KABBALAH "EXPERT" INTERVIEW: Rabbi Yehuda Berg, associate director for communications of The Kabbalah Centres, interacts with readers of USA Today. A few thoughts on this.

1. Rabbi Berg's ideas are pretty much unobjectionable in themselves � they mostly consist of moral platitudes that most people would agree with � and I imagine following his principles does some people a lot of good. Still, his New Age Kabbalah has almost nothing to do with traditional Kabbalah.

2. This doesn't bother me quite as much as you might expect. Massive revision of an ancient tradition is nothing new. Moses de Leon radically reinterpreted rabbinic Judaism when he wrote the Zohar � although he did keep it Jewish and halakhic � and he came up with something of lasting interest and value. The Apostle Paul may be a better historical analogy: he went further and dispensed with both Jewish ethnic identity and halakhah in his � soon very successful � new religion. I rather doubt that New Age Kabbalah will have the staying power of either Paul or Moses de Leon, but we'll see. Rabbi Berg is also clearly trying to make money from his Kabbalah, but, then, so was Moses de Leon.

3. Rabbi Berg makes some preposterous historical claims: Kabbalah was written by Abraham 4000 years ago; Plato, Jesus, and Muhammad were Kabbalists. Again, one can point out that Moses de Leon did the same: he had Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai and other Tannaitic rabbis teaching Medieval Platonistic ideas in Medieval Aramaic. But the world has moved on since then and I would like to think that we expect religious teachers these days to be responsible in the history they teach. Maybe that's being naive. But for me, if someone gets it wrong in areas I know about, I'm not going to trust them to tell me about things I don't know about, let alone about cosmic truth.

4. The thing that really does bother me about the new Kabbalah � something that is a major departure from the tradition � is its superficiality. Moses de Leon was tremendously learned and he produced a mystical canon that has exercised some of the most brilliant Jewish (and other) minds for many centuries. The superficial New Age platitudes of the new Kabbalah, harmless and perhaps even helpful in themselves, stand in tremendous contrast to the learned complexity of traditional Kabbalah. Although the idea of Kabbalah for the masses is appealing in principle, it really should have something to do with the teachings you actually find in traditional Kabbalah.

5. I think it is very misleading for USA Today to present this piece as an interview with a "Kabbalah expert." Rabbi Berg is doing his own thing, which is fine, but people who don't know better, and most people don't, are going to take his comments to be representing traditional Kabbalah, and they most certainly do not. Why couldn't USA Today have gotten, say, Daniel Matt, who is a high-profile scholar who really is an expert on Kabbalah? Sigh.

If you want to learn about traditional Kabbalah, here are some bibliographical resources:

Joseph Dan, Ronald C. Kiener, Moshe Idel, The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist, 1986). Excerpts from pre-Zoharic Kabbalistic texts, along with a useful, user-friendly introduction.

Daniel Chanan Matt, Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist, 1983). Excerpts and introduction, both by Matt himself.

Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (3rd ed.; New York: Schocken, 1954). Now out of date, but still very useful and reasonably user-friendly.

There are also, of course, the first two volumes of Matt's Zohar translation and commentary, but these are more oriented toward specialists.

For pre-Kabbalistic Jewish mysticism (Merkavah Mysticism or Hekhalot Literature) see:

Peter Sch�fer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Jewish Mysticism (Albany, N. Y.: SUNY, 1992). Excellent introduction, accessible to nonspecialists, but not available on Amazon, so I take it to be out of print.

Also (shameless self-promotion alert):

James R. Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2001). A scholarly monograph presenting a particular interpretation of the Hekhalot literature, but should also be helpful as an introduction and overview for serious nonspecialists. Very expensive (sorry).

ZOHAR TRANSLATION WATCH: Somehow I missed this Chicago Tribune article on Daniel Matt's ongoing new translation of the Zohar, but it's reprinted by the Fort Wayne News Sentinel. It is very long and not only tells about the project, it gives a fascinating profile of Margot Pritzker, its patron, and a good overview of the scholarly study of the Zohar. A definite Read It All.

Heiress sponsors scholar translating ancient Jewish text

BY RON GROSSMAN

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - (KRT) - Every weekday morning, Daniel Matt turns on his computer, stares at the tree-lined slopes outside his study window and waits for the words to come with which to describe the indescribable.

