Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic Reflections on Temporality 9004449337, 9789004449336, 9789004449343

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 Timemask and the Telling of Time in the Time of Telling
1 Time’s Linear Circle and Reiteration of the Inimitable
Chapter 2 Linear Circularity/(A)Temporal Poetics
1 Encircled Line: Mythologic of Hebraic Time
2 Alef/Mem/Tau: Time, Truth, Death
3 Timeless Time and the Rotation of the Sefirot
4 Temporal Ontology/Eventful Grammar
5 In this Moment: Engendering Time and Feminine Indeterminacy
6 Phallic Fecundity and the Spatio-Temporal Enshrining of Prayer
7 Day That Is Entirely Long: Temporal In-difference
Chapter 3 Kenotic Overflow, Temporal Transcendence, and Angelic Embodiment in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia
1 Tempus Discretum and the Eternal Return of What Has Never Been
2 Intellectual Conjunction and the Mechanics of Divine Influence
3 In the Blink of an Eye: Time as the Mysterium Coniunctionis
4 Angelomorphic Transformation and Monopsychic Integration
5 Kenotic Expansion, Temporal Delimitation, and Becoming the Nothing-That-Is-All
6 Life of the World to Come: yhwh and the Compresence of Time
Chapter 4 Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality
1 Alef and the Immeasurability of Eternal Time
2 Imagining Time and the Givenness of the Nongiven
3 Return of the Altogether Otherwise
4 Ṣimṣum and the Replication of Difference
Chapter 5 Suffering Time: Maharal’s Influence on Ḥasidic Perspectives on Temporality
1 Time of Suffering in the Suffering of Time
2 Time out of Time: Eternality and the Temporal Transcendence of Temporality
3 Infinity and the Eternity of Time in Ḥasidic Sources
4 Timefully Retrieving Instant beyond Time: Ascesis and Corporeal Worship
Chapter 6 The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse in Naḥman of Bratslav
1 Memory, Mindfulness, and Masculinity
2 Returning Beyond: Recollecting the Future in Anticipation of the Past
3 Perfection of Memory, Rectification of the Phallus, and the Conquest of the Eros of Time
4 Ascetic Renunciation and the Eschatological Triumph over Time
Chapter 7 Malkhut de-Ein Sof and the Temporalization of Space: Ṣimṣum in the Teaching of Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv
1 Time as the Measure of the Immeasurable
2 Temporal Eternity and the Infinite Finitude
3 Kingship of the Infinite and the Demarcation of the Not-Other as Other
4 Sha‘ashu‘a and the Autoerotic Differentiating Indifference
5 Ṣimṣum and the Literalization of the Figurative in the Figuralization of the Literal
6 Temporalization of the Spatial: Timespace as the Fourth Dimension
Chapter 8 Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking
1 Death and the Surplus of Not Yet
2 Waiting for the End of Waiting
3 Messianic Time, Futural Remembering, and Historical Disjointedness
4 Utopian Hope and Disenchantment of the Image
5 Not Yet Now and the Nothingness of the Future
Bibliography
Index
Blank Page

Citation preview

Suffering Time

Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy Edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (University of California, Santa Barbara) Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt) Hartwig Wiedebach (University of Zurich)

volume 30

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​sjjt

Suffering Time Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality

By

Elliot R. Wolfson

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Wolfson, Elliot R., author. Title: Suffering time : philosophical, kabbalistic, and ḥasidic reflections on temporality / by Elliot R. Wolfson. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Supplements to the journal of Jewish thought and philosophy, 1873-9008 ; volume 30 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The conception of time elicited by Wolfson from a host of philosophical and mystical sources-both Jewish and non-Jewish-buttresses the contention that it is precisely structural invariability that engenders interpretive variation. This hermeneutical axiom is justified, in turn, by the presumption regarding the cadence of time as the constant return of what has always been what is yet to be”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001678 (print) | LCCN 2021001679 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004449336 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004449343 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Time. | Time–Religious aspects–Judaism. | Jewish philosophy. Classification: LCC BD638 .W65 2021 (print) | LCC BD638 (ebook) | DDC 115–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001678 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001679

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1873-​9 008 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4933-​6 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 4934-​3 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Elliot R. Wolfson. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

to the one who gifted me with the time where no more was experienced as not yet may the winds of forgetfulness carry us to the shore of remembrance where not yet will be experienced as no more

∵

Absent, présent … Je suis bien seul, Et sombre, ô suave linceul. paul valéry, “La Ceinture”

Fliehe, mein Freund, in deine Einsamkeit und dorthin, wo eine rauhe, starke Luft weht. Nicht ist es dein Loos, Fliegenwedel zu sein.—​ friedrich nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra

A arte é um isolamento. Todo o artista deve buscar isolar os outros, levar-​lhes às almas o desejo de estarem sós. O triunfo supremo de um artista é quando ao ler suas obras o leitor prefere tê-​las e não as ler. fernando pessoa, Livro do desassossego

Now the bonds are broken, but they can be retied By one more journey to the woods, the holes where spirits hide It’s a never ending battle for a peace that’s always torn bob dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”

∵

Contents  Preface ix Timemask and the Telling of Time in the Time of Telling 1 1  1  Time’s Linear Circle and Reiteration of the Inimitable 62 Linear Circularity/​(A)Temporal Poetics 72 2  1  Encircled Line: Mythologic of Hebraic Time 72 2  Alef/​Mem/​Tau: Time, Truth, Death 101 3  Timeless Time and the Rotation of the Sefirot 108 4  Temporal Ontology/​Eventful Grammar 161 5  In this Moment: Engendering Time and Feminine Indeterminacy 177 6  Phallic Fecundity and the Spatio-​Temporal Enshrining of Prayer 195 7  Day That Is Entirely Long: Temporal In-​difference 202 Kenotic Overflow, Temporal Transcendence, and Angelic Embodiment 3  in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia 254 1  Tempus Discretum and the Eternal Return of What Has Never Been 254 2  Intellectual Conjunction and the Mechanics of Divine Influence 259 3  In the Blink of an Eye: Time as the Mysterium Coniunctionis 289 4  Angelomorphic Transformation and Monopsychic Integration 307 5  Kenotic Expansion, Temporal Delimitation, and Becoming the Nothing-​That-​Is-​All 318 6  Life of the World to Come: yhwh and the Compresence of Time 325 Retroactive Not Yet 4  Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality 339 1  Alef and the Immeasurability of Eternal Time 341 2  Imagining Time and the Givenness of the Nongiven 351 3  Return of the Altogether Otherwise 354 4  Ṣimṣum and the Replication of Difference 361 Suffering Time 5  Maharal’s Influence on Ḥasidic Perspectives on Temporality 377 1  Time of Suffering in the Suffering of Time 379

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2  Time out of Time: Eternality and the Temporal Transcendence of Temporality 384 3  Infinity and the Eternity of Time in Ḥasidic Sources 399 4  Timefully Retrieving Instant beyond Time: Ascesis and Corporeal Worship 431 The Cut That Binds 6  Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse in Naḥman of Bratslav 443 1  Memory, Mindfulness, and Masculinity 443 2  Returning Beyond: Recollecting the Future in Anticipation of the Past 452 3  Perfection of Memory, Rectification of the Phallus, and the Conquest of the Eros of Time 468 4  Ascetic Renunciation and the Eschatological Triumph over Time 490  alkhut de-​Ein Sof and the Temporalization of Space 7 M Ṣimṣum in the Teaching of Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv 500 1  Time as the Measure of the Immeasurable 508 2  Temporal Eternity and the Infinite Finitude 513 3  Kingship of the Infinite and the Demarcation of the Not-​Other as Other 521 4  Sha‘ashu‘a and the Autoerotic Differentiating Indifference 530 5  Ṣimṣum and the Literalization of the Figurative in the Figuralization of the Literal 545 6  Temporalization of the Spatial: Timespace as the Fourth Dimension 558 Not Yet Now 8  Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking 575 1  Death and the Surplus of Not Yet 577 2  Waiting for the End of Waiting 592 3  Messianic Time, Futural Remembering, and Historical Disjointedness 608 4  Utopian Hope and Disenchantment of the Image 641 5  Not Yet Now and the Nothingness of the Future 653  Bibliography 659  Index 753

Preface For many living through the covid-​19 pandemic, the normal patterns of spatial orientation have been disrupted by the mandate for social distancing and lockdowns forcing us to stay at home. Additionally, our normal patterns of temporal acclimation have been interrupted. Upon waking it is often difficult to recall the day of the week as minutes blend into minutes, hours into hours, days into days, and weeks into weeks. Perhaps even more telling is a strange sensation whereby time moves both rapidly and sluggishly, not at succeeding intervals but concomitantly. More troubling than this confluence is the lack of a clear sense of a future as the uncertainty of the moment has left many with a crippling inability to chart the way forward. If it is the case, to paraphrase Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian Futurist poet and playwright, that the homeland of creation is the future, then it is understandable that in the absence of futurity, summoning the creative muses has been particularly challenging. In March 2020, as I was confined to my home, I decided to gather together several of my scholarly essays on the nature of time as a way of dealing with the temporal displacement. In addition to revising the older studies, I have written a new chapter that serves as an introduction to the collection. The decision to republish some of my studies has afforded me the opportunity to correct the previously published versions. Discovering mistakes in these publications has been a humbling experience and only demonstrates that despite the sage and eminently practical advice offered by Leonard Cohen, “Forget your perfect offering /​There is a crack in everything,” one still desires and hopes that one’s offering will be perfect. Alas, this yearning for perfection may be my greatest imperfection. But beyond the opportunity to correct my errors, the rewriting of my studies performs one of the key ideas that has informed my understanding of the curvature of time: we approach the future in the present by reverting to the past where we have never been. Having been exposed to rabbinic patterns of thinking since early childhood, long before any academic crossed my path, I was deeply impacted by the principle that repetition facilitates novelty and that multivocality is a species of uniformity. These truisms were as natural to the environment in which I was raised as the oxygen that I breathed to sustain my physical wellbeing. As I advanced on my own philosophical journey, I came to appreciate that the hermeneutic underlying these claims is emmeshed with understanding time as the perpetual retrieval of what has never been, the saying again of what is always left unsaid in what is spoken. In several of the studies included in this compilation as well as other publications, I have emphasized that the temporal

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assumption to which rabbinic sages and later kabbalists were beholden is that the old may be envisioned as new to the extent that the new may be envisioned as old. The chain of tradition is constituted by limitlessly distended moments, which should not be envisaged mathematically as spatially discrete points strung together and unified by an internal time consciousness, but rather as the mythopoeic instantiations of an infinitely protracted torrent that implements the eternal recurrence of the same, which is to say, the indefatigable duplication of difference. To capture this sense of the timeswerve, I have coined the expressions linear circularity or circular linearity to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle. The attempt to criticize my work by reductively labeling it monolithic, monochromatic, essentialist, and lacking historical contextualization, is a colossal failure to grasp my contention that it is precisely structural invariability that engenders interpretive variation. This hermeneutical axiom, which has informed my scholarship, is justified, in turn, by the presumption regarding the cadence of time as the constant return of what has always been what is yet to be. I trust by bringing these pieces together I will have created an original orchard of speculation to which future readers are invited to enter and to drink of the waters of wisdom streaming from the philosophical and the mystical sources cited and discussed therein. I do not know if this will be my last monograph, but these arresting words of Fernando Pessoa hover over me at this unusual moment in time as I reflect on the sacrifices and choices I have made in the service of my life’s vocation, “I pick the petals off lost glories in the gardens of inner pomp and, past dreamed box hedges, I clatter down dreamed paths leading to the Obscure” (Desfolho apoteoses nos jardins das pompas interiores e entre buxos de sonho piso, com uma sonoridade dura, as áleas que conduzem a Confuso). I conclude by sharing the poem “corona apocalypse,” that I wrote several months ago. I trust it captures something of the uniqueness of the global contagion we have each experienced together but alone: if all were angels crowned as mortals and mortals crowned as beasts and heaven like smoke

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evaporated and earth like garment eviscerated who would take hold of time dissipating in palm of imagination doubling the nothing nothing cannot not be nothing longing for love dissimulating as death lived in balance betwixt shadow of light and light of shadow 21 March 2020

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Timemask and the Telling of Time in the Time of Telling dicimus hæc et audivimus hæc et intelligimur et intellgimus. manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rursus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum. augustine, Confessions 11:22

…

Das Schwerste ist nicht nur, das Selbe zu sagen—​sondern über das Selbe—​das Selbe sagen. Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare

∵ Years ago I began a book on the conjunction of time, truth, and death by reflecting on the expression lifetime, a conjunction that displays a juxtaposition that is elemental to our way of being in the world: what most impresses our thinking about the life that is passing is the passing that is life, a passing that lies at the root of our rootlessness.1 The emplacement of our displacement ensues from the fact that we are cast inescapably in the mold of temporal beings whose fate it is to assume the mantle of always being in time for the time being. The world of natural experience is not, as William James described the idealist position, nothing more than a “time-​mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality into those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.”2 Or, as he put it elsewhere, “To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an 1 Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 1. 2 William James, “Human Immortality,” in William James: Writings: 1878–​1899, edited by Gerald Myers (New York: Library of America, 1992), p. 1110.

© Elliot R. Wolfson, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449343_002

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absolute unity. Admit plurality, and time may be its form.”3 Rather than viewing time as an illusion or a mask concealing the timelessness of infinite univocity, it is upheld as the sign of finite multivocality. The radical empiricism affirmed by James proffers that “experience as a whole wears the form of a process in time, whereby innumerable particular terms lapse and are superseded by others that follow upon them by transitions which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in content, are themselves experiences, and must in general be accounted at least as real as the terms which they relate.”4 Deviating from James, I would contend that the positing of an infinite does not inevitably entail negating the singular plurality of the plural singularity of being, and hence the opposition of time and timelessness is predicated on a faulty supposition.5 The infinite multiple that I embrace—​informed by my study of kabbalah—​affirms the being of the one that is not-​one, that is, the one that is the concealment manifest as the unmanifest absently present in the present absence of the array of beings in the cosmological chain of the pluriverse. The manifold, accordingly, unmasks the timemask as the medium through which the inapparency of the timeless appears as the indeterminacy of the particular that is always in the process of being determined by the determinacy of the universal. As I have argued previously, unconcealment is not a disrobing of the naked truth but the disposing of the garment in which truth is 3 William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 139 n. 10. 4 William James, “A World of Pure Experience,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1 (1904): 541–​542, reprinted in a slightly emended version in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 31–​32. 5 Compare James, “Human Immortality,” in William James: Writings: 1878–​1899, p. 1125: “It is absurd to suppose, simply because our private power of sympathetic vibration with other lives gives out so soon, that in the heart of infinite being itself there can be such a thing as plethora, or glut, or supersaturation.” A similar criticism can be leveled at the dichotomization of time and timelessness in Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Sarah Richmond (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 196–​197 [L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, édition corrigée avec index par Arlette Elkaïm-​Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 168–​169]: “Either we are—​implicitly and surreptitiously—​temporalizing the timeless or else, if we scrupulously protect its timelessness, time will become a pure human illusion, a dream. Indeed, if time is real, then God has to ‘wait until the sugar melts’; he must be over there, in the future, and yesterday, in the past, in order to work the connection between moments, because it is necessary for him to go and to find them where they are. In this way, God’s pseudo-​timelessness masks other concepts, that of temporal infinity and temporal ubiquity” (emphasis in original). I would counter that timelessness is precisely what discloses the infinity and ubiquity of time, since the timeless is not a property antithetical to time but rather the limitless opening through which the delimited possibility of the temporal is manifest.

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attired, the investiture that masks the mask exposed as the face that unmasks the face. That there is no truth denuded of the vestment of untruth accords with the assumption that the infinite cannot appear except as inapparent, that every configuration of the imageless is an imaginal disfiguration of the image. Epistemologically, truth is not visible unless it is enveloped in the veil of invisibility.6 Time, I submit, is precisely the veil through which the unveiling is veiled as the veiling of the unveiled. It is customary to say of one who has died that his or her time has come. Eliciting the philosophical implication of this seemingly banal expression, Martin Heidegger wrote, “Time and the temporal mean what is perishable, what passes away in the course of time.”7 To speak colloquially of the demise of the body as the coming of one’s time suggests that time is indeed circumscribed by the nonevent that is death. And yet, from the perpetuity of this ephemerality, we may infer that the plight of our being finite is such that the end does not end, transitoriness is not transitory. Explicating Hegel’s postulate in the Wissenschaft der Logik that the indeterminate and immediate being is neither more nor less than nothing, yielding the paradoxical conclusion Pure being and pure nothingness are therefore the same (Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe),8 Jacob Taubes writes, “But nothing [das Nichts] is not 6

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Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 5, 68, 305–​306. A conclusion that resonates with my own position is articulated by Eviatar Shulman, Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 134–​135: “Buddhist meditative experiences … are deeply mediated and constructed. The awareness that satipaṭṭhāna attempts to develop is not neutral, certainly not ‘naked,’ but rather one that has been thoroughly habituated to the Buddhist understanding of truth. Furthermore, the mind in which ‘mindfulness’ has been established is meant to enter jhāna in order to intensify its experience of the truths to which it has become attuned. Thus, the liberating moments said to take place when such an awareness is enhanced by deep meditative samādhi are a unique form of wisdom. This does not mean that Buddhism did not cherish and pursue states of consciousness that are non-​mediated at all, but it does suggest that the central theories of liberation in the Nikāyas should not simply be said to bring practitioners ‘to see things as they really are.’” Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 3; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens [ga 14] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), p. 7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I. Erster Teil: Die objective Logik. Erstes Buch [Werke 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) p. 83; idem, The Science of Logic, translated and edited by George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 59. I would like to take this opportunity to correct an error in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 172. In my exposition of the Hegelian identification of being and nothing, I inadvertently cited a related passage from the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, “Being and nothing are the same” (Sein und Nichts ist dasselbe), in the

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the harmless nonpresence of something; rather, it is the annihilating power of death which puts an end to finitude. Finitude exists, but the truth of finite being is the end of being.”9 I would counter that as the permanent marker of impermanence, death decidedly does not put an end to finitude.10 Indeed, following Heidegger, I would go so far as to say that the ultimate measure of the future is the imperishable perishing that we each must endure in the nonrelational ownmost potentiality of our being-​toward-​death, the possibility of our absolute impossibility, as it were, the constant being-​there as the prospect of not being there, the not-​yet-​no-​longer that is always and already no-​longer-​ not-​yet.11 Death is not primarily confirmation of the existential finitude of

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name of the Wissenschaft der Logik. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830. Erster Teil. Die Wissenschaft der Logik. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen [Werke 8] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 188; idem, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic, translated and edited by Klaus Brinkman and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 140. The text from the Wissenschaft is cited correctly in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 196 n. 312, as is the passage from Hegel’s Enzyklopädie, op. cit., p. 198. On the identity of being and nothing in Hegel and Heidegger, see Dennis J. Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1988), pp. 63–​95. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated with a preface by David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 158 (emphasis in original). Compare Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: Existence and the Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 75: “In despair, not in death, man has come to the end of his possibilities.” And see idem, Systematic Theology, vol. 3: Life and the Spirit: History and the Kingdom of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 320: “Time under the non-​historical dimensions is neither endless nor ending. The question of its beginning cannot be asked (which should deter theology from identifying an assumed beginning of physical time with the symbol of creation). Nor can the question of its end be asked (which should deter theology from identifying an assumed physical end with the symbol of consummation). The end of history is the aim of history, as the word ‘end’ indicates. The end is the fulfilled aim, however this aim may be envisioned. Yet, where there is an end there must be a beginning, the moment in which existence is experienced as unfulfilled and in which the drive toward fulfillment starts. The beginning and the end of time are qualities which belong to historical time essentially and in every moment.” See the fuller explication in the opening section of ch. 8 of this volume, and see the reference to other scholars cited there in n. 1. See also the chapter on death in Eugène Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, translated, with an introduction, by Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 130–​147, esp. 144: “A limit is imposed upon the future, which up until now was composed only of élan and dynamism. I acquire my first knowledge about the future. I know I am going to die. I know I will no longer be. The first fixed point, the first precision, thus penetrates becoming, and this first precision is brought—​a cause for reflection—​not by an affirmation relating either to my own life or to the life of my fellow men but by a

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each person but it is rather the index of the ontological finiteness that generically informs the question of being;12 that is, the phenomenal possibility of existence whence we discern the dialetheic paradox that being is nothing,13 a nothing that denotes not nonbeing, the negation of something positive, but the nullity or emptiness that is the origin of all that comes to be in the intricate interweave of beings that make up the fabric of the world.14 The degeneration of death is not, as Taubes elicited from both Hegel and Heidegger, the final stage of finitude because the absoluteness of the nothingness of death is itself a degeneration that is subject to degeneration.15 Death, on this score, is the eventfulness of the nonevent that makes a phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable nothingness possible.16 As Heidegger put it in Sein und Zeit, when addressing the finitude of primordial temporality (die Endlichkeit der ursprünglichen Zeitlichkeit): The question is not how many things can still occur “in a time that goes on,” or about what kind of a “letting-​come-​toward-​oneself” we can encounter “out of this time,” but about how the coming-​toward-​oneself itself is to be primordially determined as such. Its finitude does not primarily mean a stopping, but is a characteristic of temporalizing itself. The

phenomenon of a negative and destructive character, by death. Death acquires a date; it is the first date, from the phenomenological point of view, that is inscribed on becoming” (emphasis in original). 12 Johannes Achill Niederhauser, “Das Sein zum Tode als Weg aus der Seinsvergessenheit?” Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 43 (2017): 114–​136. See also Lilian Alweiss, “Heidegger and ‘The Concept of Time’,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 117–​132. 13 Sigbert Gebert, “Das Nichts als Sein. Heideggers Verharmlosung des Todes,” Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 42 (2016): 20–​28. See also Susan Anima Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundation of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 167: “In the frame of the identity of Sein and Nichts and of the denial of the subject-​object distinction as the ultimate epistemological relation, the argument that was put forth against Hegel must now be raised against Heidegger. How is cognition at all possible in a system of identity? Is it not doomed to be circular and so ‘vicious’? This is the vulnerable point of all mystical systems that attempt to think beyond the subject-​object relation. Heidegger does not evade the problem but accepts the consequences of the logic of identity and bases his epistemology on the circle” (emphasis in original). 14 For citation and analysis of Heideggerian texts wherein this crucial point is articulated, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 7, 62, 98, 104, 110, 114–​116, 138, 145, 167, 169–​170, 173–​174, 197–​199, 230–​231. 15 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 159. 16 Claude Romano, There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing, translated by Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 177–​212.

