera
ture of the later Rabbinical epoch (i.e. from
about the 7th to the llth century, usually
known as the Gaonic epoch) have descended
to us. Of these, one branch is the Hekalot
(i.e. ' halls '), which are supposed to have
originated with the mystics of the fore-men
tioned period who called themselves Yorede
Merkabah (i.e. Riders in the Chariot). As
Dr. Louis Ginzberg says (see art ' Ascension '
in Jewish Encyc. vol. ii.), "these mystics
were able, by various manipulations, to
enter into a state of autohypnosis, in which
they declared they saw heaven open before
them, and beheld its mysteries. It was
believed that he only could undertake this
4

50 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Merkabah-ride, who was in possession of all
religious knowledge, observed all the com
mandments and precepts and was almost
superhuman in the purity of his life. This,
however, was regarded usually as a matter of
theory ; and less perfect men also attempted,
by fasting and prayer, to free their senses
from the impressions of the outer world and
succeeded in entering into a state of ecstasy
in which they recounted their heavenly

visions."

Much of this belief survives in modern
Jewish mysticism, whose chief representatives
known as Hasidim are to be found in Russia,
Poland, Galicia, and Hungary.

Although it was stated above that the
large volume of this phase of mystic litera
ture originated in the period from the 7th
to the llth century, modern research has
clearly proved that its roots go back to a
very much earlier date. In fact, it is very
doubtful whether its origin is to be looked for
at all in the bosom of early Judaism. Mithra-
worship is now taken by scholars to account
for much of it. But it is hazardous to ven
ture any final opinion. It must never be
forgotten that the first chapter of Ezekiel
worked wonders on the old Hebrew im
agination. Commentaries on almost every
word in the chapter were composed whole
sale. In all likelihood, the mysticism of the
Merkabah-riders is a syncretism. Mithraic

THE MERKABAH MYSTICISM 51

conceptions in vogue were foisted on to
the original Jewish interpretations ; and, in
combination with Neo-Platonism, there was
evolved this branch of Jewish mysticism which,
though by no means abundant in the Talmud
and the Midrashim, occupies a considerable
place in the ideas of the mediaeval Kabbalah,
as well as in the tenets of the modern
Hasidim.

CHAPTER III

PHILO I METATRON : WISDOM

SOMETHING must now be said about the
mystical elements in the Hellenistic, as
distinguished from the Palestinian, branch
of early Judaism. The Palestinian (which
includes the Babylonian) is, by a long way,
the more voluminous ; and its significance
for the development of the later Judaism
totally eclipses that of Jewish Hellenism
which really wielded its influence over Chris
tianity rather than over Judaism. Still there
are a few outstanding features in Jewish
Hellenism which are germane to our sub
ject. Moreover, modern research has shown
that there was a certain degree of inter
course, in the opening centuries of the Chris
tian era, between Jewish scholars of Palestine
and Babylonia on the one hand, and Jewish
scholars of Alexandria on the other, Alex
andria being the great centre of the Hellen
istic culture then predominant. This must
have resulted in an interchange and inter
action of ideas and doctrines which found their
way into the literatures of both branches.

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 53

A noteworthy example of this fusion of
ideas is the famous Philo Judseus of Alex
andria. Platonic, Stoic and Rabbinic strata
make up the philosophy of Philo. They
are intermingled not always harmoniously.
But what tells hard upon the student of
Philo's presentation of Hebrew thought is
the difficulty of knowing whether certain
parallel ideas in his writings and the writings
of the Palestinian Rabbis originated with
him or with the Rabbis. It has, however,
been shown, with a fair approach to con-
clusiveness, that where there is a resemblance
in Halachic interpretation, Philo is the
borrower ; whereas the Haggadic parallels
emanate from the Rabbis.

To attempt an examination of Philo's
mysticism as a whole lies quite outside the
scope of this book. All that can be dealt
with — and this very fragmentarily and in
adequately — are certain points in the
mysticism of his Logos idea which, by
reason of their affinity with the Haggadah,
are important to an understanding of Jewish
mysticism. How to bridge the chasm be
tween God and the world, how at the first
creation of man it was possible for God
who is the all-holy and all-perfect, to come
into contact with imperfect man, is an oft-
recurring subject of speculation in the
Talmud and Midrashim. The cosmogony
of Genesis comes in for an exceptionally

54 JEWISH MYSTICISM

elaborate treatment. In this connection
it is only to be expected that angelology
should figure largely. Theologians are quite
wrong when they say that post-Biblical
Judaism removed the Deity further and
further away from the world, and then
tried to bring Him nearer again by the
medium of the angel. The truth is that God
was in many senses brought very near, and
the angel was but an aspect of this ' near
ness.' God was immanent as well as trans
cendent, and the angel was a sort of emana
tion of the Divine, an off-shoot of Deity,
holding intimate converse with the affairs
of the world. It was on these lines that the
Rabbis solved their problem of reconciling
the idea of a pure God with an impure
world. God did not really come into con
tact with the world, but His angels did —
and His angels are really part and parcel
of His own being, emanations of His own
substance. This was, of course, far from
being a logical solution, but the Rabbis,
like many other religious thinkers of those
early centuries, were not masters of logic.

Philo's ideas run in what seems a similar
groove. All matter is to him evil ; hence
God must be placed outside the world. But
though this was his philosophy, his religion —
Judaism — taught him otherwise. Obliged
to find some way out of the difficulty, he
hit upon the idea of the Logoi, i.e. divine

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 55

agencies, which, while being in some senses
inherent in God, are, in other ways and at
various times, exterior to Him. It would
be incorrect to say that he derived this
theology from the Rabbinic sources. Pla
tonic and Stoic teachings are largely re
sponsible for them. But Philo endeavoured
to bring them into line with Rabbinic
modes of Biblical interpretation. He felt
that he ought to give them a Jewish dress —
with the result that much of what he says
about Divine powers, agencies, attributes
operating in the world, independently of
the Deity and yet as part and parcel of
Him, bears a close resemblance to much of
Rabbinic angelology and Rabbinic teaching
about the Divine attributes. Thus, to give
some examples.

The Rabbis (in Genesis Rabba, viii. 3, 4,
and in many other places) are at pains to
justify the usage of the grammatical plural
in the words : " And God said, Let us
make man " (Gen. i. 26). Various opinions
are thrown out. But the finally accepted
view is that " at the time when God was
about to create the first man, He took
counsel with the ministering angels." What
this interpretation aims at, is to relieve the
Deity of the blame for the evil in man, and to
place it upon some other shoulders. But
what it really does is to show that the earth
is the scene and centre of Divine agencies.

56 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Angels are emanations of the Divine working
here below. Man is in a double sense made
by them. It was they who had a hand in his
creation. It is they who fill his environ
ment, and make him realise that he is ever
in the grip of a Presence from which there is
no escaping. The Talmud and Midrashim
overflow with the descriptions of vast hier
archies of spiritual intelligences — angels —
who guide the will of man and the course of
nature, surrounding man on all sides and
at all moments, shielding him and lifting
him up to higher planes of thought and
feeling. They protect the pious and help
them in their transactions. Every angelic
host consists of a thousand times a thousand.
The angels give instruction in certain
matters. Every man has a special guardian
angel. All this literature of angelology can
have no possible meaning at all unless it is
interpreted to mean that God is present and
active in the world, a Power behind pheno
mena, a directing Mind, a controlling Will,
an Immanent God.

Philo's doctrine is similar. Thus he says :
ic For God, not condescending to come down
to the external senses, sends His own words
(logoi) or angels for the sake of giving assist
ance to those who love virtue. But they
attend like physicians to the diseases of the
soul, and apply themselves to heal them,
offering sacred recommendations like sacred

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 57

laws, and inviting men to practise the duties
inculcated by them, and, like the trainers of
wrestlers, implanting in their pupils strength
and power and irresistible vigour. Very
properly, therefore, when he [i.e. Jacob] has
arrived at the external sense, he is repre
sented no longer as meeting God, but only
the Divine word, just as his grandfather
Abraham, the model of wisdom did" (On
Dreams, i. 12).

In another passage in the fore-mentioned
section, he speaks of " the immortal words
(logoi) which it is customary to call angels "
(ibid. i. 19). Again, take the following :

" But these men pray to be nourished by
the word (logos) of God. But Jacob, raising
his head above the word, says that he is
nourished by God Himself, and his words are
as follows : The God in whom my father
Abraham and Isaac were well pleased ; the
God who has nourished me from my youth
upwards to this day ; the angel who has
delivered me from all my evils, bless these
children. This now, being a symbol of a
perfect disposition, thinks God Himself his
nourisher, and not the word ; and he speaks
of the angel, which is the word, as the phy
sician of his evils, in this speaking most
naturally. For the good things which he has
previously mentioned are pleasing to him,
inasmuch as the living and true God has
given them to him face to face, but the

58 JEWISH MYSTICISM

secondary good things have been given to him
by the angels and by the word of God. On
this account I think it is that God gives men
pure good health which is not preceded by
any disease in the body, by Himself alone,
but that health which is an escape from
disease, He gives through the medium of skill
and medical science, attributing it to science,
and to him who can apply it skilfully, though
in truth it is God Himself who heals both by
these means, and without these means. And
the same is the case with regard to the soul.
The good things, namely, food, He gives to
men by His power alone ; but those which
contain in them a deliverance from evil, he
gives by means of His angels and His word "
(Allegories of the Sacred Laws, iii. 62).

The intermingling of Greek and Hebraic
elements in these passages is curious. But
the two sets are easily distinguishable. Two
things are clear from these quotations.
Firstly, the angel is a kind of representative of
the Deity among mortals. It is a sort of
God in action. God is very near man and
not transcendent. Secondly, the angel and
the Logos (Word) or Logoi (Words) have
very much the same nature and fulfil very
much the same function. The Rabbinic
mysticism clustering round angels as well as
the Rabbinic doctrine of the Shechinah—
which will be dealt with later — have likewise
many points in common. Angels encompass

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 59

the worthy Israelite ; the Shechinah likewise
accompanies Israel, nay, even dwells in the
midst of impure Israelites, as a famous passage
in the Talmud says. But there are aspects
of Philo's angelology which are strange to
Rabbinic modes of thought. One of the
most interesting of these is his designation
of angels as ' incorporeal intelligences ' and
as ' immortal souls ' (On Dreams, i. 20).
The Rabbis obviously thought of angels
as material beings. They even at times
materialised the Shechinah, as will be men
tioned in the following chapter. The sight
of an angel was a physical phenomenon.
Philo's exegesis took quite a different turn.
Thus, in a lengthy comment on Genesis,
xxviii. 12 (" And he dreamed a dream and
behold a ladder was planted firmly on the
ground, the head of which reached to heaven,
and the angels of God were ascending and
descending upon it") he goes on to say:
" This air is the abode of incorporeal souls,
since it seemed good to the Creator of the
universe to fill all parts of the world with
living creatures. . . . For the Creator of the
universe formed the air so that it should
be the habit of those bodies which are im
movable, and the nature of those which are
moved in an invisible manner, and the soul
of such as are able to exert an impetus and
visible sense of their own. . . . Therefore,
let no one deprive the most excellent nature

60 JEWISH MYSTICISM

of living creatures of the most excellent of
those elements which surround the earth ;
that is to say, of the air. For not only is it
not alone deserted by all things besides,
but rather like a populous city, it is full of
imperishable and immortal citizens, souls
equal in number to the stars. Now, of these
souls some descend upon the earth with a
view to being bound up in mortal bodies. . . .
But some soar upwards. . . . But others,
condemning the body of great folly and
trifling, have pronounced it a prison and a
grave, and, flying from it as from a house of
correction or a tomb, have raised themselves
aloft on light wings towards the aether, and
have devoted their whole lives to sublime
speculations. There are others again, the
purest and most excellent of all, which have
received greater and more divine intellects,
never by any chance desiring any earthly
thing whatever, but being, as it were, lieu
tenants of the Ruler of the universe, as
though they were the eyes and ears of the
great king, beholding and listening to every
thing. Now philosophers in general are wont
to call these demons, but the sacred scrip
tures call them angels, using a name more in
accord with nature. For indeed they do
report (§(,aryye\\ovo-i) the injunctions of the
father to his children and the necessities of
the children to the father " (On Dreams, i. 22).
From this passage the following deductions

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 61

seem to be obvious : Firstly, one large de
partment of the Philonic angelology is utterly
strange to Talmudic and Midrashic exegesis.
An angel as an ' incorporeal soul ' is more akin
to the Aristotelian doctrine of 'intelligences,'
the intermediate beings between the Prime
Cause and existing things. The general level
of the Rabbinic conception of the angel is
well characterised by the following passage :
" When Samael saw that no sin was found
amongst them [the Jews] on the Day of
Atonement, he exclaimed before God, ' O
Thou Sovereign of the Universe, Thou hast
one nation on earth resembling the minister
ing angels in heaven. Just as the latter
are bare-footed, so are the Israelites bare
footed on the Day of Atonement. Just as
the angels neither eat nor drink, so do the
Israelites not eat or drink on the Day of
Atonement. Just as the angels do not skip
about, so do the Israelites stand, unmoved,
upon their feet the whole Day of Atonement.
Just as peace reigns in the midst of the
angels, so does peace reign in the midst of
Israel on the Day of Atonement. Just as
the angels are free from all sin, so are the
Israelites free from sin on the Day of Atone
ment.' God hearkens to the advocacy of
Israel from the mouth of their arch-accuser,
and He grants His atonement for the altar,
for the sanctuary, and for the priests and for
all the people of the congregation."

62 JEWISH MYSTICISM

This quotation is from the Pirke-de- Rabbi-
Eliezer, a curious Midrashic work belonging to
the 9th century A.D. It seems to summarise
all the best points in the angelic lore of the
Jews in the preceding nine centuries. The
naivete of the whole Rabbinic outlook is
here very apparent and is ever so far removed
from Philo's ' incorporeal soul.' In fact
Philo's systematic division of angels into
higher and lower grades is foreign to the
Rabbinic speculations which are largely
without any system whatsoever. Foreign
also is his view of angels as ' souls descending
upon the earth with a view to being bound
up in mortal bodies.' The angel, in Rabbinic
thought, is never inside any one.

But, in the second place, it is obvious
to the student of mediceval as distinct from
the Talmudic and Midrashic mysticism that
there is an affinity between the Philonic
treatment of angels and the treatment of
the subject by such famous Jewish theo
logians as Sa'adia b. Joseph (892-942),
Judah Ha-Levi (1085-1140), Solomon Ibn
Gabirol (1021-1058), Abraham b. David
(1100-1180), and Moses Maimonides (1135-
1204). They, too, like Philo, were influenced
by Greek thought — they were either Aris
totelians, Platonists, or Neo-Platonists ; so
that what amount of influence came to
them directly from the works of Philo is
a matter that calls for deep research. To

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 63

the first-named theologian — Sa'adiah — there
is, like to Philo, something immaterial,
something ethereal, unearthly, about the
angel. While being external to man, it is,
in a sense, internal too, Sa'adiah being of
opinion that they were visions seen during
prophetic ecstasy rather than outward
realities. See his philosophical work
Emunot we-De(ot (' Faith and Knowledge '),
ii. 8, iv. 6.

That Ibn Gabirol should develop a more
mystical line of thought than this, is
not surprising seeing he is dependent, in
many of his essential teachings, upon the
Enneads of Plotinus. The words of Judah
Ha-Levi are worth quoting here. He says
(Cusari, iv. 3) :

" As for the angels, some are created for
the time being, out of the subtle elements of
matter [as air or fire]. Some are eternal
angels [i.e. existing from everlasting to
everlasting], and perhaps they are the
spiritual intelligences of which the philo
sophers speak. We must neither accept
nor reject their words [i.e. the words of these
philosophers]. It is doubtful whether the
angels seen by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel
were of the class of those created for the
time being or of the class of spiritual
essences which are eternal. ' The glory of
God ' is a thin subtle body (goof dak) pro
duced by the will of God, and which forms

64 JEWISH MYSTICISM

itself in the prophet's imagination in the
way that the Divine will directs. This is
according to the first [i.e. simpler explana
tion]. But according to a second [i.e. more
complex] explanation, the ' glory of God '
denotes the whole class of angels together
with the spiritual instruments (kelim hd-
ruhniim), viz. the Throne, the Chariot
(Merkabah), the Firmament, the Ophanim
and the Spheres (Gdlgdlim), and others
besides which belong to the things which
are eternal. All this is implied in the term
c glory of God.'

Further on, in the same paragraph, Judah
Ha-Levi brackets together as having one
meaning, the phrases c Glory of God, ' ' King
dom of God,' and c Shechinah of God.'
Maimonides speaks on the subject thus
(Guide of the Perplexed, ii. 6) :

" The angels are not corporeal ; this is
what Aristotle also said ; only there is a
difference of name ; he calls them ' separate
intelligences ' (sichlim nifrddim), whereas we
designate them angels. Moreover, when he
says that these ' separate intelligences ' are
also intermediaries between the Creator and
existing things, and that through their means
the spheres are moved — the motion of the
spheres being the prime cause of all being —
this also is written in all books, because you
will not find that God does any deed except
by means of an angel. . . . The movement of

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 65

Balaam's ass was done by means of an angel
. . . even the elements are called angels. . . .
The term angel is applied to a messenger of
men, as, e.g., in the phrase c and Jacob sent
messengers ' (mdldkim), in Genesis, xxxii. 3.
It is applied to a prophet, as, e.g., in the
phrase c and an angel of the Lord went up
from Gilgal to Bochim,' in Judges, ii. 1.
It is the term used of the ' separate intelli
gences ' which are seen by the prophets
in the prophetic vision. It is the designa
tion also of the vital powers as we shall
explain."

Maimonides takes a Rabbinic apothegm
such as " God does nothing without previ
ously consulting his heavenly [or upper]
host," or "God and his Court of Justice
have taken counsel together over every limb
in the human body, and have put each in its
rightful place," and is at pains to show how
these statements must not be taken literally
to mean that the Deity asks advice or seeks
help, but that what they convey is that the
term ' angel ' stands for the powers embodied
in all earthly phenomena, the world-forces
which are outflowings of God and represent
the aspect of the Divine activity in the
universe. Paradoxically enough, Maimonides
is rationalist and mystic at one and the same
time. While striving to strip the Hebrew
scriptures of the supernatural and the
miraculous, he exhibits his strong belief in a
5

66 JEWISH MYSTICISM

world impregnated with traces and symp
toms of a Divine Life.

But let it not be thought that Philo's
Logos and Logoi and his angelology are
nothing but symbols of abstract thinking
on the ways in which the Deity participates
in the affairs of men and of the world. It
has been mentioned a little above, that the
Rabbis often materialised the Shechinah
and gave strongly definite personality to
their ' angels.' There is one respect in which
Philo followed a similar line of exposition.
He too gave personality to his Logos —
personality as understood in Philo's time,
and very different from our modern ideas of
personality. Not alone does he speak of the
Logos as the being who guided the patriarchs,
as the angel who appeared to Hagar, as
the cloud at the Red Sea, as the Divine form
who changed the name of Jacob to Israel,
but he also describes him as " a suppliant
to the immortal God on behalf of the mortal
race which is exposed to affliction and
misery ; and is also the ambassador sent by
the Ruler of all to the subject race " (Who
is Heir to the Divine Things, xlii.). He is
" an attendant on the one Supreme Being "
(ibid, xlviii.). He is a paraclete. " For it
was indispensable that the man who was
consecrated to the Father of the world,
should have, as a paraclete, his son, the being
most perfect in virtue, to procure forgiveness

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 67

of sins, and a supply of unlimited blessings "
(Life of Moses, iii. 14).