It is a routine he is pledged to maintain for the next 15 years or so, thanks to what has to be every scholar's dream come true: a wealthy patron, Margot Pritzker, who has freed him from the grunt work of the academic life. He has no more blue books to grade, and he no longer sits through endless faculty meetings at the Graduate Theological Union, whose campus lies just below Matt's home in the hills of Berkeley, Calif.

Now his sole responsibility is to convey the insights of a medieval Jewish mystic who wrestled with a truly heavyweight problem, a paradox that has troubled believers of many faiths: How can the limited human intellect possibly grasp the infinite nature of God?

Even the automobile parked in Matt's driveway bears witness to his single-minded focus on the question. Its license plate reads ZOHAR.

That is the title of a sprawling, multivolume work by long-ago author Moses ben Shem Tov de Leon, whose doctrines shaped Kabbalah, Judaism's mystical tradition. Such are the vagaries of history that a knockoff version of Moses de Leon's ideas is currently faddish in Hollywood, with Madonna and Dolly Parton announcing themselves disciples of Kabbalah.

Yet though the range of its influence runs from the pious to the trendy, there was no adequate English translation of the Zohar before Matt's long-awaited version. The first two volumes have just been published to choruses of scholarly praise. "Masterful," gushed Elie Wiesel. "Superbly fashioned," added Harold Bloom, America's veritable dean of literary studies.

Still, when the cheering dies down, that will leave Matt with 10 volumes to go. "On a good day," he says, "I can do 20 lines."

[...]

Taking the rabbi's suggestion to heart, Pritzker not only studied alongside her son, she kept at it afterward. She learned Hebrew and, over the years, she and Poupko worked through the Torah and read Midrash, the ancient rabbis' biblical commentaries.

"One day, Margot asked if there was a mystical tradition in Judaism and could we study some," recalls Poupko, whose current title is Judaic scholar, Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. "I said yes, but there's a problem."

The problem was that the Zohar wasn't written in Hebrew but Aramaic, a related but distinct Semitic language from antiquity. By general consensus, the existing English version, more a paraphrase than a translation, didn't begin to capture Moses de Leon's voice. Wooden where it should be poetic, that earlier version was marred by a prudish toning-down of the sensual images he employed to convey his understanding of the Almighty.

For instance, Matt's translation renders one such passage with language intended to preserve the erotic quality of the Zohar's word picture:

"When He flings and streams seed, He does not woo the female, since She abides with Him."

The earlier version, made in England in the 1930s and known as the Soncino edition, says merely:

"When the seed flows forward, He does not court the Female."

Pritzker resolved to sponsor a fresh translation of the Zohar that was more faithful to the spirit of the original. Poupko consulted scholars in the field and the nearly universal verdict was that Matt was the only one for the job.

"He has the voice of a poet, the soul of a mystic and the intellect of a computer geek," Poupko says. The latter virtue enables Matt to toggle back and forth as he translates, comparing obscure terms in the Zohar with a huge database of Jewish religious literature he has downloaded.

[...]

"HOW KABBALAH IS LIKE BRAIN SURGERY." David Klinghoffer reviews Daniel C. Matt's new translation of the Zohar for Beliefnet. (For another review, go here.) Excerpt:

Reading along, you get the strong impression that either this stuff is meaningless rubbish, or it was not meant for popular consumption but rather conveys ideas too profound to be understood by amateurs, in language that is appropriately obscure given the unfathomable depth of the subject matter. The latter is the view that Jews who know something about Judaism have historically taken.

It's like brain surgery. Someone who tells you he wants to start cracking open skulls to fix the brains inside but who hasn't yet cracked open a book of anatomy is, obviously, either a lunatic or a fool. So when these obscure secrets are seemingly readily available to all who are willing to shell out the 26 bucks for a red string without investing themselves in the basics of Judaism, namely learning and practicing Torah and its commandments, it's obvious this version of Kabbalah lacks authenticity.

To be sure, there are those in the academic world who would dismiss the Zohar itself as a hoax. It purports to be a record of the conversations of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples, yet the book "emerged mysteriously" (in Daniel Matt's diplomatic phrase) more than a thousand years after they lived, in Spain at the close of the 13th century. The venerated 20th�century scholar Gershom Scholem ruled that the work was entirely the product of the imagination and the pen of Rabbi Moses de Leon, who composed it sometime in the decade of the 1280s.