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primordial and authentic future is the toward-​oneself, toward oneself, existing as the possibility of an insuperable nullity.17 The truth of finite being cannot herald the end of being because the end cannot end without ending the possibility of being an end. If death is the ultimate signpost of our nullity (Nichtigkeit), and the latter quintessentially betrays the quality of change that is linked to our temporariness, which, as Aristotle argued in the third book of the Physics,18 is continuous and therefore infinitely divisible, then death would encompass its own opposite.19 Simplicius of Cilicia, the sixth-​century Neoplatonist, well captured the seeming absurdity that coming-​ to-​be and ceasing-​to-​be are contrary changes that must be attributed to the same thing, and as a consequence, “while what changes in some way is suited to remain unchanged in a way opposed to the change, it is clear that change will remain unchanged while being a change, which is absurd. Still more absurd is it that it will at once change and remain unchanged; for if what is at rest must exist, like what is ceasing to be, but a change as it is beginning does not yet exist while when it has ceased it no longer exists, but it has its being in changing, if were to change it would clearly change and remain unchanged at once.”20 The implications of the Aristotelian assumption of the infinite divisibility of time and of the body are drawn unequivocally by Moses Maimonides

17

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 65, p. 315 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 330. For an extensive analysis of this Heideggerian topic, see Carol J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, edited by Mark Ralkowski, foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005). See also Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, translated by John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996). 18 Physics 200b, 16–​20, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 342: “Now motion is supposed to belong to the class of things which are continuous; and the infinite presents itself first in the continuous—​that is how it comes about that the account of the infinite is often used in definitions of the continuous; for what is infinitely divisible is continuous.” 19 Compare Aristotle’s argument in On Generation and Corruption 333b 30-​333a 7 against the possibility that the transformation of elements can continue ad infinitum based on the premise that if the elements are infinitely many, an infinite number of contrarieties will belong to each element, and hence all elements will become one. See Aristotle, On Coming-​to-​Be and Passing-​Away: Some comments by Willem J. Verdenius and Jan H. Waszink (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1946), pp. 61–​64. 20 Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 5, translated by J. O. Urmson, notes by Peter Lautner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 54.

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in his discussion of the Kalām belief that the existence of that which is infinite is impossible: But as for what is infinite in potentia or accidentally, the existence of such an infinite has, in some cases, been demonstrated: thus it has been demonstrated that the division of magnitudes to infinity is possible in potentia, and likewise the division of time to infinity. Another case is an object of speculation: namely, the existence of what is infinite by succession. This is what is called the infinite by accident. And it consists in a thing coming to exist after the passing-​away of another thing, the latter’s coming to exist after the passing-​away of a third thing, and so forth to infinity. About this there is an extremely profound speculation. Thus he who claims to have demonstrated the eternity of the world says that time is not finite, and nothing absurd follows necessarily for him therefrom. For as soon as a portion of time is actualized, another portion passes away. Similarly the succession of accidents, which attach themselves to matter, goes on, in his opinion, to infinity, without an absurdity necessarily following for him from this assertion. For the accidents do not all exist simultaneously, but in succession; and the impossibility of this has not been demonstrated.21 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explicate this passage from Maimonides. Suffice it to state that from the standpoint of the quandary that anything subject to becoming what it is not of necessity remains what it was, the seeds for overcoming finitude are contained in the soil of finitude, not by presuming an eternity beyond time but rather by probing the infinitude of the finitude that shows itself, as Heidegger expressed it, in the existential assurance of Dasein that time goes on (geht weiter) to the extent that it keeps passing away (vergeht weiter).22 It is precisely this sense of the “timeliness of time,” in Susan Taubes’s felicitous formulation, that constitutes the Heideggerian understanding of eternity, “Whereby time running around and around, going nowhere, continually generates itself and continually defeats itself.”23 The 21

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:73, p. 212. Regarding this passage, see George Kohler, “Medieval Infinities in Mathematics and the Contribution of Gersonides,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 23 (2006): 100. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 65, p. 315; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 330. 23 Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1952, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), §193, p. 130.

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invocation of Heidegger in this context is to support the larger claim that “the notion of definitiveness”—​arising from the “eschatological Weltanschauung” that is a consequence of the desire for the “victory of reason”—​“shuts our eyes to both of the essential poles of the eternal, its double instantenaity whereby each instant is in eternity and all instants are in eternity; neither a ‘now’ nor an absolute point of beginning or end can be fixed in time.” The depiction of eternity as the timeliness of time is set in contrast to “Christian time,” which is described as “a monster made on the model of the finite human will, taken as ‘infinite’.”24 It may very well be, paraphrasing another passage from Hegel, that the hour of birth is the hour of death, which is to say, the in-​itselfness (Insichsein) of that which is finite consists of the inevitability of its not being in itself.25 Here we would do well to recall the negative assessment of time in the conflict between the pure conceptuality of spirit and the fluctuation of temporality accentuated in the notorious passage from the concluding section of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes: Time is the concept itself that is there [da ist] and is represented to consciousness as empty intuition. Consequently, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time as long as it does not grasp its pure concept, which is to say, as long as it does not erase time. Time is the pure self externally intuited by the self but not grasped by the self; it is only the intuited concept. As this concept grasps itself, it sublates its temporal form [Zeitform], conceptually comprehends the intuiting, and is conceptually comprehended and conceptually comprehending intuiting.—​ Time thus appears as the destiny and necessity of spirit that is not yet completed within itself.—​It appears as the necessity to enrich the participation self-​consciousness has in consciousness and to set into motion the immediacy of the in-​itself [Unmittelbarkeit des Ansich]—​the form in which the substance is in consciousness—​or, conversely, if the in-​itself is

24

Ibid. While I understand the effort here to contrast the Heideggerian notion of eternity and the Christian sense of temporality, it should be noted that it is likely that Heidegger’s view has its roots in his youthful theological training and his understanding of the parousia in Christian soteriology—​derived exegetically from Paul—​as the “enactment of life,” which gives rise to the redeemed life lived in the temporal interval that cannot be measured or calibrated objectively. See below at nn. 55–​56. 25 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, p. 140; idem, The Science of Logic, p. 101.

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taken as inwardness, it is to realize and to reveal what is at first inward, or vindicate it for spirit’s certainty of itself.26 The inexorable quality of the temporal as the indicator of the fleeting nature of our lot to become relentlessly what we are not underscores Heidegger’s observation that “Hegel occasionally speaks about having been [Gewesensein], but never about the future [Zukunft]. This accords with his view of the past as the decisive character of time: It is a fading away, something transitory and always bygone [sie est das Vergehen und das Vergängliche, immer Vergangene]. Consequently, we find here an orientation toward time and the past which reveals—​in a different and indeed thoroughly radical way—​a ‘crossroad’ [der ‘Kreuzweg’].”27 The moment we are born, we are in the process of dying. Indeed, the birth canal itself may be compared symbolically to the valley of death. The same logic, however, induces its own reversal: the time of death is the time of birth. By this I do not mean to invoke belief in postmortem existence, resurrection, or reincarnation. What I intend rather is that mortality is lodged in the core of natality; the inception of life is already a gesture of expiration whence we may infer a rudimentary axiom about the nature of time: perdurance consists of passing away.28 What is the same in the propulsion of time is the fact that nothing is the same; each moment cuts the timeline in such a way that each moment is identical in virtue of being nonidentical. The nature of temporal diremption is well captured by Françoise Dastur, who writes about the “transitional character” of time and “its non-​being or non-​essence.” The “structural eventuality of time” implies that “time is in itself what brings contingency, unpredictability, and chance into the world.”29 Building in some measure on the Heideggerian notion of time as ekstasis and the Levinasian conception of diachrony, Dastur conjectures: 26

27

28 29

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated and edited by Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 461–​462 (emphasis in original); idem, Phänomenologie des Geistes [Werke 3] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 584–​585. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 82; idem, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes [ga 32] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), p. 116. For a nuanced discussion of Hegel’s speculation on time, which in no small measure is a response to Heidegger, see Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, translated by Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005). See the Heideggerian interpretation of the meaning of time and the aporias of birth in Romano, There Is, pp. 39–​49. Françoise Dastur, “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,” Hypatia 15 (2000): 179.

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The event in the strong sense of the word is therefore always a surprise, something which takes possession of us in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us toward an unanticipated future. The eventum, which arises in the becoming, constitutes something which is irremediably excessive in comparison to the usual representation of time as flow. It appears as something that dislocates time and gives a new form to it, something that puts the flow of time out of joint and changes its direction. … For the event, as such, is upsetting. It does not integrate itself as a specific moment in the flow of time. … It does not happen in a world—​it is, on the contrary, as if a new world opens up through its happening. The event constitutes the critical moment of temporality—​a critical moment which nevertheless allows the continuity of time. … Against all expectation, even if it has been partially expected and anticipated, such is in fact the “essence” of the event. Based on this we could say without paradox that it is an “impossible possible.” The event, in its internal contradiction, is the impossible which happens, in spite of everything, in a terrifying or marvelous manner. It always comes to us by surprise, or from that side whence, precisely, it was not expected.30 Time, according to Dastur’s recalibration of Heidegger’s phenomenological chronology,31 is the “impossible possible,” the event that cannot occur in the temporal flow we ascribe to the world but which nonetheless is the very condition that accounts for our experience of the continuity of time in the world.32

30 31

32

Ibid., pp. 182–​183. For an elaboration of this approach, see Françoise Dastur, Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-​logy, translated by Edward Bullard (London: Athlone, 2000). See the summary of the author’s method on p. 15: “Not the programmatic presentation, in a negative sense, of an impossible discipline, but the sketch of what could, in a novel sense, be a ‘logic’ of temporality. For such a chronology does not permit programming or projecting in a transcendental sense, in no way does it consist in the inscription of determined limits. It is, on the contrary, destined in its essence to the unfulfillment and the inchoativity that Merleau-​Ponty recognised as inevitable for the ‘movement’, rather than doctrine or system, that was phenomenology. This is why, as with the latter, only a sketch [l’esquisse] is appropriate, which is to say, in its literal sense, improvisation. Improvising is letting time ‘happen’, trusting the favour of the ‘moment’, but also facing the unexpected and the risk of failure” (emphasis in original). The widespread image of time as a stream is deconstructed by Huw Price, “The Flow of Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, edited by Craig Callender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 276–​311. See also the neural analysis of this metaphor by Niko A. Busch and Rufin VanRullen, “Is Visual Perception Like a Continuous Flow or a Series of Snapshots?” in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology,

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The diremptive conception implied here undermines the coherence of the narratological framework—​the gesticulation of telling time—​that demarcates the lifespan of the person proceeding sequentially from birth to death insofar as our temporal experience is anchored always in the present on account of which meaning is both imparted to and withdrawn from past and future.33 In contrast to the doctrine of presentism, that is, the conviction that everything is present or that only that which is present exists,34 phenomenological chronology presumes that what ensures presence is the absence of being present. The fate of finite thought is “ceaselessly wending its way” and thus “must content itself with ephemeral shelter.”35 Every now may be compared to a flash of lightning insofar as it is a single and transient event that is identically different in virtue of being differently identical. Our experience of temporal passage, consequently, is minimally real precisely because the time that ostensibly passes therein is maximally unreal.36 While I am sympathetic to Dastur’s approach, I would counter that her notion of the instant—​discontinuous with time and hence responsible for continuity in time—​is subject to the reproach of James, based in part on the and Neuroscience of Temporality, edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2014), pp. 161–​178. 33 It is worth recalling here the preferred status accorded the present as the basic structure of temporality and consciousness in George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Open Court, 1932). 34 See the survey by M. Joshua Mozersky, “Presentism,” in The Oxford Handbook, pp. 122–​144, and the detailed study by Dean Zimmerman, “Presentism and the Space-​Time Manifold,” op. cit., pp. 163–​244. The perspective of presentism is well formulated by Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3: Life and the Spirit, p. 316: “In spite of the continuity of the time-​flux, every discernible moment of time in a physical process excludes the preceding and the following moments. A drop of water running down the riverbed is here in this moment and there in the next, and nothing unites the two moments. It is this character of time which makes the after-​each-​other-​ness of temporality exclusive.” Tillich goes on to say that this sense of exclusiveness is broken when time is viewed through the dimension of biological participation: “The space of a tree is not the space of an aggregate of unconnected inorganic parts but the space of a unity of interdependent elements. … The distance between roots and leaves does not have the quality of exclusiveness. In the same way the exclusive after-​each-​other-​ness of temporality is broken by the participation of the stages of growth within each other; in the present now, the past and the future are effective. And only here do the modes of time become actual and qualify reality. In the young tree, the old tree is included as ‘not yet,’ and conversely, the young tree is included in the old as ‘no longer.’ The immanence of all the stages of growth in every stage of growth of a living being overcomes temporal exclusiveness.” 35 Dastur, Telling Time, p. 16. 36 For discussion of this conceptual problem, see Barry Dainton, “Time, Passage, and Immediate Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook, pp. 382–​419.

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assessment of James Mill, that if all we had was the present, then we would be incapable of acquiring experience or knowledge. Consciousness would be “a string of bead-​like sensations and images,” or a “glow-​worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness.”37 The more accurate account of consciousness and the sensation of time implied thereby is thus summarized by James, “The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.”38 To presume that the present is a simple sensation is an abstraction of what is, in fact, a complex phenomenon, a complexity that reverberates the portending of the past and portends the reverberating of the future. Each moment in the stream of thought carries “the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and the prospective sense of time.”39 Time-​ duration is dependent on the simultaneity of the three tenses in the empirically present moment but in that moment there is no definitive sequence that delineates what is anterior and what is posterior. To elucidate his point of view, James cites the following passage from Shadworth H. Hodgson, the British philosopher whose reflections on time-​consciousness influenced both his psychology and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl:40

37 38 39

40

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 570–​571. Ibid., p. 571 (emphasis in original). Ibid. It is possible that James’s anchoring of time in consciousness is the object of the following lines in “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets in Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 181: “Time past and time future /​Allow but a little consciousness. /​To be conscious is not to be in time /​But only in time can the moment in the rose-​garden, /​The moment in the arbour where the rain beat /​The moment in the draughty church at smokefall /​Be remembered; involved with past and future. /​Only through time time is conquered.” See Holly K. Andersen and Rick Grush, “A Brief History of Time-​Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 277–​307; Holly K. Andersen, “The Hodgsonian Account of Temporal Experience,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, edited by Ian Phillips (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 69–​81, esp. 78–​80. See also Stuart Spicker, “Shadworth Hodgson’s Reduction as an Anticipation of Husserl’s Phenomenological Psychology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1971): 57–​73, and Karl Schuhmann, “Husserl and Hodgson: Some Historical Remarks,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3 (1972): 63–​65. On the possibility that Hodgson’s method of reflection anticipated Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and served as the basis for James’s commitment to perceptual realism, see Richard P. High, “Shadworth Hodgson and William James’s Formulation of Space Perception: Phenomenology and Perceptual Realism,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): 466–​485.

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A former and a later are included in the minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the course of time into Past, Present, and Future; but, strictly speaking, there is no Present; it is composed of Past and Future divided by an indivisible point or instant. That instant, or time-​point, is the strict present. What we call loosely the Present is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least the minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is the present time-​point.41 James appropriated from Hodgson the hypothesis that what we actually experience is always the content of a present moment of experience, an empirical present that is to be distinguished from an abstract mathematical moment of time, which, like a mathematical point of space, has no content. In diagramming the stream of consciousness horizontally—​aligned with and illumined by the phrase the pack of cards is on the table—​we can speak of time-​parts, the vertical sections of the segment, but these parts are not divided atomistically as detached points on the timeline. On the contrary, the time-​parts morph into “a thought of the whole object. … They melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be found corresponding to the object’s parts.”42 From the factical temporality of the actual experience of an empirical present, we may infer that we have had such experiences of a continuous discontinuum—​ that is, a totality made up of affiliated but noncorresponding parts43—​in the past and that we shall have such experiences in the future.44 41

Shadworth H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878), pp. 252–​253 (emphasis in original), cited by James, The Principles, p. 572 n.2. On the empirical present in Hodgson’s account of experience, see Andersen, “The Hodgsonian Account,” pp. 72–​78. 42 James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, p. 269. 43 William James, “Novelty and the Infinite,” in William James: Writings 1902–​1910, edited by Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1077: “The contrast between discontinuity and continuity now confronts us in another form. The mathematical definition of continuous quantity as ‘that between any two elements or terms of which there is another term’ is directly opposed to the more empirical or perceptual notion that anything is continuous when its parts appear as immediate next neighbors, with absolutely nothing between.” 44 Shadworth H. Hodgson, The Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), p. 35: “Now it is clear in the first place, that whatever we are actually experiencing is always the content of a present moment of experience, which may be called

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Perhaps even more pertinent is Heidegger’s notion of the equiprimordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit) of the three ecstasies of time as opposed to the accumulation and sequence (Anhäufung und Abfolge) of allegedly disjointed atomized units, a portrayal that entails the spatialization of time.45 The deeper phenomenology of time (Temporalität)—​the hermeneutical condition of the possibility of the understanding of being as the ontological constitution of Dasein46—​discards the serial approach and posits in its place a timeline that

45

46

the empirical present, in order to distinguish it from an abstract mathematical moment of time, which, like a mathematical point of space, has in itself no content at all. We have no actual experience which is not included in the content of the empirical present moment, though we may infer from this content, that we have had such and such experiences actually in the past, or shall have such and such experiences actually in the future, or should or might actually have such and such experiences in such and such other imagined circumstances.” See the passage from Husserl cited below at n. 62. The spatial conception of time rejected by Heidegger is epitomized in David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, edited by David Fate Norton and Maty J. Norton, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.2.2, p. 26: “’Tis a property inseparable from time, and which in a manner constitutes its essence, that each of its parts succeeds another, and that none of them, however contiguous, can ever be co-​existent. For the same reason, that the year 1737 cannot concur with the present year 1738, every moment must be distinct from, and posterior or antecedent to another. ’Tis certain then, that time, as it exists, must be compos’d of indivisible moments. For if in time we could never arrive at an end of division, and if each moment, as it succeeds another, were not perfectly single and indivisible, there wou’d be an infinite number of co-​existent moments, or parts of time; which I believe will be allow’d to be an arrant contradiction.” Compare ibid., 2.3.7, p. 275: “Without having recourse to metaphysics, any one may easily observe, that space or extension consists of a number of co-​ existent parts dispos’d in a certain order, and capable of being at once present to the sight or feeling. On the contrary, time or succession, tho’ it consists likewise of parts, never presents to us more than one at once; nor is it possible for any two of them ever to be co-​ existent. … Every part must appear single and alone, nor can regularly have entrance into the fancy without banishing what is suppos’d to have been immediately precedent.” For an incisive analysis of Hume’s empiricist account of time as the appearance of sensations, see Lorne Falkenstein, “Hume on Temporal Experience,” in The Routledge Handbook, pp. 42–​52. On the possibility that Husserl’s phenomenological-​eidetic examination of the flow of the immanent time-​consciousness was inspired by his reading the critique of the philosophy of the ego and the continuity of consciousness in Hume, see Louis N. Sandowsky, “Hume and Husserl: The Problem of the Continuity or Temporalization of Consciousness,” International Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2006): 59–​74. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translation, introduction and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 274–​276; Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie [ga 24] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), pp. 389–​391. Compare the discussion of the temporality of the thinking of being in Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite, pp. 24–​62, and Karin de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel (Albany: State University of New Press, 2000), pp. 79–​113.

