The Kabbalah of Tzefat

By :  Eitan Fishbane Professor of Jewish Thought Posted On May 14, 2024 / 5784

• Subscribe to podcast

After the Expulsion from Spain, a mystical revival flourished in Tzefat, building on the fellowship circles that defined groups like the Spanish Kabbalists of previous generations. These communities, which were built on the cultivation of spiritual friendships and master-disciple relationships, developed kabbalistic theology, poetry, ethics, autobiography, halakhah, and more. Elements from this period and place have become well known in contemporary Jewish practice, from the blessings of Kabbalat Shabbat to the notion of reclaiming the divine emanations that shattered with the creation of the world.

Show Notes

Kabbalistic Leaders:

• Joseph Karo (1488 – 1575): Best known as the writer of the Shulhan Arukh, he was also active in Tzefat’s kabbalist circles. He wrote Sefer Magid Meisharim, a personal reflection on his mystical pursuits
• Shlomo Alkabetz: Student of Karo who first documented Tikkun Leil Shavuot, composer of Lekha Dodi.Moshe Cordovero: Student of both Karo and Alkabetz.
• Isaac Luria: Lurianic Kabbalah was documented by his disciples, notably Rabbi Hayyim Vital in Sefer Eitz Hayyim (Book of the Tree of Life) and Sefer Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim (The Gate of Reincarnations)

Connections to Seeing the Unseeable: Kabbalistic Imagery from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary

• Sha’arei Rahamim: printed in 1741 in Salonica, was the first printed prayerbook containing the especially elaborate kavvanot taught by Isaac Luria.
• Adam Kadmon

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring Kabbalah—a JTS podcast with Dr. Eitan Fishbane, professor of Jewish Thought. Throughout this seven-part series, we’ll trace the evolution of Jewish mysticism—from Biblical and Rabbinic times, to the explosive creativity of the Medieval period, to the Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe. Join us for a tour through time and space in which Professor Fishbane provides insight into the thinkers, texts, and concepts that became central not only to the Jewish mystical tradition but to the fabric of Judaism itself. Episode six takes us to Tzefat, the center of Jewish mystical innovation after the expulsion from Spain.

Dr. Eitan Fishbane: Our journey so far has crossed continents and centuries. We pick up our story in the hilltop town of Tzefatin the northern Land of Israel where a mystical revival flourished in the 1500s among a remarkable collection of individuals (many descended from families who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and then Portugal in 1496), involving extraordinary creativity composed of kabbalistic theology, poetry, ethics, autobiography, halakhah, and more.

Modeled after the fellowship circles of the Merkavah mystics and medieval Spanish kabbalists, the cultivation of spiritual friendships and  master-disciple relationships were deep and manifold in 16th Century Tzefat. Mystical practice was rarely a lonely endeavor. The kabbalah of Tzefatwas defined by these social circles, most notably in groups of mystics surrounding Joseph Karo, Moshe Cordovero, and Isaac Luria.

The circle of R. Joseph Karo and his disciples was these groups to thrive in 16th century Tzefat. Though Karo is best known for his work of Jewish law/halakha, the Shulhan Arukh, he also authored a profound mystical diary, Sefer Magid Meisharim, a personal record of his heavenly revelations and alternations between grandiose self-perceptions and anxieties over self-worth. This highly important kabbalistic text reflects mystical experience in its own right and is also part of a larger genre of mystical autobiography that developed in Tzefat. As demonstrated in our exploration of sages like Nachmanides, the Ramban, Karo is both a major rabbinic leader and legal authority who was also a prominent kabbalist.

In addition to his mystical diary, we learn about Karo’s dramatic mystical persona through his disciple, Shlomo Alkabetz. Alkabetz wrote the first account of a Tikkun Leil Shavuot, a ritual innovated by the 16^th Century kabbalists. It was modeled on key texts from the Zohar regarding all-night study as a mystical practice but developed into an elaborate and specific ritual. Alkabetz witnessed Karo in an ecstatic state of communion with Divinity and possession by the heavenly voice of the Mishnah from the upper realm, an extension of the Shekhina, the same voice who speaks to him throughout Sefer Magid Meisharim. Another Tzefatinnovation that influenced contemporary holiday practice is the Tu B’shvat Seder. First appearing in the controversial work Sefer Hemdat Yamim in the late 17^th Century, the ritual and its symbolism are rooted in the Kabbalah developed among the mystics of 16th century Tzefat.