In his fascinating, lucid introduction to the Matt translation, Professor Arthur Green writes that just because the Zohar is "a work of sacred fantasy," that's no reason "to impugn the truth of its insights or the religious profundity of its teachings." But if the Zohar is a hoax, common sense would suggest that that is a very good reason to impugn its truth and profundity. If Shimon ben Yohai did not conceive these teachings on the basis of earlier traditions, if they were just made up by a guy with a lot of imagination, then they are mere opinions, without any special authority.

What seems undeniable is that the Zohar is a mystery. The rest of Moses de Leon's writings are pale, dry, lifeless, where the Zohar is as brilliantly colorful as it is impenetrably obscure. Some later kabbalists offered the view that de Leon was a reincarnation of Shimon ben Yohai. That would explain why, when the spirit of the ancient sage moved him, he could write in Shimon's name without it being a "fantasy" at all.

It is certainly true that kabbalah is a rigorous, demanding discipline that offers its joys only upon the expenditure of significant effort.

The Zohar

ZOHAR WATCH: Print puts the Zohar in reach of the masses. Controversy still surrounds the foundation text of Jewish mysticism, which was first printed in 1558 and written nearly 300 — or 1,400 — years earlier (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz). A nice little summary of the history and reception of the Zohar. Excerpt:

Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Jews during the period of the Second Temple (leading to endless arguments over which language Jesus actually spoke), and the language in the Zohar has been described as an “exalted” form of the language. But based on the form of the Aramaic used, latter-day academics believe de Leon wrote the books himself, which to some detracts from their sacredness and authority.

That hasn’t touched its standing among today’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, which takes its writings with deadly seriousness. It is sometimes quoted in daily life, for instance when raising money for charity. The Zohar has also been used as a source for hexes, and is often wrongly associated with being the source of the infamous “pulsa denura” (“whip of fire”) curse of death. The Zohar mentions the curse, but no more.

Zohar specialists seem to think it's more complicated than Moses de León writing the Zohar all by himself, but they agree that it was produced in his time and he was involved in a central way. For much more on the Zohar, especially Daniel Matt's new edition and English translation of it, see here and links. Also, there's lots more on the pulsa de-nura curse rite here and links, and on the golem tradition (mentioned later in the article) here and links.

ZOHAR TRANSLATION WATCH: Time Magazine has an article on Daniel Matt's project:

Found In Translation
An English version of the Zohar, a guiding text of Jewish mysticism, offers new insights
By DAVID VAN BIEMA/BERKELEY

Monday, Apr. 19, 2004
The road winds like a Talmudic discourse, first one way and then another, up toward Daniel Matt's home in the Berkeley, Calif., hills. "There's a more direct route that my wife likes," admits Matt, 53. "But I find this one more interesting."

That's not surprising. Matt is embarked on a solo journey through one of the most influential � and maddeningly difficult � works in the history of religious literature. After six years of his labor, Stanford University Press has published the first two books of his translation of the Zohar, the wellspring of Jewish mysticism, or Cabala. He will do nine more volumes, all rendered from the Zohar's original Aramaic. The work has received ecstatic advance reviews ("A superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up the Zohar to the English-speaking world," blurbed lit-crit colossus Harold Bloom), and two weeks ago it won a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for "monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought." Beneath the praise runs an undercurrent of awe that someone was crazy enough to take on the job.

[...]

I'm not sure why the piece is dated next week. It looks pretty accurate overall, although I don't think it's correct to say that Aramaic was "a language Jews had not composed in for centuries" before Moses de Leon.

Also, congratulations to Professor Matt for the award.

THE ZOHAR, volume 1, is reviewed by Jacob Neusner in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpt:

The Zohar, the apex of Jewish mysticism, has been dismissed by modern Jewish scholars, represented by German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz as nonsense, and rehabilitated by Israeli and European experts on Judaism as substantive.

Here the pendulum swings back: the Zohar is at best impenetrable, at worst nonsense. This translation proves that even those who know the text best cannot make it accessible, either in translation or in explanation.

