NATHAN DER WEISE PART I

By now the reader knows of my partiality to the cultural authenticity of the “ultra-observant” religious Jews and of my admiration for the uncompromising Talmudic minds of some brilliant Jewish thinkers. So that there is no misunderstanding about it, my sympathies are not limited to dissimilationists and loners. I understand and respect sincere assimilationists, and I have a very positive view of the Haskala, Jewish Enlightenment. I see nothing wrong in that kind of cultural symbiosis, when certain positive elements of the host culture have been accepted without sacrificing the core of one’s native culture. Mind you, both the liberal champions of the Haskala, the Maskilim, and the conservative Haredim, were always reasonable in their respective social demands. Neither of them was a cultural aggressor, a destroyer of other cultures, a proselytizer, a promoter of some pernicious alternative ideology such as the radical “communism” of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries or Globalism and neo-conservatism of the more recent times.

We have already talked at some length about the Haredim. Now it’s the turn of the Maskilim. "Nathan der Weise," aka Moses Mendelssohn, the subject of this entry, was undoubtedly the epitome of this last kind. In fact, he can be called the father and the leading representative of the Haskala in Germany, and in Europe in general.

…Abraham Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, one of the richest bankers in Hamburg, and a Lutheran by creed, had a good sense of humor, which was by no means of the self-deprecating variety, as it was unquestionably true, and even quite flattering to himself, when he was proudly “complaining”: “I used to be the son of my father, and now I am the father of my son.”
The son he was speaking of, was the illustrious composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. The father was none other than Moses Mendelssohn: philosopher, critic, and Biblical translator and interpreter, known to his admiring contemporaries as “the German Socrates” (some say, it was “Jewish Socrates”), or “the Modern Plato” (some say, it was “Berlin Plato”; but, in both these cases, who cares about such little trifles? Perhaps, this discrepancy of the multiple appellations existed in his time already), and, of course, as the prototype of Lessing’s famous novel Nathan Der Weise.
As a literary critic, Mendelssohn received high acclaim for his writings on Homer, Aesop, Pope, Rousseau, and Burke, among others. His Biblical work was of a far more unusual kind. He first translated the Psalms, and then the Pentateuch (in this case, it would probably be a mistake to call it the Torah) into German, but using Hebrew characters (!), this, for the benefit of the Jewish readers who spoke German, but were literate primarily in the Hebrew script, used both in Hebrew and in Yiddish.
Returning to Moses Mendelssohn’s prominence as a philosopher, any of his above-mentioned soubriquets, that is, either as a Socrates or a Plato, had it been a fair estimate of his philosophical potential, would have earned him a place in Britannica’s Macropaedia (after all, all major philosophers are there, as is an entry secured by his friend Lessing, as are also a number of entries on other Jewish philosophers, including even the far less known Franz Rosenzweig, who will be the subject of a later entry in this section). Not only is such an entry for Moses Mendelssohn non-existent there, but he is, likewise, prominently absent from the Time Almanac’s People list (the only Mendelssohn there, is his grandson Felix).

As a philosopher, he was unmistakably derivative, having benefited mostly from Spinoza (recently discovered for the world by Goethe and Lessing) and Leibniz, and, to some extent, from Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. He also studied the works of John Locke and Plato, and although he is frequently considered a Platonist, this is more on account of form (see my comment on his “Phaedon” below) than of the substance. In his general writings on philosophy, I repeat, he is not original. To me, however, he is original enough, as the trailblazing exponent of the philosophy of the Jewish Haskala.

It is obvious that his great fame among contemporaries rests on his extraordinary Renaissance upbringing, his encyclopedic erudition and literary skill (in 1763 he won the prize of the Prussian Academy of Arts for his essay On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences, where his argument that metaphysics pursues its subject matter by applying the same method with mathematics, conceptual analysis, is certainly derivative from at least Spinoza’s Ethica. But he puts this quite elegantly: “The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight”), and perhaps, to a much greater extent, on his far-reaching leading role in the Haskala movement, and on his lasting intellectual legacy in Germany and across Europe. Leading a commendable lifelong effort to elicit an understanding between the Jews and the Christians, he actually succeeded in winning over quite a few Christians to the defense of Judenthum, and, not altogether ironically, may have played some indirect role in his own son Abraham’s conversion to Christianity.
His overall accomplishments are eminently impressive. A prodigy linguist, he learned classical Hebrew as a child, and later taught himself Greek, French, English, Italian, and Latin (these of course in addition to German). The resulting conversational versatility, coupled with a sharp mind, helped to assure the success of his philosophical Morning Lectures given by him for the benefit of his son Joseph in their Berlin home, and in 1785, attended by the celebrated brothers von Humboldt, Wilhelm and Alexander, who were both greatly influenced by Mendelssohn’s personality.
He was a scholar of the Torah, upon which he based his belief in Judaism. As a young boy, he was reading Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, and later Leibniz’s Theodicy. He read Homer and Plato, translated the first three books of Plato’s Politeia into German, and wrote several of his philosophical treatises in the Platonic dialogue form. His famous work, Phaedon, or On the Immortality of the Soul (1767), used Plato’s Phaedon as its base. It brought him particular fame as a philosopher. He studied, and loved to recite, the works of Shakespeare. He was fascinated with the progress of the American Revolution and took a keen interest in the emergence of the United States of America…
Mendelssohn was a passionate lover of music all his life. He studied piano with Johann Philip Kirnberger, one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s disciples. His work on Bach led, in 1761, to his anonymous publication of a treatise on the best method of constructing a well-tempered piano. He included a treatise on the divine art of music in his philosophical essay On the Sentiments.
Mendelssohn's protégé and close collaborator was the silk manufacturer David Friedlander, whose brother-in-law was the rich banker Isaac Daniel Itzig. Itzig, Mendelssohn, and Friedlander founded the Berlin Free School, aimed at educating boys from poor Jewish families who could not afford to hire tutors: the only way to secure a secular education in the Jewish community. (The school developed such a reputation, that even Christian children soon began attending.)
Mendelssohn and Itzig were the direct descendants of the famous scholar, Rabbi Moses Isserles of Krakow (1520-1572), which must undoubtedly have contributed to Mendelssohn’s stature: “good” genealogy never hurts. Incidentally, the two became even closer related via the marriage of their respective progenies, when Lea Itzig Solomon, Isaac’s niece, married Mendelssohn’s son Abraham. Their son was the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

(To be continued…)

EIN GOTTBETRUNKENER MENSCH PART II

...Spinoza’s conception of God, which, because of its striking unusualness and, consequently, bound to elude popular comprehension, brought charges of atheism against him, is distinctly reminiscent of the authentic Jewish preoccupation with the Essence of God, which, in a previous entry, I called “a Journey into God’s Mind.” In his Ethica, he calls God “a thing that thinks, a being absolutely infinite, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence.”

I need to mention that calling God “a thing” means no disrespect. It is a philosophical term, foreshadowing Kant’s Ding an-Sich, where Ding, Thing, denotes something infinitely superior to anything that the popular sense may find behind this word.
Ethica starts off with the distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Substance is something that can be conceived as existing in complete independence. It cannot be explained by anything else, it becomes its own cause, and it is necessarily in existence. Because of the specific way it has been defined, substance comes to be identified with God, but also with nature as a whole, hence the presumed slide toward “pantheism.”
Substance possesses an infinite number of attributes, defined by Spinoza as “what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Of these attributes, only thought and extension can be known to the human mind. “All things are alive,” Spinoza insists, which is a natural deduction from his basic premises.
Substance is diversified into an infinity of finite modes, human beings and all other discreet objects being of this nature. Modes are parts of the whole, and cannot be separated from it, thus, the human mind is part of God’s mind.

In this “shocking” exposition, I see “pantheism” as a trap word, which allows the know-it-all skeptic to nod, with a self-indulgent smile, as he is quick to understand what the normal implications are when a concept is identified with its denotate. However, considering God in the traditional sense of an Unknowable Being, as we should, there are also His Sefirot ranging, in terms of their proximity to the human mind, from the “also-unknowable,” to the knowable, and, with this in mind, Spinoza’s God, as Substance, may be identified with a reasonably knowable manifestation of the unknowable God. By the same token, Nature may not necessarily be identified with God in-toto, but only via this great proviso of Moses Cordovero, who lived a full century before Spinoza, and can be summoned here to put Spinoza’s alleged pantheism in proper perspective: “God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.”
Substituting “Nature” for “Everything,” we can now arrive at this far more palatable “pseudo-pantheistic” formula: “God is Nature, but Nature isn’t God.”

I may be now contradicted in everything that I have said so far about Spinoza’s God, that Spinoza himself has famously denied his God transcendence, to which I stubbornly reply that, as far as I am concerned, the question here concerns not the Unknowable God, but only His manifestations. Furthermore, even I myself would not dare to call the Unknowable God “transcendent,” because knowing even this much/little about the Unknowable, makes it partially knowable, and therefore, creates a contradiction in terms. Thus denying the fact of God’s transcendence, on Spinoza’s part, can be logically reduced to denying the possession of such positive knowledge of the Unknowable God.
On the other hand, allowing the quality of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) to God, means, in the honorable Kabalistic tradition of Gvul, etc., not restricting God’s power to the sphere of the transcendent only. By the same token, his denial of free will to God (see my discussion of free will as a curse of man), as well as his “banishing of good and evil to the realm of human imagination” (note my treatment of ‘evil’ as a necessary and sufficient temporal consequence of free will), are merely removing certain restrictions on the power of God. In Nietzsche’s words, from Genealogie II (15), Spinoza “defended the honor of his free God against those blasphemers who asserted that God effected all things sub ratione boni (for a good reason) --- ‘but that would mean making God subject to fate and would surely be the greatest of all absurdities.’”

(Approaching this from a slightly different angle, one might ask, how come, that man, made in the image of God, possesses certain qualities, like free will, in which God Himself is deficient? True, indeed, that God is not in possession of a number of qualities implanted in man, but not on account of some deficiency in His powers, as much as on the grounds of their logical impossibility. The missing qualities are all qualities that characterize dependence. Thus, being independent, God cannot possess the quality of being dependent. As The First Cause, he cannot be an effect. Being the Creator of All, he cannot be a creature. Free will is one of the qualities of a creature, ergo God cannot have free will. Using the same line of reasoning, being the Creator of evil (see Isaiah 45:7), God cannot Himself possess the quality of evil (which I define as making a wrong choice in one’s exercise of free will). On the other hand, no natural disaster, resulting in a tragedy, which we call a Force Majeure, or an Act of God, can be called ‘evil,’ as Nature does not possess free will, and cannot make choices, this quality being restricted to man alone. For more on this particular subject, see my entry Creator And The Creature in the Philosophy section.)
To wrap this up, I do not insist, mind you, that Spinoza’s actual background thinking was precisely along the lines of my interpretation. But if this is not what he may have had in mind, that, in my opinion, would have put him in error.

And now, a final note to what could be an endless discussion.
When I started reading Spinoza’s Ethica for the first time many years ago, I found his ‘geometric’ style at the same time funny and irritating, as if he were artificially dressing up his greatest opus as a participant in a masked ball, where the participants’ identities could never be figured out without tearing off their masks first. The fact that his annoying style ought to be taken as something superficial, while the ‘essence’ of his thinking needed to be considered on its own merit, was confirmed by Nietzsche’s attitude, as he is hardly a wholesale admirer of everything belonging sub specie Spinozae (spoof of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis in The Antichrist 17), as he ridicules “the hocus-pocus of mathematical form, with which Spinoza clad his philosophy, really “the love of his wisdom,” in mail and mask, to strike terror into the heart of assailants,” which Nietzsche attributes to the “personal timidity and vulnerability of a sick hermit.” (Jenseits 5.)

The masquerade, however, was not entirely a hocus-pocus on Spinoza’s part, but, perhaps, a matter of some principle. He was, alas, too unhappy with the much lighter and livelier style of the presentation in his pre-Ethica works, and decided to adopt the style of Euclid’s Elements, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, as he has chosen to subtitle his Ethica. Well, each genius has his own foibles, which should not bring him down, just as the adoption of a pleasant writing style does not elevate a mediocrity to the unattainable heights of a genius.

But, whether or not he wished to appear impersonal to the maximum, his appeal to geometry does appeal to me, especially now that I have developed the concept of God by Postulate where geometry is always a most welcome guest, maybe not in form, but definitely in spirit!
Come to think of it, Spinoza, like Nietzsche, is a kindred spirit to me, if not in his manner of writing, still in more ways than one.

EIN GOTTBETRUNKENER MENSCH PART I

That last sentence in an earlier entry about Maimonides said something about Spinoza not being counted as a Jew? It was something that now requires a clarification.
Was the great Spinoza a general Western-civilization philosopher or a particular Jewish philosopher? None deny him the first, but very few acknowledge the second. As for me, both must be the answer!
Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, A God-drunk man… ---How proper thus to call a sincere and authentic Jew, someone like the magnificent Kabbalist Luria, or the charismatic Hasid Baal Shem Tov… Anyone who has read the preceding portion of this Judaic section with at least some measure of undivided attention, and an equal dose of commensurate comprehension, will see the connection right away.
This entry’s title alludes to Spinoza’s clever and perceptive characterization by Novalis (pseudonym of the German poet and novelist Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801). Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch! This label alone affirms Spinoza’s authenticity as a Jew and demands his inclusion in this Jewish section, regardless of how often he might be summoned from his eternal rest to other, non-Jewish sections.
On the other hand, what establishes Spinoza as one of the greatest philosophers of our Western civilization is perhaps exactly that Jewishness of his, which gives his nationality-transcending thinking a tinge of unique originality, if I may say so, whenever he applies his distinctive ethnic analytical and spiritual heritage to the extravagant universality of the Gentile world.

To support my conclusion, here is my favorite iconoclast and lover of originality, Nietzsche, who goes out of his way in his praise for Spinoza, calling him a “learned genius” in Menschliches (157) or “the purest philosopher” in Menschliches (475), where he extols the Jews as "a people...  to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest Book, and the most effective moral code in the world."This entry, as I said before, is not the only place where I indulge myself in discussing the great Jew, which is apparently eminently appropriate, considering (for those who seek a greater authority, rather than mine) the overwhelming attention he gets from my favorite genius Nietzsche. But the focus of this one will be on him as a person (and a Jew), and also on his preoccupation with God, which, as I have said, is a distinctive mark of Spinoza’s authentic Jewishness.
In a curious historical tit-for-tat, (I am alluding to the famous rediscovery of the German Bach by the Jew Mendelssohn-Bartholdy) Spinoza’s genius was first rediscovered for posterity by the Germans Lessing and Goethe (as well as by the Englishman Coleridge, whose admiration for Spinoza saved his reputation in the English-speaking world from David Hume’s smoldering stigma, the latter branding Spinoza’s philosophy “a hideous hypothesis.”)

Spinoza’s grandparents and parents had belonged to the Portuguese Jewish community, who had famously accepted the conversion to Christianity to avoid persecution, but remained clandestine Jews. Some of these so-called ‘crypto-Jews’ are still living in Portugal under their overtly Christian façade, up to this day; only in recent years some of them have decided to come out of the closet. Spinoza’s family, however, chose moving to Holland, when such a move became possible, where they could revert to their Jewish identity (a similar case, perhaps, to the story of Maimonides,--- again, a connection).
Born in Amsterdam in 1632, Spinoza was educated in Jewish subjects, but, being an original thinker and a natural maverick, he could not escape a clash with the Jewish religious authorities, arguing about the lack of proof that God had no body, that angels existed, and that the soul was immortal. Eventually, at the age of twenty-three, he was excommunicated, and although he sought a reconciliation, it was not at any price. At one point, as a test of his humility, he was told to sit at the doorstep of the synagogue all day, which he did, but predictably nothing came out of this.
(...Did Spinoza indeed seek such a reconciliation? Did he, a consummate hermit, really wish to be reintegrated into the Jewish community, which, as he well knew, would never tolerate his philosophical views and would demand his renunciation of independence and acceptance of a complete submission? I don’t think so. To me, this whole incident suggests Spinoza’s deliberate “experiment in self-humiliation” at the doorstep of the Synagogue. Even at that early age, and, perhaps, because of that early age when one is still compelled to prove something to others and to himself, he was mature enough to realize that such an experience would be detrimental to him, leading to nothing but humiliation, unless it was, indeed, an intellectual experiment, and its predictable outcome was the necessary quod erat demonstrandum, which he sought and obtained.)
Being an equal opportunity offender, he was also in trouble with Amsterdam’s Christian authorities, and at some point he was even expelled from the city and traveled around the country until finally settling in The Hague, where he spent the last seven years of his life, and where he died and was buried as a Christian in 1677, although, in fact, he was more of an outcast, “a sick hermit,” as Nietzsche would later call him...

To be continued as Part II of the same… next.

"LIGHT OF THE LORD"

Yet another entry bearing the title of an individual’s magnum opus as its own title. In this case, the opus is Or Adonai (Light of the Lord), and the individual’s name is Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas (1340-1410), the religious philosopher of great importance to Judaism, yet of little credit from his Jewish contemporaries and from an ungrateful Jewish posterity. The Christians, on the other hand, see him as an intolerant warrior bent on refuting Christianity, and by no means a sympathetic figure anyway. Yes, another underdog, and another reason for me to write a special entry.

My defense of Crescas starts with comparing him with Celsus, the earliest Greek anti-Christian philosopher of the 2nd century AD. I know that comparing two people spaced twelve hundred years apart may seem a bit awkward, but the point that I am making pays no attention to the time difference, as it concerns the principle itself. Celsus was a deliberate aggressor against Christianity when it was politically powerless and severely persecuted. He was indeed a sworn enemy of Christianity.

Crescas, however, was never an aggressor, but a defender. In his time the political power of Christianity was in full swing, and Judaism (as represented by the Talmud and other distinctive features of Jewishness) was a persecuted entity. Many Jews at the time were prepared to abandon Judaism as such “for the sake of peace” with the Christian superpower. Crescas was thus one of the few who actively rose against the retirement of Judaism and became one of its staunchest protectors and defenders. In doing this he may have gone too far, attacking all those perceived "collaborators" with the Gentile world who had been trying to introduce certain elements of Gentile thought, namely, Aristotelianism, into Judaism. He saw them as harbingers of a Jewish surrender, and assaulted them with all his intellectual might. Regrettably, the great Maimonides (long dead by then) was one of his biggest targets: an unforgivable crime on Crescas’ part in the eyes of contemporary and future Jewish intellectuals.

To recapitulate the above-said, Crescas was indeed a staunch defender of Judaism, but not so much against the Christian world per se, as against the “religious apostates” from within the Jewish community (whom he saw besmirching Judaism as a way for the Jews to make peace with the Christians). He also saw his work as a means of encouraging fellow Jews in their continued adherence to the much-troubled Jewish faith of those times.
Thus, Crescas’ momentous treatise Refutation of the Core Principles of Christianity was never designed to offend Christendom, but only to protect the rightful Jewish religious territory. And, logically, his great book Or Adonai (Light of the Lord) was a major exposition of the basic tenets of Rabbinical Judaism. Through his work, Crescas, displaying an exceptional intellectual boldness and originality, wanted to liberate Judaism from the influence of Aristotelianism, and from the perceived “heresies” of Maimonides and Gersonides. Whether he was right to go against the legacies of his great predecessors is beside the point. By doing this, Crescas serves the best purpose of genuine philosophy: generating a sharp debate over the issues he tackles, thus clarifying them for his contemporaries and for the future generations of thinkers. It is regrettable, though, that the Jewish scholars of his time and of posterity chose to mostly ignore Crescas’ works in their disserving defense of the assaulted authority of Rambam who, obviously, never asked for, nor needed such a defense, and would have strongly objected against the contemptible method of ignoring the opponent as a weapon of intellectual war.

There was, however, a supreme vindication for Crescas in the history of world philosophy. He is noted for exercising a major influence on the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, Benedict/Baruch Spinoza. Note the tremendous, delicious irony in this: Crescas, the uncompromising fighter against the Westernization of Jewish philosophy deeply influencing the ultimate Jewish “Westerner.” Here you see philosophical genius at its best, no matter what those petty scholars and recycled thinkers might say.

…A lesson for today: only dissimilar people and contrarian nations can discern and appreciate each other’s greatest worth.

"WARS OF HASHEM"

(Once again I am using the title of his major work to introduce a philosopher, in this case, Gersonides (1288-1344), also known as Ralbag, the standard acronym for Rabbi Levi ben Gerson, which is, of course, his full name.)

Gersonides is a mildly interesting philosopher, and I recommend that my reader take a look at his works. It is not my intention, however, to engage in an exercise in the history of Jewish philosophy for philosophy’s sake. It has been noted by most historians of philosophy that Gersonides has had the dubious distinction of being probably the most vilified philosopher of all, vilified by his own, I may add, for desecrating the Torah (!!!) by his intense rationalism. In his magnum opus Milhamot Hashem (Wars of Hashem), he writes this:

"We must believe what reason has determined to be true. If the literal sense of the Torah differs from reason, it is necessary to interpret those passages in accordance with the demands of reason… If reason causes to affirm doctrines that are incompatible with the literal sense of Scripture, we are not prohibited by the Torah to pronounce the truth on these matters, for reason is not incompatible with the true understanding of the Torah."

I am not the biggest fan of rationalist extremism, as I believe that irrationalism is entitled to an equal share in the composition of our mental faculties. For this reason, I find Gersonides wrong in his basic assertions. But this criticism of him does not prevent me from admiring this great scholar (he was also a mathematician and astronomer of note), whose intellectual integrity (whether he was right or wrong is irrelevant, as all thinkers have always been wrong in something) turned him into a virtual heretic in the eyes of his fellow Jews, yet he knew better than to be a conformist. He was an uncompromising fighter for his convictions. For all I know, he did not have to go all the way, allowing his stubborn belief in reason to challenge the truthfulness of the ultimate Jewish (and Christian) authority, arousing indignation and consequent vilification of him and of his philosophical labor.
My more specific admiration goes to his rejection of fundamentalism, that is, of the literal interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, to which rejection I fully subscribe, through the argument presented by me in the entry Christian Fundamentalism And The Parables Of Jesus, among others, in the Religion section.

...And finally, as the reader may have noticed already, I just love the underdog!

ANI MAAMIN

In the previous entry I mentioned Maimonides’s Credo Ani Maamin as the Jewish Profession of Faith, to be recited as such by all observant Jews. In case I am contradicted by those who, with some justification, would point to the Biblical Shema Yisroel (Devarim/Deuteronomy 6:4) as the more common Profession of Faith, I am not going to argue. However, I will retort that the well known phrase “Shema Yisroel: Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad” is a more symbolic and non-specific expression of the Jewish connection with God than the Maimonides formulation, which incorporates the principal Credo of Rabbinical Judaism, totally absent from the Torah.

To make my point perfectly clear, here is the longer excerpt from the Torah (Devarim/Deuteronomy 6:4-9), which is regarded by all Orthodox Jews as a specific religious instruction accounting for their obligatory use of the Tefillin and the Mezuzot. Mind you, only the first sentence is counted as the proper “Credo,” whereas the rest of it is known among the Orthodox as the “Child’s Shema,” the first prayer the child must learn and recite every day:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God; the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your means. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up; and you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for ornaments between your eyes; and you shall inscribe them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.”

Notice, that there is obviously no mention of the Zionist Dream here, nor of the key Jewish concept of the last two thousand years, that of the Mashiach. So here now is Maimonides’s Credo Ani Maamin:

Thirteen Principles of Faith.
1. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is the Creator and Guide of everything that has been created; He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.
2. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is One, and that there is no unity in any manner like His, and that He alone is our God, who was, and is, and will be.
3. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, has no body, and that He is free from all the properties of matter, and that there can be no (physical) comparison to Him whatsoever.
4. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, is the first and the last.
5. I believe with perfect faith that to the Creator, Blessed be His Name, and to Him alone it is right to pray, and that it is not right to pray to any being besides Him.
6. I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true.
7. I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of Moses our teacher, peace be upon him, was true and that he was the chief of the prophets, both those who preceded him and those who followed him.
8. I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that is now in our possession is the same that was given to Moses our teacher, peace be upon him.
9. I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be exchanged, and that there will never be any other Torah from the Creator, Blessed be His Name.
10. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, knows all the deeds of human beings and all their thoughts, as it is written, “Who fashioned the hearts of them all, Who comprehends all their actions.“(Psalms 33:15)
11. I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, rewards those who keep His commandments and punishes those that transgress them.
12. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nonetheless, I wait every day for his coming.
13. I believe with perfect faith that there will be a revival of the dead at the time when it shall please the Creator, Blessed be His name, and His mention shall be exalted for ever and ever.

It was this Maimonides Credo, Ani Maamin, that was adapted and sung as the “Hymn of the Camps” during the Holocaust, as the Jews prepared themselves and walked to imminent death as martyrs for faith. Today it is still sung at the Jewish religious services around the world. In my opinion, the basic difference between the Shema and Ani Maamin is that the one has come to signify the Jews as a people, while the other reflects their religious identity. It is terribly ironic that it is the Torah portion which is in practical terms associated with race, while the Maimonides Credo has primarily religious significance… Well, after all, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon does represent Rabbinical Judaism, the one practiced today by the Orthodox Jews, whereas the Torah, and Torah Judaism, have not been practiced for two thousand years, and thus have retained mostly symbolic, impractical, extra-religious, and therefore, secular-friendly value.

GUIDING THE PERPLEXED

In writing a systematic history of Jewish philosophy, one needs to consider, having departed from Philo, yet before arriving in the Middle Ages, a whole bunch of issues, such as the effects of the Islamic influence on Jewish thought, and the Talmud-denying anti-Rabbinical intellectual rebellion of the Karaites, initiated by Anan ben David in the eight century Anno Domini (if I may be forgiven such adherence of principle to our Christian conventional mode of reference, please!), et cetera, et cetera. But I am resolutely dismissing any condescension to rigid custom in an admittedly free-flowing and undisciplined endeavor, such as this work represents. I exhibit no pretense of encyclopedic comprehensiveness in covering the subjects of my interest and need not issue any apologies with regard to my commission of even the most glaring omissions.

Besides, certain notable subjects will be considered in the next subsection on Jewish history, which I deem well justified for at least these reasons that it is impossible to differentiate the components in the fusion of history, philosophy, religion, law, and custom, which together constitute the Jewish phenomenon. Besides, I have no intention to ignore the Jewish-Islamic Kalam, or the Karaite revolt, both of which will get their place alongside the infamous affair of the false Messiahs in the historical subsection.
But first things first, if the words first and last still carry any meaning in this wacky context, and I will be turning my attention now to the enticing figure of Rambam, that is Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, arguably, the greatest philosophical mind of the Judenthum, prior to Spinoza, with the latter owing a large sum of debt to his great, yet far less known predecessor.

I have read Rambam’s More Nevukhim, that is, Guide for the Perplexed, and found it eminently readable, interesting, and instructive, although not in the same class as my favorite giants. Ironically, both titles, in Hebrew and in English, are later translations from the original Arabic title Dalatat Al-Hairin. Its essential message is infinitely appealing to me, as the reader may easily guess from my other philosophical entries. In his Guide, Maimonides makes a very interesting attempt to reconcile philosophy, religion, and science, and, although he may not have been successful in his endeavor, at least, he tried.

In his Introduction to the Guide, Maimonides complains about the implicit “dangers” of his task, and seeks to “dodge the bullet” by concealing his real thoughts, so that his message would not be misconstrued. Some Guiding the Perplexed, turned into Perplexing the Guided!

Perhaps, the most curious theme of discussion in the Guide is about God. Ironically, Maimonides blasts the so-called God of the philosophers, who, on the superficial level, may be misconstrued as what I call God of philosophy. There is no comparison, however, let alone identity. My philosopher’s God is Absolute, which means, free from all conceivable and inconceivable restrictions, and even free from the philosophical need to be proven or justified, in other words, he is God by postulate. On the other hand, Maimonides’s God of the philosophers, the object of his criticism, is an unfree God, who is essentially limited by natural laws, as well as by the constraints of man-made rationality. Having set down this caveat of my own (in the jocular spirit of parody of Maimonides’s own caveats in his Introduction to the Guide), I shall proceed with some interesting, and allegedly conflicting, aspects of Rambam’s idea of God.

The God of Maimonides is free. His Infinite and Eternal Will (say hello to Schopenhauer, and by inference to Kant’s Ding an-Sich!) transcends the laws of nature. (Only this transcendence can give credibility to the miracles of the Torah, where God’s intervention in the world defies the laws of nature.) Having created the world in time, by an act of His Will, God superimposed the law of nature on his Creation, remaining above that law Himself.

God is unknowable to man, in the sense that no positive attribute can be ascribed to God, by virtue of such unknowability. Certain “negative” attributes, however, could be ascribed to God, in stating what He is not, like saying that He is not knowable to man. (This last illustration of negative theology is of my own making, as I believe that it goes deeper into the essence of such negativity, than any other example, including those offered by Rambam himself. What I am saying here is that all such man-made negative categories amount to the simple fact that had they not been negative, God would have become knowable to man, and therefore all of them put together restate in different ways just one single negative quality of God, namely, that He is not knowable to man.)

God is a mens, an intellect, an ens sapiens, in which sense akin to homo sapiens. Some critics of Rambam have pointed to the latter connection as an indication of the existence of positive knowledge about God, in contradiction to Maimonides’s negative theology. My view of this centers on the concept of rationality. Is God a rational being, or is he capable of irrational acts? My answer is in harmony with the mystic concept of Gvul and with the classic Kabbalistic contemplation on this subject: to deny God irrationality means to limit his power to the rational sphere only, therefore, God must be capable of both!

In keeping with this, it is an unfortunate omission on Rambam’s part to neglect the supernatural, or, in my terminology here, the irrational source of obtaining the truth. He holds that the Prophets of the Bible had great intellectual powers, which overflowed into the area of imagination, and to the latter, rather than to a direct revelation, he ascribed their prophetic visions and dreams. Moses, in his view, was a greater prophet than the rest, and he did not require a hypertrophied imagination in his purely intellectual communication with God. (I suspect that Maimonides happily uses the higher Biblical stature of Moses, to score a point for his own philosophy’s promotion of rationality.)But I think that Maimonides here inappropriately limits God’s power of communication with His Prophets, and self-servingly places the rationality of God’s communication above the irrationality of the revelation.

So much for Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed, where of all possible topics of discussion and comment I have chosen what is of most interest to me personally.

His main work, Mishne Torah, is an equally readable codification of the Jewish law, a huge project, which had taken ten years of his life, and of which I acquainted myself with certain portions of particular interest to me. In the religious sphere, his certainly greatest, in my opinion, contribution to Judaism is the profound Ani Maamin, I believe, also known as the Maimonides Credo, or, more technically, the Thirteen Articles of Faith, which have been posited in a separate essay in a series of essays, all united under the original Arabic title Kitab Al-Siraj, and constituting his Commentary on the Mishna, written between the ages of twenty-three and thirty three, before he wrote the Mishne Torah. The Credo was obviously a clever response on his part to the Christian Profession of Faith, first formulated in 325 AD as the Nicaean Creed, and to the Moslem Shahada. Unlike these two, Maimonides’s Credo is much longer, but then, it was important for the Jews to have a common understanding of what post-Biblical Judaism was all about, and in the absence of an authoritative Jewish equivalent of the law-setting Christian Catholic Church, or of a functional religious document of instruction on faith and practice, like the Koran of Islam, his Ani Maamin would become indispensable.

And finally, a few long sentences or even paragraphs on “the life and times” (to use the popular jargon) of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon.
He was born in Islamic Spain, in 1135, to a prominent Jewish family, and showed a brilliant promise since early childhood. Almost half-a-millennium before the Reconquista and the forcible Christian expulsion of the Jews, an “internal Islamic” affair destroyed the idyll of Jewish life under the Moslems, when, in 1148, a fanatical Islamist sect of the Almohads captured his native city of Cordoba demanding everybody’s instant conversion to Islam with the alternative of leaving the city. His family chose to stay in Cordoba for eleven more years, leading a double life, as outward Moslems, yet closet Jews, until finally they could not take it anymore, and moved first to Morocco, where their misery continued, then to Palestine, where they lived in abject poverty, and finally to Egypt, where Jews were still living freely as Jews.
Their peculiar challenge, however, was to prove that they had not been previously converted to Islam. In a recent private conversation with a devout Moslem, I clarified my understanding of the basic idea of Moslem tolerance for the other “people of the Book.” Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all considered as the three progressive steps of God’s revelation to the world, and all three steps are to be acknowledged as legitimate. Furthermore, it is commendable for anyone to “step up” from a lower step of God’s revelation to a higher step. It is very good for a Jew to become a Christian, or even better, to convert to Islam, or for a Christian to become a Moslem. However, should anyone desire to step down, from a higher step to a lower one, such an apostasy cannot be tolerated, and great trouble awaited the wretch. At several points in his life, Maimonides would be accused of such apostasy, and had he not been fortunate by then to acquire for himself a mighty protector in the sultan Saladin, and later in his son, as a respectable and well appreciated court physician to them both, the “burden of proof” might have crushed him to death.
His father dead, and all his fortune lost at sea, Maimonides was forced to make his living by practicing his medical skills, and, with his medical genius now apparent to all, the loss of family fortune proved a blessing in disguise, bringing him to the attention of the legendary sultan Saladin, as I have already mentioned.
His historical contribution to medical science was remarkably significant. His fame now established, and in this alone already guaranteeing him a place in history, he however kept complaining how his so many duties had robbed him of a peaceful life he had always sought, and undermined his health. He died in 1204, having lived until a respectable old age, for those times. He was buried in the Holy Land, in Tiberias, where his grave is now a shrine for the people who know his name.

So much for the greatest Jewish philosopher (Spinoza not counted… as a Jew) Moshe ben Maimon.

MOTHERS AND SONS

Supposing Philosophia Judaica is a woman and has a son, what would be his name, if not Philo Judaeus? (The reader is strongly advised to recognize here one of my favorite Nietzschean allusions, which I love to play with, in different contexts.) And then, who might be his father, if not the very great Zeus himself?
Properly Jewish, by his mother, yet bearing some unmistakably Hellenic features, well justifying that other name he is known under: Philo of Alexandria… (The city of Alexandria was named, of course, after that great Hellenizer Alexander the Great.)

What little is known about the life of Philo Judaeus, ought to be taken with a large grain of salt, thanks to the highly discreditable authority of Josephus Flavius (of whom later), who is apparently responsible for the larger chunk of it, while all the other sources of personal knowledge about him, even when put all together, remain miniscule, except for the bits and pieces about himself, which he time and again interjects into his writings in various places. However, there is no argument about the approximate time of his birth between 15 and 10 BC, which makes him, timewise, a younger contemporary of Jesus, of whom, judging by Philo’s writings, he may have known nothing. Raised in the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, his lifestyle was assimilationist, not dissimilationist, his educational staples included a broad variety of Greek literature, with epic poetry and drama perhaps the most prominent. He mastered the Greek rhetorical skill and praised the gymnasium. His education may have included all the subjects that he credits the education of Moses with (see his work On the Life of Moses, addressed to the Gentiles, in a consistent effort on his part to harmonize Judaism with the contemporary mainstream trends), that is, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (He also enjoyed the Greek theater, and, in one place in his writings he even described his attendance of a Euripidean tragedy in considerable detail. In a nutshell, Philo was “Greek” in more ways than that one, more about which, instantly.

As a Jew, his formal education was quite limited, as the only kind of Jewish schools he chooses to mention were those which met on Sabbaths only, to lecture on Jewish ethics. However he sees himself as a bona fide observant Jew, and insists that no Jew can neglect the observance of any divinely-ordained Jewish practice. Alexandrian Jews in those times held that the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Biblia Hebraica, had the same aura of divine inspiration, as the King James translation of the Bible was to enjoy among the English-speaking Protestants ages later. Yet Philo was never a fundamentalist in our Christian sense, that is, he was not a literalist, but he maintained a healthy balance between too much literalness and what he saw as excessive emphasis on allegorical interpretation, which in his opinion diluted the importance of observance of the Scripture’s basic precepts.

In his allegorical treatment of the Biblical stories, he presented them as philosophical principles, whereas in the Allegories of the Sacred Laws he considered the texts about the six-day Creation as purely mythical.

Again, as a Jew, he is an invaluable source of commentary on the Jewish law, where, among his 25 extant works on the subject, On the Special Laws and Allegories of the Laws are particularly important. His work on Halakhah and Jewish ritual observance is valued unquestionably as the largest repository of Jewish law, excepting the Talmud, that is, prior to the Middle Ages. And yet, despite all his considerable influence on the later Christian thought, his recognition by his own was practically non-existent, and until most recent times his name was virtually unknown among the Jews.

But of much greater interest to me in this subsection are his works in general philosophy, where he reveals himself as a true son of Zeus, that is, as a plethora of all things Greek, particularly, as a humble disciple of Plato on the one hand, (as a matter of fact, Saint Jerome quotes an apparently very popular quip about him among Jerome’s fellow scholars, namely: “Either Plato philonizes, or Philo platonizes”), and of the Greek Stoics (whose terminology he adopted almost indiscriminately, somewhat akin to Schopenhauer adopting Kantian terminology in his Die Welt, but for the different purpose of much harsher criticism of his golden goose than in Schopenhauer’s case, where Schopenhauer, at least, shows some respect to “one of the very greatest among all philosophers”), on the other.

As if these two major influences were not enough, Philo happily follows Aristotle (whose influence in the questions of cosmology and ethics is easily noticeable), plus, the Neo-Pythagoreans (to whom he owes his addiction to the mystic significance of numbers, especially, of the number seven), plus the Cynics. (To these last, but not least, he owes the distinctive formal structure of his homilies.)

In his relative lack of originality as a philosopher and in his pro-Greek bias, Philo is by no means unique, but quite the contrary, he is a true representative of this earliest stage of general Jewish philosophy, which, in the most conventional sense, emerged under weighty Greek influence. But to Philo goes the credit for the first serious systematic attempt to apply Greek philosophical concepts to the basic Jewish doctrines, or perhaps I should restate this as “to restate” the basic Jewish conceptions in Greek philosophical terms.

In this regard, his most valuable contribution by far (at least in the opinion of the Christian philosophers and theologians) is his application of the Greek concept of “Logos” to Biblical theology, where many authorities on Biblical criticism are ready and willing to credit him with direct influence on his younger contemporary St. John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, in the Evangelist’s use of Logos, and its celebrated identification with Jesus Christ.

Philo actually borrowed the concept of Logos from the Greek Stoics, for whom it signified the universal law at work in the world. While he rejected the Stoic contention of the Logos as being both material and divine, he held that Logos was that very agency by which the transcendent God of Creation acts, and thus manifests His Infinite Self to his finite Creation. (See my discussion of Tzimtzum and Gvul earlier in this section, but not so much in a direct connection to Philo, as in tracing the main thoroughfares of the Jewish thought.)

The idea of God acting through Logos is well-rooted in the Torah. In fact, it is explicitly stated in the very first verses of the first chapter of the Bereshit/Genesis:

“And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” (Bereshit/Genesis 1:3, et cetera.) So that there could be no doubt as to the very same mode of Creation employed in Bereshit/Genesis 1:1 (“Bereshit bara Elohim et Hashamayim veet Haaretz: In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”), Psalm 33:6 (even though not as authoritative to the Jews than the Torah, still authoritative enough for them as a corroboration of the Torah, and of course of equal authority to the Christians) states that “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made,” putting on the record that same identical mode of Creation by Logos/Word in God’s first Biblical act of Creation.

In his appropriation of the word Logos, Philo is, therefore, hardly a borrower from the Greeks, considering that his own Jewish Torah, our own Christian Bible, starts with God’s act of Creation by word, as much as he is a reconciler of the Jewish and Greek philosophical/theological traditions, finding them in harmony.

There is much more to be said about Philo’s philosophy, for the rest of which I intend to send the reader to proper philosophical anthologies, that may in turn guide him or her toward the most preferable mode of study, namely, reading these writers firsthand. My desire, both in this entry and in all entries like this, is to make a number of important points of my own, but immersing them into a minimal context, allowing a minimum of reference, to keep them comprehensible, in terms of their connection to the already known historical facts.

As a final note, it does not matter how well or little known Philo Judaeus was to the Jewish thinkers of the later generations. Even though his father was Zeus, as I said, in the final analysis, his mother, Philosophia Judaica, has proved herself genetically of greater importance than the father (Hence, my title Mothers and Sons, rather than Fathers and Sons, or Parents and Sons, or any other such variation on the Turgenev theme.) The same genes as Philo Judaeus possessed, can be found in the Talmud, in the Kabbalah, and in the Jewish intellectual propensity as such. I might also add that Philo’s remarkable contention that mystic ecstasy is far superior (in the Schopenhauerian conception of the Will, in its strictest sense, as the Kantian Ding an-Sich) to all kinds of philosophical and theological speculation even with rationality at its best, reveals the genes of the great Jewish Neviim of the Bible, before Philo; and of the wild followers of Baal Shem Tov, after Philo, leading all the way to the existing modern phenomenon of ultra-Conservative Hasidism, the only authentic expression of that Jewish genetic code traced back to its source, the mixed bag as shocking and occasionally revolting as the unembellished and unflattering stories of the Jewish Patriarchs in the Bereshit/Genesis, yet as powerful, steeped in meaningfulness and wisdom, as that one and only component of what may be called our common Judaeo-Christian legacy.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE

Beginning now my subsection on Jewish philosophy, there is a great temptation to start our discussion with nothing less than the Holy Bible, which is undoubtedly a collection of the most Jewish books ever written.

There is a customary talk among the lovers of philosophy, and also among those for whom philosophy is not a dirty word, that the Bible is a deeply philosophical book. I must take issue with this pronouncement, I am afraid, as, to me, philosophy is a human search for truth, whereas the Bible to the Christians, and the Torah to the religious Jews, is the Word of God, a postulation of truth, and thus a different quality from philosophy as all philosophers and philosophizers define it.
I will agree, of course, that the Bible must be a fountain of philosophy for any outsider who is not obligated to see it as the Word of God, and I do believe that all Christians are at a disadvantage in this respect, but the fact still remains that there is a radical difference between, say, a St. Augustine philosophizing about the Bible, and the Bible itself.

It is, therefore, inappropriate, in my opinion, for any Christian to consider the Bible from the philosophical point of view, and this is it, as far as I am concerned.

PHILOSOPHIA JUDAICA

This short post-preamble to the subsection on Jewish philosophy concerns itself with just one question: how is Philosophia Judaica different from all other philosophies, and a Judaic philosopher from all others?

In the subsection on the Judaic Religion, I have already established the fact that Biblia Hebraica is radically different from, say, the Protestant Bible, with regard to the fundamental question of its human versus Divine authorship. Now, what must be the crucial difference between Jewish and general philosophy, to compel us to distinguish the one from the other? And yet, such distinction is historically being made, thus imbuing this whole important line of inquiry with the irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial quality, which, I suspect, it richly possesses.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term Jewish Philosophy has meant different things at different times. In the Middle Ages it meant any kind of philosophical endeavor pursued by the Jews. In our time, it is limited to the philosophical discussion of specifically Judaic themes, whereas any ethnically- or religiously-Jewish thinker who is unconcerned with Judaism, or with his distinctive Jewish heritage, cannot be classified as a Jewish philosopher. (At the same time, I bet that no Gentile [non-Jewish] thinker, no matter how much he, or she, is preoccupied with the Judaic themes can ever be accepted as a “Jewish” philosopher. What a rotten discrimination!)

Governed by this “modern” principle, namely, that only an ethnically Jewish and Judaically-specific thinker can qualify as a Jewish philosopher, whereas an ethnically Jewish philosopher who studies free will an-Sich, and declares that “if a rock hurled into the air had a consciousness, it would believe it was traveling of its own will,” cannot be qualified as such, but only as a general philosopher. But what if our general philosopher of Jewish heritage also examines the Talmud or a Midrash, and therefore qualifies as a Jewish philosopher? The man I have in mind is obviously Benedict/Baruch Spinoza…

One can respond by suggesting that Spinoza ought to be classified in both these categories, depending on which subject, and where, is being discussed. But then, what if a Jewish Talmudic scholar delving into the wisdom of the Gemara should organically shift his focus to a question of sufficient reason or of etiology of forms, that is, combine his study of matters Judaic with matters of general philosophical nature? Believe me, I will never discriminate against the great Isaac Luria by denying him the well deserved status of a “general” philosopher!

That was previously a rhetorical question, of course; leading me to suggest that one should always address all such confusing issues not conventionally, but as one pleases, which is exactly what I am doing, and also, that the question of what constitutes a distinctive Philosophia Judaica is, indeed, “irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.” In my view, Jewish philosophy is philosophy, and I am convinced that leaving, say, Maimonides, or Luria, or Cordovero, etc. outside the reach of general philosophical studies, deprives the Gentile student of an essential source of philosophical knowledge and understanding.

WISDOM OF THE CHOSEN

As a preamble to this entry, which continues to focus on the Jewish issue, I wish to clarify the reason for my seemingly endless preoccupation with res Judaica. In an earlier entry, I, hopefully, made it clear that, to my knowledge, there have been only three nations in human history who explicitly set themselves apart from the rest by formulating a national “manifest destiny.” They are Russia, America, and the Jews, not necessarily in this order. As a Russian living in America, my previously displayed preoccupation with Russia and America should not cause any similar surprise, but, for a certain reason, the Jewish third of that triad seems to need a good explanation, which is why this interjection is definitely in order. Once again, I must insist that all three members of the “manifest destiny” club deserve much more than an honorable mention, but a generous and comprehensive book-size treatment, which I am therefore affording all three of them.

Dedicating the present subsection to Jewish philosophy, I am making no attempt to write a systematic and thorough exposition of the history of Jewish thought. As always, I am going to do as I please, picking and choosing my topics of interest, and let somebody else do the schoolman’s chore.
Besides, this task may be virtually impossible, as an acceptable definition of the term “Jewish philosophy” does not even exist, as I have hinted already in the previous entry.

Wisdom and Intelligence, Chochma and Bina,-- the second and third Sefirot,-- emanating immediately from the incomprehensible Keter Elyon, the Supreme Crown. How are we to delineate where exactly philosophy parts ways with her sister theosophy, both presumably starting off at their common departure station in the City of Wisdom? Perhaps, we should put our foot down: no, what the Kabbalah was working on cannot be called philosophy! Love of wisdom, philosophia, exclusively belongs on that pre-constructed railroad track which runs through the traditional domains of ethics, ontology, epistemology, etc., and cannot be derailed by some unorthodox speculation, especially when such speculation already has a designated track built for it and has no reason to intrude on somebody else’s domain.

I am not trying to satirize the compartmentalization argument, however. One can always sincerely snicker at the suggestion that human thought ought to be catalogued, and deposited in some predetermined place on a certain library shelf, with a certain mile-long Dewey Decimal Index ascribed to it. But-- come to think of it-- there is nothing wrong in such conventionalization, as long as human thought itself is allowed the freedom to soar without restriction.

Thus, honoring the laws of conventional wisdom and common convenience, I shall not make waves about matters of little importance and shall not dispute the wisdom of keeping, say, theosophy and mysticism of other colors, in separate compartments from philosophy in the traditional sense, which, as a matter of fact, I have already been doing with some consistency.

But at least one general observations on this subject may still be in order. Namely, there must be a special quality to the Jewish philosophical preoccupation with theosophy, mysticism, and their historical tradition: after all, God, History, and everyday life, are inextricably linked in the Jewish national psyche, our Bible, in its Old Testament, bearing an unimpeachable witness to that.

For this unique reason, there has to be a special inherent, even congenital, propensity for philosophizing, which I may call the wisdom of the Chosen People, which constitutes a singular characteristic of the Jewish philosophy, that right away sends its train off the regular track, that breaks all “rules of engagement.”

This does not mean that we have to face an organizational hell here, as “rules” do not apply,--some of them still do, but the above-stated considerations should always be kept in mind, at least as an excuse, however lame, for the inconsistencies, incompletenesses, inadequacies, redundancies, and all other kinds of similar “technical difficulties” of the structure of our thematic exposition.

HOW YIDDISH IS YIDDISH?

In one of their enlightening confessions, my most authentic American-Jewish friends (the rare breed among them who honestly and openly care about the preservation of the historical Yiddishkeit) have made this rather sad point to me---and quite ruefully, at that---concerning the decline, this time perhaps terminal, of the Yiddish language, which decline they have attributed to the establishment of the Hebrew-speaking State of Israel, which, according to them, openly discriminates against the use of Yiddish, no longer a competitor tongue to be sure, but, still, a ‘shameful reminder’ of the shabbiness of the shtetl subsistence of most of these Israelis’ forebears.

The state of Yiddish in the State of Israel is indeed pitiful, judging from the Time Almanac’s-2005 entry on Israel’s languages, which I now quote in its entirety: “Hebrew (official), Arabic, English.” The Almanac’s mistake of not identifying Arabic here as Israel’s second official language, of just two, can be understood, as there have been persistent efforts to deny Arabic its official language status, and, in practical terms, it is virtually impossible to live in Israel on Arabic alone. Without denying the importance of English in the country, one must not nevertheless fail to mention the huge importance of Russian as a dominant non-Hebrew language, actively spoken by at least one-fourth of Israel, but understood and accepted as a legitimate Israeli language by virtually all ethnically Jewish population of the country.

But even if we add a fourth language and somewhat rearrange the priorities, that still sadly leaves out, both in legal and practical terms, the most sentimentally Jewish of all languages: Yiddish. My American-Jewish friends were right, to worry...

Curiously, it was not Hebrew, but Yiddish, which was allowed as the second official language (the Russian language being the first) of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia, formed in 1934, with its center in the city of Birobidjan. The political reason behind the cultivation of Yiddish, while suppressing Hebrew, in the USSR, is easy to figure out: Hebrew quickly established itself as the language of international Zionism, and Yiddish was used in Russia as a counter-weapon. But it was also a practical matter of convenience, as most Soviet Jews at the time were Yiddish speakers, and Hebrew was a foreign language to most of them.

Leaving politics and convenience aside, though, this official policy of cultivating the otherwise endangered language has done a lot of good for the preservation of Yiddish, even if not too many younger Russian Jews wanted to have anything to do with it.
Today, the continued official status of Yiddish is of course mainly a formality, which does not guarantee the actual survival of Yiddish, as outside that fairly exotic place it is hardly maintained enough by Russian Jews to keep it alive and well. But it is quite heavy on symbolism, and scores a huge point in Russia’s favor with the sentimental world Jewry, even if this most remarkable fact is by no means widely enough advertised.)

Yet, insofar as Yiddish is concerned, the Almanac is not lying, and this is the main subject of interest to me in this entry. Which leads me to the key question that needs to be answered before I am done: Is such contempt for Yiddish (outside Birobidjan and JAR) completely or at least partially justified, and then, when finally this endangered species is officially pronounced extinct by its few remaining champions, will the rest of Judenthum breathe a sigh of relief and say, Good riddance!?

The basic facts about Yiddish are well known, or, better put, are readily available to anyone who wishes to obtain such information. Here is a summary of some references to Yiddish in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, interspersed with my own comments:

“Living in the Germanic Frankish lands of Western Europe among people who spoke Middle High German, the majority of Ashkenazic Jews adopted their language for colloquial use, but still relied on the language of their religious services, which was Hebrew, that had remained the language of worship and scholarship. As a result, an amalgam called Jüdisch-Deutsch developed, soon corrupted into Yiddish-Teitch, and then, reduced to the simple Yiddish. In the wake of the Crusaders’ massacres of the Jews, they now moved into Eastern Europe, where Yiddish acquired a strong Slavonic element, and now developed along independent lines, flowering into a rich literary language.” (In modern linguistic classification of world languages, this turns Yiddish into a product of artificial insemination, allowing it to occupy a unique place in the group of one, called Germanic-Slavonic Languages, but, conspicuously, giving no credit in this classification to its Hebrew connection.)
“The first books in Yiddish were written in the 12th and 13th centuries intended only for the women and the ignorant. In the wake of the catastrophes experienced by the Jews during the Thirty Years’ War, causing the massive migration to Poland, secular Yiddish literature disappeared completely, until its reemergence in the late 18th century.” (As a result of the Hasidic “revolution.”)
“The Haskala, Enlightenment, had a negative effect on Yiddish, most writers now working in Hebrew or in Russian, showing explicit contempt for the Hasidim and consequently satirizing the use of Yiddish. Its use was now mainly an expression of protest against the Haskala, but eventually even that wave of protest was bound to subside, leaving the future of Yiddish in serious jeopardy.” (I have already noted before how much that future was further threatened by the establishment of the State of Israel, giving no quarter to the "black sheep" of the Jewish linguistic family.)

This entry’s title question (How Yiddish Is Yiddish?) ought to be interpreted as a query, whether it is proper for the Jews to shun their shtetl past, or just to ignore the Yiddish connection as a sentimental, but obsolete fragment of their history, now that Hebrew is no longer a dead bookish language, but a living tongue well fit to represent the uniqueness of the Jewish national identity. The answer is in no way simple, but it may offer certain practical hints, which themselves are hard to ignore.
Even if the practical value of Yiddish is minimal, reduced to the ability to read certain Jewish writers of the past in the original, its antiquarian historical value is immense, not even in real terms, but as a question of attitude. It brings to mind that acutely “current” argument, raised in Karl Marx’s critique of Bruno Bauer’s works The Jewish Question (1842) and The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free (1843), to be discussed later in this section.

What is, after all, the ultimate objective of modern Judenthum? Is it to preserve its precious Jewish identity, as a unique flower in the lush garden of also unique and diverse national identities,--- or, in the pursuit of the Globalist dream, a perverted version of the Jewish nation-idea (which I find in the modern interpretation of the Lurianic concept of Tikkun Olam), to work toward the goal of neutering all expressions of a distinct national identity, such as religion, culture, and even historical memory, and in the process of this impossible pursuit, to abandon their own distinctiveness in religion, culture, and historical memory? Depending on the answer to this last question, the fate of Yiddish as well as the fates of many other aspects of Yiddishkeit will be determined…

MEN IN BLACK

(Anything positive and interesting that I know from my personal experience about the modern-day Hasidim, I owe to Rabbi Yisroel Rice of the Marin County Chabad in California. By observing him as a person, I have also learned quite a few unpleasant--- albeit most interesting as well!-- things about the Hasidim, but the sum total of the positives and the negatives balances out heavily in favor of the positives.)

The historians of Jewish Mysticism, in most Encyclopedic renditions, such as in the eminently authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica, habitually progress from the section on Lurianic Kabbalah to Shabbetaianism, or the False Messiah phenomenon, and from there, to Hasidism. Why so? The apparent reason is the terrible urge of the post-Lurianic Jews for a speedy arrival of their long-awaited Messiah, which somehow managed not only to elicit the cheerful “Here I am!” from several charlatans posing as the Messiahs, but, even worse, to have their "glorious" appearances and ignominious exits justified in mystical terminology, by some overly zealous pseudo-Kabbalistic “fraud-deniers,” leading to a sequence of very ugly developments in the history of the Jewish people, which speak volumes, and not a word of them well, about the integrity and credibility, or, rather, the lack thereof, of that particular portion of the Jewish intellectual heritage.

Having great respect for the legitimate aspects of the Rabbinical tradition, as epitomized by the work of the Talmudic scholars, and by the theosophical wisdom (pardon the tautology) of the pillars of the Kabbalah, I see no place in this subsection for “the bad and the ugly,” who are consequently relegated to the dark pages of the Jewish history in a later subsection, and I now move on to the Hasidic phenomenon, which is in itself, however, by no means without a congenital blemish, yet the blemish, in this case, is quite inseparable from the better contents of the overall package.

The story of the Hasidim is steeped in contrasts, taking note of the negative aspects of Hasidic life, but also pointing to the positives, which are, first and foremost, in maintaining the best of the rabbinical tradition that all other denominations either ignore, or, in the case of “normal” Jewish Orthodox congregations, do not pursue with as much zeal and intellectual acuity, both of which their common historical heritage deserves in an exuberant abundance.

So here is the bottom line. Their places of worship, shuls, are cramped, shabby, and frequently outright dirty. Their singing and dancing are wild and unaesthetic. Their lifestyle habits are, frankly, often reprehensible. If you wanted to visit a sparkling and spacious religious temple, see a well-dressed and dignified audience, and listen to an aesthetically pleasing religious service, choose the Reform, or the Conservative,--- but never the Hasids. If, on the other hand, you are after a totally different, unique, essentially authentic experience, if you really want to properly learn and understand the treasures of Jewish, or any other kind of mysticism, for that matter, there is no better place to go to, in America today, than the Hasidic shul…

Webster’s Dictionary (once again I must remind the reader of this that I am using this and similar sources as reference only, rather than as any sort of authority) describes the Hasidim (spelled by it as Chassidim) as “a sect of Jewish mystics that originated in Poland in the eighteenth century,” clearly tracing this movement to its more recent emergence under the auspices of Baal Shem Tov, born Yisroel ben Eliezer (1700-1760).

It is necessary, though, to maintain some measure of continuity by pointing to a much earlier appearance of a Hasidic phenomenon in Germany, known as German, or Ashkenazic Hasidism, and best expressed in the Sefer Hasidim, the work of Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1160-1238).
There is a great temptation to disassociate these two Hasidic phenomena completely, not only by seeing the long span of five hundred years, between Eleazar ben Judah and Baal Shem Tov, as an already good excuse to keep them apart, but especially by pointing to the conspicuous dissimilarity between the two men: one, a learned scholar, the other, a poorly educated, but exceptionally charismatic populist leader. Even more so, Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidism is seen as a populist revolt against the esoteric nerdishness of the Jewish Rabbi, and as a spirited effort to bring vitality into the life of a Jewish shtetl in Poland. Characteristically, a lively revival of Yiddish as a legitimate language results from this revolt, particularly through the literary efforts of Baal Shem Tov’s own great-grandson Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and others. (On Yiddish see my next entry).
But  the actual link does exist. The two ostensibly incompatible expressions of Hasidism, those of Eleazar ben Judah and of Baal Shem Tov, have, ironically, found an inextricable connection in modern Hasidism. Whether or not the cerebral elements of the former had an adequately prominent place in the cerebellar preoccupations of the latter, is certainly hard for me to judge. The common thread of Jewish mysticism which unmistakably ties them together seems to emphasize their connectedness, an admirable unity of cerebrum and cerebellum.
I have indeed observed how an exceptional scholarship in the best of the traditional Jewish learning, on the part of the Hasidic rabbis, goes hand in hand with an extremely random, even bizarre and chaotic lifestyle, where the strictest possible observance of the precepts of Shulkhan Arukh, and, particularly, of the Kashrut laws, such as, for instance, the sincere dedication to keeping the milchig in meticulous separation from the fleischig, do not lead to perfect cleanliness, but, on the contrary, too often end up in total disregard of the standard, “Gentile,” norms of hygiene, common to all civilized societies, even by the American standards, much coarsened and polluted by the inferior standards of an uncontrollable third-world immigration.

Another unpleasant feature of the modern Hasidic lifestyle is its almost perpetual state of drunkenness, too often bringing very young men--- in their impressive ankle-long black robes, and with large black hats or black kipahs, the skullcaps, still on,--- from a very shaky position at the Hasidic table, ashy pale, visibly spaced out, and incoherent, to an eventual rest under the table, so shockingly incongruent at first sight, but so familiar… and so, well, expected, after a while.

The striking contrast, which is the very nature of the Hasidim, the coexistence of the highly admirable with the utterly repulsive, where the one cannot possibly be extricated from the other,--- this contrast speaks a lot about the subject matter of the present Section, the res Judaica, and about the historical state of Judenthum as such. As an expression of pure Jewishness, I will take the Hasidim any time over everybody else of their Jewish kin, who may look more “normal” to non-Jews than their Ultra-Orthodox brethren, but at the same time are completely devoid of their precious authenticity and of all their other unique assets. (The frequent expressions of hypocrisy, which I have found among some members of the Hasidic flock, do not, however, infringe on the compelled authenticity of the shepherds, induced by the dominancy of their peculiar lifestyle and daily religious practices, completely overriding, in my opinion, the human capacity for dissimulation.)

KABBALAH "MADE EASY"

A word of caution to the neophytes and tourists. All that glitters is not Kabbalah. Jewish mysticism does not indulge in exhibitionism. Beware of glossy book covers! Also, I recommend only primary sources, and even those with quite a few caveats with regard to the integrity of translation and probity of commentary. My rule of thumb would be to stick to Jewish Orthodox and (preferably) Ultra-Orthodox publications, while staying away from all popularizations, both cheap and expensive.

SPIRIT BREAKING THE MATTER BARRIER: PART II

(Part II continues where Part I has just left off.)

...As for the concept of Gvul (the name is well familiar to every Israeli as a secular term in Hebrew, meaning border police, or the movement of conscientious objectors abstaining from the mandatory military service,--- but quite unfamiliar to most in its theosophical sense), it also refers to God’s contraction, but in a different sense. Whereas in the case of Tzimtzum God’s infinity withdraws to allow finite matter, in Gvul God shows his ability to squeeze a part of His infinity into a finite form.

I used to discuss this intriguing subject extensively with the Hasidic Rabbi Yisroel Rice, of the Chabad of Marin County, California, but, for some reason, it is extremely hard to find on the Internet (where I am often fishing to refresh my memory of various factual bits and pieces, or to get additional details on my subjects of interest), as if this concept were somehow being protected from an outside intrusion. Eventually, I found it on the website of the Israeli Freemasons (!), and here is how a certain Errol D. Feldman, 33°, talks about it, begging to be compared with my stimulating conversations with that remarkable Hasidic pillar of learning, Rabbi Rice, who has, perhaps without ever realizing it, taken up a permanent niche in the corridors of my consciousness.

“Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Asiyah (Action) are the four worlds that emerge out of Hashem’s infinite light, and culminate in our finite, physical, and material universe. Atzilut is the first, and highest, of the four worlds. The Ten Sefirot (Countings) of the World of Atzilut, and of the other worlds, are the fundament of the Kabbalah.
“All the worlds are created and conducted by means of the Sefirot. The Ten Sefirot demonstrate both G-d’s infinite power (Koah HaBliGvul) and His finite power (Koah HaGvul). For, as is pointed out by the author (Rabbi Meir ben Ezekiel ibn Gabbai) of Avodat HaKodesh (Tikkunei Zohar reproduced in Siddur Tehillat HaShem), just as Hashem has infinite power, so, too, does He have finite power. For, if you were to say that He possesses infinite power, but lacks finite power, then you minimize His completeness,--- and He is the most complete entity of all.
“It is within the Sefirot that infinity and the finite first coalesce, as it were, in order for worlds to be created and directed. For, the Sefirot are composed of both orot (lights) and kelim (vessels).”

Observe how effortlessly, although somewhat ambiguously, the question of the two hypostases, that is of the infinite and the finite coming to form a composite entity, is resolved here, which now brings me to the key point of this entry.

The concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul are of great interest to me, as they are raising an intriguing question of how it may be technically achievable for the spirit to so-to-speak break the matter barrier. After Einstein’s profound breakthrough in the relativity theory, where his e=mc² formula establishes a relationship between energy and matter, without the need for anyone to engage in any kind of theosophical contemplation, such mental visualization and conceptualization of an actual contraction of the spirit as the causa prima and the creative impulse for the emergence of matter, ex nihilo (in the sense that John Scotus Erigena provides us, when he says that nothing--- that is, something which is not--- is not something entirely non-existent, but it is a substance that transcends everything that is!), that is, as a result of an activity of the universal spirit, the unknowable God, is thus by no means inconceivable, but is available to scrutiny well within the capacity of human comprehension.

By the same token, it is now comparably conceivable how the Spirit of God, in Its exercise of Its ability to move (not in the spatial sense of moving from place to place, which then turns it into matter, but in a very difficult, but not impossible to grasp, sense of contraction and expansion of itself, from the infinite to finite, and back) may not only cause matter to appear (that is, to be created), but may fill a material receptacle, or “vessel,” without any diminution of its own infinity (¥-X=¥), such as was, perhaps, the physical case with Jesus Christ, either at birth, or, more likely, during His epiphany at the river Jordan, when He was filled with the Holy Spirit.

The argument expounded in this entry serves, as a matter of fact, to strengthen the contra-filioque case of the Christian Orthodox Church, as the capacity for Gvul, to continue our recourse to the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, is reserved for Ein Sof, God the Father, alone, rather than for any of His manifestations. On the other hand, it does not diminish the co-equality of the Trinity, once the two manifestations of God the Father (God the Son and The Holy Ghost) are seen as God’s Infinity filling them both, yet, once again, explained through the mathematical formulae of infinity, where even one tiny iota of infinity is still equal to the whole (¥/X=¥).

SPIRIT BREAKING THE MATTER BARRIER: PART I

It is utterly impossible to contract the immense wealth of Jewish mysticism into the space of a few entries, and such silliness was never any part of my intention. For a comprehensive grasp of this phenomenon, my suggestion to the reader is to engage in a pointed and intense study of this subject.

As far as my purpose is concerned, this last entry is dedicated to something totally unusual: an exploration of how Jewish mysticism, culminating in the Kabbalah, can actually account, in the theosophical sense, for the Divinity of Jesus Christ, as the Infinite and Unknowable God in a man’s finite body. The concept of the ten Sefirot and the nine emanations was the starting point for the concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, which, I believe, lead us exactly in that direction. Needless to say, I am not trying to score a theological point here, on behalf of Christianity. My philosophical credo is speculation for its own very important sake.

In my teasingly perplexed entry Christian Theology As A Philosophical Challenge, in the Religion section, I have marveled at the intricate complexity of Christian theology, as reflected in such intellectual puzzles as the multiplicity of oneness in the Trinity, or the harmony of incompatibility in the two hypostases of Christ, to name just these two.

The highest irony, however, lies in the fact that the best theosophical argument ever made on behalf of the Christian theological dogma belongs to the Jewish mystics of the Kabbalah.

Earlier on in this section, while discussing the significance of Sefer Ha-Bahir, I made this comment:
“Bahir contains the earliest effort to characterize the ten Sefirot of Sefer Yetzira as manifestations of God’s powers. These awesome powers are not attributes, but hypostases of God (another uncanny conceptual link to the Christian ideas of the Trinity and of the two hypostases of Christ). These hypostases are inseparable from the One God, but each possesses a personality of its own. (Once again, this argument parallels the idea of the multiplicity of oneness, contained in the Christian concept of Trinity!)”
The mystical concepts of Tzimtzum and Gvul, representing the contemplations of the Kabbalah thinkers, and above all of the great Isaac Luria, are particularly remarkable in their philosophical capacity to explain the complex phenomenon of Jesus Christ. Just as Nietzsche, with his magnificent introduction of the Creative Child concept, reveals an unexpected affinity with Christianity, even though each of them is climbing up their own path to the summit, so does the concept of God contracting His Infinity of Self into certain finite manifestations, unexpectedly perhaps even for the Jews themselves, renders the weird and incomprehensible Christian idea of the Infinite God making His appearance in the human body of Jesus more palatable than even the brightest Christian theologians could ever have expected to make their own case for.
(This theme also resonates with Nietzsche’s mystical vision of philosophical unity, like this Kantian Ding-an-Sich, which I comment on, in my entry on Jenseits-20.)

Now, a little more on the subject of tzimtzum, as represented in the so-called Lurianic Kabbalah, which is a collection of Isaac Luria’s (of the Tikkun Olam fame) teachings, compiled after his premature death by the already mentioned Hayim Vital. Three main components are essential to Luria’s theosophy, which unfolds before our eyes the whole history of the world: its past, present, and future,--- as creation, degeneration, and redemption.

Retracing these stages in reverse order, redemption is represented by the tikkun olam; degeneration by the shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels, and now the original act of creation is represented by God’s withdrawal into Himself, or his contraction, tzimtzum, thus making room for the material world, which is about to be created. Incidentally, creation itself is accomplished by a thrust of God’s infinite light into the vacated space, where the light becomes trapped in finite receptacles that break under such stress, and so on.

(Part II follows next.)

GOD IS EVERYTHING?

This entry represents a short, but meaningful detour into the ostensibly separate, but by no means irrelevant subject of pantheism, and its remarkable treatment by the Kabbalah.
Perhaps, the most famous Jewish name associated with pantheism is that of Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza. He is also suspected of being strongly influenced by the Kabbalah, apparently on the presumption that because of his Jewish heritage he could not possibly escape such an influence.
My understanding of Spinoza’s pantheism as a search for the omnipresence of the Absolute is a subject in another section. However, a partial answer to the question of influence, or rather, philosophical affinity, can be obtained just by scratching the surface, once we know where to scratch.
His magnum opus Ethica opens with the principal distinction of substance, attributes, and modes. Because substance cannot be explained by anything else, it has to be its own causa prima, and as such is equated to God, who is also equated to Nature. The fact of such equation denies God the power of transcendence. In other words, it can be said that Spinoza’s philosophy teaches that God is all Substance, and consequently  (?!)  all Substance is God.

In identifying God with Substance, I see Spinoza’s philosophical affinity with the pantheism of Giordano Bruno, the Italian maverick philosopher burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600. Here is the proper passage from Bruno’s Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum, whose bright light was a presage of the fire that was to consume him ten years after its publication:

"God is the universal substance in existing things. He comprises all things. He is the fountain of all being. In Him exists everything that is."

In my own evaluation of pantheism as-such (as opposed to a philosophical search for pantheistic ethics), I am in full agreement with Schopenhauer’s A Few Words on Pantheism, 1851, where his view is succinctly expressed in the following brilliantly literate summary:

“The chief objection I have to pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word world.”

It is therefore with great amazement that, while familiarizing myself with the teachings of the Kabbalah, I discovered a profound formula for the relationship between God and the world, which, even though it may be found objectionable to most theologians in principle, yet legitimizes the crucial pantheistic premise that God is Everything, and particularly immunizes it against the valid criticism of Schopenhauer.

This Kabalistic formula belongs to another genius of Jewish mysticism, Moses Cordovero (1522-1570), a contemporary of Isaac Luria, their two names competing in fame for epitomizing the phenomenon that we know as Kabbalah. So, here is the Cordovero formula, magnificent in its simplicity and profundity:

“God is Everything, but Everything isn’t God.”

In mathematical terms we cannot unfortunately express this astonishing blow to conventional wisdom as:

(a=b)^(b¹ a)



The reason why we can’t do it is because not only is this conventional wisdom, but the symbols = and ¹ are too conventional themselves, to allow such a bold abuse of elementary logic. That’s why we must do better than that, and fortunately we can, revolutionizing the pantheistic formula in the process:



(aÞ b)^(b¹ a)

Whether the great Spinoza, who lived a full century after Moses Cordovero, was totally unfamiliar with his predecessor’s intellectual discovery, and thus could not profit from it, is beside the point. The fact remains that in all history of human thought there does not exist a better embodiment of the pantheistic conception of GodÞEverything, yet unburdened by its self-defeating flaw, that is, of Everything=God, than the great two-part formula of Moses Cordovero.



 

BRIGHTNESS AND SPLENDOR OF THE DARK AGES

It was in the darkest phase of the Middle Ages, a “century” between the Second and the Seventh Crusades, that Brightness and Splendor appeared, ushering in the golden age of the Kabbalah, which lasted for nearly half-a-millennium, culminating in the genius of Isaac Luria, and eventually subdued by the grim historical infamy of a succession of false self-proclaimed Jewish Messiahs, shamelessly abusing the esoteric intricacy of the Kabbalah, cynically drafted into the service of their fraudulent claims, and almost wholly discredited together with her manipulative charlatan masters.

Alongside with the school of Isaac the Blind, whose greatly influential theosophical commentary on Sefer Yetzira was mentioned in a previous entry, several other momentous Seferim came into being during that rather short period of time, including Sefer Ha-Temuna, Book of the Image, an anonymous work, which is especially famous for its far too liberal indulgence in gematria, that is in its interpretative symbolism of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, and for its eerie claim of the existence of an Invisible Torah. Alas, it was exactly this overreaching and arrogant book that gave the most aid and comfort to the false Messiahs, which nearly killed the future of Jewish mysticism, as a result of the general spiritual disillusionment of the Jews, caused by the exposure of the phonies. (On the false Messiahs see my separate entry Black Sheep Rising, to be posted later.)

It is, however, the emergence of two other Seferim, which is of particular interest to me in this entry. Sefer Ha-Bahir, The Book of Brightness, and Sefer Ha-Zohar, The Book of Splendor, are now my subject here.

Bahir is a loose collection of Scriptural Midrashim, named after its opening commentary, appearing in the late 12th century, but typically attributed to ancient sources and authors, also including Isaac the Blind. Like the later Temuna, it eagerly assigns mystical significance to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, both in their shapes and in their sounds, but it does not go as far as the other one in its wild claims. Bahir is particularly noteworthy due to its basic premise that both the esoteric purpose of Creation and the actual course of human history revolve around the existence and the destiny of God's chosen people, the Jews, an early unequivocal expression of a Jewish Manifest Destiny, crystallized in the Lurianic Tikkun Olam, and eventually developing into what I regard as the modern Jewish nation-idea.

Bahir contains the earliest effort to characterize the ten Sefirot of Sefer Yetzira as manifestations of God’s powers. These awesome powers are not attributes, but hypostases of God (another uncanny conceptual link to the Christian ideas of the Trinity and of the two hypostases of Christ). These hypostases are inseparable from the One God, but each possesses a personality of its own. (Once again, this argument parallels the idea of the multiplicity of oneness, contained in the Christian concept of the Trinity!)

Calling these Divine powers Maamarot, Sayings,--- Bahir divides them into three higher manifestations and seven lower ones, each acting on its own, putting them in direct correlation with the actions of the Jews in the real world. Evil is named as a Principle contained within God Himself, and the Jewish souls are alleged to be capable of transmigration, Gilgul.

Sefer Ha-Zohar, famously known as the Zohar, whose importance has been ranked third by the Kabbalists, after the Torah and the Talmud (note the conspicuous exclusion of the Neviim and the Khetuvim, that is, of the whole non-Torah part of the Bible, from this short list!!!), appeared in the 13th century as a Commentary on the hidden meanings of the Torah, the Book of Ruth, and the Song of Solomon. Naturally, it is attributed to the much earlier authority of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, but its actual author, or, more likely, its creative compilator, is believed to be Rabbi Moses de Leon of Spain, who died in 1305.

Zohar was written in fancy Aramaic, the most popular language of the Kabbalah, which is, perhaps, due to at least two main reasons: it allows the authors to claim their hoax’s ancient origin, dated back to the time when Aramaic was in wide use, and, on the other hand, this puts just enough distance between the author’s language of choice and the classic Hebrew, Lashon Ha-Kodesh, whose cryptic spirit is certainly the salient feature of all Kabbalistic theosophy.

The immense importance of the Zohar does not lie in its originality, in which sense it is probably the least original book among the literary giants of the Kabbalah, but in its overbearing authoritative imprimatur, a license to the truth, grandiloquently granting credibility to all works of esoteric Jewish mysticism, both up to date, and for all future time. All the main ideas of Jewish mysticism, creation out of the depths of God’s unknowability, the correlation of the ten Sefirot to the reality of the sensory world, and then, of course, the totally indispensable function of the observant Jew in the ultimate restoration of the universal harmony, all these ideas are hereby given the status of Divine revelations. The Zohar unequivocally puts itself above the normal Jewish Tradition, above the Talmudic contemplations of a group of very wise Jewish rabbis, to be accepted on the supernatural strength of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s theosophical revelation as the Absolute Standard of Infinite Truth, not as a creation of some amazingly ingenious, yet finite, and therefore, limited and imperfect human mind. I would not be at all surprised, by the way, if the Zohar’s explicit urge to appeal to Divine Authority was directly influenced by the religious Authority of the Holy Koran of the Moslems. A similar daring, many centuries after the Zohar, would be exhibited in the Book of Mormon, where a “latter-day” Divine Origin has also been claimed by the book’s authors.