Rabbi Moshe Cordovero followed in this line of prominent thinkers—a student of both Alkabetz and Karo. Cordovero was a hugely prolific and often scholastic kabbalist—one might say the Thomas Aquinas of kabbalistic thought and writing. He authored a massive 24 volume commentary on the Zohar titled Or Yakar; a major tome of kabbalistic metaphysics entitled Pardes Rimmonim (The Orchard of Pomegranates); and many other works.

In addition to his more dense work, Cordovero is particularly notable for his authorship of Sefer Tomer Devorah (The Palm Tree of Deborah), the slim classic of what would come to be known as kabbalistic musar or ethics—The Tomer Devorah discusses the ways in which the ten sefirot ought to be emulated by a person as qualities of ideal character in the individual’s quest to realize be-tzelem Elohim, the idea that they are created in the image of God. A significant passage in this remarkable text is Cordovero’s emphasis on the way in which the human being, like the living organism of the ten sefirot of the One Divinity, must be grounded in compassion, love, and calm.

Perhaps the best-known invention of 16^th century Tzefat was the innovation of such famous and enduring rituals as the Kabbalat Shabbat prayer service on Friday evening. In one vivid text from the period, the devotee is instructed to stand facing the sun, place their hands over their heart/chest, and recite a selection of specific Psalms that eventually became the Kabbalat Shabbat service as we know it today.

To these Psalms were subsequently added the kabbalistically infused hymns. Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, a student of Karo and a teacher of Cordovero, composed Lekha Dodi. The hymn Yedid Nefesh, was written by another kabbalist, ethicist, and poet of this time and place, Rabbi Elazar Azikri. Among the treasures of the JTS  Library is manuscript of Yedid Nefesh  autographed by Azikri himself. Both poemsfocus on how the Shekhinah, the feminine dimension of Divinity, is revealed and greeted on Shabbat; a tradition in the Zohar as well. These poetic hymns have had an enormous influence on the history of Jewish prayer and they are among the most widely known Jewish prayers today.

We now turn to another mystical fellowship circle of 16th century Tzefat, that of Rabbi Isaac Luria, also known by his acronym, the ARI. A kabbalist whose thought and personality changed the course of Kabbalah for centuries to come. He wrote little himself, though among these few writings were his kabbalistic Sabbath table songs specific to the different Sabbath meals which are still chanted today.

Without his core disciples, most dominantly, by R. Hayyim Vital, there would not be a written record of Lurianic Kabbalah,. Among Vital’s most important collections of Lurianic teaching are his Sefer Eitz Hayyim (Book of the Tree of Life), which, among other things, articulates the ARI’s radically innovative mythology of cosmic origins; and Sefer Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim (The Gate of Reincarnations).

Corresponding in large part to these works and others, the major ideas developed in Lurianic Kabbalah are tzimtzum (withdrawal of divine infinity—the divine infinite light, called Or Ein Sof)in order to leave an empty space (the halal ha panui)—albeit one still laced with the film and traces of the sacred light of Infinity—within which the finite world might be created. As the Lurianic mythology goes, after initial attempts to infuse this Infinite Light into an unformed mass, Divine Infinity placed that original All-Pervasive Light into Vessels (keilim) that corresponded to the ten sefirot to give them shape in the gradual founding of the created world.

But that light proved too powerful for its containers, causing a cataclysmic shattering of the vessels (shevirat ha-keilim), and sending the broken shards of those vessels (the kelipot) down to now form the darkness of matter. Those broken vessel shards were believed to contain and cover traces of that infinite holy divine light that God infused into them—they being in fact luminous extensions of the Divine Self scattered into the world into which humanity would ultimately emerge.

In the wake of this shattering the vessels and the scattering of the light, Divinity sought to mend itself, and reconstituted Itself into a form that was called Adam Kadmon (literally “Primordial or Original Man,” though this was understood to be the Super-Human Divine Figure that would be the model for the subsequent creation of the human as Adam ha-Rishon, First man).