That gives you the flavor of the review. I haven't read the Zohar in Aramaic or seen Matt's translation, so I can't comment on most of Neusner's criticisms. But I don't understand this one:

First, the text that is translated does not exist outside of Matt's own study: "If I could have located a complete, reliable manuscript... this would have provided a starting point." He ignores the standard printed text, but has composed what he calls "a critical text," which is "based on a selection and evaluation of the manuscript readings."

That means his translation correlates only loosely with the available printed versions.

It's standard practice to produce a critical, eclectic text, based on evalution of the manuscripts, when working on an ancient document. Often earlier printed texts of ancient documents are based on late and corrupt manuscripts and reflect the original text very imperfectly. If Neusner has criticisms of the specific critical text Matt has reconstructed, fine, and tell us more, but the concept of a critical text isn't new or controversial. It's the proper way to proceed if the objective is to produce a translation of (the best approximation of) the text that Moses de Leon wrote.

USER-FRIENDLY KABBALAH:

This is outside my usual range, but I feel like commenting on it.

What Is Kabbalah, Anyway? (Slate)
By Ed Finn
Posted Monday, June 2, 2003, at 1:39 PM PT

[�]

Kabbalists have been an accepted part of Jewish culture since the 12th century. Though their mystical beliefs, which focused on the individual's direct communion with God through solitary study, sometimes set them apart from their mainstream coreligionists, many Kabbalists were teachers and judges highly respected by all Jews. The emphasis on secret knowledge and mysticism have also long endeared the study of Kabbalah to occultists of other persuasions, kicking off a Kabbalist fad among gentiles in Renaissance Europe�and giving us words like "cabal." In the United States, Kabbalism made a comeback in the '60s, when it was championed by Philip Berg, an American former rabbi who began studying Kabbalah on a visit to Israel in 1962.

Under Berg's leadership, Kabbalah in America has greatly expanded, spawning centers around the country and recruiting celebrity faithful like Madonna and Monica Lewinsky. Berg's version of Kabbalah dispenses with the traditional requirements of an Orthodox lifestyle and the study of ancient texts. Where traditional Kabbalah emphasizes mysticism as a part of devoted Judaism, Berg's new movement focuses on personal improvement and spiritual happiness, targeted to "people of all faiths and no faiths." Berg's centers draw big crowds for meditation, classes, and philosophical study, and his Kabbalah portal offers Kabbalah 101, a class that takes the "once arcane wisdom of Kabbalah and offers it up as [a] user friendly, accessible, self-study program," for $19.95.

How does this new Kabbalah stack up against the old? Like traditionalists, Berg presents Kabbalah as a way to perceive the inherent order of the universe, the "unseen spiritual laws that govern our lives." The difference is that he simplifies these lessons to make them easily accessible; rather than requiring devotees to learn Hebrew, he publicizes his interpretations of ancient Kabbalist texts nationally in books and speaking engagements. Traditional scholars of the field are careful not to slam the new centers too hard, but the experts do argue that Madonna's new-age spiritualism has little in common with the traditional scholarly mysticism of Jewish Kabbalah.

I've been following this story for some time with interest and a little bemusement. I can't say I find anything particularly objectionable in it. It's true that Berg's new Kabbalah doesn't seem to have a great deal to do with the actual thirteenth-century Zohar and the like. But so what? How much did the Zohar have to do with the actual Simeon ben Yohai and the other second-century rabbis? Nothing, pretty much. It's also true that Berg is making money off it. But, again, so what? Moses de Leon and his friends were out to make a buck too, but they managed to come up with texts that have had enduring spiritual value for a lot of people. It's not for me, but if other people get something out of this new Kabbalah stuff, good for them.

A short history of Hebrew literature

VERY SHORT: A short history of Hebrew literature, from Genesis to Etgar Keret. It's Hebrew Book Week, and the perfect time to glance back at Hebrew writing from biblical times to the post-modernist escapists (Elon Gilad, Haaretz). And not without omission or error. Excerpt:

Apocalypse soon

The Book of Daniel is an early version of the apocalyptic literature that became popular in the last two centuries of the first millennium B.C.E. and the first C.E. This end-of-days theme generally has God destroying the planet, eliminating the wicked and elevating the righteous. The fate of animals in this scenario is generally neglected.