The resemblances between these teachings
and much of the mysticism of Paul, as well
as of the author of the Fourth Gospel, are
unmistakable ; and whether they show
borrowing or are explicable as belonging to
the modes of thinking current in that age, is
a moot point. But what strongly concerns
our presentation of this subject, is the fact
that this branch of Philonic theology is
mirrored in the early Jewish, as well as in
the early Christian, teaching about God.
But with this considerable difference — that
whereas some of the cardinal doctrines of
Christianity are embedded in these ideas,
their significance for Judaism was, at no
epoch, vital. They belong to the literature,
not to the faith, of the Jew. They were
ever for the few rather than for the many.

It is to the figure of Metatron that we must
turn for the counterpart in Rabbinic mys
ticism to the personified Logos of Philo.
" Behold I send an angel before thee, to keep
thee in the way and to bring thee into the
place which I have prepared. Beware of
him and obey his voice, provoke him not ;
for he will not pardon your transgressions ;
for my name is in him " (Exodus, xxiii. 20, 21).
This angel in whom God's name exists is,
said the Rabbis, Metatron. And why so ?
Because, said they, the numerical value of

68 JEWISH MYSTICISM

the Hebrew letters composing the name
Metatron (314) corresponds with those com
prising the word Shaddai ( = Almighty, one
of the Divine appellations).

This is a typical illustration of the Rabbinic
mysticism clustering round (i.) arithmetical
numbers, and (ii.) the Divine Name. ' My
name is in him,' i.e. the name ' Almighty '
is comprehended in the name s Metatron.'
And the Divine Name is not merely a
grammatical part of speech. It is a kind of
essence of the Deity Himself. Hence, the
essence of the Deity exists in Metatron. He
is God's lieutenant. He represents the active
phase of Deity as manifested in the universe.

The command to ' beware of him and
obey his voice,' failing which ' he will not
pardon your transgressions,' forcibly brings
out the intercessory powers of Metatron. In
the Midrash Tanhuma (on portion Wa'-eth-
kanan) it is graphically related how Moses,
when he knew that he must die, implored all
the different parts of creation — the sea, the
dry land, the mountains and the hills — to
pray that he might live. But they all
refuse. He finally betakes himself to
Metatron and says to him : " Seek mercy for
me that I may not die." But Metatron
replies : " O Moses, my master, why troublest
thou thyself thus ? I have heard behind the
veil that thy prayer for life will not be heard."
Metatron confesses that his intercession would

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 69

be vain, but yet — and here is a great point —
the Midrashic passage in question states that
immediately after " the anger of the Holy
Spirit grew cool." Metatron did not succeed
in securing a prolongation of life for Moses,
but he managed to turn away Divine wrath
from him.

The title ' Prince of the Presence ' (Sdr
Hd'Pdnim) as well as * Prince of the World '
(Sar Ha-Olam) is often applied to Metatron.
A striking passage again depicting Metatron,
not alone as pleader for Israel, but as taking
upon himself the sorrow for Israel's sins, is
as follows (Introduction to Lamentations
Rabba, xxiv.) :

' No sooner was the Temple burnt than
the Holy One (blessed be He) said : Now will
I withdraw my Shechinah from it and I will
go up to my former habitation, as it is said
(Hosea, v. 15), 'I will go and return to my
place, till they acknowledge their offence and
seek my face.' At that hour the Holy One
(blessed be He) wept, saying : Woe is me !
What have I done ! I caused my Shechinah
to abide below for the sake of Israel, but
now that Israel has sinned 1 have returned
to my original dwelling-place. Far be it
from me that I should be a derision to the
nations and a mocking to all creatures !
Forthwith Metatron fell upon his face, ex
claiming : O Sovereign of the Universe, let
me weep, but weep thou not ! "

70 JEWISH MYSTICISM

The title ' Prince of the Presence ' or
' Prince of the World ' denotes Metatron's
active interference with the happenings of
the universe. T.B. Yebamoth, 16b, has the
following extraordinary saying :

" No one but the ' Prince of the World '
could have uttered verse 25 of Psalm, xxxvii,
* I have been young and now am old ; yet
have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor
his seed begging bread.' Who else could
have said this ? Could God have said it ?
Does old age apply to God ? Could David
have said it ? Was he advanced in years
[when he composed this Psalm] ? No one
else but the ' Prince of the World ' could
have said it."

Two important ideas are enshrined here.
Firstly, Metatron's existence is made to date
from the Creation. A kind of pre-existence
is accorded him — and the doctrine of
pre-existence, or rather pre-existences, is a
ubiquitous element in the old Rabbinic
treatment of cosmogony. " Seven things
preceded the Creation of the world, viz. : (a)
the Torah, (b) the Divine Throne, (c) the
Temple, (d) the Name of the Messiah, (e)
Paradise, (/) Hell, (g) Repentance." Whether
Metatron ought to be an eighth, or is to be
identified with one among these seven, is a
point for further research.

Secondly, Metatron speaks words of worldly
wisdom garnered from an intimate ex-

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 71

perience of contact with the multitudinous
facts and phases of earthly existence. He
knows men as no one else could know them.
He resembles, in this respect, the strongly-
personified ' Wisdom ' of the Jewish- Alex
andrian literature. Like it, he is given a
sort of prime part in the cosmic process.

The Aramaic commentary (Targum) on
Genesis, v. 24 (" And Enoch walked with
God ; and he was not, for God took him ")
renders the name ' Enoch ' by ' Metatron.'
And just as Enoch in the Apocrypha (Book
of Jubilees, iv. 23 ; 2 Enoch, liii. 2) appears as
the heavenly scribe, so Metatron is often
described in the Talmud and Midrash (see
T.B. fjaggigah, 15a).

The idea fundamental to both these
branches of literature is probably the same ;
viz. that Metatron is a link uniting the human
with the Divine, the bridge over which the
knowledge of what is passing here below
is brought to the realms above, and over
which, in return, the Divine concern for men
and the world passes down to the scenes of
earth. A truly poetic rendering of this
Divine concern is given in the Talmud
(Abodah Zarah, 3b), where God is described
as giving instruction a certain number of
hours every day, to prematurely-deceased
children. " Who instructed them in the
period previous to their death ? ': So the
question runs. And the answer is " Meta-

72 JEWISH MYSTICISM

tron ! ': On this understanding, Metatron
is the helper to the Deity ; he, as it were,
takes up the Divine work at points where its
omnipotence cannot, if one may so speak,
reach ; not even the smallest, meanest
child need be forgotten, forsaken of God,
so long as Metatron is its guide and in
structor.

Metatron has been identified with the
Zoroastrian Mithra. It certainly possesses
features resembling Philo's Logos. It has
also much in common with the theology of
the early Gnostics. In all probability it is
the result of a fusion of all these systems
of thought. The same can be predicted of
more than one other branch of Rabbinic
angelology. Noteworthy, however, is the
fact that though the Jews could get so far
as to bring themselves to look at Metatron
in the light of a heavenly co-worker with God,
a kind of semi-divinity having an access to
the Deity in a measure utterly unique, yet
so extraordinarily uncompromising were
their notions of the Divine Unity that, as
far as the religion of their daily life was
concerned, God alone was God, and Metatron
was ignored. His name figures somewhat
in certain departments of the Jewish liturgy.
He plays a role in mediaeval Jewish
mysticism. But the stringent, inelastic
emphasis on the idea of safeguarding the
Divine Unity — an emphasis rarely appreci-

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 73

ated by the non-Jew — could brook no re
cognition of Metatron in the sphere of the
Jew's most intimate religious concerns.

One other dominating characteristic of
the Jewish-Hellenistic mysticism is to be
found in the functions assigned to the idea
of Wisdom. The grand preliminary to this
branch of doctrine is to be found in the Old
Testament (Proverbs, viii. 22-31) :

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way,

before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,

or ever the earth was.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth ;
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills,

was I brought forth :
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the

fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the

world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was there :
When he set a compass upon the face of the depth :
When he established the clouds above :
When he strengthened the foundations of the deep :
WThen he gave to the sea his decree
That the waters should not pass his commandment :
When he appointed the foundations of the earth :
Then I was by him, as one brought up with him :
And I was daily his delight,
Rejoicing always before him ;
Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth,
And my delights were with the sons of men.

Wisdom is the quality through which
God acts in the world, and by the instru
mentality of which the Deity is known to

74 JEWISH MYSTICISM

man. It is, in the passage just quoted,
personified and objectified. It dwells among
the sons of men and finds its special delight
in intercourse with them. It resembles the
Divine Pneuma or Spirit of the Stoic philo
sophy which, too, is given a prime part in
the cosmic process.

The Rabbis, it is interesting to notice,
made much of the phrase c as one brought
up with him.' The phrase is represented
in the original Hebrew by one word ' Amun?
By slight alterations in the vo welling they
extracted three meanings from it : viz.
(i.) pedagogue, (ii.) pupil, (iii.) workman.
Thus (i.) Wisdom (which they identified
with the Torah or Law) was the school
master, tutor in the Divine household, giving
guidance to his Divine Master in his plans
for the creation of the universe, (ii.) Wis
dom was the pupil or child of the Divine
(according to Rabbinic teaching a pupil
stood to his master in the position of child
to a father), hidden away by reason of its
preciousness in the lap of the Father, until
the time when it became a gift to a newly-
launched universe, (iii.) Wisdom was God's
workman, or servant, in the work and ad
ministration of the universe.

And yet, in spite of all this obvious and
strong personification, Wisdom is but " a
quality belonging to God, one of His attri
butes by which He makes Himself known and

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 75

felt in the world of men and in the human
heart, one of the elements in the Divine
nature which is most in sympathy with the
innate tendency in man to go on striving
ever upward and onward." l ^

It is, after all, only God's Wisdom, no
matter how near an approach to personality
there may be in the various descriptions of
the term. It is a potency wholly in God, and
yet at one and the same time wholly out of
God. It is an embodiment, a revealer of one
aspect of Divine Spirit. As has already been
remarked, the Jew always vindicated the Unity
of God no matter into what dubious fields his
theological speculations otherwise led him.

The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon shows
forth similar mystical elements. " For
wisdom is more mobile than any motion ;
yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things
by reason of her pureness " (vii. 24). This
is the Stoic conception of the immanent
Pneuma. Again :

For she is a breath of the power of God,

And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty.

For she is an effulgence from everlasting light,
And an unspotted mirror of the working of God.

(vii. 25, 26.)

This seems to be rather the language of

1 For a fuller treatment of this point see the author's
work, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature,
pp. 198-201 (Macmillan & Co., 1912).

76 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Platonism. So is the following pronounce
ment on the soul's pre-existence :

For I was a witty child
And had a good spirit,

Yea, rather, being good, I came into a body unde-
filed.

(viii. 19, 20.)

Platonic, too, is the notion of earth and
matter pressing down the soul :

For the corruptible body presseth down the soul,
And the earthly tabernacle weigheth down
The mind that museth upon many things.

(ix. 15.)

Wisdom is man's anchorage in time of
trouble. It is the immanent protector and
redeemer of mankind. The whole of chapter
x. is given over to this theme. In xviii.
14-16, Wisdom becomes a personality. It
is identified with the ' Word ' which domin
ates the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel, and
which in very similar senses appears in the
Rabbinic mysticism as 'Dibbur,' 'Ma-amar'
or ' Memra.'

For while peaceful silence enwrapped all things,
Arid night in her own swiftness was in mid-course,
Thine all-powerful Word leaped from heaven out of

the Royal Throne,

A stern warrior into the midst of the doomed land,
Bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned command
ment ;

And standing, it filled all things with death ;
And while it touched the heaven, it trode upon the
earth.

PHILO: METATRON: WISDOM 77

The Word in this extraordinary pronounce
ment holds the idea of the Divine Energy
(as distinguished from the Divine Love)
which is operative in all things and which
" links the Transcendent Godhead with His
creative spirit, creature with Creator, and
man with man " (Evelyn Underbill, The
Mystic Way, p. 223). Truly enough, the
passage breathes what seems an unedifying
spirit of revenge and bloodthirstiness, but
it is explicable as an echo of the Old Testa
ment idea of the God of righteousness who
hates wickedness and slays the wicked.
Divine Justice energises in the world, it is
embedded in the scheme of the cosmos,
it brooks no evil, it recognises nothing but
uprightness and truth. This idea of an
antagonism between an immanent God and
sin is, as will be seen in our next chapter,
a feature of the Rabbinic conception of
the Shechinah. In Exodus Rabba, xxviii. and
xxix., the Divine Voice at the revelation
on Sinai deals out death to the idolaters.
Similarly, the Targum (Aramaic paraphrase
on the Old Testament) renders the Hebrew
for " And my soul shall abhor you " (Leviti
cus, xxvi. 30), by " And my Memra l shall
remove you afar." The Memra here is the
avenger of the wayward Israelites. The

1 ' Memra ' is the Aramaic for ' word.' For the full
theological significance of the ' Memra ' see the author's
Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature, pp. 146-173.

78 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Jewish-Hellenistic ' Wisdom,' the ' Word '
of the Fourth Gospel, the ' Memra ' of
Targumic literature, the ' Shechinah ' of
the Talmud and Midrashim — all point —
though in somewhat different ways and
degrees — to the great fact that the world
of matter and of spirit is the scene of the
immanent manifestation of Divine Wisdom,
Divine Power, Divine Love, Divine Justice.

CHAPTER IV

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN : FELLOWSHIP
SHECHINAH

THE Old Testament, which alone is, and
ever was, the Bible of the Jew, contains
two oft-recurring ideas which rank among
the principal elements of its theological
teaching. These ideas are : (a) God as
Father ; (b) God as King. To give illustra
tions from the Old Testament is unnecessary,
as the present work is not concerned with
the theology of the Bible. It is our business
to see in what ways they were developed
by the Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash,
and adapted to their systems of thought
about the relations between the Divine
and the human. The fatherhood of God
necessarily involves the sonship of man.
The Rabbis living under the rule of foreign
masters — the yoke of Rome and the mem
ories of other yokes all equally galling —
were loth to think that the oppressors of
Israel could possibly enjoy so incomparably
sublime a privilege as the Divine Fatherhood.
It seemed a glaring contradiction that

79

80 JEWISH MYSTICISM

nations who did not hold themselves bound
by the Mosaic code, should fall into the cate
gory of ' sonship ' in relation to the Father.
Hence Fatherhood and Sonship became
limited to the Jew — although it should be
said, for the sake of historical accuracy,
that gleams of a far more comprehensive
outlook occasionally peep through the pages
of Rabbinic literature.

God's Fatherhood to the Jew is evidenced
by the outflow of His love towards him.
This love, which is ceaseless and rapturous,
is described by the Rabbis in numberless
ways — in parables, proverbs and similes
of a highly picturesque kind. The Jew is
possessed by the power of a Spirit of Love
which encircles him, holds him in its grip,
assures him that forgiveness, protection from
enemies, safety from mischief, every coveted
thing in heaven and earth, are his.

'' Beloved are the Israelites," said R.
'Akiba (50-130 A.D.), (f inasmuch as they
are called sons of God ; especially did that
love manifest itself in making known to
them that they are sons of God r> (Aboth,
iii. 15). The same Rabbi declared the Book
of Canticles to be ' the holiest of all holy
books ' inasmuch as it symbolises the bond
of loving union in which Israel is joined to
God (Canticles Rabba, Introduction).

In a comment on Deuteronomy, xiv. i.
(" Ye are children unto the Lord your God ")

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 81

the Sifri states the conflicting opinions of
two Rabbis. One of them asserts that the
verse implies that the Israelites are only
called children of God when they conduct
themselves as children should, i.e. in the
right way. The other maintains that the
high privilege belongs to them even when
they are wayward and sinful. The Father's
love is with them no matter how little de
serving they may be of it.

Strikingly poetical is the view given in the
Mechilta (p. 30, Friedmann's ed.). Com
menting on Exodus, xiv. 19 (" Arid the angel
of the Lord which went before the camp of
Israel, removed and went behind them "), it
says : " Unto what may it be likened ? It
may be likened unto a man who was walking
by the way and leading his son before him.
Robbers came to snatch the son away from
him. Seeing this, the father removed the
son from before him and placed him behind
him. Then came a wolf behind him to
steal the son away. So the father removed
him from before him and placed him once
again behind him. Then came the robbers
from before him and the wolf from behind
him in order to take the son away. What
did the father do ? He took the son and
placed him upon his arms. But the son
thereupon began to feel the pain of the sun's
heat upon him. So the father spread his
mantle over him ; and when he felt hungry
6

82 JEWISH MYSTICISM

he gave him food to eat, and when he felt
thirsty he gave him water. Likewise did
the Holy One (blessed be He) for Israel, as
it is said, ' And I taught Ephraim to go, I
took them on my arms ; but they knew not
that I healed them ' (Hosea, xi. 3). When
the son [Israel] felt the pain of the sun's heat,
He [the Father] spread his mantle over him,
as it is said, ' He spread a cloud for a covering ;
and fire to give light in the night ' (Psalm,
cv. 39). When he began to feel hunger, He
gave him food, as it is said, ' Behold, I will
rain bread from heaven for you ' (Exodus,
xvi. 4). When he began to feel thirst, He
gave him to drink, as it is said, * And he
brought forth streams out of the rock '
(Psalm, Ixxvhi. 16)."

The truth enshrined in this parable — a
parable which has its counterparts in all
branches of the Rabbinic literature — is that
the closest and most loving of relationships
subsists between Israel and God. The love
of the Father forms an environment for
Israel. The atmosphere the latter breathes is
saturated with that love. His whole life is,
as it were, a response to it, infected with it,
absorbed in it. It gives him the sense of
a companionship with a greater and far
more real Life than himself. He is ever
lastingly conscious of an intimate union
with a Power who can work all things for
because the governing motive of that

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 83

Power is Love. Israel and the Father are
one.

The Rabbis summarised all the far-reaching
implications of this deeply mystical thought
of Fatherhood by the usage of the term
6 Shechinah.5

But the roots of the teaching about the
Shechinah lie in something more than this
Fatherhood idea. The Kingdom idea must
be reckoned with — the Kingdom of Heaven,
as it is familiarly designated both in the
Rabbinic literature and in the Prayer-book
of the Synagogue. As in the case of the
Fatherhood, so here, too, we must seek the
origin of the Kingdom in the compass of the
Old Testament. In the latter, the kingship
of God is sometimes pictured as an event
consummated in the present and sometimes
as some 6 far-off divine event ' in the remote
future. Thus Psalm, cxlv. 13, says : " Thy
kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy
dominion endureth throughout all genera
tions." This is clearly a present kingship.
Zechariah, xiv. 9, says : " And the Lord shall
be king over the whole earth, on that day
shall he be one and his name one." This is
obviously a future kingship.

The student of Apocryphal and Apocalyp
tic literature will find it bearing the same
duality of meaning there too. In the
Rabbinic literature it is further amplified.
The favourite expression there is ' the taking

84 JEWISH MYSTICISM

upon one's self [or the receiving] of the yoke
of the Kingdom of Heaven.' An examina
tion of several of the contexts in which the
phrase is embedded, proves that it stands for
a conglomeration of doctrines, such as that :

(a) The Jew must abandon idolatry (i.e.
servitude to man or the work of man's hands).