Adam originally emerged as a gargantuan body of light. When enormous and luminous Adam sinned, the light of Divinity once again fell into a state of cosmic rupture and disrepair, but that body of light also shattered into countless fragments of light that fell into the kelipot (and Adam was reduced to a normal human size), each radiant fragment of which was understood to be a root-spark for a soul lineage that was to come to be. From this mythic event arose one final core idea of Lurianic Kabbalah that I shall mention here: the doctrine of soul reincarnation (gilgul), an elaborate theory involving an individual, their metaphysical/heavenly origins and a process of rupture and repair (tikun) in the spiritual practice of that person.

Belief in reincarnation and rebirth is perhaps best known to many from the religious traditions of India, but such ideas are found in a variety of religious traditions, including quite prominently in kabbalistic Judaism. The deep presence of this phenomenon in Jewish sources is little known, and is sometimes surprising.

Getting back to the ARI and his fellowship circle, the disciples would come to Luria as a spiritual physician of the soul. They looked to him to diagnose the flaw or wound of their soul and its history (what sins it committed in a previous physical lifetime), and what specific mitzvot among other penitential practices needed to be enacted in order to bring about that personal tikun. For once all the souls, traveling through many physical generations, are properly repaired, the ultimate redemption and restoration of the cosmos—the universe first broken in that primordial catastrophe of shattered vessels—can be attained.  This ongoing work of tikun, repair is the ultimate goal of Lurianic Kabbalah.

In our next episode, we will pick up on the work of these two mystical circles as we move a century forward and travel westward to Poland. Cordavero’s emphasis on the psychologization of the divine metaphysical sefirot, which was central to his work Tomer Devorah. greatly influenced the rise of Hasidism in 18th century Poland and Russia as well as the Musar movement that developed in Poland in the 19th century. Hasidism deeply engaged and built on the Lurianic idea of the Immanence of God, present as sparks of light in the mundane world and the restoration of these sparks to achieve divine perfection.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Exploring Kabbalah with Professor Eitan Fishbane, a JTS podcast. It was recorded and produced by Ellie Gettinger, with editing assistance from Sarah Brown. I’m Rabbi Julia Andelman, JTS’s Director of Community Engagement. The music for this series is Yah Notein Binah by sixteenth-century Kabbalist Israel Najara, from the album Seeds of Song, produced by JTS. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts, where you’ll find sources, archival material, and more in the Exploring Kabbalah show notes—along with the complete library of JTS podcasts.

Meditative Kabbalah

By :  Eitan Fishbane Professor of Jewish Thought Posted On May 7, 2024 / 5784

• Subscribe to podcast

Kabbalah is not limited to the sefirot and the mystical knowledge of the Divine inner self. In this episode, we examine two other focuses of Kabbalah—Prophetic Kabbalah and the Kabbalah of Names. The Kabbalah of Names derives from a form in which different combinations of divine names can be employed to achieve an altered state of consciousness. This consciousness could be employed to find a prophetic mindset.  

SHOW NOTES

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.  

Kabbalistic Leaders 

• Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (1240-1291): a prophetic kabbalist known for his meditative practice using the ineffable Divine Name 
• Rabbi Natan ben Sa’adya Harar: Student of Abraham Abulafia who wrote Sha’arei Tzedek (The Gates of Righteousness) 
• Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel of Akko (late 13th and early 14th centuries): A student of Nachmanides, he combined the Kabbalah of names and prophetic Kabbalah 

Connections to Seeing the Unseeable: Kabbalistic Imagery from the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary

Commentary on Sefer Yetsirah (Abulafia):  

This text is an excerpt of a commentary that Abraham Abulafia  composed to the Sefer Yetzirah, in which he expounded on the numerological significance of the Hebrew alphabet. This passage was preserved in a collection of Abulafia’s writing that was copied by an Ashkenazi scribe four centuries after his death.  

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring Kabbalah—a JTS podcast with Dr. Eitan Fishbane, professor of Jewish Thought. Throughout this seven-part series, we’ll trace the evolution of Jewish mysticism—from Biblical and Rabbinic times, to the explosive creativity of the Medieval period, to the Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe. Join us for a tour through time and space in which Professor Fishbane provides insight into the thinkers, texts, and concepts that became central not only to the Jewish mystical tradition but to the fabric of Judaism itself. In this episode, our fifth of the series, we take a deep dive into Meditative Kabbalah.

The Kabbalah of 13th century Spain—from the fascinating figures and rich texts of Catalonian Kabbalah to the magisterial myth and lyrical theology of the Castilian Zohar—was filled not only with speculations on the nature of Divine Being, but also reflections, direct and indirect, about the nature of mystical experience. This facet of Catalonian and Castilian Kabbalah, often downplayed by earlier generations of academic scholars, has received a surge in attention and exposition by modern Kabbalah scholars since the 1980s.

Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that alongside “theosophic” Kabbalah”—that is, kabbalistic thought that focused on the mystical knowledge of the hidden inner realms of Divine Being and the mythic dynamism of the sefirot—there also developed an equally fascinating stream of thought and writing that was far more explicitly concerned with the practices and experiences of mystical contemplation and meditation. This was described by the kabbalists themselves as the distinction between Kabbalat ha-sefirot (The Kabbalah of the sefirot) and Kabbalah Nevu’it (Prophetic Kabbalah), the latter also often referred to as Kabbalat ha-Sheimot (The Kabbalah of Names). The terms Prophetic Kabbalah and The Kabbalah of Names derive from a form of Kabbalah in which variations, combinations and permutations of the divine names were understood to be practical techniques whereby the devotee employing them might achieve a transformed state of consciousness, characterized as Nevu’it (Prophetic) in mind.

This didn’t necessarily imply the foretelling of events (as is often associated with prophecy), nor did it indicate a host of other characteristics associated with ancient prophecy (such as social critique and so on), but rather depicted a para-normal, heightened state of awareness that was understood to be a revelatory encounter with Divinity. One of the most prominent and prolific kabbalists of the “prophetic” school was one Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (not to be confused with Todros Abulafia who appeared in our last episode) who lived from 1240-1291—dwelling, traveling, and teaching in Spain, Land of Israel, Italy and elsewhere. Abulafia was a highly creative mystic whose confessional and prescriptive practice emphasized the meditation upon, visualization of, and recitation of the enunciated (vocalized) letters and vowels of the ineffable Divine Name. This included various practices of controlled breathing and head movements that bear striking comparison to the Yogic practices of Hindu religious tradition.

One of Abulafia’s disciples (or so it would seem), Rabbi Natan ben Sa’adya Harar, in an autobiographical work known as, Sha’arei Tzedek (the Gates of Righteousness) reflects on this approach. Rabbi Natan describes his lengthy spiritual quest for knowledge and meaning through varied ways of learning, teachers, and physical locations, until he received mentorship from a particularly revered kabbalist (seemingly none other than Abraham Abulafia himself), who gradually taught Natan the secrets of manipulating the sacred divine names through written permutation as techniques to achieve a revelatory state of consciousness. Rabbi Natan ben Sa’adya describes one of these experiences (which he boldly and somewhat irreverently undertakes against the warnings of his mentor) as an event in which the entire room in which he dwelled appeared to be filled and animated by an otherworldly light as a direct causal result of engaging in the powerful meditative practice of extensively writing out the permutations and variations of the names of God with a quill and parchment.

 Another kabbalist who wrote evocatively of the contemplative and experiential dimensions of Kabbalah—and in all probability had direct or indirect contact with Abulafia or his disciples—is especially worth mentioning here, the kabbalist Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel of Akko (late 13th and early 14th centuries). The formative years of Isaac of Akko were spent in the northern Land of Israel (in the port city of Akko!). In that relatively cosmopolitan city (the primary gateway for trade, pilgrimage, and the exchange of ideas of Christian Europeans traveling to the Levant), he was influenced by a number of kabbalistic and other spiritual forces, including Nahmanides and his disciples. One of Isaac’s most important works was actually part of that genre known as beurei sodot ha-Ramban (Clarifications or Meta-commentary on the Commentary on the Torah of the Ramban), which I mentioned in Episode 3. But he also seems to have been shaped by the presence of Islamic and Jewish Sufi mystics and philosophers who were present in Akko at that time, along with others.