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can be reversed on the basis of the presumption that the end is antecedent to the beginning that is consequent to the end.47 Hans-​Jost Frey succinctly captured the subversive repercussion of this reversal, “The arbitrariness of beginning and end, which are impossible to keep a watch on from the inside of the whole, is the whole’s crumbling away at the edges.”48 The interruption of the sequential order is the import of Heidegger’s tautological depiction of the temporalization of temporality (Zeitigung der Zeitlichkeit) in the unity of each temporal ecstasis: Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-​been, and the having-​been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future that makes present, in the process of having-​been [Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich als gewesende-​ gegenwärtigende Zukunft].49 Taking Nietzsche as the exemplar of the thinker who thinks “beings in their Being [das Seiende in seinem Sein],” Heidegger maintained that to think historically, as opposed to historiologically, that is, to think beings in the ecstatic unity of their temporal being, is to discern regarding what is in world history that “what, because it already is, is only coming” (das, was, weil es schon ist, erst kommt).50 The future is clearly privileged in Heidegger’s tempocentrism,51 but 47

See the analysis in Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-​ Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 90–​92. For a similar theme in Rosenzweig’s view of time, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 43–​44, and compare Ricoeur’s comment about Rosenzweig’s idea of temporal narration breaking with all chronology cited on p. 312 n. 78. 48 Hans-​Jost Frey, Interruptions, translated and with an introduction by Georgia Albert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 24. 49 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 68, p. 334 (emphasis in original); Sein und Zeit, p. 350. 50 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 138; Parmenides [ga 54] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), p. 205. 51 Compare Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, translated by Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 211 (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [ga 26] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), p. 273): “Temporality temporalizes itself primarily out of the future. This means that the ecstatic whole of temporality, and hence the unity of horizon, is determined primarily out of the future.” An analogous privileging of futurity is attested in Sartre’s analysis of temporality. For instance, consider the account of the ipseity—​that is, the mode of being of a being that it outside itself—​of the for-​itself in Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 201 (L’être et le néant, p. 172) as “a being that has its being to be [un être qui a à être son être], i.e. as the for-​itself’s internal structure. It is not that the for-​itself has any ontological priority

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we should not lose sight of the fact that the future is so privileged because it makes present that which has been. The future, in other words, epitomizes the compresence of the three ecstasies, which is to be distinguished from the view that the three aspects of time merge or melt into one another as is sometimes argued with respect to the phenomenological texture of the timelessness of the dreamscape experienced as the omnipresent or spacious now.52 The temporal simultaneity experienced in the dream—​a sensibility that undergirds the Jungian conception of synchronicity as the acausal connecting principle, that is, the rupture in time that induces the meaningful coincident occurrences of events that are apparently disconnected53—​does not fit neatly into either

52 53

over temporality. Rather, temporality is the for-​itself’s being in so far as the for-​itself has it ecstatically to be. Temporality is not; rather the for-​itself, in existing, temporalizes itself [La temporalité n’est pas, mais le pour-​soi se temporalise en existant].” Even though Sartre (Being and Nothingness, p. 204; L’être et le néant, p. 174) does emphasize that the present of the for-​itself arises from the original and nihilating relation to the in-​itself as the being that is not consciousness and through this process the absolute of the event of the past is constituted as such, there is still a priority accorded the future inasmuch as the for-​itself is delineated as a being that has its being to be. On the priority accorded the future, see Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 189 (L’être et le néant, p. 162): “In this way the future, as a for-​itself’s future presence to a being, drags the in-​itself into the future with it. This being, to which it will be present, is the meaning of the in-​itself that is co-​present to the present for-​itself, just as the future is the meaning of the for-​itself [le futur est le sens du pour-​soi]. The future is presence to a co-​future being because the for-​itself can exist only outside itself, alongside being, and the future is a future for-​itself. But in this way, through this future, a future arrives in the world, which means the for-​itself is its meaning as presence to a being that is beyond being [comme présence à un être qui est par delà l’être]. Through the for-​itself a ‘beyond’ to being [un par-​delà de l’être] is disclosed, alongside which it has to be what it is. I must, according to the famous phrase, ‘become what I was’ [devenir ce que j’étais], but I must become it within a world that has itself become, and within a world that has become on the basis of what it is” (emphasis in original). The what-​is-​to-​be cannot be severed from what-​has-​been, and indeed the full paradox of the temporal inversion is disclosed by the mandate to become what one was, but since the future is the meaning of the for-​itself, futurity is the locus of the transcendence of the being beyond being. Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 221–​222, 319 n. 42. See the essays “Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle” and “On Synchronicity” included in Carl G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, second edition, translated by R. F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 417–​531, and especially the comments on the “psychic relativity of time,” ibid., p. 433. A useful reader on this topic is Encountering Jung: On Synchronicity and the Paranormal, selected and introduced by Roderick Main (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). The bibliography on this Jungian theme is extensive so my references of necessity will be limited: Ira Progoff, Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny: Noncausal Dimensions of Human Experience (New York: Julian Press, 1973); Marian L. Pauson, Jung the Philosopher: Essays in Jungian Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 31–​43; Mel D. Faber, Synchronicity: C. C. Jung,

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the mold of the punctiform or the extended. The tenor of temporality in the dream state must be imagined from the paradoxical stance of the linear circle or the circular line in which nothing changes because everything changes insofar as there is no thing to change. The memory that coheres in the crease of the dream partakes of the fabric of time stitched through this undoing of time. The activity of dreaming reminds us—​if we care not to forget the remembering that can be remembered only through forgetting the need to remember—​that the moment comes to be periodically in its passing away incessantly, that the durability of the temporal consists precisely in its ephemerality.54 Parenthetically, Heidegger’s equiprimordiality may reflect his youthful interpretation of Pauline eschatology and his notion of the Christian enactment of life (Vollzug des Lebens) that he links experientially to the parousia, which is not the expectation of an event to take place at some fixed point in the future but an appropriation in the present of what happened in the past. The paradox of Christian hope is to believe that the one who is to come is the one who has already come.55 The mandate is to wait for the reappearance of what has appeared by living factically in Christ in the moment (καιρός rendered in German as Augenblick), an “obstinate waiting” that is itself a “transformation before God.”56 The enactment, therefore, in the words of Sean J. McGrath, is Psychoanalysis, and Religion (Westport: Praeger, 1998); Roderick Main, The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (New York: Brunner-​ Routledge, 2004); idem, Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (Albany: State University of New York, 2007). 54 I have taken the liberty to repeat my words in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 228–​229. See also Robert Moss, The Secret History of Dreaming (Novato: New World Library, 2009), pp. xiii, 10, 24, discussed in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 319 n. 42. Compare Thomas More, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino (Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Press, 1990), p. 109. 55 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-​Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 71–​ 73, 81, 83–​84; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens [ga 60] (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), pp. 102–​104, 114, 116–​117. See Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 87–​97, and references to other scholars cited on pp. 229–​230 n. 1. See the elaboration of this topic in ch. 8 of this volume. 56 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, p. 66; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, p. 95. Heidegger’s interpretation of waiting for the second coming as the fulfillment or transformation resonates with the words in “East Coker,” the second of the Four Quartets, in Eliot, The Poems, p. 189: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope /​ For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love /​For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith /​But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. /​Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: /​So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” I am not sure if the last line means that

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“simultaneously a running ahead and a recapitulation. And because it is both of these at once, it is the fullness of a moment that is not separate from what went before and what is yet to come, a now that is constitutively determined by the already/​not yet, a present that is a relation to the future through the past.”57

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darkness will give way to light, and stillness to dancing, or that darkness is the light, and stillness the dancing. I gather that true enlightenment would consist of the latter provided we understand the dialetheic paradox that darkness is the same as light insofar as it is different from light and that stillness is the same as dancing insofar as it is different from dancing. The aforecited passage should be contrasted with the beginning of the poem, in “Burnt Norton,” op. cit., p. 179: “Time present and time past /​Are both perhaps present in time future, /​And time future contained in time past. /​If all time is eternally present /​All time is unredeemable.” Compare ibid., p. 183: “Or say that the end precedes the beginning, /​And the end and the beginning were always there /​Before the beginning and after the end. /​And all is always now.” Eliot seems to be reversing here the traditional idea of the nunc stans in which the fullness of time is experienced in the single moment of eternity rather than as an infinite duration. As an attribute of God, the term signifies an eternal existence outside of time and therefore not subject to change or succession. For Eliot, if time is eternally present such that there is no distinction between the three tenses, then there is no path to redeem time. Consider the lyrical musing of Bob Dylan on the recently released album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), http://​www.bobdylan.com/​ songs/​crossing-​the-​rubicon/​: “What are these dark days I see in this world so badly bent /​ How can I redeem the time—​the time so idly spent /​How much longer can it last—​how long can this go on /​I embraced my love put down my head and I crossed the Rubicon.” Sean J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp. 194–​195 (emphasis in original). The comment of McGrath is cited by Peter S. Dillard, Fate and Faith after Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Eugene: Pickwick, 2020), pp. 34–​35, to support his conclusion, “Unfortunately, the novel view of time that Heidegger detects in the Pauline Epistles by itself does not prevent primitive Christian intensity from transforming into gnawing anxiety over the ongoing non-​occurrence of the parousia. … The longer the post-​resurrection Christ does not return, the more the now of Christian existence becomes constitutively determined by an already of unfulfilled expectation. Furthermore, the fear that the same now will continue to be constituted by a not yet of unfilled expectation grows greater and greater. The upshot is that the now of Christian existence is increasingly determined not by intense excitement in the face of a joyful reunion but by deepening ennui, frustration, and disappointment” (emphasis in original). Dillard’s criticism is psychologically understandable but it imposes on Heidegger’s interpretation of the parousia the objective temporality—​waiting for an event to occur in historical time—​that he considered inappropriate. What I have written about Jewish messianic belief in The Duplicity, pp. 106–​107, can be applied to Heidegger: “the waiting itself is the fulfillment of the expectation, as there is no way to think of the occurrence of the messianic coming but as the occurrence of what cannot occur save in the nonoccurrence of its occurrence. The nonoccurrence in no way effects the belief in the possibility of the eruption of the future; on the contrary, insofar as that eruption cannot transpire in time except as what has not yet transpired, the nonoccurrence is, strictly speaking, what guarantees its occurrence.” See also Burt C. Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of

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Translating the Heideggerian perspective into an idiom of cognitive neuroscience, we can speak of the synchronous coupling of neuronal assemblies coalescing in the presentification of consciousness such that the contours of nowness would be akin to a visual field where the center is peripheral and the periphery central, where retention and protention merge in the duration of what is present in its absence and absent in its presence.58 Lived temporality is not merely a series of now-​points such that the now-​as-​present is lodged between and serves as a bridge to connect the no-​longer-​now and the not-​yet-​now. The function of memory, accordingly, is not primarily to record an allegedly inert past but rather to mold the past into the present expectancy of the future.59 The phenomenological inference concerning temporal pliability and the construction of self-​identity is drawn adroitly from the neuroscientific perspective by Lawrence J. Hatab: We live in a temporal, narrative condition; we experience time as a looping intersection of time dimensions, as a coming to presence out of the future and shaped by the past. The “absences” of the future and past have a presence in anticipation and recollection. In this way human experience is extended into the future and past; it is presently engaged with future possibilities enabled and prompted by past orientations. Temporal extension can address the question of the self’s “identity” through time, though not as some enduring state; the self is its ongoing temporal extension gathered by looping interactions of anticipation and recollection.60 Despite the many differences between Heidegger and Husserl,61 to explain the former’s signature notion of Gleichursprünglichkeit we may avail ourselves

58 59 60 61

the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), pp. 150–​152. See below, n. 61. For an attempt to differentiate the kenotic time of Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology and Husserl’s internal time-​consciousness, see Adam Y. Wells, The Manifest and the Revealed: A Phenomenology of Kenōsis, foreword by Kevin Hart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), pp. 119–​131. Francisco J. Varela, “Present-​Time Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999): 111–​140, esp. 118–​124. Moshe Bar, “The Proactive Brain: Memory for Predictions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 364 (2009): 1235–​1243. Lawrence J. Hatab, Proto-​Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech I (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), p. 54 (emphasis in original). Needless to say, many have analyzed the respective theories of temporality in Husserl and Heidegger, but especially pertinent to my analysis is the following comment of Hopkins, Intentionality, pp. 195–​196: “Hence, for Heidegger, the phenomenal basis for the Husserlian encounter with entities as something present-​at-​hand, is to be found in the ecstatic unity of the modes of existence which make possible Dasein’s (and intentionality’s) ‘movement’

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of the latter’s insight that the wonder of time-​consciousness (die Wunder des Zeitbewuβtseins) discloses itself when we turn to the phenomenon of sound and consider the perception of the perception, that is, when we detect that the “perception of the sound in the perception’s ever new now is not a mere having of the sound, even of the sound in the now-​phase. On the contrary, we find in each now, in addition to the actual physical content, an adumbration [Abschattung], or better: we find a unique sound-​adumbration [Ton-​ Abschattung] that terminates in the actually sensed sound-​now.”62 Reflecting on the nature of sound in particular to comprehend the time-​constituting phenomenon more generally, Husserl argues that there is a “trail of memory that extends the now-​point,” and that “the immanent thing could not be given in its unity at all if the perceptual consciousness did not also encompass, along with the point of actually present sensation, the continuity of fading phases that pertain to the sensations belonging to earlier nows. The past would be nothing for the consciousness belonging to the now if it were not represented in the now; and the now would not be now—​that is, for the perceiving consciousness pertaining to the moment in question—​if it did not stand before me in that consciousness as the limit of a past being.”63 The past persists as re-​presented in the present through the continuity of adumbrations. The adumbration-​ continuity belonging to any now can continue infinitely such that each adumbration is adumbrated in turn, and we thus must speak of “the adumbration of adumbration-​continua [Abschattung von Abschattungskontinuen] that undergo continuous expansion by means of new sensation-​ points [Empfindungspunkte], which are then immediately transmuted into the form of adumbration-​ phases [Abschattungsphasen].”64 Consciousness of sound consists of the consciousness of temporal duration, which stands before the

beyond entities. These modes of existence (which are most emphatically not intentional modes of consciousness, thematically directed toward entities ‘in’ time) are essentially characterized by Heidegger in terms of the ecstatic unity of an awaiting which renders present by having been. It is the phenomena of each of these three ἔκστασις which, by temporalizing themselves in an ecstatic unity from out of the future issued forth from awaiting, yield the phenomenal basis for Dasein’s stretching itself beyond the entities which it initially encounters as dated within time.” 62 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–​1917), translated by John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), § 39, p. 290; idem, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewuβtseins, herausgegeben von Rudolf Bernet (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2013), p. 311. 63 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 39, p. 290 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, pp. 311–​312. 64 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 39, p. 291; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 313.

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person “as an ongoing present over against a continuity of pasts.”65 Central to Husserl’s phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time is the correlation between the unity of apprehension and the unitary object that endures, which is constituted by the retention of the past in the present.66 However, this continuity involves as well the protention of the future in the present, what Husserl calls the double intentionality of the flows of consciousness (Die doppelte Intentionalität der Bewuβtseinsflüsse): The immanent temporal object … is what it is only insofar as during its actually present duration it points ahead to a future and points back to a past. The tone that is now the object of consciousness is intended and accomplished in a time-​constituting phenomenon in such a way that the ideal possibility is opened up of re-​presenting anew the past flow of just this tone, of constituting it again in the mode of re-​presentation. And in the same way, a continual “intention” reaches into the future: The actually present portion of the duration again and again adds a new now, and a protention adheres to the tone-​constituting “appearances”—​a protention that is fulfilled as a protention aimed at this tone just as long as the tone endures and that is annulled and changes if something new begins in its place.67 65 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, p. § 39, 292 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 313. 66 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 39, p. 293; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 314. See Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 37, p. 272 (idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 294): “The unity of the temporal object extends throughout this continuity, but the continuity is not the theme. If I live in the stream of time, the objective continuity (the process) does flow on, but it is not the theme. The unity of the temporal object and the objective continuity exist inseparably. Hence the extension of spatial concepts to temporality: the apprehension of time in the image of a line, of a duration in the image of a section of a line, together with which the one-​dimensional order in time also finds its pictorialization [Verbildlichung]” (emphasis in original). On the relation between Husserl’s notion of inner consciousness and his theory of inner time-​consciousness, see Dan Zahavi, “Inner (Time-​)Consciousness,” in On Time—​New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Ichiro Yamaguchi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 319–​339. 67 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 45, pp. 308–​309 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 330. Compare the section on “The double intentionality of retention and the constitution of the flow of consciousness” (Die doppelte Intentionalität der Retention und die Konstitution des Bewuβtseinflusses) in Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 39, pp. 84–​88 (idem, Zur Phänomenologie, pp. 86–​90), and Appendix 8 on “The double intentionality of the Stream of Consciousness” (Doppelte Intentionalität des Bewuβtseinsstromes) in Husserl, On the Phenomenology, pp. 120–​122 (idem, Zur Phänomenologie, pp. 130–​133), and the analysis in Christoph Hoerl, “Husserl, the Absolute Flow, and Temporal Experience,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2013):

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In the Bernau Manuscripts, written in the fall of 1917 and in the spring of 1918, Husserl expressed this idea by referring to time-​consciousness as the intertwining of retentional and protentional intentionality (die Verflechtung von retentionaler und protentionaler Intentionalität).68 The recasting of his earlier emphasis on the constitutive function of the original impression of the presently given at each moment in light of the complex entanglement of the tripartite nowness of the time-​object is well summarized by Nicolas de Warren: Within this weave of temporality, the now-​phase is the point of fulfillment in which a protention becomes fulfilled with a maximal degree of intuitive fullness while at the same time becoming emptied, through retentional modification, of its newly acquired plentitude. Every now-​ phase of time-​consciousness contains a stretch of retention, a point of original presentation as fulfilled protention, and a stretch of unfilled protention. … On this account, every retention implies a protention, whereas every protention implies a retention: protention emerges from an “earlier” retention much as a protention intends the now-​yet-​to-​come in its temporal constitution of running-​off. … Husserl rearticulates the meaning of his earlier insights into the three-​fold declension of original time-​consciousness in light of this newly discovered complexity on the side of protention and its entwinement with retention.69 For Heidegger, the diverging convergence, which we have elicited from Husserl, arises as a result of the temporality that “temporalizes itself out of the authentic future … in such a way that, futurally having-​been [zukünftig gewesen], it first arouses the present [Gegenwart]. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.”70 Most telling is the locution futurally having-​ been, an expression that insinuates the transposal of the causal order—​in direct assault of the commonsense assumption regarding the fixity of the past and the inability to affect or influence it71—​such that the past is 376–​411. See also Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 13-​40. 68 Edmund Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte Über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/​18), herausgegeben von Rudolf Bernet und Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), § 2, pp. 6–​8. See Luis Niel, “Temporality, Stream of Consciousness and the I in the Bernau Manuscripts,” in On Time—​New Contributions, pp. 213–​230. 69 Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 194–​195. 70 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 65, p. 314 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 329. 71 Douglas Kutach, “The Asymmetry of Influence,” in The Oxford Handbook, pp. 247–​275.

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the effect of the future rather than the future being the effect of the past.72 In a previous study, I noted the affinity between this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking and comparable strategies in psychoanalytic theory, especially the Freudian concept of nachträglich, rendered by Lacan as l’après coup, that is, “after the fact,” the deferred action that assumes the character of the future perfect tense (futur antérieur) in place of the present perfect tense. According to this construal of time, the symptom does not relate primarily to an occurrence in the past but rather to an event that awaits its futural unfolding.73 Lacan thus offers a corrective to the time-​function of the logic implied by Freud’s idea of repeating (Wiederholen) and remembering (Erinnerung). To remember, in its deepest assonance, is to repeat, but to repeat means to come back to the same place 72

For an innovative exploration of temporal reversal, see Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious (San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2018). Consider the author’s criticism of the more routine assumption regarding time irreversibility and the causal arrow on p. 176: “Any kind of retrocausation or precognition throws an epistemology founded totally on memory and inference into disarray, a bit like tracking the dirt of the future into the clean home of the present. (Boundary crossing, or liminality, characterizes most paranormal phenomena, in fact.) Consequently, skeptics who have not really looked at the evidence for precognition, who assume (because they do not know better) that physics regards it as impossible, or who feel especially threatened by epistemic violations, are quick to ridicule or ostracize those who try to fairly consider the topic. While there are good reasons to be skeptical of unusual or extraordinary claims, purely closed-​minded reactions may have everything to do with deep-​seated taboos about things that penetrate other things in a culturally non-​sanctioned fashion” (emphasis in original). Wargo’s position is conceptually allied with my understanding of the timeswerve and we both support our positions by appeal to the reversal of the causal order according to some theorists of quantum computation. See Wargo, op. cit., p. 144 and references on p. 363 n. 59; Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. xviii-​xix, 394 n. 28. 73 On Nachträglichkeit, see Teresa Fenichel, Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis: Uncanny Belonging (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 14, 69, 79, 107, 119, 132, 150, 158, 162. The privileging of the past as the ground of the future is exemplified in the concluding paragraph of Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Joyce Crick, with an Introduction and Notes by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 412: “And what of the value of dreams for our knowledge of the future? Of course that is out of the question. Instead, one should rather ask: for our knowledge of the past. For in every sense, dreams come from the past. It is true, the ancient belief that dreams show us the future is not entirely without some truth. For by representing a wish as fulfilled, a dream does indeed take us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer to be in the present, is shaped by the indestructible wish into the image of that past.” According to Freud’s understanding of dreams as a means of wish fulfillment, the archaic idea of prognostication is reduced to a facet of recollection whereby the future, which is shaped by the past, is experienced to some degree in the present.

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where one has always never been.74 Unfortunately, I neglected to mention in that discussion the use of the term Nachträglichkeit in Husserlian phenomenology to name the temporal lag of the passage from the perceived object to the act of perception, a state of reflection and retention that constitutes the very datum by which it is constituted. Perception is thus a “constitutive recapitulation” that renders contemporaneous two noncontemporaneous perceptual registers such that the retentional process presupposes an impressional inner consciousness of the now that is present in being past and past in being present.75 The topic of the nonsimultaneity versus the simultaneity of the act of perception and the perceived object is addressed in the following passage from Husserl that I cite in full: At the moment when the apprehension commences, the perception begins; before that moment we cannot speak of perception. The apprehension is the “animation” of the datum of sensation. It remains to be asked, however, whether the apprehension begins simultaneously with the datum of sensation or whether the datum must not be constituted—​ even if only for an extremely brief period of time—​before the animating apprehension can commence. It seems that the latter is what occurs. In that case, in the moment in which the apprehension begins, a part of the datum of sensation has already elapsed and is preserved only in retention. … A difference in time therefore exists between the beginning-​point 74 Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 45–​46, and see references to primary and secondary sources cited ibid., pp. 58–​59 nn. 127–​131. Mention here should also be made of the conclusion of the chapter on “Sensing” (Le Sentir) in Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012) p. 252 (Phénoménologie de la perception [Paris: Gallimard, 1945], pp. 279–​280): “The reflective ideal of thetic thought will be grounded in the experience of the thing. Thus, reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-​reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present [un passé qui n’a jamais été present].” Regarding this theme, see Alia Al-​Saji, “‘A Past Which Has Never Been Present’: Bergsonian Dimensions in Merleau-​Ponty’s Theory of the Prepersonal,” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 41–​71. 75 Natalie Depraz, “The Phenomenological Reduction as Praxis,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999): 99–​100. Regarding the topic of Nachträglichkeit in Husserl, see Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-​Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005), p. 70; Matthew Coate, “On Nachträglichkeit, or a Certain Blindness of the ‘Now:’ Time, Self, and Self-​Responsibility in Derrida’s Analyses of the Husserlian Account of Temporality,” Theoria and Praxis 5 (2017): 65–​94; Klaus Held, “The Phenomenology of Time Following Husserl,” in Husserl: German Perspectives, edited by John H. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, translated by Hayden Kee, Patrick Eldridge, and Robin Litscher Wilkins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 214.