(b) He must desire and work for the universal
recognition of the Jewish God. (c) He must
acknowledge and feel the ' nearness ' of God
to him, the Divine companionship ever en
shrouding him and his race, the direct reve
lation of a living and loving God in all fields
of his activity and hope, (d) The Jew must
acknowledge himself as one of a band, and
not as an isolated unit — a band held and
welded together by the feeling that it is a
kingdom within a Kingdom — a greater King
dom, the Kingdom of Heaven. The so-called
4 clannishness ' of the Jews, their tendency
for herding together, a fault for which they
are continuously scolded, abused or, at best,
derided, is thus seen to be based upon a motive
which is by no means as undesirable as it is
generally pictured to be. The Jewish flock
must be one because the ' kingdom ' of the
Jews must be one — and the latter ' kingdom '
must be one because the 4 Kingdom of
Heaven ' in which it is comprised and which
thrills it through and informs it, is one.
44 God is king in Jeshurun," say the sages (in
allusion to their particular interpretation of

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 85

Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 5), only when "the heads
of the people are assembled, and the tribes of
Israel are together." In other words, the
earthly kingdom is the fons et origo of the
Heavenly. Remove the earthly kingdom
and you remove the Divine Revelation of
God in the midst of Israel. The Heavenly
Kingdom is broken up and vanishes. Its
raison d'etre is completely gone.

For the individual Jew there are two
avenues along which the Kingdom of Heaven
can be brought in and consolidated. These
are : (a) as already said, by his harbouring
an intense sense of the solidarity of his race ;
(b) by prayer. A remarkable passage, in
T.B. Berachoth, lOb, runs thus : " Whoso
ever eats and drinks previous to praying, of
him it is said, 4 And me hast thou cast behind
thy back ' (1 Kings, xiv. 9). Do not read
4 thy back ' (gey-ve-kdh) but read ' thy pride '
(gey-e~kdh), i.e. after priding himself (with
food and drink) this man thinks to take upon
himself the Kingdom of Heaven."

These two conceptions already described,
viz. (a) the abounding, manifested love in
volved in Fatherhood, combined with (b)
the incorporation of a Heavenly Kingdom
within the folds of an Israel welded in strictest
fellowship, these two conceptions lie at the
root of the mysticism of the Shechinah.

6 Shechinah ' comes from shachan = to
dwell. The whole edifice of thought about

86 JEWISH MYSTICISM

the Shechinah is based upon such passages
in the Old Testament as " And let them make
me a sanctuary that I may dwell among
them " (Exodus, xxv. 8). " Defile ye not
therefore the land which ye shall inhabit,
wherein I dwell : for I the Lord dwell among
the children of Israel " (Numbers, xxxv. 34).
" And I will set my tabernacle among you
and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will
walk among you and will be your God, and
ye shall be my people" (Leviticus, xxvi. 11,
12).

The Israelites were one compact fellow
ship, an indivisible organism, and not a
series of separate units. God's dwelling
among them, or placing His Tabernacle
among them in Old Testament times, was
interpreted by the Rabbis of the Talmud
and Midrashim as implying that there is a
permanent presence of the Divine Spirit in
the midst of the people of Israel ; and that
this Divine Spirit not only accompanies
them without ceasing, but that it also im
parts itself, communicates itself, to every
member of Israel whenever he orders his
life in such a way as to be capable of realising
it. It is a perpetual incoming of the Divine
Life into the human life of the Jew. It is a
46 Divine-human fellowship which only fails
when the human partner [the people of Israel]
is in sin." Israel is bathed in a Divine en
vironment. As the great mystic theologian

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 87

among the Jews of the middle ages (Moses
Nahmanides, born in Spain 1194, died in
Palestine about 1270) says, in commenting
on Leviticus, xxvi. 11 : " The Divine soul, of
which His dwelling among us is a part, will
not thrust us forth [when we work and live
aright] as a vessel when heated by hot water
thrusts forth its impurities."

All this is meant by the Shechinah.
Writers on mysticism, no matter to what
school of religious thought they may happen
to belong, familiarise us with the great fact
that the mystic, by reason of the high levels
of spiritual intensity on which his life is
lived, experiences certain physical sensations
which enable him to see or to hear something
of the mystery of the Divine Presence.
Christian mysticism invariably quotes the
experiences of Paul in this connection —
Paul who was so deeply struck by the
brilliant light about him that he " was three
days without sight and neither did eat nor
drink " (Acts, ix. 9). Evelyn Underhill says
of a certain mediaeval German mystic,
Rulman Merswin, that " a brilliant light
shone around him ; he heard in his ears
a Divine voice of adorable sweetness ; he
felt as if he were lifted from the ground,
and carried several times round the garden "
(The Mystic Way, p. 162).

Phenomena of a similar type cluster round
the Shechinah mysticism. Thus, a passage

88 JEWISH MYSTICISM

in Leviticus Rabba, xx. 10, commenting
on Exodus, xxiv. (" And upon the nobles of
the children of Israel he laid not his hand ;
also they saw God, and did eat and drink "),
runs thus : " R. Tanhuma said that this
verse teaches us that they [i.e. the nobles of
Israel] uncovered their heads and made their
hearts swell with pride and feasted their eyes
on the Shechinah. . . . But Moses did not
feast his eyes on the Shechinah, and yet he
gained a benefit from the Shechinah [viz.
that ' the skin of his face shone ' (Exodus,
xxxiv. 35)]."

Three points are noteworthy here.
Firstly, the strongly materialised characterisa
tion of the Shechinah. It was actually a
physical food to the onlookers. Secondly,
the physical impressions created by the sight
of it. The uncovering of the head was no
trivial bodily movement. Involving as it
did a distinct breach of the oriental mode
of showing veneration to a superior, it
must have been a highly purposeful act.
Thirdly, the contrast between the experience
of Moses and that of the nobles is intended
to bring out what is a cardinal feature of
the Shechinah mysticism, viz. that in
spite of the fact that the Shechinah is the
Presence inseparable from Israel, accom
panying him whithersoever he goes, yet the
realisation of this Presence by the individual
Israelite can only come after a series of

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 89

spiritual and moral disciplinary acts of the
highest order have been gone through by
him.

Thus said the Rabbis, the Shechinah
says of the proud man : " There is no room
for this man and myself in the world."
Again : ' ' Whosoever commits a sin in secret
acts as though he were pressing against the
feet of the Shechinah, as it is said (Isaiah,
Ixvi. 1), ' Thus saith the Lord, the heavens
are my throne and the earth is my foot
stool' (T.B. Kiddushin, 31a). 'Who
soever shows anger regards the Shechinah
as though it were a thing of nought "
(T.B. Nedarim, 22b). " The Shechinah only
resides with him who is at once wise,
strong and wealthy " (T.B. Sabbath, 92a)—
' wise ' denoting the perfection of spiritual
ity ; ' strong ' denoting the perfection of
the physical faculties ; 1 ' wealthy ' standing
for the perfection of the moral qualities,
because, as the Rabbis explained, the man
of wealth being independent of the smiles
and favours of his fellow-men, will not readily
fall a prey to that great perverter of morals
— the sin of accepting bribes.

Other instances of the way in which the
Shechinah was objectivised and experienced
through the channels of the visual or auditory

1 The Rabbis (in T.B. Nedarim, 38a) give some curious
illustrations of Moses' wealth, strength and wisdom — all
deduced from Old Testament verses.

90 JEWISH MYSTICISM

senses are the following : " The Shechinah
used to beat before Samson like a bell "
(T.B. Sotah, 9b). This is a commentary on
Judges, xiii. 25, " And the Spirit of the Lord
began to move him " (the Hebrew word for
' to move ' is here from the same root as the
Hebrew word for a ' bell '). In Canticles
Rabba, ii., the Shechinah is visible from
between the shoulders and fingers of the
priests at the time they pronounce upon
Israel the priestly benediction of Numbers,
vi. 24-26 : ' The Lord bless thee and keep
thee ; the Lord make his face shine upon
thee, and be gracious unto thee ; the Lord
lift up his countenance upon thee and give
thee peace." l

In the Midrash Tanhuma on chapter xvi.
of Leviticus, the Shechinah is associated with
the sense of smell — another phenomenon of
the mystic life much dwelt upon by modern
writers on the subject. Aaron's rod is stated

1 Philo says : " For what life can be better than that which
is devoted to speculation, or what can be more closely
connected with rational existence ? For which reason it is
that though the voices of mortal beings are judged of by
the faculty of hearing, nevertheless the Scriptures present to
us the words of God to be actually visible to us like light ;
for in them it is said that, ' All the people saw the voice of
God ' (Exodus, xx. 18) ; they do not say ' heard ' it, since
what took place was not a beating of the air by means of
the organs of the mouth and tongue, but a most exceedingly
brilliant ray of virtue not different in any respect from the
source of reason, which also in another passage is spoken of
in the following manner, ' Ye have seen that I spake unto
you from out of heaven ' (ibid. 22), not ' Ye have heard ' for
the same reason " (On the Migration of Abraham, ix.).

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 91

to have * smelt the Shechinah.' Similarly in
the Yalkut on Canticles, i., a mystical inference
is drawn from the usage of the metaphor of
6 a bundle of myrrh ' applied to * my well-
beloved,' i.e. God.

In T.B. Megillah, 29a, it is stated as follows :
" The father of Samuel and Levi [Babylonian
Rabbis of the 3rd century A.D.] were once
sitting in the synagogue of Shef-Ve-Yatib in
Nehardea [Babylon]. They suddenly heard
a sound of movement. It was the Shechinah
coming. They at once rose and went out.
A fellow-Rabbi by name Shesheth (who was
blind) was once sitting in the same synagogue,
and when the Shechinah came, he did not go
out. Then the ministering angels came and
struck terror into him." In the end Shesheth
addresses the Shechinah, who advises the
angels to cease from vexing him.

It must be borne in mind, in this connection,
how intimately conjoined, in the minds of the
Rabbis, was the idea ' synagogue ' with the
idea ' Shechinah.5 The blending of the two
even went so far as to prompt the Rabbis to
say — what is sometimes falsely and foolishly
described as ' grotesque ' — that God prays
and the synagogue is His house of prayer.
Hence if it is true, as Evelyn Underhill
maintains, that the visionary experience of
mystics is ' a picture which the mind con
structs . . . from raw materials already at
its disposal ' (Mysticism, p. 325), one can

92 JEWISH MYSTICISM

quite see how the consciousness of being in
side the synagogue should bring home to the
Rabbi, in so particularly drastic a fashion,
the reality of the Shechinah's intercourse
with men.

Noteworthy also — and this is, as well, one
of the distinguishing features of the mystical
temperament — is the contrast in the effects
which this sudden invasion of a Divine
Presence had upon the objects of the visi
tation. The two Rabbis who left the syna
gogue did so, most probably, as the result of
the fearful weakening and depressing effect
of the vision. The Rabbi, however, who
stayed on and succeeded in eliciting from the
Shechinah a promise that the ministering
angels should henceforth cease from troubling
him, is the type of the mystic who feels
the mental and physical elation, the joy, the
rapture, the triumph consequent upon the
conviction of his having, at last, reached
the goal of his quest — the sight, sound and
touch of the Ultimate Reality.

A feature of the Shechinah mysticism
which deserves a deeper appreciation than
is usually accorded it, is to be found in the
reiterated Rabbinic belief that goodness and
piety radiate an atmosphere of divinity
which infects all who breathe it, with a new
impulse towards the good, the beautiful and
the true. The good man can bring the
Shechinah to his fellows. He can invest

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 93

earth with the quality which belongs to
Heaven. Sight of, or contact with, a saint,
is equivalent to an inflowing of the Shechinah.
Thus, a striking passage in Canticles Rabba,
vi., says :

" The original abode of the Shechinah was
among the c tabtonim,' i.e. the lower ones,
i.e. human beings, earth. When Adam
sinned, it ascended away to the first heaven.
With Cain's sin, it ascended to the second ;
with Enoch's, to the third ; with the genera
tion of the Flood, to the fourth ; with the
generation of the Tower of Babel, to the
fifth ; with the Sodomites, to the sixth.
With the sin of the Egyptians in the days
of Abraham, it ascended to the seventh.
Corresponding to these there arose seven
righteous men who brought the Shechinah
down back to earth again. These were
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Kehath, Amram,
and Moses."

There is, of course, a strong sprinkling of
the ' fellowship ' idea which, as was said on
a previous page, is a basic factor in Jewish
spirituality. The greater the bond of union
between the members of the Jewish brother
hood, the greater the realisation of the Divine
Presence in their midst. Add to this the
existence of men of conspicuous piety within
the bosom of the fellowship, and you have
all the essentials for a deeper and stronger
infiltration of the Divine stream. The

94 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Shechinah is brought back to men by the aid
of the better men.

The same train of thought is expressed
more pointedly by the following aphorisms :

T.B. Berachoth, 64, says : "Whosoever par
takes of a meal at which a ' disciple of the
wise ' is present, it is as though he enjoyed of
the splendour of the Shechinah." Clearly,
the presence of the c disciple of the wise '
makes the life of the company about him to
be lived on higher levels. He gives it an
access to the Divine which it would not
otherwise have had. T.B. Keluboth, 105a,
says : " Whosoever brings a gift to a
6 disciple of the wise ' it is as though he
brought the first-fruits (bikkurim) to the
Temple." The ' disciple of the wise ' is
here a Temple in human form. To approach
him is to approach a Holy of Holies. Con
tact with him is a sanctifying influence. He
radiates divinity.

T.B. Ketuboth, lllb, says : " Is it possible
for any man to cling to the Shechinah ?
For is it not said, in Deuteronomy, iv. 24,
6 For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire ' ?
But the meaning is this : Whosoever marries
his daughter to a ' disciple of the wise ' or
engages in any enterprise with him, or who
lets a ' disciple of the wise ' enjoy of his
worldly possessions, it is counted unto him,
by Holy Writ, as though he clung to the
Shechinah."

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 95

Companionship with the good must be
acquired at all costs. It is the dynamic
power for opening the door to the spiritual
world. The man of virtue is Shechinah -
possessed ; and to touch only the hem of his
garment is tobecomeShechinah-possessedtoo.

When Ruth the Moabitess forsakes her
ancestral gods in favour of the God of
Israel, when Abram, according to the Rab
binic interpretation of Genesis, xii. 5 (c And
the souls that they had gotten in Harran '),
brings the weary and footsore into his home
and initiates them into the belief in the God
in whom he himself believes, the Rabbis say
that the act performed in both cases is
4 the entering of the non-Israelite under the
wings of the Shechinah.'

The narrow, exclusive nationalist view of
the Deity is very apparent in these and
many other similar utterances. The Shechi
nah is for Israel only. The Shechinah is
primarily for Israel. God is near to the
Jew, far from the non-Jew. These are
seemingly natural and correct deductions
from the Rabbinic records. If so, is not the
term ' mysticism ' as applied to the Shechinah
a misnomer, seeing that the primal assump
tion of mysticism is the truth that every soul,
notwithstanding race or religion, can have
intimate intercourse with the Divine ? The
answer is this :

The title 6 Jew ' or ' Israelite ' is frequently

96 JEWISH MYSTICISM

used by the Rabbis in a more comprehensive
sense than they are usually given credit for.
Thus T.B. Kiddushin, 40a, says : " Who
soever denies the truth of idolatry becomes a
believer in the whole Torah." T.B. Megillah,
13a, says : ' Whosoever denies idolatry is
called a Jew." In the Midrash Sifra on
Leviticus, xvi. there is a comment on Psalm,
cxxv. 4, " Do good, O Lord, unto those that
be good, and to them that are upright in
their heart." "The Psalmist," says the
Sifra, " does not say ' Do good to the
Priests or to the Levites or to the Israelites.'
But he says ' Do good unto those that be
good.' : More instances could be quoted
did space not forbid.

From the first of the quotations just given,
it follows that ' Jew ' is a term of the widest
scope. From the second one infers that the
Jew fills no higher a place in the Divine favour
than do the good and worthy of all men and
races.

" Yea, He loveth the people," says the
Deuteronomist (xxxiii. 3). " Yes," says
Rabbi Samuel b. Meir, the great Rabbinic
commentator of the 12th century, " God
loveth also the nations of the world." Of
King Solomon's chariot it is said (Canticles,
iii. 10) that " the midst thereof is paved with
love." "This love in the midst thereof,"
say the Rabbis, " is the Shechinah." It is
certainly not meant in any sectarian sense.

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 97

The Divine Chariot in Jewish mysticism is,
broadly, the idealised universe. And all
degrees of creation from amoeba to man hold
and reveal the traces of the Divine love which
is ever born anew in our hearts and which
guarantees the ultimate goodness of the
world.

CHAPTER V

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH '

THE date and origin of this extraordinary
book — the oldest philosophical work in the
Hebrew language — are shrouded in obscurity.
There is as yet no critical edition of it,
although there are several translations of it,
both of the whole and of parts, into Latin,
German, and French ; and the numerous
commentaries written on it in Arabic and
Hebrew (and the subsequent translations
of these into Latin, German, etc.) show,
not only the high position which it held in
the estimation of Jewish thinkers from the
10th century onward, but also the great
influence which it wielded on the general
development of Jewish mystical specula
tion.

The difficulties of fixing its date and origin
are illustrated by the fact that whereas
the voice of mediaeval Jewish scholarship
assigned its -authorship to the patriarch
Abraham (on the grounds of some supposed
internal evidence), individual writers here
and there credited the book to Rabbi 'Akiba

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 99

(50-130 A.D.) — 'Akiba having been an adept
in the mystic lore of numbers ; and the
Book Yetsirah is pervaded with the mystical
significances of numbers. Others, again,
without touching the question of authorship,
give it an origin in the late Talmudic epoch—
about the 6th century A.D. This theory is
the likeliest of all, because the 6th century
marks the beginning of what is known in
Jewish history as the Gaonic epoch, when
several Rabbinic-mystical works, second in
importance only to the Book Yetsirah, were
composed.

The latest theory is that of Reitzenstein
(Poimandres, pp. 14, 56, 261, 291) who,
arguing from the resemblances between the
doctrines of letters and numbers in this book
and the miraculous cosmic powers wielded by
numbers and letters in the thaumaturgical
books current among the Gnostics of the
2nd century B.C., concludes that it is a
Hebrew production of the 2nd century B.C.
The fatal objection to Reitzenstein's theory,
however, seems to lie in the fact that his
argument holds good of only one aspect of
the work, viz. the philological part. The
other part — the philosophical — although
vitally connected with the philological and
deduced from it — contains elements of
thought and modes of expression which are
many centuries later than the pre-Christian
Gnosticism. But Reitzenstein's theory cuts

100 JEWISH MYSTICISM

very deeply and cannot be disposed of in a
few words.

The clue to the particular nature of the
Book Yetsirah lies in its two constituent
elements which we have a moment ago
contrasted. It is a mystical philosophy
drawn from the sounds, shapes, relative
positions, and numerical values of the letters
of the Hebrew alphabet. The nucleus of
much of this teaching is to be found in the
Talmud, but the Rabbis were certainly not
the originators of it. Just as Philo excelled
in the art of clothing Grecian philosophy in
a Hebraic dress, so did the Rabbis show
a considerable capacity for ' naturalising '
many an alien product. In the case of the
mysticism under consideration they drew
from older available sources — Egyptian,
Babylonian, Mandaean — and adapted the
idea to the framework of their own essential
lore.