After the catastrophic and violent fall of Christian Crusader rule in 1291, Isaac of Akko became a Jewish refugee who wandered from the Levant (the Mediterranean east) through the Jewish centers of Europe, focusing his time learning and adapting traditions in both Catalonia and Castile. While Rabbi Isaac reflected upon having heard mystical teachings from the prominent halakhist Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret in Barcelona, a disciple of the Ramban himself. In his pursuit of mystical truth, Rabbi Isaac went on a quest to encounter the “newly discovered” manuscript of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the Zohar itself.

For our purposes, what is most remarkable about Isaac of Akko is the way which he merged elements of both The Kabbalah of the Sefirot and The Kabbalah of Names to develop a highly contemplative and meditative approach to the sefirot.  This approach centered on prayer, as well as  the uncovering of the divine meaning of sefirotic symbols. For Isaac, these meanings were embedded in the natural world as reflections of the mysteries of the universe. Infinity, itself, opened up to him through the liminality between sleep and waking consciousness. Isaac often reports, in a notable first-person voice no less, his experiences waking from sleep into moments of extraordinary revelation (in one potent case, he describes—not unlike the anecdote described by Natan ben Saadya Harar—waking several times during the night, floating in consciousness in that liminal space of mind between sleep and waking. He was first stirred by the sensory pleasure of a sweet otherworldly light filling his house. This light was mysteriously different from that of the sun, contrasted by his physical awakening at dawn to a climactic awareness of the metaphysical meaning of the Hebrew letter alef, a representation of the stunning and elusive power of Ein-Sof (Infinity) itself.

Other times, clearly in his journeys out of doors, he would pause at the edge of a beautiful garden to reflect on the petals of the wondrous flowers he beheld therein and to interpret these forms as symbolic allusions to the meta-physical realities of the inner-divine sefirot beyond the world. Or he would pause on his outdoor journeys to behold a mountain bathed in twilight blue, tekheilet, leading him to think about the mysteries of the Shekhinah—the lowest of the ten sefirot and the one closest to the human world—who is often referred to by kabbalistic thinkers as tekhelet, blue like the color of the Great Sea into which all the rivers of divine life flow and ultimately converge, in poetic homage to the famous verse from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 1:7):  kol ha nahalim holkhim el ha yam ve ha-yam eineinu malei—“All the rivers run to the sea, and yet the sea is never full.”

Tekhelet, Isaac said in this passage, is also known as Takhlit, Perfection or Completion. This is yet another symbolic name used to refer to the Shekhinah as She gathers in all the energies of upper divine life and overflows like a well of living waters to nourish the worlds below Her. In its Hebrew form, the word Takhlit is only different from the word Tekhelet in its inclusion of the letter yod—תכלית—a playful interpretive correlation that Isaac all but explicitly states indicates the ten sefirot (represented numerologically by the Hebrew letter yod) that flow as the upper divine rivers reaching their completion and perfection in the blue Tekhelet that is Shekhinah, the tenth sefirah that is the Great Ocean of Existence, the convergence point of all the ten sefirot into Oneness, the streaming together of the purest and most ultimate Divine Unity. For the kabbalists, everything in this world is a symbolic allusion to the heavenly realm; the physical is a reflection of the metaphysical.

Throughout this series, we continue to see the ways in which kabbalists engage with ideas and innovate across time and space. In this episode, we explored the personal reflections of those mystics using meditation upon God’s names to create a “prophetic” state of mind. Next time, we will move eastward and jump two hundred years into the future to Tzfat where an extraordinary spiritual and mystical revival took place, one that is still even reflected in our Shabbat liturgy today.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Exploring Kabbalah with Professor Eitan Fishbane, a JTS podcast. It was recorded and produced by Ellie Gettinger, with editing assistance from Sarah Brown. I’m Rabbi Julia Andelman, JTS’s Director of Community Engagement. The music for this series is Yah Notein Binah by sixteenth-century Kabbalist Israel Najara, from the album Seeds of Song, produced by JTS. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts, where you’ll find sources, archival material, and more in the Exploring Kabbalah show notes—along with the complete library of JTS podcasts.