After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in 135 C.E., fond expectations of imminent messianic salvation were tempered by serial false messiahs. Apocalyptic literature gave way to legal writing, codified in the Mishnah by Judah HaNasi in about 220 C.E., and its accompanying Tosafot (addendums). This literature concerns how a Jewish life is to be lived in the here and now: it is practical, not poetic, philosophical or literary.

In addition to these legal halakhic texts, the late classical-early medieval period saw the birth of Midrash, a fanciful interpretation of the Bible, supposedly revealing the texts true hidden meanings. Another form of Hebrew writing to flower in this period is piyut, religious poetry, written in incredibly obscure Hebrew.

With these exceptions, other Jewish writings of this period were written nearly exclusively in Aramaic, which gradually pushed out Hebrew as the language of the Jews. The commentary in the Mishnah, the Talmud and Gemara is almost entirely in Aramaic, not Hebrew.

The Mishnah is mostly in Hebrew, not Aramaic. The addenda to the Mishnah are called the Tosefta, not the Tosafot. The latter are medieval commentaries on the Talmud. Apocalyptic literature continued to be produced and copied by Jews in Hebrew into the Islamic period: for example, the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel, the Apocalypse of Elijah, and the Apocalypse of David. See also on Sefer HaRazim below.

Mystical and magical literature are almost completely ignored in this survey. One would expect more coverage in the section on philosophy:

Philosophy books also began appearing in Hebrew, many in response Maimonides’s "Guide for the Perplexed," which was translated by Samuel ibn Tibbon. The greatest number of Hebrew philosophy books at this time was in the field of ethics, featuring ethical wills written by fathers to sons, explaining how one should live his life. An early example of these is one written by Eliezer of Worms in the 11th century.

This period also gave rise to a great deal of mystical literature, including the famous Zohar, the foundational work of kabbalah, written by Leon of Modena in the 17th century.

The Hebrew magical tractate Sefer HaRazim (the Book of the Mysteries) goes back to the Talmudic period and there are many Hebrew incantation texts recovered from the Cairo Geniza (although many are also in Aramaic or Judeo-Arabic). The pre-Kabbalistic mystical, mostly Hebrew, Hekhalot literature is not mentioned at all. Eliezer of Worms is also well known for his transmission and development of Hebrew (and Aramaic) mystical and magical traditions. And the last paragraph quoted above is quite a howler. The Zohar was published in the thirteenth century by Moses de León in Spain and it is in Aramaic. Leon of Modena debunked the Zohar in the 17th century.

A BOOK ON GIORDANO BRUNO AND KABBALAH is reviewed in the Commentator:

Are Hermes and the Kabbalah Irrelevent?

Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah

By Joshua Harrison

Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Karen Silvia De Leon Jones
University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

The figure of the Renaissance magus looms large at Yeshiva College. Indeed, the very slogan of the school channels the spirit of Egyptian pneumatic magic. Beckoning us to "bring wisdom to life," the new motto conjures an image of a magician, his figure ensconced in dark robes, Picatrix in hand, standing over the moribund YU student and imparting him with the ancient Gnostic wisdom of the Hermetica. Just as the ancient Egyptians brought the celestial powers into their idols, we take the lifeless Modern Orthodox youth and fill them with celestial knowledge!

Scorn is heaped on the pedant by Giordano Bruno. The pedant represents the opposite of the magus. With his emphasis on philology or his willingness to analyze primary texts (like Copernicus), the pedants of the world challenged Bruno, whom Yates calls "the lunatic the lover and the poet." Indeed, the Oxford doctors who so opposed Bruno find piercing arrows of invective hurled at them. While they ponder the true epicycles, Bruno hears the song of the Universe.

Of course, the Isaac Casaubon controversy, in which Casaubon used early philological methods to disprove the authenticity of the Hermetica as received Egyptian wisdom, brought this situation to a head. At least Bruno had the authoritative Hermetica on his side. When Casaubon proved that the Hermetica was a Gnostic text, and not a text that antedated Moses (who cribbed, in the old account, liberally from Hermes Trismegistus!), the later Magi, like Robert Fludd, had to persist in their art in the face of vastly superior critical scholarship.

[...]