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of the perception and the beginning-​point of the object. By clarifying the “external conditions” to which the occurrence of a datum of sensation is subject, one can perhaps make the naturalistic assertion mentioned above—​about the nonsimultaneity of the perception and the perceived—​a matter of insight as well. Now let us exclude transcendent objects and ask how matters stand with respect to the simultaneity of perception and the perceived in the immanent sphere. If we take perception here as the act of reflection in which immanent unities come to be given, then this act presupposes that something is already constituted—​ and preserved in retention—​on which it can look back: in this instance, therefore, the perception follows after what is perceived and is not simultaneous with it. But—​as we have seen—​reflection and retention presuppose the impressional “internal consciousness” of the immanent datum in question in its original constitution; and this consciousness is united concretely with the currently intended primal impressions and is inseparable from them: if we wish to designate “internal consciousness” too as “perception,” then here we truly have strict simultaneity of perception and what is perceived.76 Perception, on this account, presumes that the perceived object is already constituted and preserved in the reflexivity of retention. Insofar as retention presupposes the impressional internal consciousness of the immanent datum in its original constitution, we are warranted to postulate a simultaneity of the perceptual act and what is perceived.77 However, I would add, as we noted above, retention cannot be disentangled from protention, and hence the three temporal modes are not only intertwined but both the no longer and the not yet remain malleable in the moment at hand. The indefiniteness of the future, according to Heidegger, is secured by the fact that the having-​been in the present is grounded as what is to come, the past molded by the future that is molded by the past. Expanding this theme in the 1961 lecture commemorating the seventh centennial of his hometown Meßkirch, Heidegger writes, “But what if we understand the future as that which comes towards us today? In this case the future is not just something that follows upon today, but rather is that which projects into today. Today, then, is not a segment of time existing on its own, self-​contained on all sides. 76 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, Appendix 5, p. 115; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, pp. 122–​123. 77 On the co-​constitution of perception and the perceived, see James R. Mensch, Husserl’s Account of Our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010), pp. 115–​135.

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Today has its Origin in what-​is-​as-​having-​been [im Gewesen] and at the same time is opened out onto what comes towards it [was auf es kommt].”78 This construal of temporality disrupts the standard view of time as a rectilinear movement through past, present, and future. Hegel’s gloss on the aforementioned dictum in the Wissenschaft der Logik, pure being and pure nothingness are the same, lends support to this surmise regarding the nature of time: The truth is neither being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being—​“has passed over,” not passes over. But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself.79 Hegel does not mention the matter of time explicitly, but it does not seem to me unreasonable to introduce it as a legitimate facet of his description of becoming. The paradoxical identity of being and nothing is deemed logical in light of the continual movement from one to the other. Truth consists in this movement whereby being vanishes in nonbeing and nonbeing in being. Hegel’s dialectic affords him the possibility of identifying the identity of the identity and the nonidentity, as we see, for example, in this delineation of existence (Dasein) in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, “The being in becoming, as one with nothing, and the nothing that is likewise one with being are only vanishing [moments]. Due to its inner contradiction, becoming collapses into the unity in which both are sublated. Its result is therefore existence.”80 In contrast to a sublated contradiction (aufgehobene Widerspruch), I would propose in Heideggerian terms a belonging-​together (Zusammengehörigkeit) such that being and nothing are technically the same (das Selbe) but not identical (das Gleiche), that is, being and nothing are the 78

Martin Heidegger, “Messkirch’s Seventh Centennial,” translated by Thomas J. Sheehan, Listening 8 (1973): 42–​43; idem, Reden und Andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–​1976 [ga 16] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 575. 79 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, p. 83; idem, The Science of Logic, pp. 59–​60 (emphasis in original). 80 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, p. 193; idem, Encyclopedia, pp. 144–​145 (emphasis in original).

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same in virtue of being disparate; conjunction necessarily comprises disjunction.81 This hermeneutic provides the conceptual model that allows us to take hold of the indeterminate nature of temporal determinacy. To avoid misunderstanding, let me state that the idea I am proffering should not be understood as cognate to Hegel’s notion of bad infinity, that is, the everlasting progression of something becoming other, which in turn becomes a something that becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum.82 There is no evolution along these lines since the process of time entails the coming to itself in its own other—​there is no other that is not-​other. The infinity of time, therefore, is not the not-​finite (Nichtendliche), “the negative of negation, i.e.

81

On this decisive distinction in Heideggerian thought between sameness (Selbigkeit) and identity (Gleichheit), the former preserving difference and the latter obfuscating it, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 9–​13, 53 n. 83, 265. In that study, I proposed that Heidegger’s distinction between das Selbe and das Gleiche betrayed the influence of Schelling. I neglected to mention the contrast made between identity (Gleichheit) and similarity (Ähnlichkeit) in Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, revised and edited by Ludwig Landgrebe, translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, introduction by James S. Churchill, afterword by Lothar Eley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), § 44, pp. 189–​192; Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, redigiert und herausgegeben von Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999), pp. 223–​227. On the one hand, the coincidence of identity entails that the duality of A and B is changed into a unity, “which preserves a doubling in consciousness but materially is not a separation or duality of elements ‘outside one another.’ The two are within one another [ineinander], and only to this extent are they two. They constitute a unique assemblage [ein einziges Zusammen], which, so to speak, is present in two ‘editions’ [in zwei ‘Ausgaben’]” (Experience and Judgment, § 44, p. 190; Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 225). On the other hand, the relation of similarity between A and B entails a coincidence as well, however, “the feature of similarity of A which is seen through the feature of similarity of B, and ‘coincides’ with it, has a ‘gap’ [‘Abstand’]. The two features are blended in a community [Gemeinsamkeit]; yet there also remains a duality of material separation [sachlichen Sonderung], which is the separation and coincidence of what is ‘akin’ [‘Verwandtem’]. They do not go together to form a ‘like’ [Gleichen] but to form a pair [Paar], where the one is certainly ‘like’ the other but ‘stands off’ from it. This duality, with its unity of community, can approach more and more the unity of perfect community, which is precisely likeness and essential coincidence without disparity, and can come so close that we speak of an approximate likeness, of a similarity which is almost complete likeness, only with slight deviations. But the difference still remains extant, despite the continuous transitions” (Experience and Judgment, § 44, p. 191; Erfahrung und Urteil, pp. 225–​226). What Husserl attributes to Ähnlichkeit bears a conceptual resemblance to what Heidegger ascribes to Selbigkeit. Interestingly, with respect to Gleichheit, Husserl maintains that it is the interpenetration of the two elements that facilitates their separateness. On the Husserlian notion of Ineinander, see below, nn. 96–​97. 82 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, p. 199; idem, Encyclopedia, p. 149.

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the negation that is identical with itself and thus at the same time true affirmation.”83 Beyond the sublation of negation, the negation of negation, the crowning achievement of the Hegelian dialectic, what is called for is a triple negation, the negation of the negation of negation. On this account, there is no reconciliation of the infinite and the finite, the ideal and the real, no overpowering of the absolute over the relative, no degeneration of the nothing of the transitory in the face of the generation of the being of the interminable, no affirmation of eternity arising from the negated negation of temporality. The power of infinitivity is revealed in the finitization of the death of life that is the life of death, a process that is neither affirmative nor negative because it is affirmative in its negation and negative in its affirmation, a tetralemmic logic that is to be contrasted with the trilemmic logic undergirding the dialectical avowal that in the space of sublation negation can be conceived at the same time as true affirmation.84 The logical refutation of the conventional understanding of the human lifecycle can be elicited from Nāgārjuna, the renowned Indian philosopher of the Middle Way (Mādhyamika), in the eleventh chapter of his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā on the examination of the initial and final limits (Pūrvāparakoṭi-​parīkṣā): If birth came first, /​And then old age and death, /​Then birth would be ageless and deathless, /​And a deathless one would be born. If birth were to come after, /​And old age and death first, /​How could there be a causeless aging and death /​Of one not born?

83 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, p. 200; idem, Encyclopedia, p. 150. The citation is from the addition (Zusatz) written by Hegel’s students explicating his comments. The supplementary material was added to the posthumous edition of Hegel’s works published in 1832. 84 The tetralemmic logic goes one step beyond the triadic structure of the Hegelian dialectic. To be sure, the latter does challenge the prevalent Aristotelian logic predicated on the principle of identity, that is, everything is identical to itself, “A = A,” and its negation, “A cannot be A and not A at the same time.” See Hegel, Enzyklopädie, p. 237; idem, Encyclopedia, p. 178. The tetralemmic logic I affirm, in consonance with the Buddhist madhyamaka, reclaims the middle excluded by the law of the excluded middle such that A is both A and not A to the extent that A is neither A nor not A. For a thorough analysis of the tetralemma, see Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 67–​90. For an exposition and application of this logic to kabbalistic texts, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 109–​114; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 107–​108 and 167.

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Birth and age and death /​Cannot occur at one time. /​Then what is being born would be dying /​And both would occur without cause.85 The two termini that condition the span of cyclic existence have no beginning and no end and they do not coincide.86 However, if we were to examine birth and death from the standpoint of the middle, which is not to be construed as the midpoint between beginning and end but rather as the temporal location where the binary of beginning and end collapses in the identity of the nonidentity of their identity and in the nonidentity of the identity of their nonidentity, then we could, indeed we would have to, affirm the concurrence and coexistence of birth and death. Time is lived experientially in the moment wedged between the beginning that cannot begin and the ending that cannot end. In every moment, there is a beginning of the end and an ending of the beginning, and hence each moment is identical but distinctive, nay, identical because distinctive. This particular example highlights the illusory nature of the causal succession we impose universally on dependent phenomena. On the one hand, if cause precedes effect, then the basis for designating it as cause would be missing and, consequently, there would be no basis for designating the effect as effect. If, on the other hand, the effect were present before the cause, then the effect would be without cause, and that which is uncaused cannot properly be labeled an effect. If, finally, we assume that cause and effect are simultaneous, then both would be causeless.87 85 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translation and commentary by Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 31–​32. 86 Compare Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Reason Sixty with Chandrakīrti’s Reason Sixty Commentary, translated with introductory study and annotation by Joseph John Loizzo and the aibs Translation Team, edited by Robert A.F. Thurman, Thomas F. Yarnall, and Paul G. Hackett, critical editions by Joseph John Loizzo and Paul G. Hackett (New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies, 2007), pp. 120–​121: “If [you] claim a beginning, then, definitely, /​You are embracing an [addictive] view. /​What beginning or end could there be /​To that which arises interdependently?/​How could something primordially created, /​Subsequently be eliminated? /​Free from initial and terminal limits, /​Beings appear like illusions. … What arises, dependent upon this and that, /​Is not intrinsically created; /​How can you call the intrinsically /​Uncreated, ‘created?’ … Thus, nothing whatsoever is created, /​And nothing whatsoever will cease.” 87 Mabja Jangchub Tsöndrü, Ornament of Reason: The Great Commentary to Nāgārjuna’s Root of the Middle Way (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 2011), pp. 294–​295. Compare the critique of the simultaneity of cause and effect, and the consequent eradication of time, in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.3.2, p. 54: “The second relation I shall observe as essential to causes and effects, is not so universally acknowledg’d, but is liable to some controversy. ’Tis that of priority of time in the cause before the effect. … ’Tis

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Insofar as neither birth nor death can be applied intrinsically to phenomena that come to be and pass away, we must conclude that the phenomena neither depart nor remain, and thus the only way they abide is through not abiding. Extending the logic, the beginning is devoid of beginning and the end is devoid of ending. The determination of temporal being is determined precisely by the absence of determination. Nāgārjuna’s syllogistic argument in his examination of time (Kāla-​parīkṣā), the nineteenth chapter in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, can be charted structurally in terms of the following major premise, middle term, and conclusion: (1) present and future cannot be said to be contingent upon the past because if that were the case, then present and future would be in the past; (2) if we say, however, that present and future are noncontingent upon the past, then the time of neither present nor future is evident; (3) insofar as present and future cannot be both contingent and noncontingent upon the past, neither a present nor a future time is evident.88 The same deduction can be applied logically to the present in relation to the past and the future, and to the future in relation to the past and the present. Hence, regarding all three experiential modes of time, we are led to conclude that they do not exist whether they are considered as independent or as mutually dependent.89 As Nāgārjuna put in the twenty-​ninth stanza of the Shūnyatāsaptatikārikānāma: Time does not exist inherently because the three periods of time do not maintain continuity by themselves, but are dependent on each other. If the three times were to have inherent existence in a mutually dependent way, then we could not make distinctions between them, but because we can make distinctions so time itself cannot be established as having an establish’d maxim both in natural and moral philosophy, that an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its sole cause; but is assisted by some other principle, which pushes it from its state of inactivity, and makes it exert that energy, of which it was secretly possest. Now if any cause may be perfectly co-​temporary with its effect, ’tis certain, according to this maxim, that they must all of them be so; since any one of them, which retards its operation for a single moment, exerts not itself at that very individual time, in which it might have operated; and therefore is no proper cause. The consequence of this wou’d be no less than the destruction of that succession of causes, which we observe in the world; and indeed, the utter annihilation of time. For if one cause were co-​temporary with its effect, and this effect with its effect, and so on, ’tis plain there wou’d be no such thing as succession, and all objects must be co-​existent” (emphasis in original). For Hume’s standpoint, the relations of contiguity and succession are essential to a proper understanding of causality. 88 David H. Kalupahana, Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 275–​277. 89 Tsöndrü, Ornament, p. 387.

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inherent existence. Because time does not have inherent existence, the functional basis on which the three times is imputed cannot have inherent existence, so therefore the three times do not have inherent existence and are merely imputed by concepts.90 Time cannot be known when isolated from temporal phenomena, yet time renders these phenomena temporal.91 There is no conception of time as either entitatively coherent in itself or as the measure of duration of self-​subsisting substances, mental or material, for in the world of contingency, the true nature of everything is the nothing devoid of any nature. Such a conclusion is implied, albeit in a different ideational template, in the following comment of William James in Psychology: A Briefer Course (1892): Consciousness, as a process in time, offers the paradoxes which have been found in all continuous change. There are no “states” in such a thing, any more than there are facets in a circle, or places where an arrow “is” when it flies. The vertical raised upon the time-​line on which we presented the past to be “projected” at any given instant of memory, is only an ideal construction. Yet anything broader than that vertical is not, for the actual present is only the joint between the past and future and has no breadth of its own.92 The temporal distinctions we presume to exist are relational constructs the mind imposes on the real;93 no external substrate perseveres and extends through the continuum of momentary-​substrates that come and go in the fluctuation of time.94 The only permanence is impermanence, a quality—​or 90 91

92 93

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David Ross Komito, Nāgārjuna’s Seventy Stanzas: A Buddhist Psychology of Emptiness (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1987), p. 86. For a similar portrayal of the identity of time and the impermanent nature of all that exists in the thought of Dōgen, see Masao Abe, Zen and Comparative Studies, edited by Steven Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 163–​167. The identification of time and the nonsubstantiality of conditioned phenomena leads to undermining the ontological status of time. William James: Writings: 1878–​1899, pp. 431–​432 (emphasis in original). See James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 74: “Size and shape are deemed subjective by Kantians; time itself is subjective according to many philosophers; and even the activity and causal efficacy which lingered in physics long after secondary qualities were banished are now treated as illusory projections outwards of phenomena of our own consciousness.” My language is indebted to Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 35, p. 257 (idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 279): “Momentary substrates (which are the limit of extensions of substrates), when they fulfill the conditions of certain continuous temporal succession,

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perhaps, more accurately, the privation of quality—​concretized in the moment that is always different because always the same and always the same because always different, an idea expressed poetically by Merleau-​Ponty, when he wrote of the present as simultaneously toujours neuf and toujours la même.95 As Merleau-​Ponty makes clear, he has appropriated Husserl’s notion of the interweaving (Ineinander) to depict time as the chiasm wherein past and present coincide in the mutual relationship of enveloping and being enveloped.96 Consider the following enunciation by Husserl himself on the “associative linkage” (assoziative Verknüpfung) by which the present awakens the past and the no longer living worlds of memory acquire a revived sense of being: From what is given intuitively (perception or memory) emanates an intention, an intentional tendency, in which, gradually and uninterruptedly,

95

96

constitute one substrate, which is not itself the continuum of these momentary-​substrates but extends throughout them and in this way lasts for that extent of time” (emphasis in original). For Husserl, the proper theme for a phenomenological analysis of time is the temporal measure of the phenomenal field of modes of givenness in their fluctuation. See Held, “The Phenomenology of Time,” pp. 209–​210. Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 267; idem, Le visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail, texte établi par Claude Lefort accompagné d’un avertissement et d’une postface (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 315. Compare Fernando Pessoa, Livro do desassossego (Milton Keynes, UK: Jiahu Books, 2014), §343, p. 215: “Afinal deste dia fica o que de ontem ficou e ficará de amanhã: a ânsia insaciável e inúmera de ser sempre o mesmo e outro.” English version in Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (New York: New Directions Books, 2017), §73, p. 86: “At the end of this day there remains what was left behind of yesterday and what will be left behind of tomorrow: the insatiable, innumerable longing to be always the same and always other.” Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 267–​268; idem, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 315. See Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 268 (idem, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 316): “The idea of chiasm and Ineinander is on the contrary the idea that every analysis that disentangles renders unintelligible—​This bound to the very meaning of questioning which is not to call for a response in the indicative—​It is a question of creating a new type of intelligibility (intelligibility through the world and Being as they are—​‘vertical’ and not horizontal)” (emphasis in original). On the Husserlian Ineinander, compare Merleau-​ Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 116, 172, 180, 244; idem, Le visible et l’invisible, pp. 154, 224, 231, 292; idem, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 16. On Merleau-​Ponty’s indebtedness to Husserl’s concepts of intertwining (Verflechtung) and interpenetration, literally, in-​one-​another (Ineinander), see Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 280–​281; Eran Dorfman, “History of the Lifeworld: From Husserl to Merleau-​Ponty,” Philosophy Today 53 (2009): 299.

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what is submerged and no longer living seems to steadily change over to the vivid and ever more vivid, until, as a tempo now more deliberate, now more rapid, what has receded appears again as intuition … Complete submergence is thus only a limit of what has receded, as, on the other hand, the opposite limit is complete intuitiveness; thus, intuitiveness does not really denote a breach. Linked to this, to be sure, are the processes of overlapping [Überschiebung] and interpenetration [Durchdringung], of the fusion of memories belonging to different “awakened” worlds of memory.97 97 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, § 42, pp. 178–​179 (emphasis in original); Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 209. The term Ineinander is deployed on several occasions in this work, and most importantly in Husserl, Experience and Judgment, § 11, pp. 50–​51 (Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 50): “The elucidation of the whole interpenetration [ganze Ineinander] of the operations of consciousness which leads to the constitution of a possible world (of a possible world: this means that it is a question of the essential form of the world in general and not of our factual real world) is the comprehensive task of constitutive phenomenology” (emphasis in original). For the centrality of this term in Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological enterprise, see the comment in “Husserls Inhaltsübersicht im Urtext” printed in Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, herausgegeben und eingeleiter von Stephan Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), pp. 190–​191: “In der Phänomenologie immer ein Ineinander reeller und intentionaler Analyse.” See also Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/​24), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion, herausgegeben von Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), §45, p. 124: “Vielmehr welche der Intentionalitäten wir auch ins Auge fassen, es zeigt sich bei tieferem Eindringen in ihre Strukturen, daß eine konkrete Intention nur möglich ist durch ein Ineinander der intentionalen und im übrigen unselbständigen Leistungen, mit einem verborgenen Ineinander intentionaler Gegenständlichkeiten. So werden wir gerade erst durch solche intentionale Analyse dessen inne, daß Subjektivität etwas absolut Einzigartiges ist, das in der Welt der ichfremden Gegenständlichkeiten seinesgleichen gar nicht haben kann, und wir erheben uns zur Erkenntnis, daß in der Tat eine phänomenologische Analyse wie methodisch so sachlich einen total anderen Sinn hat als natürlich-​objektive Naturanalysen.” On the application of the term Ineinander to denote the intentional interweaving or interpenetration of all souls in the communalization (Vergemeinschaftung) of a psychic framework, see Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologische Philosophie, herausgegeben von Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), §71, p. 258; idem, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated, with an introduction, by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 255. Compare Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/​24), Zweiter Teil, p. 198: “Andererseits, wie die Gemeinschaft nicht eine bloße Kollektion außereinander und nebeneinander seiender Einzelner ist, sondern eine Synthesis der Einzelnen durch interpersonale Intentionalität, eine durch das soziale Füreinander-​und Ineinander-​Leben und -​Wirken gestiftete Einheit.” And see Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Zweiter Teil: 1921–​1928, herausgegeben von Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus

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Time is thus characterized by Husserl as the universal form of all egological genesis insofar as the “consciousness-​constituents of the transcendental ego” cohere in “a universe of compossibilities only in the universal unity-​form of the flux, in which all particulars have their respective places as processes that flow within it.”98 In characterizing the temporal flow of consciousness, Husserl memorably noted that “every phenomenon is a continuity of phases with a principal phase of which we say that it dies away. … The coming into being of a phenomenon in objective apprehension is the emerging of something new; the enduring of the phenomenon is a process of change, since a comet’s tail of dying phases ‘of the same content’ is given along with what remains the same.”99 The foundation for all temporal apprehension is the absolute becoming of the essence of phenomenality, but the constant change does not in and of itself yield the apprehension of time. The latter is dependent on the pretense of transempirical objectivity imposed on phenomena through the ideational synthesis that results in postulating something enduring in the duration of constant change.100 In that respect, the temporal form is not a “phansiological Nijhoff, 1973), § 9, pp. 268–​269. This connotation of Ineinander corresponds, more or less, to the idea of transcendental intersubjectivity, which is discussed in detail in the fifth meditation in Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), §§ 42–​62, pp. 87–​151; idem, Cartesianische Meditationen, pp. 121–​177. For a comprehensive study of this theme, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-​ Pragmatic Critique, translated by Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001). On the notion of Ineinander in Husserl’s phenomenology, see Dermot Moran, “The Phenomenology of the Social World: Husserl on Mitsein as Ineinandersein and Füreinandersein,” Methodo 5 (2017): 99–​142; Joseph Rivera, “We-​Synthesis: Husserl and Henry on Empathy and Shared Life,” Research in Phenomenology 49 (2019); 183–​206, esp. 201–​202. 98 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 37, p. 75 (emphasis in original); idem, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 109. Compare the account of phenomenological time in Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: Routledge, 2002), §81, p. 236 (idem, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die Reine Phänomenologie, herausgegeben von Karl Schumann [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976], p. 182): “The essential property which the term ‘temporality’[Zeitlichkeit] expresses in relation to experiences generally indicates not only something that belongs in a general way to every single experience, but a necessary form binding experiences with experiences. Every real experience … is necessarily one that endures; and with this duration it takes its place within an endless continuum of durations—​a concretely filled continuum. It necessarily has a temporal purview concretely filled, and stretching away endlessly on all sides. And that at once tells us that it belongs to one endless ‘stream of experience’ [‘Erlebnisstrom’]” (emphasis in original). 99 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 44, p. 306; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 328. 100 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 44, p. 307; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 329.

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form in the ultimate sense, not a form of absolute being, but only a form of ‘appearances’; that is, only a form of individual objects. … The consciousness of time is therefore an objectivating consciousness. Without identification and differentiation, without the positing of the now, the positing of the past, the positing of the future … [there would be] no enduring, no resting and changing, no being in succession.”101 What is available phenomenologically to the individualizing ego—​itself part of the noematic referent of the worldly structure fabricated noetically in the eidetic reduction that occasions the suspension of the habitual belief in the natural world as a domain of positively given data,102 the apodictic repository of the transcendental ego whose unique object is precisely the subject in its particular universality103—​in its internal temporality is the present whose actuality is ascertained from either the present that is past or the present that is future. The aporicity of the present is such that the now perpetually presents itself as the now that is presently not now, the instant of immediacy that can never be grasped as the object of our immediate experience.104 As Husserl expressed this phenomenological insight, “to the modus of the actual ‘Now’, and to this feature also that with this very ‘now’, a new and continuously new ‘now’ links up in necessary continuity, and that in concert with this every actual now passes into a just vanished, the just vanished once again and continuously so into ever-​new just vanishings of the just vanished, and so forth. And similarly for every ‘now’ that has been newly linked on to its predecessor. The actual now is necessarily punctual and remains so, a form that persists through continuous change of content.”105 The now is, quite literally, punctual, 101 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 44, p. 308 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, pp. 329–​330. 102 See Guido King, “The World as Noema and as Referent,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3 (1972): 15–​26. 103 Depraz, “The Phenomenological Reduction,” p. 97. See also Dieter Lohmar, “On the Constitution of the Time of the World: The Emergence of Objective Time on the Ground of Subjective Time,” in On Time—​New Contributions, pp. 115–​136, and for a different approach to this philosophical problem, see Ernst Pöppel and Yan Bao, “Temporal Windows as a Bridge from Objective to Subjective Time,” in Subjective Time, pp. 241–​261. 104 See Rudolf Bernet, “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence,” Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85–​112. 105 Husserl, Ideas, §81, p. 237; idem, Ideen, p. 183. On the ungraspable nature of the present as the threshold where past and future meet and give birth to the horizon of meaning, see Ugo Perone, The Possible Present, translated by Silvia Benso with Brian Schroeder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). See also Maurizio Ferraris, “The Aporia of the Instant in Derrida’s Reading of Husserl,” in The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, edited by Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 33–​51.

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but its punctuality—​its pointedness—​consists of a continuous succession of ever-​new now points in a stream of duration that is continually “annexing itself” (fügt sich) such that each impression of the experience of now transforms itself into a retention or, in the opposite direction, into a protention.106 The problem of “now-​consciousness” (Jetztbewusstsein) and “the original presentation of a new event” (der Urpräsentation eines neuen Ereignisses) can be assessed only from the vantage point of “the interweaving of retention and protention in the constitution of the phenomenological object of time” (das Ineinander der Retention und Protention in der Konstitution der phänomenologischen Zeitgegenständlichkeit).107 Hence, we know nothing of the moment other than the fact that it is a bridge joining what remains apart. The use of the metaphor of the bridge and its dual function of connecting that which is separate and separating that which is connected is a corrective to viewing the present proffered by James, “the practically cognized present is no knife-​edge, but a saddle-​back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—​a rearward-​and a forward-​looking end.”108 I concur that the present should be viewed through this double prism but I do not see the need to bifurcate the images of the knife-​edge and the saddle-​back; the moment that cuts is at the same time the moment that binds. As Ugo Perone has more recently expressed the Janus face quality of the present, the very condition of temporality, in amalgamating it partitions and in partitioning it amalgamates. The nature of the divide, therefore, is to delimit by conjoining and to conjoin by delimiting: The present that is not presence, that is, the present that I do not have but on the basis of which I have time, does not divide the world into two, like a summit from which opposite sides depart. The present instead builds the world because it makes [the world] exit a vague flowing by anchoring it to a point, to a subject, and to a perspective from out of which the world appears as that which surrounds me. Then [the present] cannot

106 Husserl, Ideas, §81, p. 237; idem, Ideen, p. 183. On Husserl’s emphasis on the capacity of the now to make itself present through memory, see Held, “The Phenomenology of Time,” pp. 216–​217. Compare the depiction of Husserl’s theory of time as a phenomenological monadology in Yves Mayzaud, “The Metaphor of the Stream: Critical Approaches,” in On Time—​New Contributions, pp. 137–​151, and in the same volume, Stefano Micali, “The Temporalization of the Absolute Flow of Time-​Consciousness,” pp. 169–​185. 107 Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte, §4, p.11. 108 James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, p. 574.

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be a simple limit, that is, [it cannot be] the extreme line either of a contact defining itself through separation or of a being whose consistency is given through exclusion or of an encounter stiffening differences. Nor is it properly a barrier, because the barrier is simultaneously insurmountable and independent from me. The divide is instead mobile, and a constitutive trait of the deciding subject. Nor is [the divide] the irruption of the absolute that tangentially encounters the infinite, the eschaton that becomes time, because the divide does not discriminate absolutely but rather chooses on the basis of finitude, reorients finitude, and arranges it within the order of time. This divide that is neither limit nor barrier or irruption of the transcendent is the threshold; finite matter that is handled by finite existence in order to orient itself within the temporality of the world.109 Insofar as the so-​called specious present is the fictional duration of time through which one’s perceptions in the present are considered to be real,110 we can propose that the process of temporalization is innately metaphorical, indeed, the metaphor of metaphoricity. At the end of chapter nineteen in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna conveys the agnostic state we must assume with respect to the nature of temporality:

1 09 Perone, The Possible Present, p. 16. 110 The locution specious present was adopted by James, The Principles, pp. 573–​ 574, from E. Robert Kelley, referred to as E. R. Clay, The Alternative: A Study in Psychology (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 167. For surveys of the theory of the specious present, see J. D. Mabbott, “Our Direct Experience of Time,” in The Philosophy of Time: A Collection of Essays, edited by Richard M. Gale (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1968), pp. 304–​321; Holly Andersen, “The Development of the ‘Specious Present’ and James’s Views on Temporal Experience,” in Subjective Time, pp. 25–​42; and Simon Prosser, “Rethinking the Specious Present,” in The Routledge Handbook, pp. 146–​156. On the Jamesian specious present as the lingering that generates a sense of the now prior to the self-​appropriation of the just-​past and the Husserlian description of the passage of the primal impression into retention as a condition for the emergence of the consciousness of the living present (lebendige Gegenwart), see Richard Cobb-​Stevens, “James and Husserl: Time-​Consciousness and the Intentionality of Presence and Absence,” in Self-​Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity: Central Topics in Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), pp. 41–​57. See also Dainton, “Time,” pp. 392–​404; and Jenann Ismael, “Temporal Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook, pp. 462–​467, 472–​477; Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, “Primal Impression and Enactive Perception,” in Subjective Time, pp. 83–​99. On the Husserlian notion of the living present, see the monograph of Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).

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A nonstatic time is not grasped. /​Nothing one could grasp as /​Stationary time exists. /​If time is not grasped, how is it known? /​If time depends on an entity, /​Then without an entity how could time exist? /​There is no existent entity. /​So how can time exist?111 The ordinary conception of time—​or what Heidegger called the vulgar understanding112—​presumes that time is an existent, that is, a metaphysical entity having its own self-​subsisting nature that is divided into the three components of past, present, and future. This premise, however, is rejected by Nāgārjuna, since the doctrine of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) precludes the positing of an intrinsic nature (svabhāva)—​all dharmas depend on other dharmas and hence the being of any phenomenon consists in its lacking being.113 Nāgārjuna’s teaching that suchness (tathātā) is emptiness (śūnyatā) corresponds to the inherently paradoxical nature of the apophatic orientation found in Western philosophical and mystical texts: to say anything of the nothing that is, is to say nothing of the anything that is not. “For whom there is emptiness,” Nāgārjuna concludes his Vigrahavyāvartanī, “there are all things. For whom there is no emptiness there is nothing whatsoever.”114 Emptiness thus bespeaks the nonsubstantiality (nairātmya) of all that exists, the “cognitive basis of Madhyamika Soteriology,”115 that is, the path that leads to the discernment that all conditioned entities, which arise codependently 1 11 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, pp. 50–​51. 112 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 65, p. 314; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 329. 113 See Garfield’s comments in Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, pp. 94–​95, 176–​177. On the conceptual link between dependent origination and the doctrine of the emptiness of all entities, see David Burton, Emptiness Appraised: A Critical Study of Nāgārjuna’s Philosophy (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), pp. 35–​36: “emptiness (the absence of svabhāva of entities) appears to mean both that entities are dependently arisen (pratītyasamutpanna), and that they do not have foundational existence (dravyasat). Which is to say that all dependently arisen entities have merely conceptually constructed existence (prajñaptisat). Thus entities which dependently arise are like a dream, a reflection, etc. Emptiness is thus essentially an ontological doctrine, rather than an attack on all knowledge-​claims. It states something about how things actually are. Namely, it states that all entities have a dependently arisen and conceptually constructed existence; an existence without svabhāva.” See ibid., pp. 87–​121, 143, 146–​149, 217–​219; Nancy McCagney, Nāgārjuna and the Philosophy of Openness (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 105–​106; Joseph Walser, Nāgārjuna in Context: Mahāyāna Buddhism in Early Indian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 168–​175, 231–​232, 234–​235, 242–​243, 258–​259. 114 Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes: Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī, translation and commentary by Jan Westerhoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 41. 115 Peter Fenner, The Ontology of the Middle Way (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 35–​42.

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and interconnectedly, are delusions, for no phenomenon possesses inherent being or nonbeing; indeed, for the enlightened mind, both being and nonbeing are false constructs, and the liberation of nirvāṇa consists of discerning that neither is to be considered real or unreal.116 Even the assertion that all things are empty is also empty because of its nonemptiness.117 Alternatively expressed, to the extent that there is no name without a referent, if we hypothesize that there is no substance, we could not speak of insubstantiality, but if we do negate all existing substances, then we must account for the existence of the nonexistence of the insubstantial substance, the being that is neither being nor nonbeing because it is both being and nonbeing.118 In Nāgārjuna’s own words, “Whatever is dependently co-​arisen /​That is explained to be emptiness. /​That, being a dependent designation, /​Is itself the middle way. /​Something that is not dependently arisen, /​Such a thing does not exist. /​Therefore a nonempty thing /​Does not exist.”119 Turning more specifically to time, we cannot say that it is dependent on an existent, but, at the same time, we cannot say of time that it is independent of 116 Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Reason Sixty, pp. 119–​124: “Those whose intellect transcends /​ Being and nothing, and does not dwell [between], /​Realize the meaning of ‘condition,’ /​Which is profound and non-​perceived. … Of the two, existence and nirvāṇa, /​Neither is known to exist [intrinsically]; /​The full understanding of existence /​Is what is called ‘nirvāṇa.’ … Those who accept dependent things /​As being like the moon in water, /​ Neither [intrinsically] real nor unreal, /​Are not deprived by addictive views.” And see ibid., p. 126: “Those disturbed by false knowledge /​Suffer all the faults of addiction; /​But those who come to know the [true] meaning /​Have no [false] constructs of being or nothingness. /​When one has a place [for reified things], /​One experiences attachment and detachment; /​But the great souls, having no [such] place, /​Are neither attached nor detached.” 117 Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes, pp. 19–​20. Compare ibid., p. 38: “If negation is of an existent thing, is it not that emptiness is established? Because you negate the insubstantiality of things. … Or, if you negate emptiness and that emptiness does not exist, is your statement that ‘negation is of an existent thing’ then not abandoned? … I do not negate anything, and there is nothing to be negated. To this extent you misrepresent me when you say ‘you negate.’” Regarding the apparent nihilistic implications of this paradox in the Madhyamaka theory of emptiness, see the comments of Westerhoff in Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes, pp. 45–​46. 118 Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes, p. 24: “And if there was no substance, there would also not even be the name ‘insubstantiality of things,’ for there is no name without a referent. … Rather, substance exists, yet the substance of things does not exist. It has to be explained to what this thingless substance belongs. … Now as this substance does not exist, what is negated by that statement of yours? For the negation of a non-​existent is accomplished without words.” See the extensive analysis of Westerhoff, op. cit., pp. 104–​116. 119 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, p. 69.

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an existent.120 To resolve the impasse, we might say paradoxically that just as the nonexistence of phenomenal existence is retrieved in the emptiness that is the suchness of being—​dependent arising is a nonarising and therefore a nonceasing121—​so the insubstantiality of time is experienced substantially as the continuity delimited by discontinuity. The moment—​momentary because nonexistent and nonmomentary because unremitting—​prevails by perishing to prevail.122 This, I suspect, is what is intended by the locution nonstatic time; that is, the temporal flux, which cannot be grasped, is the flowing present “where the future continues to flow into the past through the present. Any attempt to grasp it would be futile, for by the time the attempt is made the present has disappeared into the past.”123 What takes place in time is not, to borrow Paul Valéry’s formulation, “Between the chasm and the pure event” (Entre le vide et l’événement pur).124 The pure event is itself the chasm of the nonevent, the emptiness of the nonobjectifiable there is of being, and hence one can be said to participate in the event of time only because one participates in the nothingness that is the plenitudinal void of temporal ipseity. A parallel view many be elicited from Jean-​Paul Sartre’s characterization of the antinomy of the present: “on the one hand, we readily describe it in terms of being: what is present is opposed to the future which is not yet, and also to the past, which is no longer. But, on the other hand, a strict analysis that aimed to rid the present of everything it is not—​i.e. its immediate past and future—​would in fact find 120 On negation and temporal relations, see the analysis of Westerhoff in Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes, pp. 17–​18, 123–​129. The two statements of Nāgārjuna around which the discussion revolves are “Supposing that the negation is earlier, and the negated later fails to be successful. And being later and being simultaneous fail to be successful. Therefore substance exists” (p. 26), and “Because the case is the same, the difficulty of the reason in the three times has already been answered by this. The proponent of emptiness obtains the counter-​reason of the three times” (p. 40). 121 Walser, Nāgārjuna in Context, p. 181. 122 Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, pp. 124–​127. See also Walser, Nāgārjuna in Context, p. 263. 123 Kalupahana, Nāgārjuna, p. 278. See Francisco J. Varela, “Pour une phénoménologie de la Sunyata (I),” in La gnose, une question Philosophique: Pour une phénoménologie de l’invisible, edited by Natalie Depraz and Jean-​François Marquet (Paris: Cerf, 2000), pp. 121–​148, esp. 131–​133. 124 Paul Valéry, The Ideal of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry—​A Bilingual Edition, translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-​Brody (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020), pp. 276–​277. The poetic sentiment of Valéry served as the philosophical guideword of the analysis of the chapter “‘Between Emptiness and the Pure Event’: Phenomenology” in Romano, There Is, pp. 213–​236. Romano follows the rendering in Paul Valéry, Poems, translated by David Paul, vol. 1 of the Collected Works of Paul Valéry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 215.

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nothing more than an infinitesimal instant, which is to say, as Husserl observes in his Phenomenology of Internal Time-​Consciousness, the ideal term of an infinitely pursued division: a nothingness.”125 The philosophical implications I have elicited from Nāgārjuna correspond to the following meditation on time offered by Nishida Kitarō, founder of the twentieth-​century Kyoto School of philosophy: Time is, in the end, neither to be thought from the past, nor from the future. If the present is regarded merely as the moment, as a point on a continuous straight line, then there is no present whatever, and, consequently, no time at all. … Time consists essentially in the present coexistence of moments. By saying this I mean that time, as the one of the many as well as the many of the one, consists in the contradictory unity of the present. … Touching eternity in a moment of time, the Now, means nothing else than this: that the moment, in becoming a “true” moment, becomes one of the individual many, which is to say, the moment of the eternal present which is the unity of opposites. Seen from the other side, this means nothing else than that time is constituted as the self-​ determination of the eternal now. The fact that in the present the past has passed and not yet passed, and the future has not yet come and yet shows itself, means not only, as it is thought in abstract logic, that the past is connected with the future, or becomes one with it; it also means that they become one, by negating each other, and the point, where future and past, negating each other, are one, is the present. Past and future are confronting each other, as the dialectical unity of the present. Just because they are the unity of opposites, past and future are never connected, and there is an eternal movement from the past into the future.126 To behold the time of the flow, one would have to stop the flow of time, but if the flow of time were stopped, one would not be able to behold the time of the flow. The standard demarcation of the timeline proffers the illusion of stasis such that we traverse through one fixed now-​point to another consecutively, but authentic temporal experience cannot be accounted for in this manner. Past and future dialectically confront one another in the present and 125 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 180–​181 (emphasis in original); idem, L’être et le néant, p. 156. 126 Nishida Kitarō, Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays, translated with an introduction by Robert Schinzinger (Honolulu: East-​West Center Press, 1958), pp. 164–​166.

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are unified by negating each other. The dispelling of the delusive nature of the instant of time as a durable substance accounts for the materialization of its fluidity within consciousness. From this brief analysis of the undermining of the polarity between death and life, we can deduce a general characteristic about the deportment of time.127 The end that is never ending can never begin just as the beginning that is never beginning can never end. To be always beginning is to be never ending, but to be never ending is to be always of the moment. To be always of the moment, however, is to always be of the moment, that is, to begin in the beginning that cannot begin because as beginning it has already begun. In the language of Nāgārjuna in the seventh chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, an examination of the nature of the conditioned (Saṃskṛta-​parīkṣā), we can posit of the beginning hypothetically that if the “arising of arising only gives rise to the basic arising,” then the “the arising of the basic arising /​gives rise to arising.”128 To avoid an infinite regress in the effort to explain the appearance of a conditioned phenomenon on the basis of an unconditioned arising,129 Nāgārjuna posits that the primary arising must be an arising of arising, but the latter is caused by the former. Cast in a different terminological manner, individual phenomena are engendered by the fundamental phenomenon that is engendered by the individual phenomena. The circularity of this reasoning about causation—​predicated not simply on the mutual dependence of cause and effect such that the effect is latent in the cause but rather on the more paradoxical assumption that cause and effect are contemporaneous or identical, that is, the cause begets the effect of which it is itself the effect130—​leaves us with the following predicament: “If, as you say, the arising 1 27 I have taken the liberty here to rework my analysis in Wolfson, Alef, pp. 131–​132. 128 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, p. 18. 129 Compare Nāgārjuna, The Dispeller of Disputes, p. 30: “If according to you objects of some kind are established by the epistemic instruments, you have to indicate how according to you the epistemic instruments are established in turn. … If the epistemic instruments were established by other epistemic instruments, there would be an infinite regress. … Neither the beginning, the middle, nor the end is established there.” See Westerhoff’s commentary, op. cit., pp. 69–​71. 130 Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, pp. 120–​122. And compare the undoing of the concept of causation in the sixth stanza of the Shūnyatāsaptatikārikānāma in Komito, Nāgārjuna’s Seventy Stanzas, p. 80: “The cause of a result which already exists is similar to that which is not a cause. Also in the case where a result does not already exist, then its cause will be similar to that which is not a cause. A phenomenon should be either existent or non-​existent but cannot be both non-​existent and not-​non-​existent because these two are contradictory. Therefore it is not suitable to assert that there is either an inherently existing cause or an inherently existing result in the three times.”

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of arising /​Gives rise to the basic arising, /​How, according to you, does this, /​Not arisen from the basic arising, give rise to that?”131 The arising of arising thus entraps the mind in an insurmountable paradox of concomitantly affirming and denying the possibility of arising from that which is nonarisen. If there is an arising of arising, the arising will have already arisen, since in the absence of its having arisen, we could not speak of an arising, but if it has already arisen, we cannot speak of it as nonarising, and consequently there can be neither arising nor nonarising. Reiterating the paradox in the fifth stanza of the Shūnyatāsaptatikārikānāma, Nāgārjuna writes, “Whatsoever has already arisen will not be able to arise. Whatsoever has not arisen will not arise. Either a phenomenon has already arisen or else it will arise; there is no other possibility beyond these two. Whatever is in the process of arising should have already arisen or else it will arise in the future.”132 The presumed existence of an arising phenomenon is undermined by the logic of the argument that provokes the awareness that nothing exists inherently, and by extension, the causal relationship is subverted. As Nāgārjuna opines in the twenty-​fourth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, an examination of the four noble truths, “If you perceive the existence of all things /​In terms of their essence, /​Then this perception of all things /​Will be without the perception of causes and conditions. /​Effects and causes /​And agent and action /​And conditions and arising and ceasing /​And effects will be rendered impossible.”133 The temporal implications of this challenge to a lineal conception of causality are drawn explicitly by Nāgārjuna in the eleventh chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: When asked about the beginning, /​The Great Sage said that nothing is known of it. /​Cyclic existence is without end and beginning. /​So there is no beginning or end. /​Where there is no beginning or end, /​How could there be a middle? /​It follows that thinking about this is terms of /​Prior, posterior, and simultaneous is not appropriate.134

131 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, pp. 18–​19. See Garfield’s analysis, pp. 162–​164. For a technical exposition of the themes of arising, enduring, and ceasing in this text, see also Rje Tsong Khapa, Ocean of Reasoning: A Great Commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated by Geshe Ngawang Samten and Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 175–​219. 132 Komito, Nāgārjuna’s Seventy Stanzas, p. 80. 133 Nāgārjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom, p. 69. 134 Ibid., p. 31.

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Temporality is measured by the moment that instantiates the primary arising of arising, the impossible condition that makes the unconditional conditionality of time possible, the beginning that cannot begin but as the ending that cannot end the beginning that cannot begin. What will be in time is the same as what was in time in virtue of being different than what is in time, different, that is, in virtue of being the same. As Heidegger put it: What is in time and is thus determined by time, we call the temporal [das Zeitliche]. … Time and the temporal mean what is perishable, what passes away in the course of time. Our language says with greater precision: what passes away with time [was mit der Zeit vergeht]. For time passes away. But by passing away constantly, time remains as time [Aber indem die Zeit ständig vergeht, bleibt sie als Zeit]. To remain means: not to disappear, thus, to presence. … Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is [nichts Seiendes], and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.135 The evanescence of time is intransient even as its intransience is evanescent. As Susan Taubes expressed it, the identity of being with time so conceived invariably requires a negative phenomenology: “Time is transience par excellence; but the transient never ‘is’ and thus tends toward pure negativity. Time is the zero point … to which all phenomena must be gathered. If Being and time are identical, then Being is absolute negativity.”136 The only temporal certainty, consequently, is that nothing endures but the fact that nothing endures. A perpetual passing lies at the root of our rootlessness; as temporal creatures, we are always in the being of time solely for the time being. With this in mind, we must ask again, where does the time go? Philosophers have long understood that to behold the time of flux, we would have to stop the flux of time, but if we were to stop the flux of time, there would no longer be a time of flux to behold. The conventional threefold division of time offers the illusion of a temporal trajectory traversing through one fixed point to the next in a linear pattern, but the experience of the flowing currents of time cannot be accounted for on the basis of spatially-​conceived instants, momentary units, measurable, decipherable, commingled yet discrete. Here it is well to recall the comment of Albert Einstein in a letter he wrote to the family of Michele Besso a few days after learning of his demise, “People like

1 35 Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 3; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 7. 136 Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundation,” p. 166.

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us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”137 Einstein was not rejecting the existence of time as such but rather the differentiation of time into three absolutely separate zones. The four-​dimensional view of time, implied in the conception of the block-​universe of physical reality accepted by Einstein, assumes that events that presumably occur at the same time are always relative to a frame of reference of an observer.138 It follows that since there is no 137 Einstein’s comment is cited in David Saudek, Change, the Arrow of Time, and Divine Eternity in Light of Relativity Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2020), p. 66. Saudek credits as his source for the citation of the passage the back cover of A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein, edited, with commentary, by Stephen Hawking (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007). 138 David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity, with a foreword by Basil Hiley and a new preface by John D. Barrow (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 67–​72, 177. According to the special theory of relativity, the laws of physics would prove to be invariant only for observers moving at a constant speed. See ibid., p. 196: “The conclusions of this theory evidently cannot be applied symmetrically in the frames of both observers, since one of them is accelerated and the other is not. For this reason it is not legitimate to interchange observers, and to say, for example, that the observer in the rocket ship should equally well see his twin in the laboratory as having aged less than he has. Rather, as long as we remain within the special theory of relativity, we must give the unaccelerated reference frame a unique role in the expression of the laws of physics; and in this way we explain how observers who have suffered different kinds of movements can, on meeting again, find that they have experienced different amounts of time.” On the broader epistemological issue of analyzing the concepts of space and time in terms of frames of reference, see ibid., pp. 51–​57. On Bohm’s own quantum modification of the Einsteinian perspective, see David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 268–​ 269: “Thus, since the quantum theory implies that elements that are separated in space are generally non-​causally and non-​locally related projections of a higher-​dimensional reality, it follows that moments separated in time are also such projections of this reality. Evidently, this leads to a fundamentally new notion of the meaning of time. Both in common experience and in physics, time has generally been considered to be a primary, independent and universally applicable order, perhaps the most fundamental one known to us. Now, we have been led to propose that it is secondary and that, like space … it is to be derived from a higher-​dimensional ground, as a particular order. Indeed, one can further say that many such particular interrelated time orders can be derived for different sets of sequences of moments, corresponding to material systems that travel at different speeds. However, these are all dependent on a multidimensional reality that cannot be comprehended fully in terms of any time order, or set of such orders. Similarly, we are led to propose that this multidimensional reality may project into many orders of sequences of moments in consciousness. Not only do we have in mind here the relativity of psychological time … but also much more subtle implications. Thus, for example, people who know each other well may separate for a long time (as measured by the sequence of moments registered by a clock) and yet they are often able to ‘take up from where they left off’ as if no time had passed. What we are proposing here is that sequences of moments that ‘skip’

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empirical or logical rationale to consider events in the present as more real or actual than those in the past or in the future, the three temporal modalities are to be placed on an equal ontological footing. On these grounds, it is hard to ascribe any literal meaning to the metaphors of the flow of time or the arrow of time. Indeed, despite the strong psychological impression of being swept along an unstoppable current of time, the purported passage of time—​as opposed to intervals of time between events—​cannot be measured or detected by any laboratory instrument.139 In spite of the certainty of the temporal disposition of our experience, try as we may, the precise nature of that temporality eludes our grasp and the conjecture regarding the unreality of time may be as logically plausible as trying to prove its reality.140 Hence, Aristotle wrote about time that “it either does not exist at all or barely, and in the obscure way.”141 The most celebrated articulation of the aporia concerning the true character of time is the comment of Augustine in the eleventh book of the Confessions: What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what is meant when we hear someone else taking

intervening spaces are just as allowable forms of time as those which seem continuous. The fundamental law, then, is that of the immense multidimensional ground; and the projections from this ground determine whatever time orders there may be. … One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.” 139 Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mystery of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp. 192–​195, esp. 193: “When the arrow on a compass needle points north it doesn’t indicate that you are moving north. In the same way, it is fine to attach an arrow or sequences of events in the world in order to distinguish past from future in the sequence, but what is not fine—​what is absurd, in fact—​is to then say that this arrow of asymmetry implies a movement towards the future along the timeline of events, that is, a movement of time” (emphasis in original). 1 40 See Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “The Mystery of Time (Or, The Man Who Did Not Know What Time Is),” Journal of Philosophy 51 (1954): 341–​363; Richard M. Gale, “Some Metaphysical Statements about Time,” Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963): 225–​237; and the chapter “Is Time Real”? in Michael F. Wagner, The Enigmatic Reality of Time: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Today (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 19–​41, and the discussion of the “nonreality” of time in Jonathan Bricklin, The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 211–​242. 141 Physics 218a1, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 370.

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about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.142 Many centuries later Husserl demonstrated his solidarity with Augustine when he concluded that “the problem of the analysis of time” is “the most difficult of all phenomenological problems.” His task, then, is “only to lift the veil a little from this world of time-​consciousness, so rich in mystery, that up until now has been hidden from us.”143 Echoing this sentiment, Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of the creative passage of nature without overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human knowledge.”144 Heidegger, too, lends his voice to the chorus of thinkers who have affirmed the aporetic consequence of the human attempt to calculate the incalculable nature of time: “Although we constantly reckon with time or take account of it without explicitly measuring it by the clock and are abandoned 142 Augustine, Confessions, translated with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 230. In n. 19, ad locum, Chadwick calls the reader’s attention to the fact that Plotinus remarked that when we attempt to examine closely the concepts of eternity and time “we become confused once more again in our thoughts as we consider the different assertions of the ancients about them, sometimes interpreting even these in different ways, and are satisfied with them and think it adequate to state as answers to our questions what they had decided and are happy to free ourselves from further enquiry about them. And although we should consider that some of the ancient and blessed philosophers have said what is right, we ought to examine which ones came closest and how we, too, can attain comprehension regarding these matters.” See Plotinus, The Enneads, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, translated by George Boys-​Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.7.1, p. 334. Many scholars have discussed the Augustinian analysis of time in book eleven of the Confessions. I will here mention several examples: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 5–​30; Marinus B. Pranger, Eternity’s Ennui: Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 35–​54; David van Dusen, The Space of Time: A Sensualist Interpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X-​XII (Leiden: Brill, 2014). See also Friedrich-​Wilhelm von Herrmann, Augustine and the Phenomenological Question of Time/​Augustinus und die Phänomenologische Frage nach der Zeit, translation, prologue, epilogue, and annotation by Frederick Van Fleteren and Jeremiah Hackett (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2008). 143 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 39, p. 286; idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 307. On this dimension of Husserl’s thinking about temporality, see John B. Brough, “The Wonder of Time-​Consciousness,” The Routledge Handbook, pp. 82–​92. The indebtedness to Augustine is noted on p. 82: “Husserl and Augustine are of one mind in holding that nothing is more familiar and yet more resistant to understanding than temporal experience.” 144 Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 73.

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to it as the most commonplace thing, whether we are lost in it or pressed by it—​although time is as familiar to us as only something in our Dasein can be, nevertheless, it becomes strange and puzzling when we try to make it clear to ourselves even if only within the limits of everyday intelligibility.”145 Heidegger buttresses his observation by citing the Augustinian passage mentioned above and by referring as well to the comment of Simplicius,146 “as to what time may be, then, to this question hardly the wisest would be able to find an answer.”147 Not only is the proper definition of time confounding, but it is also not clear how we can distinguish the telling of time from the time of its telling.148 On 1 45 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, p. 229; idem, Die Grundprobleme, pp. 324–​325. 146 For the fuller text, see Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics 4.1–​5, 10–​14, translated by J. O. Urmson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 102: “There is something remarkable about time, in one way in common with other things, in another special to it. For, just as colour and change gave a very evident existence, but it is hard to get hold of an account of their nature, similarly the existence of time is totally obvious, not just to the learned but to all. For we all say ‘younger’ and ‘older’, and ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, and ‘formerly’, ‘at present’ and ‘in the future’; would one ignorant of days, nights, months and years seem human? But, asked what time is, even the most learned would scarcely have an answer. In this way time is like other things. What is special is that its actual existence is not grasped by perception, even if perception gives us some approaches to it—​for the older and the younger, yesterday and today, are not perceptible—​and yet it seems the most obvious of all things.” 147 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, pp. 229–​230; idem, Die Grundprobleme, p. 325. 148 Augustine’s famous questioning of the meaning of time was strongly criticized by Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 26–​27. According to Wittgenstein, Augustine’s aporia regarding our ability to grasp the nature of time stems from a mistaken effort to understand the phenomenon of time by trying to establish its definition. A definition, at best, clears up the grammar of the word based on a logic that explores the essence or foundation of everything empirical without concern whether those things actually happen in this or in another way as facts of nature. Moreover, the inquiry into how we can measure time is based on a conflict between two usages of this word, one that applies to the distance between two physical localities and the other that applies to the length between two temporal durations. Underlying Augustine’s puzzlement, consequently, is a fascination inspired by the analogy between two similar linguistic structures. The attempt to apply the way the word is used in a consistent manner is what gives rise to the paradoxes that befuddle reason. The argument is repeated in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by Gertrude E. M. Anscombe, Peter M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, revised fourth edition by Peter M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), §§ 89–​90, p. 47: “Augustine says in Confessions xi. 14, ‘quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.’—​This could not be said about a question of natural science. … Augustine calls to mind the different statements that are made about the duration of events, about their being past, present or future. (These are, of course, not philosophical statements about time, the past, the present and the future). Our inquiry is therefore a grammatical one. And this inquiry sheds light on our problem

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the contrary, ruminations about time well forth from the dilemma that it is not possible to experience external events and objects temporally unless we presuppose an inner sense of time, but if we presume the latter, then we cannot be confident that we are experiencing the former—​temporal objects can be constituted in consciousness only because of the temporal comportment of consciousness. How can consciousness constituted by time, and thus always in flux, account for the perseverance of intentional contents of consciousness as identifiable subjects of experience? Husserl, who dedicated so much of his life pondering the human experience of time, ably captured the wider issue underlying this puzzle when he wondered in his Amsterdam lectures of 1926 if we can “overcome the paradox of our doubling [Verdoppelung] … We are fated as human beings to be the psychophysical subjects of a mental life in the real world and, at the same time, transcendentally to be subjects of a transcendental, world-​constituting life-​process.”149 As the following citation from Barry Dainton illustrates, even contemporary physicists, utilizing a different methodology, have been forced by the dint of their speculations to acknowledge the inherent difficulty in thinking about time so well formulated by Husserl: “Immanent flow is such a pervasive feature of our consciousness that it is hard to think of anything that does not possess this feature, time included, for not only do our thoughts possess it as we think them, but so do any mental images that we call up.”150 The supposedly distinctive capacity for human beings to live in this state of doubling, as immanent and transcendent subjectivities, is facilitated by the “transcendental power of imagination,” in

by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, brought about, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of our language.—​Some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called ‘analysing’ our forms of expression, for sometimes this procedure resembles taking a thing apart” (emphasis in original). Compare op. cit., §196, p. 86 and §436, p. 136, and see Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–​47: Notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah. A.C. Jackson, edited by P. T. Geach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 6. Compare the analyses of Ronald Suter, “Augustine on Time with Some Criticisms from Wittgenstein,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 16 (1962): 378–​394; James McEvoy, “St. Augustine’s Account of Time and Wittgenstein’s Criticisms,” Review of Metaphysics 37 (1984): 547–​577; and the critical dismissal by van Dusen, The Space of Time, p. 46. 149 Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation With Heidegger (1927–​1931), translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 244. 1 50 Barry Dainton, Time and Space (Montreal: Mc-​Gill-​Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 107 (emphasis in original).

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Heidegger’s locution, a “spontaneous receptivity and receptive spontaneity,”151 a metamorphic power that unsettles binary oppositions, rendering the real unreal, the concrete abstract, the somatic symbolic. “To render Time sensible,” wrote Gilles Deleuze, “in itself is a task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence.”152 The time of which Deleuze speaks is not “time as Chronos,” that is, the time of physical movement measured in accord with the repetition of actual events patterned after the static being of present time, but “time as Aion,” that is, the time of the virtual event of becoming, the sign of pure eventness that is without thickness or extension, the present that comprehends the hybridity of past and future.153 Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future—​but only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems. Aion is the past-​future, which in an 151 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, translated by Richard Taft, fourth edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 134; idem, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik [ga 3] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), p. 196. On the role of the reproductive and the productive imagination in making temporal consciousness possible according to Kant, see Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and the Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 24–​25; Tobias Rosefeldt, “Kant on Imagination and the Intuition of Time,” in The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism, edited by Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 48–​65. 152 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated and with an introduction by Daniel W. Smith, afterword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 54. 153 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 162–​168. Deleuze’s distinction between Aion and Chronos has been discussed by many scholars. For instance, see Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 85–​86, 91, 96–​98, 104; Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 172–​173; Eleanor Kaufman, Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 38–​39, 111–​112, 116–​117, 194 n. 23; Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-​Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 59–​65. Many have also discussed Deleuze’s categories of the virtual and the real. See, for instance, Henry Somers-​Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 91–​123; Gavin Rae, Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze: A Comparative Analysis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 116–​144.

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infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present.154 The time of Aion—​the eruption of eventality155—​cannot be identified with either past or future, since it infinitely subdivides into both at once and, as a consequence, it is a present that eludes and therefore displaces the present, the instant that is, in Plato’s locution, atopon, that is, the aleatory point that is always without place.156 Expounding Bergson’s theory of memory, Deleuze notes: We have great difficulty in understanding a survival of the past in itself because we believe that the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus confused Being with being-​present. Nevertheless the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not, but it acts. … At the limit, the ordinary determinations are reversed: of the present, we must say at every instant that it “was,” and of the past, that it “is,” that it is eternally, for all time. This is the difference in kind between the past and the present.157 In the temporal underpinnings of the Deleuzian differential ontology, the past is not a present that has ceased to be because the present never was a presence of being but rather a process of becoming; the present, therefore, is merely a past that is virtual in recollection and never coincidental with a sense of being actual.158 Deleuze’s position can be profitably elucidated by Claude Romano’s 1 54 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 77. 155 See Alberto Anelli, “Leaving Metaphysics? Deleuze on the Event,” in Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, edited by Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska (Lanham: Boulder, 2014), pp. 17–​44, and in the same volume, Alain Beaulieu, “Deleuze and Badiou on Being and the Event,” pp. 137–​152. See also Sjoerd van Tuinen, “A Transcendental Philosophy of the Event: Deleuze’s Non-​Phenomenological Reading of Leibniz,” in Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 155–​183, esp. 156–​161. 156 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 166. 157 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 55 (emphasis in original). Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 105, infers from this passage that “Deleuze equates transcendental or ontological memory with the ontological difference between Being and beings.” 158 Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me emphasize that the virtual is to be contrasted with the actual and not the real. The point is lucidly explained by Bryant, Difference and Givenness, p. 106: “It is important not to associate the virtual with images, the imaginary,

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suggestion that “the event is not a fact on which the advenant would confer a meaning after the fact; it is that whose very sense is to make sense—​that is, never to be made, whence its paradoxical temporality. On the one hand, certain events can take place in the instant, suddenly; on the other hand, they can only appear as such retrospectively, according to the temporal gap of their appropriation by the advenant.”159 Drawing an analogy between Kant’s identification of memory as the subjectivation that is time and Foucault’s depiction of the foldings of memory in a manner analogous to the inside of thought revealing the outside to be its own unthought,160 Deleuze concludes that forgetting is an indispensable feature of remembering and hence the opposite of memory is not forgetfulness but the agnōsía of forgetting the forgetfulness: Not that brief memory that comes afterwards and is the opposite of forgetting, but the “absolute memory” which doubles the present and the

or the unreal. The virtual, as Deleuze uses it, has nothing to do with what conventional discourse sometimes calls ‘virtual reality.’ For Deleuze, the virtual is not opposed to the real, but is on the side of the real. For this reason, it is better to think the virtual as opposed to the actual. The virtual is the condition under which the actual actualizes itself.” On the neorealist or nonessential realism of Deleuze as it relates specifically to the indeterminacy of the future, see Manuel de Landa, “Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-​ Ended Becoming of the World,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 29–​41. 159 Romano, There Is, p. 221. 160 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated and edited by Seán Hand, foreword by Paul Bové (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 97: “The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside. The classical age had already stated that there was an inside of thought, the unthought, when it invoked the finite, the different order of infinity. And from the nineteenth century on it is more the dimensions of finitude which fold the outside and constitute a ‘depth’, a ‘density withdrawn into itself’, an inside to life, labour and language, in which man is embedded, if only to sleep, but conversely which is also itself embedded in man ‘as a living being, a working individual or a speaking subject’. Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside. … The inside as an operation of the outside: in all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as the ship were a folding of the sea.” And see ibid., p. 118: “This auto-​affection, this conversion of far and near, will assume more and more importance by constructing an inside-​space that will be completely co-​present with the outside-​space on the line of the fold. The problematical unthought gives way to a thinking being who problematizes himself, as an ethical subject (in Artaud this is the ‘innate genital’; in Foucault it is the meeting between self and sexuality). To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside” (emphasis in original). Compare Keith Robinson, “Thought of the Outside: The Foucault/​Deleuze Conjunction,” Philosophy Today 43 (1999): 57–​72.

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outside and is one with forgetting, since it is itself endlessly forgotten and reconstituted: its fold, in fact, merges with the unfolding, because the latter remains present within the former as the thing that is folded. Only forgetting (the unfolding) recovers what is folded in memory (and in the fold itself). There is a final rediscovery of Heidegger by Foucault.161 Memory is contrasted not with forgetting but with the forgetting of forgetting, which dissolves us into the outside and constitutes death.162 Rendered more technically, we must presume a twofold paradox of the contemporaneity and coexistence of the past and the present in memory to explain how the present passes and the past is constituted: 161 On the image of the fold in Heidegger and Merleau-​Ponty, the two major sources of inspiration for Foucault, see Deleuze, Foucault, p. 100: “And in Heidegger, and then in Merleau-​Ponty, the surpassing of intentionality tended toward Being [l’Etre or Sein], the fold of Being. From intentionality to the fold, from being to Being, from phenomenology to ontology. Heidegger’s disciples taught us to what extent ontology was inseparable from the fold, since Being was precisely the fold which it made with being; and that the unfolding of Being, as the inaugural gesture of the Greeks, was not the opposite of the fold but the fold itself, the pivotal point of the Open, the unity of the unveiling-​veiling.” See ibid., p. 129: “If the fold and the unfold animate not only Foucault’s ideas but even his style, it is because they constitute an archaeology of thought. So we are perhaps less surprised to find that Foucault encounters Heidegger precisely in this area. It is more an encounter than an influence, to the extent that in Foucault the fold and the unfold have an origin, a use and a destination that are very different from Heidegger’s. According to Foucault they reveal a relation between forces, where regional forces confront either forces that raise to infinity (the unfold) in such a way as to constitute a God-​form, or forces of finitude (the fold) in such a way as to constitute a Man-​form. It is a Nietzschean rather than Heideggerian history, a history devoted to Nietzsche, or to life” (emphasis in original). Many have opined on the relationship of Heidegger and Foucault, but especially apposite to the topic at hand is Béatrice Han, “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, edited by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 127–​162. Consider the author’s statement on p. 131 that much of Heidegger’s early work “can be read as addressing the crucial issues highlighted by Foucault’s analysis. Indeed, the uncovering of the ontological level might be interpreted as Heidegger’s way of taking up the transcendental approach, but in such a manner as to avoid the circularity of the analytic of finitude, the point being to displace the empirico-​transcendental divide itself and therefore to come up with a renewed understanding of existence. Seen in this light, his strategy consists in acknowledging the traditional limitations of anthropological finitude (such as temporality and death), but by recasting them at the ontological level itself, a move that reestablished the possibility of an a priori analysis of the structure of existence (fundamental ontology itself) while generating a new understanding of finitude (as defined by existentials identified and indexed by Being and Time)” (emphasis in original). 162 Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 107–​108.

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This is the first paradox: the contemporaneity of the past with the present that it was. It gives us the reason for the passing of the present. Every present passes, in favour of a new present, because the past is contemporaneous with itself as present. A second paradox emerges: the paradox of coexistence. If each past is contemporaneous with the present that it was, then all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past. The past is no more “in” this second present than it is “after” the first. … For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions.163 The image of Aion denotes the deterritorialization of each instant, the “form of empty time” that fractures the “I” and dissolves the self,164 a “demented time” that is “out of joint,”165 the time of “the nonsense of the surface and the quasi-​ cause,”166 the interval of the fold as the singular differential in a world that 163 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 81–​82 (emphasis in original). See Bryant, Difference and Givenness, pp. 113–​120. 164 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 284. In Deleuze’s materialist logic, the idea of space as pure continuum is homologous to the description of time as empty form. See Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 156–​157; Leen De Bolle, “Deleuze’s Passive Syntheses of Time and the Dissolved Self,” in Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis, edited by Leen De Bolle (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), pp. 131–​155. On the pure and empty form of time in Deleuze’s philosophy, see Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 133–​134. 165 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 88. See Tamsin Lorraine, “Living Time Out of Joint,” in Between Deleuze and Derrida, edited by Paul Patton and John Protevi (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 30–​45. 166 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 166. On Deleuze’s use of the term nonsense, see ibid., pp. 66–​73, esp. 67–​68: “Nonsense has two sides, one corresponding to the regressive synthesis, the other to the disjunctive synthesis. One could object that all of this means nothing. It is a bad play on words to suppose that nonsense expresses its own sense since, by definition, it has none. But this objection is unfounded. The play on words would be to say that nonsense has a sense, the sense being precisely that it hasn’t any. This is not our hypothesis at all. When we assume that nonsense says its own sense, we wish to indicate, on the contrary, that sense and nonsense have a specific relation which can not copy that of the true and false, that is, which can not be conceived simply on the basis of a relation of exclusion. … The logic of sense is necessarily determined to posit between sense and nonsense an original type of intrinsic relation, a mode of co-​presence. For the time being, we may only hint at this mode by dealing with nonsense as a word which says its own sense.” Deleuze is here claiming the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle, the middle, that is, where sense and nonsense are co-​present rather than contradictory, and hence we can sensibly speak of the sense of nonsense. It is appropriate to mention

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is “an infinite series of curvatures or inflections,”167 the caesura that ruptures chronological succession,168 the discontinuous duration of the continuous here Deleuze’s idea of schizophrenia as the loss of sense—​the non-​sense of Untersinn as opposed to the nonsense of Unsinn—​due to the collapse of the surface. See Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence—​Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 98–​100. For discussion of the larger context to appreciate Deleuze’s engagement with this topic, see Daniel W. Smith, “From the Surface to the Depths: On the Transition from Logic of Sense to Anti-​Oedipus,” in Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Rebellion, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 82–​97. Also relevant, but beyond the confines of this note, is the question of whether the Deleuzian difference entails an exclusivism where difference is merely an exception or an inclusivism where difference in the end is unthinkable. For discussion of this topic, see Petra Carlsson Redell, Mysticism as Revolt: Foucault, Deleuze and Theology Beyond Representation (Aurora: Davies Group, 2014), pp. 83–​103. 167 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and translation by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 24–​25: “The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view. The world is the infinite curve that touches at an infinity of points an infinity of curves, the curve with a unique variable, the convergent series of all series. … With greater reason an infinite series, even if the variable is unique, cannot be separated from an infinity of variations that make it up: we necessarily take it in accord with all possible orders, and we favor this or that partial sequence at this or that time. That is why only one form—​or one street—​recovers its rights, but only in respect to the entire series” (emphasis in original). On the nature of the fold, see ibid., pp. 6–​9: “A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line. … Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold. … Folding-​unfolding no longer simply means tension-​release, contraction-​ dilation, but enveloping-​ developing, involution-​ evolution. The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and to unfold them, not to infinity, but to a degree of development assigned to each species. Thus an organism is enveloped by organisms, one within another (interlocking of germinal matter), like Russian dolls.” On the depiction of the fold as the “differentiator” or the “differential,” see Smith, Essays on Deleuze, p. 129: “The concept of a straight line is a universal, because all straight lines resemble each other, and the concept can be defined axiomatically, as in Euclid. The concept of the fold, by contrast, is a singularity, because folds vary, and every fold is different; all folding proceeds by differentiation” (emphasis in original). For other pertinent studies on the Deleuzian fold, see Mogens Lærke, “Five Figures of Folding: Deleuze on Leibniz’s Monadological Metaphysics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (2015): 1192–​ 1213; Angelika Seppi, “Simply Complicated: Thinking in Folds,” in On Folding: Towards a New Field of Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael Friedman and Wolfgang Schäffner (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), pp. 49–​76; Claudia Blümle, “Infinite Folds: El Greco and Deleuze’s Operative Function of the Fold,” in On Folding, pp. 77–​92. 168 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 89. See Arkady Plotnitsky, “The Calculable Law of Tragic Representation and the Unthinkable: Rhythm, Caesura and Time, from Hölderlin to Deleuze,” in At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-​Kantian Philosophy, edited by Craig Lundy and Daniela Voss (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 123–​145.

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present,169 the immeasurable time of the force of becoming, the “pure immanence” of the indeterminate life,170 the order of the disorderly, the time that for all time remains predictably unpredictable.171 Eliciting the ramification of Kant’s effort to contextualize the “I think” of the Cartesian cogito under the sensible form of the subjective intuition of time by which the undeterminable is rendered determinable and difference establishes an a priori relation between thought and being, Deleuze concludes: The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the “I think” cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought—​its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I—​being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. … To “I think” and “I am” must be added the self—​that is, the passive position (what Kant

169 With respect to this matter, Deleuze was clearly indebted to Bergson. See, in particular, Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp. 80–​81: “The flight of the bird and my own duration are only simultaneous insofar as my own duration divides in two and is reflected in another that contains it at the same time as it contains the flight of the bird: There is therefore a fundamental triplicity of fluxes. It is in this sense that my duration essentially has the power to disclose other durations, to encompass the others, and to encompass itself ad infinitum. But we see that this infinity of reflection or attention gives duration back its true characteristics, which must be constantly recalled: It is not simply the indivisible, but that which has a very special style of division; it is not simply succession but a very special coexistence, a simultaneity of fluxes.” For scholarly assessments of Bergson and Deleuze, see Rosi Braidotti, “Tetratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 161–​ 162; Elizabeth Grosz, “Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, pp. 214–​234, esp. 230, 232–​233; Valentine Moulard-​Leonard, Bergson—​Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 105–​122; Bryant, Difference and Givenness, pp. 20–​21, 44–​46, 49–​72, 73–​80, 196–​197, 223–​225, 242–​243; Somers-​Hall, Hegel, pp. 69–​89. For a comparative analysis of the theories of time promulgated by Deleuze and Merleau-​Ponty as readers of Bergson, see Judith Wambacq, Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-​Ponty (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017), pp. 125–​145. 170 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, with an introduction by John Rajchman, translated by Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 171 My formulation is indebted to the analysis in Lorraine, “Living a Time Out of Joint,” pp. 32–​39.

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calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. … It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.172 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve more deeply into Deleuze’s presentation of Kant’s account of time as the auto-​affection that constitutes the essential structure of subjectivity and the ways in which he veers in a different direction. Suffice it for our purposes to highlight his utilization of Kant to articulate a sense of time as a “disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self,” a schizophrenia that “opens Being directly on to difference.”173 Having reached this point, we return to where we started. What sense of time does one convey when one speaks of a lifetime and of death as the coming of one’s time? No sooner spoken that another and perhaps even more elementary question suggests itself: how does one distinguish the time of telling from the telling of time? It seems we are inexorably implicated in media res, that is, the vantage point of the middle whence we can speak about not being in the middle. To discourse about time is to be ensconced in this middle and hence to be caught in a hermeneutical circle from which there appears to be no escape: one cannot speak of the being of time except from the standpoint of the time of being, nor of the time of being except from the standpoint of the being of time. As Julia Kristeva noted in her exposition of “the experience of time embodied” (l’expérience du temps incorporé) in the thought of Marcel Proust, “Whether we are lost in time, losing time, or losing our lives without discovering anything in death, we are made of the same substance as time because it defines the boundaries of our speech. Speaking about time while time passes is a problem that circles in on itself, producing a painful cyclical

1 72 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 86 (emphasis in original). 173 Ibid., p. 58. On Deleuze’s analysis of Kant’s discovery of difference and the fractured I, see Beth Lord, Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 143–​151. See also the chapter on “Time and the Split Subject” in Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 210–​264.

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motion in which the problem disappears in order to attain a rapture beyond words—​and beyond time.”174 Just as there is no way beyond language but through language, so there is no way beyond temporality but through temporality. If it is true, as Heidegger proposed, that the constitution of Dasein’s being is grounded in temporality (Die Seinsverfassung des Daseins gründet in der Zeitlichkeit), it follows that the constitution of temporality’s being must be grounded in Dasein. But then, if indeed the understanding of being belongs to the Dasein’s existence, this understanding too must be based in temporality. The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself. Therefore we must be able to cull from it that by way of which we understand the like of being. Temporality takes over the enabling of the understanding of being and thus the enabling of the thematic interpretation of being and of its articulation and manifold ways; it thus makes ontology possible. … The term “Temporality” [Temporalität] is intended to indicate that temporality [Zeitlichkeit], in existential analytic, represents the horizon from which we understand being.175 Temporality is the horizon from which humans understand being but it is also the perimeter that makes the existential analytic of being human possible. Speaking about time, consequently, transpires always in the time of speaking and the time of speaking always in speaking about time. We are intractably positioned between the present that is no longer and the present that is not yet, the middle wherein the beginning ends and the ending begins, the chiasm of death that is birth and birth that is death. In this interim, each now is concurrently becoming and expiring. The philosophical import of the present so construed bears affinity to Aristotle’s conception of the now as the indivisible monad by which the mind measures the motion of bodies in time.176 174 Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 167. On Kristeva’s view regarding the temporal architectonic of narrative, see Luz Aurora Pimentel, Metaphoric Narration: Paranarrative Dimensions in À la recherche du temps perdu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 83–​113; Amittai Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 171–​195. 175 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, p. 228 (emphasis in original); idem, Die Grundprobleme, pp. 323–​324. 176 See the discussion of the Aristotelian perspective in David G. Leahy, Novitas Mundi: Perception of the History of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 157–​161. For a different approach to Heidegger’s relationship to the Aristotelian conception or time as the “flow of a current,” see Jacques Derrida, “Le temps des adieux: Heidegger

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Particularly germane is Heidegger’s account of the “double visage” (eigentümliches Doppelgesicht) of Aristotle’s understanding of the now: Time is held together within itself by the now; time’s specific continuity is rooted in the now. But conjointly, with respect to the now, time is divided, articulated into the no-​longer-​now, the earlier, and the not-​yet-​ now, the later. It is only with respect to the now that we can conceive of the then and at-​the-​time, the later and the earlier. The now that we count in following a motion is in each instance a different now. To de nun dia to kineisthai to pheromenon aiei heteron, on account of the transition of the moving thing the now is always another, an advance from one place to the other. In each now the now is a different one, but still each different now is, as now, always now. The ever different nows are, as different, nevertheless always exactly the same, namely, now. Aristotle summarizes the peculiar nature of the now and thus of time—​when he interprets time purely by way of the now … that is, in each now it is now; its essentia, its what, is always the same (tauto)—​and nevertheless every now is, by its nature, different in each now … nowness, being-​now [Jetztsein], is always otherness, being-​other [Anderssein] … the now is in a certain way always the same and in a certain way never the same. The now articulates and bounds time with respect to its earlier and later. On the one hand it is indeed always the same, but then it is never the same. … This constitutes its always being-​now, its otherhood [Andersheit]. But what it always already was as that which it is, namely, now—​that is the same.177 The destabilization of the mathematical understanding of a chronological series, the implied interpretation of time as an objective being or an existing actuality, and the positing of an alternate chronology, is elicited by Heidegger from Aristotle’s own attentiveness to the property of Jetztsein, the time of the (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 1(1998): 16–​17; English translation “A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou,” in Malabou, The Future of Hegel, pp. xix-​xx. 177 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, pp. 247–​ 248 (emphasis in original); idem, Die Grundprobleme, pp. 349–​351. For discussion of Aristotle’s mathematic theory of time as the prototype of Heidegger’s ontological difference, see Alexei Chernyakov, The Ontology of Time: Being and Time in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 42–​77. Also pertinent are the studies by Stephen Crocker, “The Oscillating Now: Heidegger on the Failure of Bergsonism,” Philosophy Today 41 (1997): 405–​423, and Heath Massey, The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 49–​85.

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now that personifies otherness in virtue of its being in a certain way always the same and in a certain way never the same. The only dimension of time that appears to be real is the transtemporal present, what Heidegger will label praesens, that is, the instant, Augenblick, literally, the blink of the eye, which “is more original than the now [Jetzt] for the reason that the instant is a mode of the pre-​sent [Gegen-​wart], of the enpresenting of something [des Gegegnwärtigens von etwas], which can express itself with the saying of ‘now’ [Jetzt-​sagen].”178 The praesens, the moment of vision, is the basic determination of the horizonal schema of the ecstasis of the present, the condition of possibility of transcendence or the “beyond itself” (über sich hinaus),179 the making-​present of the horizon that exists between two nows, since it is no more and not yet, indeed no more because not yet and not yet because no more. The sense of transcendence affirmed by Heidegger does not point to any trace of the traditional theological or metaphysical understanding of transcendence as the being that is beyond being. On the contrary, the radical finitude affirmed by Heidegger’s existential ontology presumes that being is to be interpreted within the horizon of time that is conceived in the image of Dasein’s becoming.180 Together with Heidegger we can aver that time is not something or nothing; what determines both in their belonging-​together (Zusammengehören) is the event of appropriation (Ereignis) that is neither being nor nonbeing,181 the event that persists in passing and passes in persisting: 178 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, p. 306; idem, Die Grundprobleme, p. 434. See Chernyakov, The Ontology, p. 210. 179 Heidegger, The Basic Problems, p. 306; idem, Die Grundprobleme, p. 435. 180 Jacob Taubes, “The Development of the Ontological Question in Recent German Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 6 (1953): 663–​664. Compare the formulation of Susan Taubes in “The Gnostic Foundations,” p. 156: “The title of Heidegger’s major work, Sein und Zeit, presents a paradox. He aims in this work to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being; and it is the interpretation of time that opens the possible horizon of any understanding of Being. The frame of reference of an ontology is not the timeless but time itself. This paradox of uniting what is usually accepted as the concept of permanence itself (Being) with the potency of transience (time) demands an explanation. … The aim of ontology is to formulate, not the categories for the understanding of the structure of the cosmos, but the Existenzialien as structures of ‘Dasein,’ or the self.” 181 Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 19; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 24. I would respectfully disagree with the assessment of Heidegger in Chung-​Ying Cheng, The Primary Way: Philosophy of Yijing, foreword by Robert Cummings Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), p. 299: “In light of the Yijing tradition, it also is clear that reality, in the absolute sense, which is developed in Greek philosophy, Christianity, and modern European philosophy, be it rationalist or be it metaphysical or scientific, is not acceptable. … Even the most Eastern-​minded Heidegger does not fully appropriate the rich creative dialectics of the interpretation of being and nonbeing and their co-​creativity as the basis for understanding being and nonbeing.” For a more detailed comparison of Heidegger’s

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Time is not. There is, It gives time [Die Zeit ist nicht. Es gibt die Zeit]. The giving that gives time is determined by denying and withholding nearness. … We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time.182 Of time I cannot say much but whatever I do say about anything at all relates to time in its mode of giving. “Thus true time appears as the ‘It’ of which we speak when we say: It gives Being. The destiny in which It gives Being lies in the extending of time.”183 For Heidegger, the two dicta, Es gibt Sein and Es gibt Zeit, are homologous,184 and neither should be construed as “statements about beings.”185 Ontically speaking, time is not a being, but, ontologically, like being, it gives. To say of either being or time that “it gives” is tautologous for it is in the very nature of being and in the very nature of time to give. However, the giving of being, which is the giving of time, is simultaneously an extending and a refusal to extend. In the giving that gives time and being, the bestowal is commensurate to the withholding; indeed, the givenness can be given only as ungiven in the same manner that what is unthought lingers as the most crucial dimension of a thinker’s thought.186 Genuine innovation consists of the repetition of the same that in each iteration is entirely different.187 The secret of time idea of alētheia and the onto-​hermeneutic of being and the Chinese Chan Buddhist understanding of being, see ibid., pp. 127–​132, 134–​137, esp. 137: “The Heideggerian idea of the ‘unthought’ (das Ungedachte) or the ‘unthinkable’ (das Unvordenkliche) and Laozi’s idea of the ‘unnamable’ (feichangming) are similar and perhaps speak to the Same, that is, the Ultimate. … In later Heidegger, the term ‘appropriation,’ or ‘Ereignis,’ is given to naming this Ultimate as the Same. This also means that time and Being form an inseparable relationship of mutual definability and interreference in understanding (and therefore finding meanings in) actual instances of beings. There is no time without Being and no Being without time. Thus, Being can be said to be an aspect of time just as time can be said to be an aspect of Being. Perhaps, the best way to describe this relationship is the rich, multimeaningful statement of Cheng Yi: ‘The substance and the function come from the same source and there is no gap between the manifest and the unmanifest.’” For other scholarly discussions of Heidegger and Daoism, see the sources cited in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 232–​233 n. 10. 182 Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 16; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 20. 183 Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 17; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 22. 184 Heidegger, On Time and Being, pp. 17–​18; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 23. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 244. 185 Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 18; idem, Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 24. 186 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 77; idem, Was Heißt Denken? [ga 8] (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p. 83. 187 See the text of Heidegger cited below, n. 222.

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is expressive of the truth—​apperceived at all times through the semblance of untruth—​that the fleetingness of becoming alone is the resoluteness of being; what is given is steadfastly similar because interminably dissimilar.188 1

Time’s Linear Circle and Reiteration of the Inimitable

In the final section of this chapter, I reflect again on the ending of the beginning and the beginning of the end. The beginning, we may presume, never ends if it is to persist as beginning, but that which never ends cannot ever begin. Utilizing a distinction made by Edward Said, we can say that the point of departure is inaccessible because it is not a transitive property determined by an anticipated end or expected continuity; it is rather a radical and intransitive starting point that has no object other than its own constant clarification and critical unraveling.189 The beginning is thus the “making or producing difference; but—​ and here is the great fascination in the subject—​difference which is the result of combining the already-​familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language.”190 By his own admission, Said’s conception is indebted to the circular movement of the Husserlian phenomenological reduction whereby the search for the absolute beginning leads to its own undermining inasmuch as the beginning can show itself sensuously only as the beginning intended in the constitution of the intuitive object that “attains original givenness in and with the form of a temporal duration, rendering an encompassing and objective unity possible.”191 Even in its immanent essence as an absolute givenness, the beginning is always noetically at a distance from being the beginning of the beginning of being.192 The logic of this argument can be adduced further from Husserl’s remark in the lectures on the consciousness of internal time from 1905, “But this question 188 Wolfson, Giving, p. 243. For a more extensive discussion of this theme, see the section “Novelty and Repetition of the Altogether Otherwise” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 35–​40. 189 Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 72–​ 73. I have taken the liberty to repeat here a section from Elliot R. Wolfson, “Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory,” in Jews at the End of Theory, edited by Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and Jonathan Boyarin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 294–​301. 190 Said, Beginnings, p. xvii (emphasis in original). 191 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, § 36, p. 157 (emphasis in original); idem, Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 181. 192 Said, Beginnings, pp. 48–​49.

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of origin is directed towards the primitive formations of time-​consciousness, in which the primitive differences of the temporal become constituted intuitively and properly as the original sources of all the evidences relating to time.”193 Phenomenological—​in contradistinction to psychological—​apperception is not concerned with the empirical genesis whence the intuitions of objective space and objective time arise but only in the immanent sense and descriptive content of the experiences (Erlebnisse) bracketed from the natural standpoint and the ensuing epistemological inquiry into the presumed existence or nonexistence transcendent to consciousness. As Husserl boldly states, “We do not fit experiences into any reality. We are concerned with reality only insofar as it is reality meant, objectivated, intuited, or conceptually thought. With respect to the problem of time, this means that we are interested in the experiences of time [Zeiterlebnisse]. … We seek to bring the a priori of time to clarity by exploring the consciousness of time, by bringing its essential constitution to light, and by exhibiting the apprehension-​contents and act-​characters that pertain—​perhaps specifically—​to time and to which the a priori temporal laws essentially belong.”194 The origin, then, is not an objective time that can be calculated instrumentally by the ego in “the sense of the absolute self-​givenness of what is simply seen” (im Sinne der absoluten Selbst-​gegebenheit eines rein Geschauten) in the world of physical things and psychic subjects,195 but rather as the interior time of the eidetic experiences of pure consciousness accessible phenomenologically and not psychologically through the pure seeing of the pure phenomena (rein schauend im reinen Phänomen).196 When construed from this vantage point, the origin of time can never be something that originates in time, and thus the essence of the arche is inessentially an-​archic. Husserl himself, it is worth recalling, defined philosophy more generally—​although obviously the standpoint of phenomenology is privileged—​as “a science of true beginnings, or origins, of rizōmata pantōn.”197 But the true beginning is the beginning that cannot begin. The constant quest for origin, which is the watchword of 193 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 2, p. 9 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 9. 194 Husserl, On the Phenomenology, § 2, pp. 9–​ 10 (emphasis in original); idem, Zur Phänomenologie, p. 10. 195 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, translated by Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 33; idem, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Paul Janssen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986), p. 43. 196 Husserl, The Idea, p. 35; idem, Die Idee, p. 46. 197 Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, translated with an introduction by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 146.

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phenomenology as the science of pure phenomena, to go back to the things themselves (zur Sache selbst), is perforce a retreat to the domain where the very question of origin is interrogated as the origin of the question. At the beginning stands the impasse of the beginning. In lieu of a unitary point whence all things originate, we find a fold, duplicity, contravention, the doubling of infringement that marks the way of the beginning in the beginning of the way. A corresponding account, albeit betraying the influence of both Husserl and Merleau-​Ponty, is offered by John Sallis: “Radical philosophy is a peculiar return to beginnings, a turning towards what already determines it. It is a circling which sets out from the beginnings so as to return to them, which it can do only if in its circling it never really leaves them. … Radical philosophy, as return to beginnings, is thus simultaneously a turning towards its own beginnings, towards those beginnings with which the return to beginnings is initiated.”198 I would only add that this return is a return to the beginning where one has never been because the very notion of beginning, as Sallis himself wrote elsewhere, is always a “redoubling—​which is to say no beginning at all.”199 The beginning bears the paradox of existing only “after the fact;” that is, its state of having “always already been the beginning” implies that it continuously begins and therefore can never begin.200 In Derridean parlance, the commencement is permanently second, an echo, a trace, the “originary iterability.”201 Only that which is different can be duplicated, since what recurs is the same difference that is indifferently the same. Perhaps more efficaciously than any other twentieth-​century philosopher, Heidegger has expressed the intonation of time—​or, to be more meticulous, what he calls the “primordial temporality” (ursprünglichen Zeitlichkeit) experienced in the ecstatic unity of past, present, and future, as opposed to the vulgar understanding (vulgären Verständnis) of time as the ceaseless succession of nows (Jetzt-​folge)—​as the concurrence of the heterogeneity of the homogeneous and the homogeneity of the heterogeneous. This confluence is expressed as well in spatial terms as “the primordial ‘outside itself’ in and for itself [das 198 John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), p. 17 (emphasis in original). 199 John Sallis, “Doublings,” in Derrida: A Critical Reader, edited by David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 120. 200 Frey, Interruptions, p. 23. See my formulation of the paradox of the temporality of the beginning in Wolfson, Alef, pp. xiii, 131–​132. 201 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 163. See citation and discussion of some other Derridean sources on the nature of the beginning in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 184–​185.

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ursprüngliche ‘Außer-​sich’ an und für sich selbst].”202 That time is extrinsic to itself in the manner of being intrinsic to itself suggests that the temporal flow consists of the return of the same in which the same is the replication of difference.203 Following this notion of time, thinking itself is best characterized by a circular movement (Kreisbewegung) by which one is restored to where one has previously not been. In contrast to the path of philosophy, the pedestrian understanding “can only perceive and grasp what lies straight in front of it: it thus wishes to advance in a straight line, moving from the nearest point on to the next one, and so on. This is called progress [Fortschritt].”204 When viewed from this perspective even the circular movement is treated in a linear fashion as a “straightforward progression” (Geradeausgehen), culminating in reverting to the starting-​point and coming to a standstill. Inasmuch as progress is the criterion that engulfs the ordinary understanding, the circular motion, which seemingly gets one nowhere but to the place whence one set out, is objectionable. However, a proper comprehension of the “essential feature of the circular movement of philosophy does not lie in running around the periphery and returning to the point of departure [Ausgangsstelle]. It lies in that view of the centre that this circular course [Kreisgang] alone can provide. The centre, that is, the middle and ground, reveals itself as such only in and for the movement that circles it.”205 The linearity of ordinary thinking is linked to the certainty of progress, but the circularity of philosophical thought is bound up with ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) that is not eliminated or leveled by means of the synthetic exoneration of the conflict between thesis and antithesis according to the Hegelian dialectic.206 To move at the center of philosophizing is to move in the greatest possible propinquity to the ambiguity of philosophizing because this move is always a retracing of one’s steps to the beginning of 2 02 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 65, p. 314 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 329. 203 The view I have expressed here resembles the Deleuzian interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 12; idem, “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 31–​ 33 (reprinted in this volume). Compare the interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return and its relationship to the moment as a subversion of the metaphysical motif of presence offered by David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 11–​35, esp. 26–​30. 204 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 187; idem, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—​Endlichkeit—​Einsamkeit [ga 29/​30] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), p. 276. 205 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts, p. 187; idem, Die Grundbegriffe, p. 276. 206 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts, p. 187; idem, Die Grundbegriffe, p. 276.

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the question that calls into question the question of the beginning.207 The discourse to displace the closed circular movement—​and the inferred assumption that the future truth is already determined by the past—​must partake of that movement. For Heidegger, the task, as Derrida well understood, is not to escape from this hermeneutic circulation, as vicious as it might seem, but to engage it by going around it.208 This is implied in the Heideggerian emphasis on resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit): The experience of the circular closure does not close anything; it suffers neither lack nor negativity. Affirmative experience without voluntarism, without a compulsion to transgression: not to transgress the law of circle and pas de cercle but trust in them. Of this trust would thought consist. The desire to accede, by this faithful repetition of the circle, to the not-​ yet-​crossed, is not absent. The desire for a new step, albeit a backward one (Schritt zurück), ties and unties this procedure [démarche]. Tie without tie, get across [franchir] the circle without getting free [s’affranchir] of its law. Pas sans pas [step without step/​step without not/​not without step/​not without not].209 With regard to the temporal paradox of the law of the circle—​the future signaling the return to where one has never been, the fourfold connotation of the idiomatic expression pas sans pas—​there is continuity between the so-​ called earlier and latter Heidegger.210 To cite one relevant passage from Sein und Zeit: the three temporal modes are said to commingle around the notion that only the “being that, as futural [zukünftiges], is equiprimordially having-​ been [gleichursprünglich gewesend], can hand down to itself its inherited possibility [ererbte Möglichkeit], take over its own thrownness [Geworfenheit] and be in the Moment for ‘its time’ [augenblicklich sein für ‘seine Zeit’]. Only authentic temporality [eigentliche Zeitlichkeit] that is at the same time finite makes something like fate [Schicksal], that is, authentic historicity [eigentliche Geschichtlichkeit], possible.”211 In some measure, Heidegger’s early thought bears affinity to Husserl’s description of the “eidetic laws of compossibility”—​the “rules that govern 2 07 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts, p. 183; idem, Die Grundbegriffe, p. 272. 208 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 32. 209 Ibid., p. 33 (emphasis in original). 210 See Wood, The Deconstruction, p. 217. 211 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 74, p. 366 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 385.

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simultaneous or successive existence and possible existence together”—​ anchored in the motivation of the transcendental sphere, as opposed to causation, structured as the “universal unity-​form of the flux,” that is, the “formal regularity pertaining to a universal genesis, which is such that past, present, and future, become unitarily constituted over and over again, in a certain noetic-​ noematic formal structure of flowing modes of giveness.”212 The ego transcendentally constitutes itself for itself in the unity of its history, and in that constitution are contained the constitutions of all the objectivities, whether ideal or real, transcendent or immanent, that exist for that concrete and monadic ego. Heidegger translated Husserl’s insight into his own conceptual and terminological register: the authentic temporality of Dasein—​the finitude that makes possible the destiny of our historicity—​is distinguished by the resoluteness of claiming the present moment as the realization of the future recuperating the past. In that respect, the resoluteness “becomes the repetition [Wiederholung] of a possibility of existence that has been handed down.”213 That the repetition is deemed a “handing down” (Überlieferung) does imply that Dasein can relapse to the possibilities of where it has been, but this does not mean that there is an exact duplication of the past. The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been … is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness [vorlaufenden Wiederholung]; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle over what is to follow [kämpfende Nachfolge] and fidelity [Treue] to what can be repeated. The handing down of a possibility that has been in repeating it, does not, however, disclose the Dasein that has been there in order to actualize it again. The repetition of what is possible neither brings back “what is past,” nor does it bind the “present” back to what is “outdated.” Arising from a resolute self-​projection, repetition is not convinced by “something past,” in just letting it come back as what was once real. Rather, repetition responds to the possibility of existence that has been-​there. But responding [Erwiderung] to this possibility in a resolution is at the same time, as a response belonging to the Moment, the renunciation [Widerruf] of that which is working itself out in the today as “past.” Repetition neither abandons itself to the past nor

212 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 37 p. 75 (emphasis in original); idem, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 109. 213 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 74, p. 367 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 385.

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does it aim at progress. In the Moment, authentic existence is indifferent to both of these alternatives.214 The resolve to live momentarily (augenblicklich), to be responsive to the moment, depends on repetition, but an indispensable component of that repetition is renunciation of the past. Authentic existence entails being in the moment that is forged neither by retroaction nor by prolepsis but by repeating what is unrivaled with regard to the truth of what was once real. To leap to where one is no more is to retreat to where one is yet to be.215 In the lecture course “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet,” offered in the winter semester 1931–​1932 at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger writes, “For in genuine historical reflection we take just that distance from the present which allows us room to leap out [hinauszuspringen] beyond our own present, i.e. to treat it just as every present as present deserves to be treated, namely as something to be overcome [überwunden]. Genuine historical return is the decisive beginning of authentic futurity [Zukünftigkeit]. … In the end it is historical return which brings us into what is actually happening today. In the end it is also only a self-​evident and therefore doubtful everyday opinion which takes history as something ‘past’.”216 Striking a congruent note, Heidegger writes in a notebook entry from autumn 1932: “What truly remains in history is the unique [Einzige]—​ unrepeatable [Unwiederholbare]—​at once necessary; what can be ‘repeated’ in the extrinsic sense [äußeren Sinne]—​does not abide—​instead, it vacillates and 2 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 74, p. 367 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 385. 215 Heidegger returned to this theme in the 1955–​1956 lecture course at the University of Freiburg on the Leibnizian principium rationis that “nothing is without reason” (Nichts ist ohne Grund). See Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 88-​89 (idem, Der Satz vom Grund [ga 10] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), p. 132): “Nevertheless the history of Western thinking shows itself as the Geschick of being when and only when we glance back upon the whole of Western thinking from the point of view of the leap and when we recollectively preserve it as the Geschick of being that has-​been. … The leap leaves the realm from which one leaps while at the same time recollectively regaining anew what has been left such that what has-​been becomes, for the first time, something we cannot lose. That into which the leap anticipatorily leaps is not some region of things present at hand into which one can simply step. Rather, it is the realm of what first approaches as worthy of thought. But this approach is also shaped by the traits of what has-​been, and only because of this is it discernible” (emphasis in original). 216 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: on Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, translated by Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 7; idem, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet [ga 34] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), pp. 9–​10.

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has no unassailable necessity. It is altogether something else to repeat what is unique [das Einzige wiederholen]—​i.e., to carry out a proper necessity—​and not just calculate [ausrechnen].”217 Contra intuitively, uniqueness is not antithetical to repetition. Indeed, Heidegger insists that the mandate is to repeat what is unique. How does one repeat what is unique such that what is repeated remains in the status of being unique? As he put it in a second passage from the notebooks written at a later date, for the common understanding of the masses the notion of sameness (das Selbe) is set in opposition to what is novel, but “creative individuals” are committed to the “mystery” (Geheimnis) of sameness “in its ever-​originary essentiality” (immer ursprünglichen Wesentlichkeit).218 In a third passage, Heidegger opines that the assumption that what is most common is the universal and its universalization arises “from the incapacity to experience the ever-​incomparably unique in the same [das jeweils Unvergleichbare Einzige im Selben] and to maintain it in its mystery.”219 An equivalent idea is expressed in the observation in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), composed between 1936–​1938, that every essential occurrence of the essence of being “is determined out of what is essential in the sense of the original-​ unique [Ursprünglich-​Einzigen].”220 The upheaval in thinking that Heidegger sought to spearhead rests on this hermeneutical foundation: as opposed to the conservative wish to preserve what was begun in the wake of the beginning, the more revolutionary and genuine relation to the beginning demands acting and thinking from the perspective of the future, since the beginning is always a recurrence of difference and hence requires the “renunciation of the crutches and evasions of the habitual and the usual.”221 In much the same cadence, Heidegger writes in another section from the Beiträge that the wish to traverse the course of the question of being 217 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-​IV: Black Notebooks 1931–​1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 144; idem, Überlegungen II-​ VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–​1938) [ga 94] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), p. 196. 218 Heidegger, Ponderings II-​IV, p. 257; idem, Überlegungen II-​VI, p. 353. 219 Heidegger, Ponderings VII-​XI, p. 201 (emphasis in original); idem, Überlegungen VII-​XI, p. 260. 220 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​ Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), Contributions, § 29, p. 53; idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [ga 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 66. 221 Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic,’ translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 38; idem, Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik” [ga 45] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), pp. 40–​41.

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(Seinsfrage), in the hope of retrieving the lineage of antiquity, can be fulfilled if one comprehends that the matter of repetition means “to let the same, the uniqueness of being, become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. ‘Again’ means here precisely ‘altogether otherwise’ [‘Wieder’ besagt hier gerade: ganz anders].”222 Prima facie, one would not expect the concept of “the same” to be glossed as “the uniqueness of beyng” (die Einzigkeit des Seyns), since sameness, by definition, is demonstratively opposed to uniqueness. However, in Heideggerian terms, there is no opposition, for to attend to the same, which he contrasts with the identical, one must heed that which is recurrently different. This hermeneutical assumption furnishes the rationale for the pattern of time that posits the “same” as unique and the “again” as altogether otherwise. In Einführung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger writes that to “stand with Being” means “nothing less than to repeat and retrieve [wieder-​holen] the inception [Anfang] of our historical-​spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception.”223 The repetition of the novel is the basis for the phenomenological nexus that Heidegger establishes between time (Zeit), eternity (Ewigkeit), and the moment (Augenblick): “The eternal is not the incessant [das Fort-​währende]; it is instead that which can withdraw [entziehen] in a moment so as to recur [wiederzukehren] later. What can recur: not as the identical [das Gleiche] but as the newly transforming [Verwandelnde], the one and the unique [Eine-​Einzige], i.e., beyng, such that it is not immediately recognized, in this manifestation, as the same [das Selbe]!”224 Conspicuously suggestive of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, Heidegger insists that eternity is not set in opposition to time; it is rather that which withdraws each moment to recur. What recurs is not the identical but the same, that is, the unique being that is always—​originarily—​different. In his exposition of Trakl’s poem “An einen Frühverstorbennen,” Heidegger notes that the premature death of the child Elis, which symbolizes the “stranger

222 Heidegger, Contributions, § 33, p. 58 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 73. For previous discussion of this aphorism, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 243–​244; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 40. 223 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 41 (emphasis in original); idem, Einführung in die Metaphysik [ga 40] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), p. 42. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/​veiling Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Secret,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 33–​34, and the sources that treat the paradox of the repetition of the origin in Heidegger cited op. cit., p. 34 n. 35. See also Wolfson, Giving, pp. 442–​443 n. 116. 224 Heidegger, Contributions, § 238, p. 293 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 371.

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called to go under,”225 reveals the wisdom about time fully expressed in the last line, “Golden eye of the beginning, dark patience of the end” (Goldenes Auge des Anbeginns, dunkle Geduld des Endes): Here, the end is not the sequel and fading echo of the beginning. The end—​being the end of the decaying kind—​precedes the beginning of the unborn kind. But the beginning, the earlier earliness, has already overtaken the end. That earliness preserves the original nature—​a nature so far still veiled [verhüllte]—​of time. This nature will go on being impenetrable to the dominant mode of thinking as long as the Aristotelian concept of time, still standard everywhere, retains its currency. According to this concept, time—​whether conceived mechanically or dynamically or in terms of atomic decay—​is the dimension of the quantitative or qualitative calculation of duration as a sequential progression.226 Already in Sein und Zeit, as we saw above, Heidegger contrasts the primordial temporality and the vulgar understanding of time. The latter coheres with the Aristotelian perspective insofar as time is viewed as the succession of interchangeable now-​points. As long as this perspective prevails, the true nature of time is veiled. The deeper phenomenology of time rejects the calculative approach and hence we can reverse the timeline: the end precedes the beginning, and yet, the beginning overtakes the end. The timeswerve is open at both termini, and hence the end cannot be ascertained from the beginning nor the beginning from the end; the reversibility of the circular linearity implies not closure but an ever-​changing fluctuation, an indeterminacy that destabilizes the model of an irreversible succession proceeding unidirectionally from start to finish. 225 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 174; idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache [ga 12] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 50. 226 Heidegger, On the Way, p. 176; idem, Unterwegs, p. 53.

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Linear Circularity/​(A)Temporal Poetics Nature revolves but never advances, Eternal—​that a circle, this a line edward young

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Encircled Line: Mythologic of Hebraic Time*

As other facets of phenomenal experience, time has played a critical role in the history of world religions.1 Turning specifically to Judaism, it must be said at the outset that there have been numerous opinions expressed about this matter, spanning many centuries, geographical localities, intellectual influences and literary genre. Accordingly, no attempt is made here to provide a comprehensive understanding of time in the variegated history of Judaism.2 * An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings of Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Permission to reprint the material has been granted by the publisher. 1 For an overview, see James G. Hart, “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance,” in Religion and Time, edited by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and Jitendra Nath Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 17–​45. 2 Eliezer Schweid, The Jewish Experience of Time: Philosophical Dimensions of the Jewish Holy Days, translated by Amnon Hadary (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 2000), provides a systematic overview of how the sequence of time is structured through the commandments, symbols, and prayers connected to the Jewish calendar. See also Shalom Rosenberg, In the Footsteps of Jewish Time: The Philosophy of the Annual Calendar (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth and Chemed Books, 2013) (Hebrew). For a far-​ranging study of various constructions of time—​the multiplicity of temporal registers—​in Jewish history, see Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism, translated by Benjamin Ivry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). For an analysis of the biblical conception of time, see Ida Frömlich, ‘Time and Times and Half a Time’: Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Literature of the Persian and Hellenistic Eras (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). The phenomenon of rewritten bibles discussed by the author entails the convergence of the linear and the circular. On time in classical rabbinic literature, see Sacha Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003). Stern challenges the notion that there is an abstract concept of time in ancient Judaism, a taxonomy that for him includes the biblical, Qumran, apocryphal, pseudepigraphical, and rabbinic corpora, as well

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I take the liberty, however, of making two general observations, the generality of which will foster rather than eschew specific historical analyses. First, it is not viable to depict temporality in Judaism in opposition to or in separation from spatiality, let alone to privilege the former as the genuine mark of Hebrew spirituality.3 Practitioners of Judaism in its disparate spatio-​temporal as inscriptions. In Stern’s mind, what we find rather are temporal processes demarcated by various signposts. The argument is repeated in Sacha Stern, “The Rabbinic Concept of Time from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, edited by Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-​Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 129–​145. Notwithstanding the interesting challenge set forth by Stern, I would still argue that it is credible to assume some conceptual structure underlying the terminological signposts that demarcate the temporal process even if we accept that time was not an abstract idea for the rabbinic sages. For a more recent examination of the temporal thinking to be culled from both halakhic and aggadic dicta of the rabbis in late antiquity, which arrives at a similar conclusion, see Lynn Kaye, