Saturday, September 30, 1995
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Drawn to the Taboo
A conversation with Daniel C. Matt
For centuries, the Kabbalah has remained off-limits to all but the most persistent students. Study of the Jewish mystical tradition has been shrouded in prohibitions: One is supposed to be at least 40 years old, married and steeped in years of rabbinic learning before even approaching it. So powerful are the super-conscious states the Kabbalah induces, it is said, that renowned scholars of old went insane or died while trying to plumb its secrets.
So when Daniel C. Matt, a translator and teacher of Jewish mysticism, gathered together some of his favorite passages for “The Essential Kabbalah” ($18, Harper San Francisco), what happened? The book sold out its first 10,000 copies in a matter of weeks. As always, people are drawn to the taboo.
The Kabbalah teaches that God originally carried all the light of the world in cosmic vessels. These containers broke, and light was dispersed throughout the universe in the form of divine sparks. Even today, these sparks are thought to remain in all people and things, waiting to be ignited by good deeds. The call of Kabbalah is to “raise the sparks.”
Matt is a natural teacher who makes the paradoxes and abstruse ideas of this medieval, esoteric literature come alive. “Without human participation, God remains incomplete, unrealized,” he writes in his introduction. “It is up to us to actualize the divine potential in the world. God needs us.”
Matt lives in Berkeley, where he is a professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union.
Q Is studying the Kaballah really so dangerous? Why wait until you’re 40 years old?
A I see the prohibitions more as a warning that one should be aware of the dangers. With Kabbalah, you’re really probing your own inner psyche, and as Freud would say, “It’s dangerous to uncover too much of yourself at once.”
If Isaac Luria, the mystic and scholar, had waited, he never would have studied Kabbalah, because he died at 38. And he was one of the greatest kabbalists who ever lived! It was, really, after Luria in the 16th century that the ideas began to spread to the masses. Hasidism was, in effect, just a popularization of Kabbalah. And some of the most bitter opposition to Hasidism came from the kabbalists themselves. The Hasidim basically translated Kabbalah into a popular idiom and made it into a psychology for discovering the divine within.
I really see what I’m doing as being very much in that mode—making it more accessible. But you certainly run a danger of diluting it when you do that.
Q There’s such a lack of connection between Jews and their mystical tradition. How do you go about re-activating a tradition that’s been nearly extinguished?
A It’s being rediscovered now, especially in the Reform movement. But yes, very often even the rabbis don’t know about it, because they didn’t study it in rabbinical school. That’s changing.
Q Yet most Jews still have no idea of the importance of, say, meditation in Judaism.
A That’s what most Jewish services need. Just a little silence. That has really been lost. The most natural place to introduce it is during the Sh’ma (the most fundamental prayer in Judaism, it is a declaration of faith offered four times daily by the most traditional Jews; literally, the word “Sh’ma” means “listen”). Partly because, immediately after the first line of the Sh’ma, you have to be silent anyway. There’s a moment of silence, just a moment. The kabbalists meditated on that first line very intensely.
Q You said there was a lot of opposition to the kabbalists. Why?
A I think what often happens with this material is you have some insights and then the ego can take over and say ”That’s mine. I have a direct pipeline to God.” For example, Abraham Abulafia, a 13th century kabbalist, was very controversial. He was excommunicated for seeing himself as the messiah. I sometimes think that’s an occupational hazard of being a Jewish mystic.
When I teach Kabbalah to Christian divinity students, I tell them that one good way to understand the consciousness of Jesus is to study these Jewish mystics. One of the fears of spreading Kabbalah in the Middle Ages was that it might disrupt the Jewish community, if you have independent people who claim to be in touch with God, and prophesizing. Because the general line was that prophecy had died with the last of the biblical prophets and would not return until the Messiah.
Q It sounds as if the kabbalists were almost spiritual anarchists, upsetting the tradition. Did they play this role consciously?
A They were really wrestling with the rationalists, trying to find a way to bolster the tradition. The kabbalists realized the negative effect that philosophy has had on traditional observance, in terms of peoples’ commitment to tradition. In Spain, especially, the philosophy of rationalism was starting to filter down to the masses and people were starting to neglect tradition.
Philosophy makes everything abstract and relative. The ideas expressed did undermine observance among certain circles. Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed” was actually burned because it was seen as dangerous. It made God too abstract. The kabbalists say this explicitly: People can’t touch or feel that kind of divinity.
Q Let me read one 13th century passage from your book: “When sexual union is for the sake of heaven, there is nothing as holy or pure. The union of man and woman, when it is right, is the secret of civilization. Thereby, one becomes a partner with God in the act of Creation.” That’s pretty heady stuff.
A Sexual union is seen as imitating the divine and, at the same time, contributing to divine union. True sexual union, if done with right intention, brings about the divine union; through your union below you join together the divine lovers above.
It’s telling people to “Be careful how you relate sexually, because you’re having an effect on the upper world.”
But it’s also true of all the teachings. What you do below has its effects above. So the human being becomes integrated with the cosmos, and every action you perform has a cosmological effect. You’re either contributing to the union of divine lovers or splitting them apart. It’s very grounded in the material world, it’s a holistic spirituality. Through being in the physical world you can experience the divine.
Q Much of this is reminiscent of insights from other traditions. The connections between all the mystical traditions are so powerful.
A Most significant is the Buddhist notion of emptiness. You can compare it with the Kabbalist notion of nothingness.…They’re roughly the same. St. John of the Cross calls God “nada,” or nothing; Meister Eckhart calls God “niht” or “nihil.”
You know, the West was totally unaware of the number zero, mathematically, until the Arabs brought it from India. It only becomes popular among mathematicians in the 12th or 13th century, and then it takes hundreds of years before regular Europeans would have anything to do with it. And that happens at the same time that the spiritual notion of nothingness is being introduced in Europe. Those dates are approximate, but basically the mystics and mathematicians are discovering the wonder of nothingness at about the same time.
Q One of the claims of the kabbalists was that their teachings derived from the Garden of Eden. They say that Adam was shown the Tree of Life and chose only to show reverence to one aspect of God, the Shekhinah, the feminine divine presence. Instead of looking at the whole, as the kabbalists did, he splintered it.
A The question becomes, What was Adam’s sin? He focused solely on one aspect of God, instead of combining the aspects. One of my favorite questions from the Zohar (the so-called “Bible of Kabbalah”) is, “Who divorced whom?”
Who threw whom out of the garden? Did God throw out Adam, or… did Adam throw out God? In a sense, we’re still in the garden, but we’ve lost our connection with God.
Copyright 1995 San Jose Mercury News