Thus in T.B. Berachoth, 55a, there occurs
the remark, " Bezaleel [the architect of the
Tabernacle in the desert] knew how to
join together (le-tsa-ref) the letters by means
of which the heavens and earth were
created." This is because he was " filled
with the spirit of God, with wisdom and
understanding " (Exodus, xxxi. 3), and this
wisdom is the same as that of Proverbs,
iii. 19 : " The Lord by wisdom founded the
earth." This belief in the magic power of

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 101

the letters of the alphabet can be traced
to Zoroastrianism and ultimately to Chaldea

—as Lenormant has shown in his Chaldean
Magic. It was by means of the combination
of letters comprising the Holy Name of God
that the disciples of Judah the Prince
(c. 135-220 A.D.), who were keen on cos
mogony, used to create a three-year-old calf
on the eve of every Sabbath and used to eat
it on the Sabbath. So says a passage in
T.E. Sanhedrin, 65b. There is a strong
flavour of old Semitic witchcraft here. It is
an exotic notion introduced for the purpose
of intensifying an essentially Jewish belief

—the belief in the wonder-working powers
bestowed by the Sabbath on those who
scrupulously uphold it. The practice of
magic and witchcraft was sternly repro
bated by the Old Testament, and the Rabbis
were equally severe in its condemnation.

One quotation from the book will suffice
to give us a glimpse into the supernatural
importance of the forms, sounds, and relative
positions of the letters in the Hebrew
alphabet. It says : " Twenty-two letters :
He drew them, hewed them, combined them,
weighed them, interchanged them, and
through them produced the whole creation
and everything that is destined to come into
being " (ii. 2). Each of the actions here
mentioned, viz. 'drawing,' 'hewing,' 'com
bining,' ' weighing,' ' interchanging,' is de-

102 JEWISH MYSTICISM

scribed with a fulness which is as bizarre
as it is bewildering ; and although the in
terest is mainly a philological one, it is an
indispensable part of the book's philosophy.

As it would be impossible to give the
reader any tangible notion of these involved
stretches of philological reasoning, without
introducing a considerable amount of Hebrew
words and Hebrew grammatical terminology,
the subject can only be dealt with fragment -
arily. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet
are pressed into the service of a doctrine
which is an element of ancient Semitic
theosophy, and which passed thence into
Greek philosophy. It is the doctrine of the
three primordial substances — water, fire, and
air. These three substances underlie all
creation, and are the fountain-head of all
existence. The three Hebrew letters play
ing the principal part in connection with
these three primal substances are Aleph
(K), Mem (D), and Shin (w). Why just these
letters ? For two reasons.

Firstly, these three letters represent three
cardinal divisions into which the twenty -two
letters of the Hebrew alphabet naturally fall.
The divisions are : (a) mutes unaccompanied
by any sound in producing them (as can be
seen by any one who tries the pronunciation
of the sound of Mem — it is merely a com
pression of the lips) ; (b) sibilants, best
represented by Shin ; (c) aspirates, the class

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 103

to which Aleph belongs — this class being, in
the naive imagination of these theosophists,
intermediate to the mutes and the sibilants
and, as it were, holding the balance between
them. Hence these three letters are called
c mothers ' (em = mother) because all the
other letters are, as it were, born from them.
The mediaeval Kabbalah, as will be mentioned
later on, likewise speaks of ' father ' and
4 mother ' in somewhat similar connections.

Secondly, these three representative
6 parent ' letters — the mute, the sibilant, the
aspirate — symbolise the three basic elements
of all existing things, the three primordial
substances. Thus water (the first letter of
which word in Hebrew is Mem) is symbolised
by the mute Mem. Why ? Because the
chief product of water is fish ; and fish are
the representatives of the mute creation.
Fire (in Hebrew esh, most prominent in
pronunciation is sh) is symbolised by the
sibilant Shin. Why ? Because the char
acteristic of fire is its -hissing sound; and
the equivalent in Hebrew for ' sibilant ' is a
word which means ' hissing.' Air (the first
letter of which word in Hebrew is Aleph) is
symbolised by the aspirate Aleph, which has
an airy, vacant pronunciation. Just as
Aleph holds the balance between the mute
letters and the sibilants, so air is, in the
natural world, intermediate to the water
which always tends in a downward direction,

104 JEWISH MYSTICISM

and fire which by its nature always ascends.
Of course it needs no hard reasoning here to
see how an alien system of very early thought
has been mechanically and arbitrarily foisted
on to the Hebrew alphabet.

But, as was before mentioned, all the
twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet
play a dominant role in the book's philosophy.
Thus we read (ii. 2) :

" By means of the twenty-two letters, by
giving them a form and a shape, by mixing
them and combining them in different ways,
God made the soul of all that which has been
created and of all that which will be. It is
upon these same letters that the Holy One
(blessed be He) has founded Bis high and holy
Name."

This remark probably indicates that the
existence of these letters and the impress
which they leave in every particle of creation
are the unfailing source of our knowledge of
that supreme Intelligence which, while being
immanent in the universe, is its guide and
controller and holds all the different parts
together. In short, the harmony of the
cosmos is due to the Divine wisdom underlying
the manipulations of the twenty-two letters.

These twenty-two letters are split up into
three divisions. These are : (i.) The three
which have just been considered, the three
' mothers ' or c parent ' letters (Aleph, Mem,
Shin) which symbolise the elements, air,

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 105

fire, and water, which together make up the
cosmos. The year (or time), which is part of
the cosmos, also consists of three parts — three
seasons, viz. summer, which corresponds to
the element fire ; winter, which corresponds
to the element water ; spring and autumn,
which form a season intermediate to the other
two, correspond to the element air, which
also is intermediate to the fire and the water.
Again, the human body is likewise a trinity,
composed of head, chest, and stomach, and
likewise corresponds to the three elements.
And the world is a trinity too. Fire is the
substance of the heavens, water (condensed)
is the basis of earth, air is the dividing medium
necessary for preserving the peace between
the two.

(ii.) The seven double letters typify the
' contraries ' in the cosmos, the forces which
serve two mutually opposed ends. Thus,
there are seven planets which exercise at
times a good and at times a bad influence
upon men and things. There are seven days
in the week ; but there are also seven nights.
And so on. It is all arbitrary and highly
dubious. The seven 'double' letters are
Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Caph, Peh, Resh, Tau.
They are 6 double ' because they express two
different sounds according as they possess
dagesh or not. The letter Resh is not usually
classed among these by Hebrew gram
marians. By deducting these seven and the

106 JEWISH MYSTICISM

three c parent ' letters, we get the remaining
twelve c simple ' letters.

(iii.) The twelve 'simple' letters are em
blematic of the twelve signs of the zodiac,
the twelve months of the year, the twelve
organs in the human body which perform
their work independently of the outside world
and are subject to the twelve signs of the
zodiac. A strong Gnostic colouring pervades
the whole.

Thus the cosmos — embraced ideally in the
twenty-two letters — is an expression of the
Divine Intelligence. Man, the world, time —
these three constitute the cosmos, and out
side them there is but one great existence, the
Infinite.

This brings us to two doctrines of Jewish
mysticism which appear for the first time
in the Book Yetsirah, and which were de
veloped subsequently on diverse lines. These
are : (a) the doctrine of emanation ; (b)
the Ten Sefirot.

In the general literature of mysticism, the
doctrine (or rather doctrines) of emanation is
usually associated for the first time with the
great name of Plotinus (born at Lycopolis,
in Egypt, about 205 A.D.). This remark
raises a twofold reflection which is of the
highest interest. Firstly, it shows how one
particularly influential aspect of mysticism,
viz. emanation, is a feature common to the
theologies of both the early Church and the

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 107

early Synagogue — sundered as these two were
from one another by so many other irrecon
cilable points of disagreement. Secondly,
it shows how both Jewish and Christian
mysticism are alike indebted to one and the
same set of sources, viz. Gnosticism and its
development — the Alexandrian Neoplaton-
ism. The latter is the jpith and core of
the emanation doctrines of Plotinus. It is
equally the root of the emanation doctrines
of the Book Yetsirah^ihe Zohar, and, in
fact, all branches of the mediaeval Kabbalah.
Emanation implies that all existing things
are successive outflowings or outgoings of
God. God contains within Himself all. He
is perfect, incomprehensible, indivisible, de
pendent on nothing, in need of nothing.
Everything in the cosmos, all finite creatures
animate and inanimate, flow out, radiate, in
a successive series, from God, the Perfect
One. The motif of this teaching is that of
explaining the difficulties involved in the
inevitable assumption of all religion, viz.
that there is a bond of relationship between
God and His creation. How can there be
any connecting link between a Being who is
self-sufficient, unchangeable, infinite, perfect,
and matter which is finite, changeable, im
perfect, etc. ? This is the difficulty. All
doctrines of emanation answer it in more or
less the same way, by saying that God is
not really external to any one or anything.

108 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Everything is originally comprehended in
Him, " with no contrasts of here or there, no
oppositions of this and that, no separation
into change and variation" (Rufus Jones,
Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 73). On this
understanding there is no necessity for
hunting after ' the missing link ' between the
Divine and the human. The multiplicity
that one beholds in the cosmos, the whole
panorama of thought, action, goodness, bad
ness, the soul, the mind — all things that go to
make up the pageant of man's life in the uni
verse, are emanations, radiations from the
one Unity, manifestations of the God from
whom all things flow and to whom they must
all finally return because they are ultimately
one with the One, just as the flame is one
with the candle from which it issues.

In the Book Yetsirah, the teaching about
emanation is intertwined with the doctrine
of the Ten Sefirot. The object of this inter
twining is that of giving a more decidedly
Jewish colouring to the Neoplatonic con
ceptions of emanations. The Jewish mystics,
however far they may have wandered into
other fields for their views about God, always
felt that the Hebrew Bible and God as preached
by the Hebrew Bible must be the core of their
message. There, thought they, lies the final
Truth. Final Truth, taught they, is but a
commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

Where did the idea of the Sefirot originate ?

THE BOOK 'YETSIRAH' 109

In all probability it originated with the
Rabbis of the Talmud in the first three cen
turies of the Christian era. Thus, a passage
in T.B. Haggigah, 12a, speaks of the " Ten
agencies through which God created the world,
viz. wisdom, insight, cognition, strength,
power, inexorableness, justice, right, love,
mercy."

There are, as will be shown more fully in
a later chapter, some obvious resemblances
between these ten creative potentialities of
the Talmud, and the Ten Sefirot of our Book
and of the mediaeval Kabbalah (though the
resemblances between those of the Talmud
and of the Kabbalah are considerably
stronger than the resemblances between
those of the Talmud and our Book Yetsirah).
To these facts must be added also the per
sonification of Wisdom as well as of Torah
by the early Rabbis, and their doctrine
about the creation of the world by two
Middot (Attributes), viz. the Attribute of
Mercy and the Attribute of Justice.

Let us turn to the description of the Ten
Sefirot as given by the Book Yetsirah (i. 9) :

" There are Ten Sefirot — ten, not nine; ten,
not eleven. Act in order to understand them
in thy wisdom and thy intelligence ; so that
thy investigations exercise themselves con
tinually upon them ; also thy speculations,
thy knowledge, thy thought, thy imagina
tion ; make things to rest upon their principle

110 JEWISH MYSTICISM

and re-establish the Creator upon his
foundation."

Again (i. 3) :

' The Ten Sefirot are like the fingers of
the hand, ten in number, five corresponding
to five. But in the middle of them is
the knot of the Unity."

There is a tantalising vagueness about
these descriptions, and, as modern scholars
always hasten to point out, the Sefirot of
the Book Yetsirah differ from those of the
Zohar and the mediaeval Kabbalah generally
in one cardinal respect, viz. that whereas in
the two latter systems the Sefirot have the
fullest possible mystical connotation, in the
Yetsirah Book they cluster mainly round the
mysticism of numbers. Numbers and letters
(of the Hebrew alphabet, as we have seen) give
the main impetus to the peculiar teaching.
Divine action in its relation to the universe is
conceived in the form of abstract numbers.
But yet the following quotation from the
book shows a clear foreshadowing of a real
mystical system such as is seen in the
Zohar.

" The first of the Sefirot, one, is the spirit
(Ruah) of the living God (blessed be His
Name, blessed be the Name of Him who
inhabits eternity !). The spirit, the voice,
and the word, these are the Holy Spirit."

The second of the Sefirot, two, is the air
which comes from the spirit. On it are hewn

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 111

and engraven the twenty-two letters which
form altogether but one breath.

The third of the Sefirot, three, is the water
which comes from the air [i.e. condensed
vapour]. It is in the water that He has dug
the darknesses and the chaos, that He has
formed the earth and the clay, which was
spread out afterwards in the form of a carpet,
hewn out like a wall and covered as though
by a roof.

The fourth of the Sefirot, four, is the fire
which comes from the water, and with which
He has made the throne of His glory, the
heavenly Ophanim (Wheels), the Seraphim,
and the ministering angels. With the three
together He has built his dwelling, as it is
written, " He maketh the winds his mes
sengers, his ministers a flaming fire" (Psalm,
civ. 4).

The remaining six Sefirot are the six
dimensions of space — the four cardinal points
of the compass, in addition to height and
depth.

The difficulties here are many, and some are
insuperable. Are the Sefirot really a piece of
Jewish mysticism (as was suggested before)
or are they nothing more than echoes of the
Gnostic systems of number-manipulations ?

What is the relation between the cosmic

e>wers of the twenty-two letters of the
ebrew alphabet and the cosmic powers of
the Sefirot ?

112 JEWISH MYSTICISM

What bearing has the doctrine of the three
primal elements upon the first four Sefirot
which seem to contain very much the same
thought ?

In the answer to the first of these queries
lies the clue to the nature of the book. The
Book Yetsirah is syncretic, and while the
emphasised significance of the number ' ten,'
as well as the importance of the idea of the
world as the scene of Divine Agencies (or
Middot), is in its native origin Jewish, the
teaching about the creative powers of
letters and numbers is only Jewish by
adoption, and whether the word ' Sefirot ' is
originally Jewish or alien is a moot point ;
the notion of the three primal substances is
clearly an exotic foisted on to the book to
give it the appearance of the philosophic
completeness which the age demanded.
Viewing the book, therefore, as a mosaic
rather than a concrete and continuous whole,
it is futile to ask questions about the con
sistency of its parts. What, however, we
can do, and ought to do, is to try to see how
the author pieced his mosaic together so as
to give to his readers what, in his opinion,
was a presentation of the doctrine of emana
tion as interpreted by the spirit of Judaism.

It will be noticed that the three primal
substances, air, fire, water, are identical with
the second, third, and fourth of the Sefirot,
but whereas each of these is produced from

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 113

the preceding one, the three primal sub
stances seem to be all independent of one
another as regards production. And again,
the second, third, and fourth of the Sefirot
all emanate originally from the first, viz.
the Ruah — the Spirit of the living God. No
such notion attaches to the three primal sub
stances. The object in all this seems to be
that of giving an essentially Jewish colouring
to cosmogony. Everything was brought
forth by the Spirit of God. As the Psalmist
says : '' By the word of the Lord were the
heavens made ; and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth " (xxxiii. 6). It is
a counterblast to the Aristotelian doctrine
of the eternity of matter which to the Jewish
mediaeval mind was rank blasphemy. To
say that everything emanates originally from
the Spirit of God is tantamount to the asser
tion that the prototypes of matter are all of
them aspects or modifications of the Divine
Spirit. This, again, is to put a more Jewish
complexion on the doctrine of emanation,
which, when carried out to its logical con
clusion in the philosophy of Neoplatonism,
leads to pantheism — another pitfall which
our author apparently wanted to avoid.

That such a construction is a tenable one
is seen from the book's remark, " The last of
the Sefirot unites itself to its first just like
a flame is joined to the candle, for God is
one and there is no second " (i. 5). The
8

114 JEWISH MYSTICISM

offence of recognising ' two Divine powers '
(shete-re-shooyot) was always a terrible one
to the Jewish mind. Again, all the numbers
from two to ten are derived from the unit,
one. Even so does all the multiplicity and
variety of forms, types, etc., in the cosmos
find its highest consummation, its ultimate
home and goal, in the Unity, viz. God.
Here, again, we see how an alien system of
number-mysticism is drafted into the fold
of an essentially Jewish type of mysticism,
viz. that clustering round the cardinal
notion of the Unity of God. This theme,
after being elaborated by the Talmudic
Rabbis of the opening centuries of Christian
ity, was again taken up by the mediaeval
Jewish theologians, and reached the zenith of
its mystical development in the pages of the
Zohar and the mediaeval Kabbalah generally.
But what is the relation between the cosmic
powers of the twenty-two letters of the
Hebrew alphabet and the cosmic parts
played by the Ten Sefirot ? The answer
would seem to lie in the peculiar description
which the book itself, in one place, gives to
the Sefirot. The latter are, it says, ' Ten
Sefirot without anything ' (belee ma). In
other words ' abstracts.' They are the cate
gories of the universe, the forms or moulds
into which all created things were originally
cast. They are form, as distinguished from
matter. Whereas the Sefirot are responsible

THE BOOK ' YETSIRAH ' 115

for the first production of form, so the twenty-
two letters are the prime cause of matter.
All existence and development are due to
the creative powers of the letters, but they
are inconceivable apart from the form with
which the Sefirot has invested them.

The Book Yetsirah lands us into the heart
of Jewish mysticism and prepares the way
for the ramified literature of the Zohar. It
does this by teaching that God and the world
are a unity rather than a dualism. The
Sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the
alphabet, or, in other words, the forms and
essences which make up the visible universe,
are all an unfolding of the Divine, all
emanations from the Spirit. God is at one
and the same time both the matter and form
of the universe. But He is something more.
He is not identical with the universe. He
is greater than it, transcends it. Nothing
exists or can exist outside Him. Though
immanent, He is also and at the same time
transcendent. This insistence upon the
Divine transcendence runs like a golden
thread throughout all branches of Jewish
mysticism, thus enabling it, both as a system
of thought and as a phase of practical
religion, to do justice at once to the ' legal '
and spiritual elements which are inextricably
intertwined in Judaism.

But if the Book Yetsirah gave the impulse
to the great books of mediaeval Jewish

116 JEWISH MYSTICISM

mysticism, it was eclipsed by them in one
great particular. The naive conception of
the mysterious powers of letters and numbers
was superseded by the introduction of theo
logical and moral ideas. The object of
discussion became not so much the relation
ship between the Creator and His cosmos
as the relationship between God and that
inner surging world of thought and emotion
which we term man. How man can ascend
to God whilst bound in the trammels of the
flesh or after having shuffled off this ' muddy
vesture of decay,' how God communicates
Himself to man, imparting to him the know
ledge which has its fountain-head in His own
inexhaustible Being and the love which is the
seal of His abiding goodness and nearness, —
these themes form, roughly speaking, the
staple of the Zohar mysticism which presents
itself for brief consideration in the coming
pages.

CHAPTER VI

SOME GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ' ZOHAR '
MYSTICISM

THE Zohar (lit. = ' Shining ' or 'Brightness'
from the word in Daniel, xii. 3 — " And they
that be wise shall shine as the brightness of
the firmament") is, par excellence, the text
book of Jewish mediaeval mysticism. Its
language is partly Aramaic and partly
Hebrew. While purporting to be but a
commentary on the Pentateuch, it is, in
reality, quite an independent compendium
of Kabbalistic theosophy. Its style, its
subject-matter, its spirit lead the reader into
realms which bear hardly any conceivable
resemblance to the manner and substance of
the Pentateuch.

The Zohar compares well with the Talmud
in one respect. They are both painfully
unsystematic^ in the handling of their sub
ject-matter. Both present us with a bizarre
medley of ideas and facts, an ill-assorted
conglomeration of history and fable, truth
and fiction, serious comment which has a
value for all time and observations which

118 JEWISH MYSTICISM

the march of time asks us to dismiss as
outworn and valueless. Both works, too,
cover a long stretch of time.

The Zohar is a pseudepigraphic work.
It is impossible, in the present book, to give
the reader even the faintest outlines of the
literature written by Jews of many countries
and many centuries, on the vexed question
of the authorship of the Zohar. It pretends
to be the record of a direct Divine revelation
to Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai (born in Galilee
2nd century A.D.) ; and it is mainly written in
the form of a series of utterances from the
mouth of Simeon to his disciples, who be
lieved him to be conveying to them the
truths which he had received first-hand from
Heaven. Criticism has long ago demon
strated the utter untenability of this view.
The Zohar made its first appearance in
Spain in the 13th century, and its con
tents show incontestably that not alone
must the work, as a whole, be con
siderably later than the 2nd century
(although many an idea and doctrine cer
tainly does go as far back as that, and further
too), but that it could not possibly be the
production of a single author or a single
period of history. It is, like the Yetsirah
book, a syncretism. Many civilisations,
many faiths, and many philosophies went
to the making of it. All these were, in some
instances, taken in their original state and

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 119

incorporated in the work, while, in other
instances, they found room in it only after
they had passed through the crucible of
the Jewish mind and had thus become
4 judaised ' in the process. But that a
goodly proportion of it is the development
of many a doctrine embodied in the Talmud
and Midrashim, there cannot be the least
doubt. To ask whether this or that doctrine
of Talmudic literature is indigenous to the
Talmud or has its source elsewhere, is, of
course, quite another matter. But that it
reached the Zohar from the Talmud and Mid
rashim and their progeny, directly, is certain.

Where the foreign elements are drawn from
is a fruitful subject of speculation amongst
scholars. There is general admission, how
ever, that Neoplatonism and Gnosticism are
responsible for much.

And to this must be added a newer theory,
which finds echoes of Persian Sufism in the
Zohar. The sufi mystics were very numer
ous in Persia from the 8th century onwards,
and it is maintained that the Jews of Persia,
influenced by Sufism, transmitted to the
Jews of Spain (who were very numerous,
very influential, and very distinguished in
learning from the 10th to the 15th century)
many mystical interpretations of esoteric
tenets which in various shapes found an
entrance into the Zohar.

Be this as it may, we must be on our guard

120 JEWISH MYSTICISM

against following the mistaken opinion of a
certain set of Jewish theologians who would
have us regard the whole of the mediaeval
Kabbalah (of which the Zohar is a conspicuous
and representative part) as a sudden and
strange importation from without. It is
really a continuation of the old stream of
Talmudic and Midrashic thought with the
admixture of extraneous elements picked up,
as was inevitable, by the stream's course
through many lands — elements the com
mingling of which must have, in many ways,
transformed the original colour and nature of
the stream.

The Zohar, as was said above, purports to
be but a commentary on the Pentateuch. It
is self-explanatory on this point. The follow
ing is a direct quotation :

" Woe unto the man," says Simeon ben
Yohai, "who s^^s in the Torah nought but
simple narratives and ordinary words. For
if, in truKi, it contained only that, we should
have b' ^n able, even to-day, also to compose
a Torau which would be, in very much another
way, worthy of regard. In order to find only
simple statements we should only have to
betake ourselves to the ordinary legislators,
among whom we could find valuable words
in even greater quantity. It would suffice
us to imitate them and to make a Law
after their words and example. But it is
not thus. Every word of the Torah con-

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 121

tains an elevated sense and a sublime
mystery."

Here is a direct intimation of the Zohar's
emphasis upon the existence of higher truths
in the Bible. It continues :

" The narratives (or words) of the Law are
the garment of the Law. Woe unto him who
takes this garment for the Law itself ! It is
in this sense that David spake, saying, ' Open
thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous
things out of thy Law ' (Psalm, cxix. 18).
David wished to speak of that which is hidden
beneath the garment of the Law. There
are fools who, seeing a man covered with a
beautiful garment, look no further than that ;
and yet that which gives a worth to the
garment is his body, and what is even more
precious than that, his soul. The Law, too,
has its body. There are precepts which
one might call the body of the Law. The
ordinary narratives which are intermingled
are the garments with which the body is
covered. Simpletons have regard only to
the garments or narratives of the Law. . . .
The better instructed pay no regard to the
garment, but to the body which it encloses.
Finally, the wise, the servants of the supreme
King, they who inhabit the heights of Sinai,
are concerned only with the soul which is
the foundation of all else, which is the
real Law. And in the time to come they
will be prepared to gaze at the soul of

122 JEWISH MYSTICISM

that soul which breathes through the
Law."

The mystical sense of the Law, then, is its
highest and truest sense. What edifice of
thought does the Zohar erect on this foun
dation ? It posits the cardinal principle
that there is an esoteric as well as an exoteric
reality in the phenomena of the world. The
world is a series of emanations from the
Divine. To quote the original :

" He is the beginning as well as the end of
all stages (dargin) ; upon Him are stamped
(etrashim) all the stages. But He can only
be called One, in order to show that although
He possesses many forms, He is nothing other
than ONE " (i. fol. 21).

Or, to give a fuller and more striking ver
sion of the same thought :

"Before the Holy One (blessed be He)
created this world, He went on creating worlds
and destroying them. Whatsoever exists in
this world, everything that has been in
existence throughout all generations, was
in existence in His presence (kdme) in all their
manifold forms" (iii. fol. 61).

In other words, the universe is the outward
expression of the inner Divine thought.
Everything germinated from the eternal
archetypal Divine idea. Or as it is put in
another way :

" He made this world of below to corre
spond with the world of above. Everything

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 123

which is above has its pattern here below
and all constitutes a unity " (ii. fol. 20).

What the Zohar thus aims at teaching us
is, that man, having the privilege to behold
everywhere the Divine image — the world
being an embodiment of God — can, if he will,
make his way to the Invisible Author of all ;
can have union with the Unseen. " What
soever belongs to the domain [literally ' side,'
sitrd] of the Spirit, thrusts itself forward and
is visible " (ii. fol. 20). The universe is
Divine Spirit materialised, and it is given to
man to have contact with it. The Rabbis
of the Talmud and Midrashim had an idea
of a sort of image of God which is immanent
in the universe. Thus, a passage in the
Tanhuma (on Genesis, xxiii.) says : " If a
mortal king engraves his image upon a
tablet, the tablet is greater than the image.
But God is great, and yet His image is greater
than the whole world."

But it is only fair to add — and it bears out
the remark already made about the curious
mixture of ingredients which make up the
Zohar — that in conjunction with this high
note of thought there is another note which
strikes the modern reader as being of a piti
fully inferior nature. The juxtaposition is de
plorable. We are presented with an almost
unintelligible mass of mediaeval astrology.
Thus : "In the firmament above which
covers all things, signs are engraven in which

124 JEWISH MYSTICISM

are fixed hidden things and secrets. These
marks are those of the constellations and
the planets " (ii. fol. 74). Here is a tiny
quotation representative of a huge quantity of
the Zohar's material. " He who has to set
out on a journey in the morning must rise at
the break of day and must look towards the
east. He will behold letters moving in the
heavens, one ascending and another de
scending. These brilliant forms are those of
the letters with which God created the
heaven and the earth. They form His
mysterious and holy Name " (Ibid. 76).
This looks very much like a mixture of Pyth
agorean theories of letters with mediaeval
astrological notions. " When the spirits and
the souls come out of Eden [the Zohar, like
all the Kabbalah, abundantly teaches the
pre-existence of souls] they all possess a
certain appearance which, later on, is re
flected in the face " (Ibid. 73). From this,
all sorts of the strangest facts of physiognomy
are seriously deduced.

In a work which professes to draw its
substance from the secret and esoteric aspect
of the Old Testament, and which, as we have
said, makes the seen world so much akin
to the unseen, it is only to be expected that
angelology should fill an important place.
The impetus to much of it is directly given
by a saying of the Talmud, to the effect that
" the righteous are greater than the minister-

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 125

ing angels " (T.B. Sanhedrin, 93a). This idea
is just of a piece with the general drift of the
Zohar. For, by its theories of emanation,
and by its insistence on the idea of the
macrocosm or of the world as being an
evolution of the image of God and of man as
a small copy of the world, a microcosm, it
cannot but make man as the centre, the crown
and consummation of all creation. Hence
man must rank above the angels.

It is important to observe the framework
of thought into which the Zohar fits its
ideas on the relative positions of angels
and men in the microcosm. The world as a
manifestation of the Divine, as the material
ised expression of God's immanent activity,
is really made up of four component parts
(or f worlds,' as the Kabbalah always styles
them). These are : (a) the world of Azilut
or emanation ; (b) the world of Beriah,
i.e. creative ideas ; (c) the world of Yetsirah
or creative formations ; (d) the world of
'Asiyah or creative matter.

The first term, Azilut, is based on the
Hebrew verb azal in Numbers, xi. 17 (" And I
will take of the spirit which is upon thee and
will put it upon them "). The second, third,
and fourth terms are derived from the three
Hebrew verbs in Isaiah, xliii. 7, ( I have
created,' ' I have formed,' ' I have made.'
The world of Azilut constitutes the domain
of the Ten Sefirot — which will be considered

126 JEWISH MYSTICISM

in our next chapter. The world of Beriah
holds the Divine throne which emanates
from the light of the Sefirot, also the souls
of the pious. The world of Yetsirah is the
scene of the ' divine halls ' (hekalot) — the
seven heavenly halls guarded by angels,
into which the ecstatic seekers for the
Merkabah (Chariot) strive to gain admis
sion. The angels have their abode there,
presided over by Metatron ; and there also
are the souls of ordinary men (as distin
guished from the pious). In the world of
'Asiyah are the lower order of angels — the
Ophanim, whose business it is to combat
evil and to receive the prayers of men. Thus,
seeing that the hierarchy of angels only
begins with the ' third world,' whereas the
souls of the pious belong to the ' second
world,' the position of man in the Divine
evolution is superior to that of the angel.

The idea of the active part thus played
by angels in the emanation-worlds of Jewish
mediaeval mysticism is primarily derived
from such Old Testament verses as "he
maketh his angels winds [A.V. spirits] ;
his ministers a flaming fire " (Psalm, civ. 4),
which has already been quoted in a similar
connection before. But suppose we attempt
to rationalise the old-world allegorical lan
guage, what constructions would we place
upon these angelic activities in the scheme of
man and the universe ? Much light is shed

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 127

on the subject by the fact of the decisive
names which are accorded to the angels —
names which denote missions. Thus Rah-
miel is the angel ol mercy, Tahariel is the
angel of purity, Pedael is the angel of de
liverance, Tsadkiel is the angel of justice,
Raziel is the angel who guards the Divine
secrets. Metatron is the master of all these,
and it has been shown in a previous chapter
how closely Metatron is allied to the Deity,
playing in the world a role akin to that of the
Deity. The inference from all these state
ments is that every particle of the natural
world, every shred of man's organism, is
saturated with some manifestation or other
of the Divine Will — the Divine Will which is
goodness and truth and love and justice
made manifest arid real. It is this impreg
nable Force underlying all phenomena that
preserves the world in its course and that
makes its manifold and variegated parts
work in harmonious relations.

But what about the existence of sin and
evil ? How can their existence be justified
in a world such as the Zoharic mysticism
implies — a world which is a series of emana
tions from the Divine, a world wherein God
is eternally and intimately present in its
every part, because the whole is but a mani
festation of Himself ? If all things, i.e.
everything good and everything evil, are
similarly and equally phases of the same

128 JEWISH MYSTICISM

Divine Life, then the distinction between
good and evil becomes meaningless. But to
affirm this, is to deny the first principles of
both religion and morality. It is the quag
mire of pantheism. Does the Zohar lead
to any pantheistic conclusion ? If not, how
does it evade the difficulty ?

The reply to these queries is that the
Zohar steers clear of the dangers of panthe
ism, and that it solves the problem of evil
in a way which, while appearing highly
unsatisfactory to the modern scientific
Western mind, is quite in keeping with the
intellectual level of the times in which its
writers lived. Evil, sin, and their personifi
cations, the demons, are termed kellfoth,
i.e. the coverings, wrappings, externals of
all existing things. Just as the covering
(or husk) of anything is not the real thing
and far inferior to it, so sin and evil are, as it
were, the gross, inferior, imperfect aspects of
creation. And as the world is an emanation
of the Divine, it follows that whatsoever in
the world is evil, and not of the Divine,
cannot be real. Hence evil is that which has
no being ; it is a sort of illusion ; it is a
state of absence, negation ; it is a thing
which merely appears to be but is not. It
is symbolised, according to the Zohar, by
the condition of the primaeval chaos as
described in Genesis, i. 2, viz. ' without form,'
f void,' ' darkness,' i.e. the absence of all

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 129

visible form, order, life. By means of the
creation of the world (which is an emanation
of the Divine) the Infinite became, as it were,
' contracted ' (Tsimtsum) and took on certain
attributes of the finite. To this finite be
longs the ' darkness ' of the first chaos
or, in other words, evil. Hence the finite
stands at the uttermost extremity of the
Divine emanation, i.e. the world. And as it
is man's duty to strive after union with the
Infinite, his pursuit of the finite leads him
to that which lies at the extremity of the
Divine nature rather than that which lies
at the heart of it. This constitutes evil.
It is a state of absence, a negation, because
man who, like the universe, is but one of
the manifestations of the Divine, can only
attain the real when he seeks the Real
who is his fount, his home.

It is of interest — and vital to an under
standing of all Kabbalistic literature — to
note some of the favourite technical terms
employed, in addition to those already here
mentioned in passing. A ubiquitous term
is En-Sof, applied to the Deity. These words
mean literally c No End.' ' The Deity is
boundless, endless. The Zohar was not the
first mystical work to use the words. The
underlying idea was probably supplied by
the idea underlying the description of the
Godhead in the philosophy of Ibn Gabirol, the
Spanish-Hebrew poet and mystic philosopher
9

130 JEWISH MYSTICISM

of the eleventh century. He describes the
Deity as the ' she- en lo tiklah,9 i.e. the one
who has no bounds or ends. Ibn Gabirol
was a Neoplatonist, and much of his philo
sophy shows the influence upon him of
Plotinus. But he forsakes his master and
follows strictly in the line of Jewish tradi
tion in one respect, viz. that in order, as he
thought, to safeguard the Jewish doctrine
of monotheism, the Deity must be freed from
the ascription to Him of all attributes.
Hence God can only be properly described
by a title which emphasises the negation
of all attributes. The En-Sof of the Zohar
and its predecessors is probably an echo of
this ultra-negative characterisation of the
Deity. Let us quote the Zohar :

" Before having created any shape in the
world, before having produced any form,
He was alone, without form, resembling
nothing. Who could comprehend Him as
He then was, before creation, since He had
no form ? It is forbidden to picture Him by
any form or under any shape whatsoever,
not even by His holy name, nor by a letter
[of the alphabet] nor by a point [the Yod,
which is the smallest letter in the Hebrew
alphabet, is usually designated as a point].
Such is the sense of the words, ' For ye saw
no manner of similitude on the day when the
Lord spake unto you in Horeb, out off the
midst of the fire ' (Deut. iv. 15). This means

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 131

that you saw no other thing which you
might possibly represent by a form or shape.
But after He had created the form of the
Heavenly Man (Adam 'Ild-d), He used him
as a chariot (Merkabah) on which to de
scend. He wished to be called by the form
which consists of the holy name of Jahveh.
He wished to make Himself known by His
attributes, by each attribute separately.
So He let Himself be styled as the God of
pardon, the God of justice, the God omni
potent, the God of hosts and He who is
(Jahveh). His object was to make thus
intelligible what are His qualities and how
His justice and His compassion extend over
the world as well as over the works of men.
For, had He not shed His brightness over all
His creatures, how would we get to know
Him ? How would it be true to say that
the world is filled with His glory ? Woe
unto the man who would dare to compare
Him to even one of His own attributes !
Yet still less ought He to be likened unto
the man who came from the earth and who
is destined for death ! It is necessary to
conceive of Him as above all creatures and
all attributes. And then when these things
have been removed, there is left neither
attribute, nor shape, nor form " (ii. fol. 42).

From this characteristic extract, the fol
lowing deductions are possible :

(a) God as the En-Sof and as a Being

132 JEWISH MYSTICISM

utterly divested of attributes is an idea that
can only be postulated negatively. You
cannot tell what God is ; you can only tell
what He is not. But if this be so, and if, as
is axiomatic to the Zohar and all the Kab
balah, the world is contained in God just
as a small vessel is contained in a larger,
and nothing exists outside of God, how can
creation be explained, whence and how
arose the universe ? The universe is im
perfect and finite, and its creation must have
involved, therefore, some change in the
character of God who ex hypoihesi is perfect,
free from all attributes, and therefore free
from all possibility of change. How could
this be ? The answer is contained in the
Zohar's teaching on the Ten Sefirot, which
will be considered in our coming chapter.

(b) The idea of God using the Heavenly
Man (Adam 'Ild-d) as a chariot on which
to descend indicates a noteworthy identity
of teaching in the Zohar and Plotinus.
For both systems imply that there is a sort
of double movement in the universe, ' a
way down and a way up.5 There is a process
of Divine emanation, i.e. an outgoing of God,
a self-descent from His transcendent height
towards the lowly abodes of man. And
correspondingly there is an ascent, a way up,
on the man's part. For, just as to Plotinus,
the final stage of the soul's return journey
to its home in God, consists in its highest

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 133

experience (brought about by a withdrawal
from desires and from objects of sense) of
contact and union with God, so also, accord
ing to the Zohar, the three elements of which
the soul is composed, viz. the rational
(neshdmdh), the moral (ruab), and the vital
(nefesh), are each of them, not only emana
tions from the Sefirot, but also have the
potency of uniting him again with the
Sefirot, and, in the case of the pious man,
of uniting him with the highest of the Sefirot,
the Crown or Supreme Intelligence.

(c) The idea of the Heavenly Man, or
Adam Kadmon (' First ' or ' Original ' Man),
or Shechinta Td-td-d (' Lower ' or ' Terres
trial ' Shechinah), is vital to an understand
ing of the Zohar and of all Kabbalistic
literature. It has resemblances to the
Philonic exegesis on the distinction between
" the heavenly man born in the image of
God," and therefore having " no participa
tion in any corruptible or earthlike essence,"
and "the earthly man," who was made " of
loose material, called a lump of clay "
(On the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, i. 12).
One thinks also in this connection of Paul's
views on the First Adam who was flesh and
blood, a ' living soul,' and the Second Adam
whom he describes as a ' quickening spirit '
(1 Cor. xv. 45-49). There is, too, a Rabbinic
dictum about a " spirit of Adam " which
" moved upon the face of the waters " (as

134 JEWISH MYSTICISM

did the ~Rualq, in Genesis, i. 2) — a pre-exist ent
First Man.

The Zohar is possibly indebted for its
treatment of the Heavenly Man to some one
or, perhaps, all of these sources. It says as
follows : " The Heavenly Man after he had
manifested himself from out of the midst of
the upper-world primitive obscurity, created
the earthly man " (ii. 70 fol.). This means
that the creation of man was the work, not
of God, but of His supreme manifestation,
His first emanation. This manifestation or
emanation is the first of the Ten Sefirot (the
Crown), which, as will be shown later, is the
primal will of God which contained within
itself the plan of the universe in its entire
infinity of time and space. To say that the
plan of the world in its entirety is contained
in one of the emanations of God, is tanta
mount to saying that man (who is part of the
world) is the product of an immanent Divine
activity in the world. This immanent Divine
activity is denoted by the term ' Heavenly
Man,' as also by the term ( First of the
Sefirot,' and, in varying senses, by all the
Ten Sefirot.

But why, after all, such a title as ' Heavenly
Man ' ? It is because, according to the
Zohar, man is a copy of the universe below
as well as of the universe above. Hence God
in His creative capacity chose also the form
of man. The Zohar puts it thus :

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE ZOHAR 135

" Believe not that man consists solely of
flesh, skin, bones, and veins. The real part
of man is his soul, and the things just men
tioned, the skin, flesh, bones, and veins, are
only an outward covering, a veil, but are
not the man. When man departs he divests
himself of all the veils which cover him.
Arid these different parts of our body corre
spond to the secrets of the Divine wisdom.
The skin typifies the heavens which extend
everywhere and cover everything like a gar
ment. The flesh puts us in mind of the evil
side of the universe. The bones and the
veins symbolise the Divine chariot, the inner
powers of man which are the servants of
God. But they are all but an outer covering.
For, inside man, there is the secret of the
Heavenly Man. . . . Everything below takes
place in the same manner as everything above.
This is the meaning of the remark that God
created man in His own image. But just as
in the heavens, which cover the whole uni
verse, we behold different shapes brought
about by the stars and the planets to teach
us concerning hidden things and deep secrets,
so upon the skin which covers our body there
are shapes and forms which are like planets
and stars to our bodies. All these shapes
have a hidden meaning, and are observed by
the sages who are able to read the face of
man " (ii. 76a).

CHAPTER VII

THE TEN SEFIROT

ALL finite creatures are, in divergent senses
and varying degrees, part and parcel of the
Deity. Creatio ex nihilo is unthinkable,
seeing that God, in the Neoplatonic view,
is the Perfect One, ' an undivided One,' to
whom no qualities or characteristics can be
ascribed, and to whom, therefore, no such
idea as that of intention or purpose, or change
or movement, can be applied. All existences
are emanations from the Deity. The Deity
reveals Himself in all existences because He
is immanent in them. But though dwelling
in them, He is greater than they. He is
apart from them. He transcends them.

The foregoing might be said to be a general
resume of the philosophy of the Ten Sefirot.
To quote a passage from the section of
the Zohar called the Idra Zutta (' Small
Assembly') :

" The Most Ancient One1 is at the same

1 One of the favourite names for God in the mediaeval
Kabbalah. It is based on the phrase in Daniel, vii. 9, 13,22,
' ancient of days.'

136

THE TEN SEFIROT 137

time the most Hidden of the hidden. He is
separated from all things, and is at the same
time not separated from all things. For all
things are united in Him, and He unites
Himself with all things. There is nothing
which is not in Him. He has a shape, and
one can say that He has not one. In as
suming a shape, He has given existence to
all things. He made ten lights spring forth
from His midst, lights which shine with the
form which they have borrowed from Him,
and which shed everywhere the light of a
brilliant day. The Ancient One, the most
Hidden of the hidden, is a high beacon, and
we know Him only by His lights, which
illuminate our eyes so abundantly. His Holy
Name is no other thing than these lights."

The ' ten lights ' are, of course, the Ten
Sefirot, the ten successive emanations from
the Godhead, the ten powers or qualities
which were latent from all eternity in the God
head. But wrhat is meant by saying that ' His
Holy Name is no other thing but these lights ' ?
We turn to another passage in the Zohar for
the explanation. It reads as follows :

' The name ( I am ' [in Hebrew, eheyeh ;
see Exodus, iii. 14, 'I am that I am ' — in
Hebrew, eheyeh asher eheyeh] signifies the
unity of all things. Afterwards He brought
out that light which is the celestial mother,
and when she bare a child, then He called
Himself ' that I am ' (asher eheyeh). And

138 JEWISH MYSTICISM

when all else came into existence, and every
thing became perfected and in its right place,
then He called Himself Jahveh " (iii. 65).

The passage seems hopeless as regards a
meaning. But on deeper consideration it
becomes quite clear. The Divine Name, ' I
am that I am,' is inferior to the Divine Name
Jahveh. It typifies an earlier, less-devel
oped stage. The student of Hebrew will
readily know why this is. Although trans
lated into English as ' I am that I am ' it
belongs grammatically to what the Semitic
philologists call the 'imperfect tense,' repre
senting an unfinished action. But ' Jahveh '
is grammatically the ' present tense ' (i.e.
a noun formed from this tense). Hence ' I
am that I am ' signifies the Godhead as He
was when He existed as the ' Hidden of the
hidden,' i.e. when He was the ' undivided
One,' the Absolute containing in Himself the
All, before He had, so to speak, unfolded
Himself in His creative acts, before any
emanations had radiated out from Him.
But ' Jahveh ' denotes the crown and summit
of the Divine self-manifestation ; in other
words, it denotes God as immanent in all the
numberless parts of the cosmos, which is but
a revelation, an embodiment of the Divine
thought. The idea of the ' celestial mother '
having a child is part of the Zohar's doctrine
of emanation, where, as will be shown later
on, a certain one of the Ten Sefirot is

THE TEN SEFIROT 139

called ' father ' (Abba) and another is called
' mother ' (Imma), and from the union of the
two, there is born another of the Sefirot,
called the ' son ' (Ben).

Hence to say that 'God's Holy Name is
no other thing than these lights ' is but to
say that the Sefirot which represent the
world as the copy of an ever-active, ever-
energising God, sum up all that the Divine
Name stands for. And that the Divine
Name denotes a strongly mystical aspect of
the relation between God and the universe
is abundantly clear from the Essenic litera
ture, as well as from the Book Yetsirah.
In fact, it appears occasionally in this sense,
in the Talmudic and Midrashic records (see,
e.g., T.B. Pesahim, 55b), and the germ of the
idea can be traced back to the Old Testament,
to such phrases as : " This is my name for
ever, and this is my memorial unto all
generations " (Exodus, iii. 15) ; or : " Thy
name, O Lord, endureth for ever; and thy
memorial, O Lord, throughout all genera
tions " (Psalm, cxxxv. 13).

One of the clearest passages in the Zohar
stating what the Ten Sefirot are, is the
following :

" For the waters of the sea are limitless
and shapeless. But when they are spread
over the earth, then they produce a shape
(dimion), and we can calculate like this : The
source of the waters of the sea and the force

140 JEWISH MYSTICISM

which it emits to spread itself over the soil,
are two things. Then an immense basin is
formed by the waters just as is formed when
one makes a very deep digging. This basin
is filled by the waters which emanate from
the source ; it is the sea itself, and can be
regarded as a third thing. This very large
hollow [of waters] is split up into seven canals,
which are like so many long tubes, by means
of which the waters are conveyed. The
source, the current, the sea, and the seven
canals form together the number ten. And
should the workman who constructed these
tubes come to break them up, then the waters
return to their source, and there remains
naught but the debris and the water dried up.
It is thus that the Cause of causes has created
the Ten Sefirot. The Crown is the source
whence there springs a light without end,
from which comes the name En-Sof, i.e.
Infinite, designating the Supreme Cause ; for
while in this state it possesses neither shape
nor figure ; there are no means of compre
hending it ; there is no way of knowing it.
It is in this sense that it has been said, ' Seek
not the things that are too hard for thee '
(Ecclesiasticus, iii. 21). Then there is formed
a vessel contracted to a mere point [the letter
Yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew
alphabet] into which the Divine light pene
trates. It is the source of Wisdom, it is
Wisdom itself, in virtue of which the Supreme

THE TEN SEFIROT 141

Cause is called the God of Wisdom. After
wards, it [i.e. the Supreme Cause] constructs
a channel, wide as the sea, which is called
Intellect [or Intelligence]. From this, comes
the title of ' God who understands ' [i.e. is
intelligent]. We must know, however, that
God only understands and is wise by means
of His own essential substance ; for Wisdom
does not merit the title by itself, but only by
the instrumentality of Him who is wise and
who has produced it from the light which
emanates from Him. One cannot conceive
what ' knowing ' is by itself, but by Him
who is the ' knowing One,' and who fills it
with His own essential substance.

" Finally, the sea is divided into seven parts,
and there result [from this division] the
seven precious channels which are called :
(a) Compassion (or Greatness), (b) Justice (or
Force), (c) Beauty, (d) Victory, (e) Glory, (/)
Royalty, and (g) Foundation.1 It is for this
reason that God is called the ' Great ' or the
6 Compassionate,' the 'Strong,' the 'Magni
ficent,' the ' God of Victories,' the ' Creator
to whom all glory belongs,' and the ' Founda
tion of all things.' It is this latter attri
bute which sustains all the others, as well as
the totality of the worlds. And yet, He is
also the King of the universe, for all things
are in His power whether He wills to lessen
the number of the channels and increase the

1 Some authorities invert the order of / and g.

142 JEWISH MYSTICISM

light which springs from them, or whether
He wills the contrary " (foil. 42, 43).

According to this characteristic passage,
the Sefirot are the Names of the Deity — but
only in the deeply mystical sense of ' Names '
as has been referred to above. The Divine
Name is, on this understanding, equivalent
to the Presence of God, the eternal Source of
the power and intelligence enshrined in the
constitution of the world and the heart of
man. The Ten Sefirot together are thus a
picture of how an infinite, undivided, un
knowable God takes on the attributes of the
finite, the divided, the knowable, and thus
becomes the cause of, the power lying at
the bottom of, all the multifarious modes of
existence in the finite plane — all of which are
thus a reflection of the Divine. The Sefirot
have no real tangible existence at all. They
are but a figure of speech showing the Divine
immanence in all cosmic phenomena, in all
the grades of man's spiritual and moral
achievement.

It should, however, be pointed out here,
that the functions and natures of the Sefirot
are described by the Zohar in the most
enigmatic of enigmatic language. Hence
different deductions have always been pos
sible, and hence, too, the rise of more than
one school of Zohar interpretation. The
view mostly followed — and it may be said
to be the universally-accepted standard — is

THE TEN SEFIROT 143

that of the school of Luria and Cordovero,
the two most famous Kabbalists of the six
teenth century.

Let us now consider each of the Sefirot
separately. What we shall say will amount
in substance, though not in form, to a com
mentary on the lengthy passage from the
Zohar previously quoted. Prior to the first
of the Sefirot must come, what our extract
has termed the Supreme Cause (literally the
' Cause of causes ') or the En-Sof. What is
the relation of the En-Sof to the Sefirot ?
According to the theories of Luria and
Cordovero, all the Sefirot emanate from the
En-Sof, who, although eternally present in
them all, is not comprehended in them, but
transcends them. All modes of existence and
thought embody some fragment of the En-Sof,
but, with all this, the En-Sof is divided from
them by an impassable gulf. He remains
the hidden, unapproachable Being. This is
why, while each of the Sefirot has a well-
known name, the En-Sof has no name. Just
as in the Talmudic mysticism of the Shechinah
the idea of a universally-diffused, all-pene
trating Deity is conveyed by the metaphor
of light, so in the case of the mediaeval
Kabbalah the En-Sof is likewise spoken of
as Light (Or En-Sof = ' The Infinite Light ').
The Christian mystics also favoured the same
figure. Closely connected with this teaching
is the general Kabbalistic doctrine of Tsim-

144 JEWISH MYSTICISM

tsum, i.e. contraction. It, too, is found in
the Talmud and Midrashim, and it is from
them that the Kabbalah, most likely, received
it. Thus Genesis Rabba, iv. 5, dwells on the
paradox (mentioned also by Philo) of the
world being too small to hold God, but yet
the space between the Ark's staves being
large enough. The Kabbalistic idea of Tsim-
tsum is an attempt to explain the contraction
or limitation of the En-Sof (the Infinite), in
order to make possible the emanation of the
Sefirot, i.e. in order to produce the finite
world of phenomena. The universal in
filtration of the light of the En-Sof, its
diffusion throughout all the Sefirot, gave rise
to the idea of the existence of a changeable
and an unchangeable element in each of the
Sefirot. The former represents the material,
outward, perishable side of man and the
universe. The latter is the changeless,
unfading eternal quality embedded in man
and the universe. It is just this dual aspect
which is referred to in the long extract from
the Zohar quoted above, in the words :
" Should the workman who constructed these
tubes come to break them up, then the waters
return to their source, and there remains
naught but the debris and the water dried
up." In other words, should the En-Sof
withdraw its eternal immanent light and life
from any one of the Sefirot, or, to speak
in untechnical language, should God, who is

THE TEN SEFIROT 145

the Life of the universe, the Power lying
beneath and behind all phenomena, by some
miraculous intervention withdraw or suspend
some fragment of Himself, then the cosmos
reverts to chaos.

The first of the Ten Sefirot is the Crown
(in Hebrew, Keter). It is of importance
for the reader to note that whereas Neo-
platonism is largely responsible for the basis
of the Zohar's doctrines of emanation, the
names of the Sefirot and the teaching em
braced and conveyed by those names are
entirely drawn from the field of the Old
Testament and Rabbinical theology. All
ages of Jewish thought (as well as of Jewish
art) employ the word, image, and idea of a
' crown ' in a considerable variety of senses.
In Biblical Hebrew there are no less than
five different words all indiscriminately
translated as ' crown,' but denoting really
either different forms of the thing or different
prominent portions of it. In the Apocryphal
and Rabbinical literature men ' crowned '
themselves in all sorts of ways, and the
crown was symbolic of a host of religious
ideas. In the theological realm, ' crown '
played many parts.

Only two references — both germane to
our subject — can be quoted here. In T.B.
Berachoth, 17a, it is said : "In the world to
come there is neither eating nor drinking,
nor marrying, nor bargaining, nor envy,
10

146 JEWISH MYSTICISM

nor hatred, nor quarrel ; but the righteous
sit, with crowns upon their heads, and feed
upon the splendour of the Shechinah, as it
is said of the nobles of the children of Israel,
( He laid not His hand upon them, but they
saw God, and this was equivalent to their
eating and their drinking ' [so the Targumic
paraphrase of Exodus, xxiv. 11]." T.B.
Megillah, 15b, says : "In the time to come,
God will be a crown of glory upon the head
of each saint, as it is written, ' In that day
shall the Lord of Hosts be for a crown of
glory, and for a diadem of beauty, unto the
residue of His people ' (Isaiah, xxviii. 5)."
Hence, it is not hard to discover by what
process of reasoning the mediaeval Jewish
mystics thought it fitting to designate the
first of the Sefirot as the Crown.

'It is," says the Zohar, " the principle
of all principles, the hidden Wisdom, the
Crown which the Highest of the high, and by
which all crowns and diadems are crowned "
(iii. 288). It is the first of the emanations
from the En-Sof. The latter being, as has
been said above, the infinite, hidden, un
knowable Being, the Crown represents, as
it were, the first stage by which the Infinite
Being takes on the properties of the finite
and becomes drawn out of His impenetrable
isolation. But, nevertheless, the Crown is
an absolute indivisible unity, possessing
no attributes or qualities, and baffling all

THE TEN SEFIROT 147

analysis and description. It is, to quote
the original, a ' nekudah peshtuah,' i.e. { a
simple point,' or ' nekuda rishonah,' i.e. 'a
primordial point.5 The idea here is that
the first manifestation of the Divine is a
point, i.e. a unity, unanalysable, indescrib
able, and yet possessing the All. In other
words, it is the Hegelian idea of ' pure being '
(das reine seiri). This ' pure being ' or
' existence ' is the thought or reason of
God. The starting-point of everything is
the thought as it existed in God. The uni
verse is this ' thought ' of God. It is in
this ' thought ' of God that everything was
originally embraced. The first of the Sefirot
denotes, then, the primordial Divine Thought
(or Divine Will, as the Hebrew commentators
often style it) ; and to say this is tantamount
to saying that the Crown contained within
itself the plan of the universe in its infinity of
time and space, in its endless varieties of form,
colour, and movement. And it is an emana
tion from the En-Sof who, while immanent
in the Crown, and hence immanent in all the
Sefirot, yet transcends them all.

The Crown, for the reasons just men
tioned, is ofttimes styled Resha Hivra, i.e.
the ' White Head '- - head ' denoting the
idea of source, and ' white ' being the blend
of all the colours (just as the Crown is the
blend of all forms in the cosmos). But the
idea may possibly be drawn from Daniel,

148 JEWISH MYSTICISM

vii. 9, where " One that was ancient of days
did sit ; his raiment was white as snow, and
the hair of his head like pure wool " (cf.
1 Enoch, xiv. 18-22 ; Revelation, i. 14). The
original Aramaic for ' ancient of days ' is
' attik ' ; and this, too, is a name for the first
of the Sefirot, and is frequently employed in
the Kabbalah, generally as a designation of
the Deity.

Wisdom and Intelligence are the second
and third of the Ten Sefirot. They are
parallel emanations from the Crown or first
Sefirah. Here we alight upon an interesting
feature of this mysticism, viz. the applica
tion of the idea of the sexual relationship
to the solution of the problem of existence.
" When the Ancient One, the Holy One,
desired to bring all things into being, He
created them all as male and female "
(iii. 290). Wisdom is the ' father,' i.e. the
masculine active principle which engenders
all things and imposes on them form and
measure (an idea derived from Job, xxviii.
12). Intelligence is the ' mother,' the
passive, receptive principle (derived from
Proverbs, ii. 3, " Yea, if thou cry after dis
cernment," i.e. ' Binah ' in Hebrew ; and the
word rendered by 'if can, by the slightest
alteration of a vowel, be rendered by
' mother,' and thus the passage is translated
by the Zohar as, ' Yea, if mother thou
callest discernment "). Out of the union of

THE TEN SEFIROT 149

Wisdom and Intelligence comes a ' son '
who is dowered with the characteristics of
both parents. This son is Reason (Da'at),
which is, by the way, not regarded as an
independent Sefirah. These three, father,
mother, son (i.e. the two Sefirot, viz. Wisdom
and Intelligence, and their offspring Reason),
hold and unite in themselves all that which
has been, which is, and which will be. But
they in their turn are all united to the first
Sefirah (the Crown), who is the all-compre
hensive One who is, was, and will be.

Here one meets again with a foreshadow
ing of the Hegelian teaching concerning the
identity of thought and being. The universe
is an expression of the ideas or the absolute
forms of intelligence. Cordovero says :

" The first three Sefirot must be con
sidered as one and the same thing. The first
represents c knowledge,' the second ' the
knower,' the third 'that which is known.'
The Creator is Himself, at one and the same
time, knowledge, the knower, and the known.
Indeed, His manner of knowing does not
consist in applying His thought to things
outside Him ; it is by self-knowledge that
He knows and perceives everything which is.
There exists nothing which is not united to
Him and which He does not find in His own
essence. He is the type of all being, and all
things exist in Him under their most pure and
most perfect form. ... It is thus that all

150 JEWISH MYSTICISM

existing things in the universe have their
form in the Sefirot, and the Sefirot have theirs
in the source from which they emanate."

Thus, the first three Sefirot form a triad
constituting the world as a manifestation of
the Divine Thought. The remaining seven
Sefirot likewise fall into triads. The Divine
Thought is the source whence emanate two
opposing principles, one active or masculine,
the other passive or feminine. The former is
Mercy (Hesed), the latter is Justice (Dm).
From the union of these two there results
Beauty (Tifereth). The logical connections
between these three principles, as they stand
in the Zohar, are extremely difficult to
fathom. But Cordovero and other Hebrew
commentators give us the needed solution of
the problem. The Sefirot Mercy and Justice
represent the universe as being at one and
the same time an expansion and contraction
of the Divine Will. Mercy, as the active
masculine principle, is the life-giving, ever-
productive because ever-forgiving power
innate in man and the universe. Justice is
the necessarily-opposed immanent faculty
holding in check what would otherwise prove
to be the excesses of Mercy. The theology
of the Talmudic Rabbis shows itself un
mistakably here. In the beginning, say the
Rabbis, God thought to create the universe
by the ' attribute of justice ' (designated by
the word ' Jahveh '). But on considering

THE TEN SEFIROT 151

that the universe could not exist by c justice '
alone, He determined to join the ' attribute of
mercy ' (designated by the word ' Elohim ')
with the ' attribute of justice,' and to create
the universe — as He finally did — by the dual
means. Likewise in the Zohar mysticism,
the moral order of the universe can only follow
on a combination of the Sefirot Mercy and
Justice. And the inevitable product of the
union is the sixth Sefirah, Beauty. The
reasoning is apparent. We have thus far seen
how the first triad of Sefirot pictures God as
the immanent thinking power of the universe,
and how the second triad interprets God as
the immanent moral power of the universe.

The third triad are : Victory (Nezah),
Glory (Hod), and Foundation (Yesod). The
first of these is the masculine active prin
ciple. The second is the feminine passive
principle, while the third is the effect of
their combination. What aspect of a God-
saturated world do these three Sefirot point
to ? The Zohar tells us, as follows : " Ex
tension, variety [or multiplication], and force
are gathered together in them ; and all forces
that come out, come out from them, and it is
for this reason that they are called Hosts
[i.e. armies or forces]. They are [the two
fore-mentioned Sefirot] Victory and Glory '
(hi. 296). The allusion is obviously to the
physical, dynamic aspect of the universe,
the ceaseless, developing world with its multi-

152 JEWISH MYSTICISM

plicity and variety of forces, changes and
movements. From their coalescence comes
the ninth Sefirah, Foundation. Rightly so ;
for it is the endless, changeless ebb and flow
of the world's forces that, in the last resort,
guarantees the stability of the world and
builds up its ' foundation.' It creates the
reproductive power of nature, endows it with,
as it were, a generative organ from which all
things proceed, and upon which all things
finally depend.

The last of the Sefirot is Royalty (Malk&t).
Its function is not very apparent, and its
existence may be due to the desire on the
part of the Kabbalists to make up the
number ten — a number which looms largely
in the Old Testament literature, as well as in
the theology of the Talmud, Midrashim, and
Philo. Generally speaking, this tenth Sefirah
indicates the abiding truth of the har
monious co-operation of all the Sefirot, thus
making the universe in its orderliness and in
its symmetry a true and exact manifestation
of the Divine Mind — an 'Olam Azilut, i.e.
a world of emanation, as the Kabbalists
themselves style it.

The fact that the Sefirot fall into triads or
trinities, and the ascription to them of such
sexual titles as ' father,' ' mother,' ' son,' has
encouraged many an apologist for Christianity
to say that the essential Christian dogma of
the Trinity is implicit in the Jewish mystical

THE TEN SEFIROT 153

literature. But it is beyond a doubt that the
resemblance is quite a matter of accident.
It cannot be too often repeated that there is
a substantial admixture of foreign elements
in all branches of the Kabbalah. The philo
sophy of Salomon Ibn Gabirol (which largely
echoes Plato), Neoplatonism, Gnosticism,
Philonism, and other systems have all left
indelible traces. But Christianity, be it
remembered, besides being a debtor to Juda
ism, is a debtor to these sources as well ; so
that what appears to be Christian may be, in
reality, Jewish ; a development of the original
material by an unbroken succession of Jewish
minds. This original material is the old
Talmudic and Midrashic exegesis upon which
was foisted the alien philosophies just alluded
to. That there should be a resultant re
semblance to Christianity is quite a normal
outcome; but it is beyond dispute that the
Christian Trinity and the trinities of the Ten
Sefirot lie in quite distinct planes.

The Jewish Prayer Book echoes much of
the theological sentiment of the Zohar.
There is a fine hymn in the Sabbath-morning
service which, while giving a noteworthy
prominence to the names of the Sefirot,
reproduces with a charming simplicity of
Hebrew diction, the main body of the Zoharic
doctrine, its cosmology, angelology, astrology,
and psychology. It is as follows : * " God,

1 From the Authorised Daily Prayer Book, ed. Singer, p. 1 29.

154 JEWISH MYSTICISM

the Lord over all works, blessed is He, and
ever to be blessed by the mouth of every
thing that hath breath. His greatness and
goodness fill the world ; knowledge (Da'at)
and understanding (Tebunah = Binah) [i.e. in
telligence] surround Him. He is exalted above
the holy Hayot, and is adorned in glory (Kabod
= Hod) above the celestial chariot (merkabah) ;
purity and rectitude are before his throne,
loving-kindness (Hesed) and tender mercy
before his glory. The luminaries are good
which our God hath created : He formed
them with knowledge, understanding, and dis
cernment ; He gave them might and power
to rule in the midst of the world. They are
full of lustre,1 and they radiate brightness ;
beautiful is their lustre throughout all the
world. They rejoice in their going forth, and
are glad in their returning ; they perform
with awe the will of their Master. Glory
and honour they render unto his name,
exultation and rejoicing at the remembrance
of his sovereignty (Malkut). He called unto
the sun, and it shone forth in light ; He looked
and ordained the figure of the moon. All the
hosts on high render praise unto Him, the
Seraphim, the Ophanim, and the holy Hayot
ascribing glory (lit. beauty, i.e. Tifereth) and
greatness." 2

1 Ziv in Hebrew, a mystical term for the shining of the
Shechinah.

2 Another appellation for Hesed, the fourth Sefirah.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOUL

As in all systems of mysticism, the soul
plays a towering part in the theology of the
Zohar. Mysticism's centre of gravity is the
close kinship between the human and the
Divine ; and the only avenue through which
this kinship can become real to us is the
soul. The soul, as a spiritual entity playing
the highest of high parts in man's relation
with the Unseen, is not a conspicuous
element of either the Old Testament or
the Talmudic-Midrashic writings ; and the
critics of Judaism have a way of saying
harsh things about that religion on the
grounds of its deficiency in this respect.
But the shortcoming is amply atoned for by
the large part assigned to the function of the
soul in all branches of the mediaeval Kabbalah.
That the Zohar is a debtor to a double
source — the Talmudic teachings and the
teachings of the Neoplatonists — is very
apparent from its treatment of the soul. A
passage from the former reads as follows :
" Just as the soul fills the body, so God

'55

156 JEWISH MYSTICISM

fills the world. Just as the soul bears the
body, so God endures the world. Just as the
soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is
not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body
[i.e. spiritually, intellectually], so God gives
food to the world" (T.B. Berachoth, lOa).
The predominant influence of the soul over
the body, the body as overflown in all its
parts by the soul and dependent upon it
for the source of its life — these are the im
plications of the passage just quoted ; and
they are the substratum of the Zoharic ideas
of the soul.

Neoplatonism gave to the Zohar the
idea of the soul as an emanation from the
' Overmind ' of the universe. There was
originally one ' Universal Soul,' or ' Over-
soul,' which, as it were, broke itself up
and encased itself in individual bodies. All
individual souls are, hence, fragments of the
' Oversoul,' so that although they are dis
tinct from one another they are, in reality,
all one. Thus, to quote the Zohar :

" At the time when God desired to create
the universe, it came up in His will before
Him, and He formed all the souls which
were destined to be allotted to the children
of men. The souls were all before Him in
the forms which they were afterwards
destined to bear inside the human body.
God looked at each one of them, and He
saw that many of them would act corruptly

THE SOUL 157

in the world. When the time of each
arrived, it was summoned before God, who
said to it : ' Go to such and such a part of
the universe, enclose thyself in such and
such a body.' But the soul replied : ' O
sovereign of the universe, I am happy in
my present world, and I desire not to leave
it for some other place where I shall be
enslaved and become soiled.' Then the
Holy One (blessed be He) replied : ' From
the day of thy creation thou hast had no
other destiny than to go into the universe
whither I send thee.' The soul, seeing
that it must obey, sorrowfully took the way
to earth and came down to dwell in our
midst " (ii. 96).

There is more than one echo of Plotinus —
the master-mind of Neoplatonism — in this
Zoharic extract. ' The world coming up in
His will before Him ' is Plotinus' teaching
about God thinking out the original patterns
of all things, the first manifestation of God
being Thought. ' The souls were all before
Him in the forms which they were after
wards destined to bear ' is clearly an allusion
to the splitting-up of the Oversoul, so that its
fragments might get embodied in individuals
—as Plotinus taught. But although the
Zohar, like Plotinus, draws a distinction
between lower souls (' they who would act
corruptly in the world ') and higher souls,
it, unlike Plotinus, makes every soul de-

158 JEWISH MYSTICISM

scend into some body. Plotinus has quite
a different teaching.

' The lower soul desires a body and lives
in the stage of sense. . . . The higher soul,
on the other hand, transcends the body,
( rides upon it,' as the fish is in the sea or
as the plant is in the air. This higher soul
never absolutely leaves its home, its being
is not here but ' yonder,' or, in the language
of Plotinus, ' The soul always leaves some
thing of itself above ' (Rufus M. Jones,
Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 74).

According to the Zohar, while there are
distinctions there, too, between superior
and inferior souls — as is shown by their
belonging to a higher or lower Sefirah—
they must all descend to earth and unite
with the body, returning, all of them, at
death to their fountain-head, God.

The Zohar is, after all, but a commentary
on the Hebrew Bible, and however much it
may, at times, forsake the traditional Jewish
pathways in favour of alien philosophies,
it is always strictly conservative where the
fundamental axioms of the Jewish faith are
concerned. That every body possesses a
soul which in its pristine form is ' pure,'
that recompense in an after-life awaits it on
a scale commensurate with its deserts, is an
impregnable tenet of Judaism. The Zohar,
wherever it may wander, must come back
to this central point.

THE SOUL 159

The soul is a trinity. It comprises three
elements, viz. : (a) Neshamdh, the rational
element which is the highest phase of
existence ; (b) Ruah, the moral element,
the seat of good and evil, the ethical quali
ties ; (c) Nefesh, the gross side of spirit, the
vital element which is en rapport with the
body, and the mainspring of all the move
ments, instincts, and cravings of the physical
life.

There is a strong reflection of Platonic
psychology in these three divisions or
powers of the soul. More than one mediaeval
Jewish theologian was a Platonist, and in all
probability the Zohar is a debtor to these.
The three divisions of the soul are emana
tions from the Sefirot. The Neshdmah,
which, as has been said, is the soul in its
most elevated and sublimest sense, eman
ates from the Sefirah of Wisdom. The Ruah,
which denotes the soul in its ethical aspect,
emanates from the Sefirah of Beauty. The
Nefesh, which is the animal side of the soul,
is an emanation from the Sefirah of Founda
tion, that element of divinity which comes,
most ot all, into contact with the material
forces of earth.

To sum up the matter in general and
untechnical language, the three divisions or
aspects of the human soul enable man to
fit himself into the plan and framework of
the cosmos, give him the power to do his

160 JEWISH MYSTICISM

multifarious duties towards the multifarious
portions of the world, — the world which is
a manifestation of God's thought, a copy of
the celestial universe, an emanation of the
Divine. The Zohar puts it poetically thus :

" In these three [i.e. Neshdmdh, Ruab,
Nefesh] we find an exact image (diyukna)
of what is above in the celestial world. For
all three form only one soul, one being, where
all is one. The Nefesh [i.e. the lowest side
of soul] does not in itself possess any light.
This is why it is so tightly joined to the body,
acquiring for it the pleasures and the foods
which it needs. It is of it that the sage says,
' She giveth meat to her household and their
task to her maidens ' (Proverbs, xxxi. 15).
' Her household ' means the body which is
fed. ' Her maidens ' are the limbs which
obey the dictates of the body. Above the
Nefesh is the Ruah [the ethical soul] which
dominates the Nefesh, imposes laws upon
it and enlightens it as much as its nature
requires. And then high above the Ruah
is the Neshdmdh, which in its turn rules the
Ruah and sheds upon it the light of life.
The Ruah is lit up by this light, and depends
entirely upon it. After death, the Ruah
has no rest. The gates of Paradise (Eden)
are not opened to it until the time when
Neshdmdh has reascended to its source,
to the Ancient of the ancients, in order to
become filled with Him throughout eternity.

THE SOUL 161

For the Neshdmdh is always climbing back
again towards its source " (ii. 142).

It can be gathered from this passage, as
from many similar ones which might have
been usefully quoted had space allowed,
that Neshdmdh is only realised, that man
only becomes conscious of Neshdmdh, after
death. A whole lifetime is necessary (and
in some cases more than one lifetime, as we
shall see) in order that Neshdmdh should be
able to mount up again to the Infinite source
from which it emanated. And it is the in
evitable destiny of Neshdmdh to climb back
and become one with the ' Ancient of
ancients.5

But if Neshdmdh is so exalted, so sacro
sanct, why should it have emanated from
its immaculate source at all, to become
tainted with earth ? The Zohar anticipates
our question and gives its answer as follows :

" If thou inquirest why it [i.e. the soul]
cometh down into the world from so exalted
a place and putteth itself at such a distance
from its source, I reply thus : It may be
likened to an earthly monarch to whom a
son is born. The monarch takes the son to
the countryside, there to be nourished and
trained until such a time as he is old enough
to accustom himself to the palace of his
father. When the father is told that the
education of his son is completed, what does
he do out of his love for him ? In order
ii

162 JEWISH MYSTICISM

to celebrate his home-coming, he sends for
the queen, the mother of the lad. He brings
her into the palace and rejoices with her the
whole day long.

"It is thus with the Holy One (blessed be
He). He, too, has a son by the queen. This
son is the high and holy soul. He conducts
it to the countryside, i.e. to the world, in order
to grow up there and gain an acquaintance
with the customs appertaining to the royal
palace. When the Divine King perceives
that the soul has completed its growth, and
the time is ripe for recalling it to Himself,
what does He do out of His love for it ? He
sends for the queen, brings her into the
palace, and brings the soul in too. The soul,
forsooth, does not bid adieu to its earthly
tenement before the queen has come to
unite herself with it, and to lead it into the
royal apartment where it is to live for ever.

" And the people of the world are wont
to weep when the son [i.e. the soul] takes its
leave of them. But if there be a wise man
amongst them, he says to them, Why weep
ye ? Is he not the son of the King ? Is it
not meet that he should take leave of you
to live in the palace of his father ? It
was for this reason that Moses, who knew
the Truth, on seeing the inhabitants of
earth mourning for the dead, exclaimed,
' Ye are the children of the Lord your God ;
ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any

THE SOUL 163

baldness between your eyes for the dead'
(Deut. xiv. 1). If all good men knew this,
they would hail with delight the day when it
behoves them to bid adieu to the world.
Is it not the height of glory for them when
the queen [i.e. the Shechinah, the Divine
Presence] comes down into the midst of
them to lead them into the palace of the
king to enjoy the delights thereof for ever
more ? " (i. 245).

It should be noted, by the way, that there
are many instances in Talmudic literature,
of men seeing the Shechinah at the hour of
death. It is the signal of the return of
Neshdmdh to its home, the Oversoul, of
which it is but a loosened fragment ; and
the return can only begin after it has com
pleted its education within the life-limits of
an earthly body.

It seems to follow, as a necessary corollary
from the foregoing doctrine, that the Zohar
must give countenance to some theory of the
transmigration of souls. If it is imperative
upon Neshdmdh to climb back again to the
Oversoul and obtain union with it ; and if,
in order to effect this end, it must previously
have reached the summit of purity and per
fection, then it stands to reason that its
sojourn within the confines of one body
may, on occasions, be inadequate to enable it
to reach this high and exacting condition.
Hence it must ' experience ' other bodies,

164 JEWISH MYSTICISM

and it must repeat the ' experience ' until
such a time as it shall have elevated and
refined itself to the pitch at which it will be
able to become one again with the fountain
from which it emanated. The Zohar does
contain some such tenet as this, although for
the full and systematic treatment of the sub
ject one has to look to the Kabbalistic writers
who built upon the Zohar. The Zohar states
as follows :

" All souls must undergo transmigration ;
and men do not understand the ways of the
Holy One (blessed be He). They know not
that they are brought before the tribunal
both before they enter into this world and
after they leave it. They know not the many
transmigrations and hidden trials which they
have to undergo, nor do they know the num
ber of souls and spirits (Ruah and Nefesh)
which enter into the world, and which do not
return to the Palace of the Heavenly King.
Men do not know how the souls revolve like
a stone which is thrown from a sling. But
the time is drawing nigh when these hidden
things will be revealed " (ii. 99).

To the minds of the Kabbalists, trans
migration is a necessity not alone on the
grounds of their particular theology — the
soul must reach the highest stage of its
evolution before it can be received again into
its eternal home — but on moral grounds as
well. It is a vindication of Divine justice to

THE SOUL 165

mankind. It settles the harassing query
which all ages have propounded : Why does
God permit the wicked to flourish as the
green bay tree, whereas the righteous man
is allowed to reap nothing but sorrow and
failure ? And the only way for reconciling
the dismal fact of child-suffering with the
belief in a good God, is by saying that the pain
is a retribution to the soul for sin committed
in some one or more of its previous states.
As has been already mentioned, the Jewish
literature of this subject of transmigration is
an exceedingly rich one. But it lies outside
the scope of the present book.

Not only does the Zohar, as we have seen,
teach the emanation of a threefold soul, but
it also propounds a curious theory about the
emanation of a pre-existent form or type of
body, which, in the case of each one of us,
unites the soul with the body. It is one of
the strangest pieces of Zoharic psychology
extant; and the object is probably that of
accounting, on one and the same ground,
for the varying physical and psychical char
acteristics embedded in each of us from birth.
The passage runs as follows :

" At the moment when the earthly union
[i.e. marriage] takes place, the Holy One
(blessed be He) sends to earth a form [or
image] resembling a man, and bearing upon
itself the divine seal. This image is present
at the moment just mentioned, and if the*eye

166 JEWISH MYSTICISM

could see what goes on then, it would detect
above the heads [of man and wife] an image
like a human face, and this image is the
model after which we are fashioned. ... It
is this image which receives us first on our
arrival into this world. It grows in us as we
grow, and leaves us when we leave the world.
This image is from above. When the souls are
about to quit their heavenly abode each soul
appears before the Holy One (blessed be He)
clothed with an exalted pattern [or image or
form] on which are engraven the features
which it will bear here below " (iii. 107).

But of far greater consequence in the history
of Jewish mysticism is the commanding
place assigned by the Zohar to the idea of
Love. Indeed, Jewish mysticism is here but
a reflection of the nature of the mysticism
inherent in all other creeds. The soul's most
visible, most tangible, most perceivable
quality is love. The soul is the root of love.
Love is the symbol of the soul. " Mystic
Love," says Miss Underbill, "is the off
spring of the Celestial Venus ; the deep-
seated desire and tendency of the soul towards
its source." The soul, says the mystic of all
ages, seeks to enter consciously into the
Presence of God. It can do so only under
the spur of an overpowering ecstatic emotion
called love. Although, according to the
Zohar, the soul in its most exalted state as
Neshdmdh can only enjoy the love inherent

THE SOUL 167

in its union with its source after it has freed
itself from the contamination of earthly
bodies, it is nevertheless possible, under cer
tain conditions, to realise this ecstatic love
while the soul is in the living body of an
individual. One of these conditions is the
act of serving God, the chief outward con
comitant of which is prayer.

" Whosoever serves God out of love," says
the Zohar, " comes into union (itdabak) with
the place of the Highest of the High, and
comes into union, too, with the holiness of
the world which is to be " (ii. 216). This is
to say that the service of God, when effected
with love, leads the soul into union with the
place of its origin, and it gives it, as it were, a
foretaste of the ineffable felicity which awaits
it in its highest condition as Neshdmdh.

The verse " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
God the Lord is One " (Deut. vi. 4) hints, says
the Zohar, at this blending of the soul into a
Unity. For this branch of its teaching the
Zohar is certainly not indebted to Neo-
platonism or any other alien system. It got
it from its Jewish predecessors — the Midrashic
homilists who enriched the Jewish literature
of the opening centuries of the Christian era
with their mystic interpretations of the
Song of Songs. Verses like " I am my
beloved's, and my beloved is mine " (vi. 3)
served them as a starting-point for their
sermons on the nearness of man and God to

168 JEWISH MYSTICISM

one another, brought about by the instru
mentality of love.

When the soul has completed the cycle
of its earthly career and hurries back to
become blended with the Oversoul, it revels
in ecstasies of love, which the Zohar describes
with a wealth of poetic phraseology. The soul
is received in what is termed a ' treasury of
life,' or sometimes a ' temple of love,' and
one of its crowning joys is to contemplate the
Divine Presence through a ' shining mirror.'
The Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrashim
used the same phrase. Thus a passage in
Leviticus Rabba, i. 14, reads thus : " All the
other prophets saw God through nine shining
mirrors, but Moses saw Him through only
one. All the other prophets saw God through
a blurred mirror, but Moses saw Him through
a clear one." The meaning is that Moses
had a clearer and nearer apprehension of the
Deity than all other prophets.

Thus we read : " Come and see ! When
the souls have reached the treasury of life
they enjoy the shining of the brilliant mirror
whose focus is in the heavens. And such is
the brightness which emanates therefrom
that the souls would be unable to withstand
it, were they not covered with a coat of light.
Even Moses could not approach it until he
had stripped off his earthly integument ':
(i. 66). Again : " In one of the most mys
terious and exalted parts of heaven, there is a

THE SOUL 169

palace called the Palace of Love. Deep
mysteries are enacted there ; there are
gathered together all the most well-beloved
souls of the Heavenly King ; it is there that
the Heavenly King, the Holy One (blessed be
He), lives together with these holy souls and
unites Himself to them by kisses of love "
(ii. 97).

The Talmudic Rabbis described the way
in which death comes to the righteous as
4 death by a kiss.' The Zohar defines this
4 kiss ' as ' the union of the soul with its
root ' (i. 168). There is, in fine, an excep
tionally high degree of optimism encircling
the Zohar' s treatment of the soul.

If the theology of the early Rabbinic
schools of Palestine and Babylon errs, as
its critics say, in the direction of making
Judaism too much of a rigid discipline, too
much of a law-compelling, outward obedi
ence rather than inward feeling, the balance
is redressed by the theology of the Zohar
which, by making the soul, on the completion
of its earthly work, so great a partaker in
the Divine love, emphasises the deep spiritu
ality inherent in Judaism, the emotional
element which it calls forth in those who
rightfully and adequately put its teachings
into practice. It thus imports an added
brightness into Jewish life. It inspires the
Jew with the conviction that a high destiny
awaits him in the hereafter. It makes him

170 JEWISH MYSTICISM

put a premium upon virtue, and encourages
him to raise himself to the sublimest pitch
of moral and religious worth. Judaism for
the Jew can never be a mere soulless for
malism so long as the Zohar's doctrine of
Divine love is an integral part of Judaism.
Such a consummation is well attested by
such a passage from the Zohar as the follow
ing :

' When Adam our first father dwelt in the
garden of Eden he was clothed, as men are
in heaven, with the Divine light. When he
was driven forth from Eden to do the
ordinary work of earth, then Holy Writ tells
us that ' the Lord God made for Adam
and for his wife coats of skin and clothed
them.' For, ere this, they wore coats of
light, of that light which belongs to
Eden.1 Man's good deeds upon earth bring
down on him a portion of the higher light
which lights up heaven. It is that light
which covers him like a coat when he
enters into the future world and appears
before his Maker, the Holy One (blessed
be He). It is by means of such a covering
that he can taste of the enjoyments of the
elect and look upon the face of the ' shining
mirror.' And thus, the soul, in order to
become perfect in all respects, must have
a different covering for each of the two

1 In Hebrew there is a great similarity in sound between
the word for ' skin ' and the word for ' light.'

THE SOUL 171

worlds which it has to inhabit, one for the
terrestrial world and the other for the higher
world " (ii. 229).

And this cheerful view of the soul is an
incitement to nobler effort, not only for the
Jew as an individual, but also for the Jew as a
unit of a race which, according to Scriptural
prescription, looks forward to its highest
evolution in the arrival of a Messiah. The
Zohar, truly enough, is comparatively silent
upon this theme. But the famous Kabbalist
and mystic Isaac Luria, who is the chief ex
pounder of the Zohar, and who carried many
of its undeveloped dogmas to their logical
conclusions, has elaborated this point in a
strikingly ingenious and original way. Luria
held a peculiar theory of the transmigration
of the soul ; and conjoined with this there
went, what might appear to some, an ap
proach to Christian teaching about the
truth of original sin. With the Zohar,
Luria maintained that man, by means of
his soul, unites the upper and the lower
world. But he maintained further that
with the creation of Adam there were created
at the same time all the souls of all races
of mankind. Just as there are variations
in the physical qualities of men, so there
are corresponding variations in their souls.
Hence there are souls which are good and
souls which are bad and souls of all the shades
of value which lie between these two ex-

172 JEWISH MYSTICISM

tremes. When Adam sinned there was con
fusion in all these classes of souls. The good
souls became tainted with some of the evil
inherent in the bad souls, and, on the con
trary, the bad souls received many an
admixture of goodness from the superior
souls.

But who emanated from the inferior sets
of soul ? According to Luria, the pagan
world. Israel, however, issued from the
superior souls. But, again, seeing that the
good souls are not wholly good nor the bad
souls wholly bad by reason of the confusion
ensuing upon Adam's fall, it follows that
there can be no real unalloyed good in the
world. Evil infests some spot or other
everywhere. A perfect condition of things
will only come with the coming of the
Messiah. Until that time, therefore, all
souls, tainted as they all inevitably are with
sin, must, by means of a chain of trans
migrations from one body to another, shake
off more and more of the dross clinging to
them, until they reach that summit of purity
and perfection when, as Neshdmdh, they can
find their way back to unite with the Infinite
Source, the Oversoul. Hence the individual
Jew in promoting the growth of his own soul
is really promoting the collective welfare
of his race. Upon the weal or woe of
his own soul hangs the weal or woe of his
people.

THE SOUL 173

Luria's arguments, when fully stated, have
a decided air of the fantastic about them.
But that his conclusion is sound and valu
able, no one will doubt. He encourages
the Jew to the pursuit of a lofty communal
or national ideal. He reminds him, too,
of the imperative necessity of Israel's
solidarity. For the Jew, taking his stand
upon many a text in the Old Testament,
has always felt that his thought and his
work must not be for himself alone. His
prayer has ever been for the well-being of
Israel rather than for the well-being of
individual Israelites. What he counts, in
God's sight, as a separate entity is small in
comparison with what he counts as an in
separable unit in the compact body of Israel.
In this voluntary, self-forgetful merging of
the smaller interests of the part in the greater
interests of the whole lies much of the secret
of the long roll of Israel's saints and heroes,
his martyrs and his mystics.

CONCLUDING NOTE

THE course of Jewish mysticism subsequent
to the Zohar consists, in the main, of develop
ments and elaborations, by Jews in many
lands, of the doctrines taught in that unique
work. There is an enormous fund of origin
ality in many of these elaborations. Their
writers were men engrained with the deepest
of mystical sentiments, men whose lives
accorded with the high strain of their teach
ings, and whose writings constitute a material
addition, for all time, to the body of Jewish
spiritual literature. But limits of space
prevent the consideration of this subject.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century
there arose, among the Jews of Poland,
a great religious movement known as
6 Hasidism ' (from Hebrew l^asid = pious).
Its aim was to revive the spiritual element in
Judaism which had been largely crushed
out of existence by the [dead - weight of
Rabbinical formalism. /"Hasidism was in
vented in order to show that Judaism meant
not merely law and commandment, ritual
and dogma, but denoted also the emotions

of love and aspiration and faith felt towards

174

CONCLUDING NOTE 175

a Father who was eternally near, and whose
heart overflowed with a father's compassion
for his children. Hasidism strove to effect
for Judaism the supremacy of inward ' first
hand ' religion over the dogmatism of out
ward traditionalism. Judaism needed this
corrective. And although Hasidism is often
flouted as a failure, and its adherents de
preciated as the devotees of excess and
extravagance in religious exercise, it never
theless was a force, and deserves an abiding
place in the history of Jewish theology, if
only on the ground that it tried to do for
Judaism what the general mystical tendencies
of our own day are more and more doing
for it, viz. to make it conscious of how
dominating a part is played in it by the
inner impulse urging us to seek and to find
a pathway to the realised Presence of God.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS in English are unfortunately very few.
On the whole subject of the mystical elements in
Talmudic, Midrashic, and Kabbalistic theology, the
student should see :

A. Franck, La Kabbale (Paris, 1843 ; 2nd ed.,
1889). German Trans, (with many original
additions) by A. Jellinek (Leipsic, 1844).

Ginsbarg, The Kabbalah (London, 1865).

Isaac Myer, Qabbalah (Philadelphia, 1888).

Karppe, Etude sur les Origines et la Nature du
Zohar (Paris, 1901).

Joel, ' Essays on Ibn Gabirol,' in his Beitrdge
zur Geschichte der Philosophic, 1876.

All of the above works contain many
translations of the original Hebrew and
Aramaic.

On the subject of the Essenes :

Graetz, History of the Jews (English Trans., vol. ii.

pp. 16-34).
>burg,

Ginsburg, The Essenes, their History and their

Doctrines (London, 1864).
Article ' Essenes ' by F. C. Conybeare in Hastings'

Dictionary of the Bible.
Article ' Essenes ' in Jewish Encyclopedia.
Philo's The Contemplative Life, ed. Conybeare

(Oxford, 1895).

12

178 JEWISH MYSTICISM

On the Jewish Hellenistic Literature :

Schiirer, Geschichte des Jiidischen Volkes im
Zeitalter Jesu Christi, ii. pp. 556-584.

Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, 1879.

Gerald Friedlander, Hellenism and Christianity
(London, 1912).

C. G. Montefiore, The Wisdom of Solomon
(London, 1891).

On Philo :

Drummond, Philo Judceus (London, 1888).

On Shechinah, Memra, Holy Spirit :

Volz, Der Geist Gottes (Tubingen, 1910).
Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical
Literature (London, 1912).

On the Yetslrah book :

Franck, La Kabbale, pp. 53-66, 102-118.

Graetz, Gnosticismus und Judenthum (Breslau,
1846), pp. 102-132.

Parts of it are translated into English in
W. W. Westcott's Sefer Yezirah (London,
1893) and into French in Karppe's Etude
sur les Origines et la Nature du Zohar (Paris,
1901).

On the doctrines of Emanation and the Ten Sefirot :

Joel, in the work previously mentioned. It
contains the best account of the relation
between Jewish and Neoplatonic mysticism.

Ehrenpreis, Die Entwickelung der Emanationslehre
in der Kabbalah des XIII. Jahrhunderts
(Frankfurt, 1895). This work is indispens-

BIBLIOGRAPHY 179

able for the history of the development of
ideas.

Eliphaz Levi, Le Livre des Splendeurs (Paris,
1894).

A translation of the whole of the Zohar,
into French, by the late Jean de Pauly, has
recently been published. It is absolutely
indispensable as the only complete trans
lation yet attempted.

INDEX

Abodah Zarah, 71.
A both, 80.
Acts, 21, 87.
Adam's fall, 172.
Albertus, Magnus, 13.
Angelology, 29, 35, 55, 56,

59,61, 72, 153.
Apocalyptic literature, 48, 83.
Apocrypha, 71, 83, 145.
Aquinas, 13.
Aristotle, Aristotelian, 14, 15,

61, 64, 113.

Bahir, 8.

Berachoth, 23, 24, 28, 85, 94,
100, 145,156.

Canticles, 39, 47, 80, 91, 96.
Canticles Rabba, 80, 90, 93.
Christian mysticism, 7, 13,

31, 39, 87, 107, 143.
Cordovero, 143, 149, 150.
i Corinthians, 133.
Cosmogony, 53, 101.
Creatio ex nihilo, 136.

Daniel, 63, 117, 136, 147.

Dante, 39.

Darwin, 13.

Day of Atonement, 61.

Death, 169.

Deuteronomy, 24, 80, 85, 94,

96, 130, 163, 167.
Disciple of the Wise, 94.
Divine Energy, 77.

Divine Name, 25, 27, 138,

139, 142.
Divine Presence, 4, 33, 38,

92, 93, 163, 168.

Ecclesiasticus, 140.

Eckhart, 9, 13.

Ecstasy, 17, 34, 41, 48, 50,

63, 126, 1 66.
Elijah, 48.
Emanation, 54, 106, 107, 112,

113, 115, 122,126,127,129,

132,134, 138, 143, 145,146,

150, 159, 1 60, 165, 172.
Enneads of Plotinus, 63.
Enoch literature, u, 36, 71,

148.
En-Sof, 129, 130, 131, 140,

143, 144, 146, 147.
Esoteric teaching, 18, 23, 25,

29, 40, 119, 122, 124.
Essenes, 18, 20,30, 31, 139.
Evil, 45, 54, 55, 57, 127, 128,

129, 135, 172.
Exodus, 67, 81, 86, 88, 100,

137, 139, M6.
Fxodus Rabba, 77.
Ezekiel, 17,33,34,36, 37, 38,

45, 50, 63.

Fatherhood of God, 16, 79,

83-

Fellowship, 20, 22, 31 (Chap
ter IV.).

Fourth Gospel, 46, 67, 76.

182

INDEX

Gaonim, Gaonic epoch, 49,

99-

Genesis, 22, 36, 48, 53, 55,
59, 65, 71, 95, 123, 128,

134-

Genesis Rabba, 55, 144.
Gnostics, Gnosticism, 72, 99,

106, 107, 119, 153.
Graetz, 8, 9.

Haggadah, 23, 53.
Haggigah, 10, 36, 37, 42, 46,

49, 71, 109.
Halacha, 53.
Harnack, 10.
Hashdim, 21, 22.
Hashmal, 37, 38.
Hasidim, 18, 28, 29, 50, 51,

174, 175-
Heavenly Man, 131, 132,

133, 134, 135-

Hegel, Hegelian, 147, 149.
Hekalot) 49, 126.
Hellenism, 52, 73, 78.
Hindu mysticism, 7.
Holy Spirit, 1 10.
Hosea, 69, 82.

Ibn Gabirol, 62, 63, 129, 153.
Illumination, 39, 317.
Image of God, 123, 125, 135,

165, 166.

Isaac the Blind, 8.
Isaiah, 17, 36, 63, 89, 125, 146.

Job, 148.

Josephus, 1 8, 20, 30.
Jubilees, Book of, 71.
Judah Ha-Levi, 62, 63, 64.
Judges, 65. 90.

Kabbalah, 8, 36, 38,51, 103,

107, 109, 1 10, 114, 120,
124, 136, 143, 144, 153,
155-

Kant, 13.

Ketuboth) 94.
Kiddushin, 25, 27, 89, 96.
Kingdom of Heaven, 24, 64
(Chapter IV.).

1 Kings, 85.

2 Kings, 48.

Lamentations, 46.
Leviticus, 77, 86, 87, 90, 96.
Leviticus Rabba, 88, 168.
Liturgy, Jewish, 72.
Logos, 46, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58,

66, 67.
Luria, 9, 143, 171, 172, 173.

Maimonides, 14, 15, 26, 62,

64, 65.

Mechilta, 81.
Meekness, 24, 44.
Megillah, 91, 96, 146.
Memra, 41, 76, 77, 78.
Messiah, 12, 171, 172.
Metatron, 35, 38, 67, 68

(Chapter III.), 126, 127.
Midrash Rabbet^ 22, 39.
Mishna, 23, 28, 36.
Mithra, Mithraism, 35, 50, 72.
Mohammedan mysticism, 7,

35-
Mystic love, 166.

Nahmanides, 87.

Name, Divine, 67, 68, 104,

124.

Name of Messiah, 70.
Nationalism, 5, 6.
Nedarim^ 89.
Neoplatonic, Neoplatonism,

51, 62, 107, 108, 113, 119,

130,145,153, 155,156,157,

167.

Newton, 13.
Nordau, 10.
Numbers, 86, 90, 125.
Numbers, mysticism of, 99,

116.

INDEX

183

Optimism, 169.
Original sin, 171.
Oversoul, 156, 157, 163, 168,
172.

Pantheism, 128.

Paraclete, 66.

Paul, 2, 87, 133.

Pesahim, 139.

Pharisees, 18, 31.

Philo, 18, 19,30, $2etseg.tgo,

100, 133, 144, 152,153.
Pirkt-de- Rabbi Eliezer, 62.
Plato, Platonism, 15, 76, 153,

159.
Plotinus, 9, 63, 106, 107, 132,

157, 158.
Pneuma, 74, 75.
Prayer, spirituality of, 12, 23,

25, 91, 167.
Prayer Book of Synagogue,

83, 1.53-

Pre-existence, 124, 165.
Primordial substances, 102.
Prince of the Presence, 69,

70.

Prince of the World, 69, 70.
Proverbs, 73, 100, 148, 160.
Psalms, 23, 43, 46, 70, 82,

83, 96, III, 113, 121, 126,
139.

Reitzenstein, 99,
Repentance, 70.
Revelation, Book of, 148.
Ritschl, 10.
Rufus Jones, 9, 108, 158.

Sabbath, T.B., 89.
Sa'diah b. Joseph, 62, 63.
Samael, 61
Sandalphon, 46.
Sanhedrin, 101, 125.
Sefirot, 27, 1 06, 108, 109,

in, 112, 113, 115, 125,

I33» T34-

Sexual relationship, 148, 150.

Sifra, 96.

Sifri, 81.

Simeon b. Yohai, 118, 120.

Sin, 45,61, 67,' 69, 89, 93, 127,

128, 171, 172.
Solomon, Wisdom 0/", 75-
Sotah, 28, 90.
Stoicism, 53, 74, 75.
Sufi, Sufism, 119.
Sukkah, 28, 40.
Superior Soul (Chapter VII.),

172.
Supreme Cause, 140, 141,

143-

Synagogue, 91, 107.

Talmud, 15, 18, 30, 49, 51,

53, 56> 7i, 78, 79, loo, I09,

117, 119, 123, 124, 144,

152, 168.

Tanhuma, 68, 90, 123.
Targ'um, 71, 77, 78, 146.
Testament of Solomon, 29.
Tosefta, 21.
Transmigration, 12, 164, 165,

171, 172.

Treasury of life, 168.
Trinity, dogma of, 152, 153.
Trinity of the Soul, 159.
Tsimtsum, doctrine of, 129,

143, 144-

Unity, Divine, 72, 75, no,

114.

Unity of Soul, 167.
Universalism, 5.
Universal Soul, 156.

Vat f kin, 23, 24.
Volz, 29.

Wellhausen, 18.

Wisdom, 71 (Chapter III.),

100, 104, 109, 135, 140,

146, 148, 149, 159.

184

Yalkut, 91.
Yebamotk, 70.

Yoma, 45.

Zechariah, 83.

INDEX

Zenmm, 25, 44.

Zohar,%, 107, no, 115, 116

(Chapter VI.), 150, 151,

153, itfctseg.
Zoroastrianism, 72, 101.

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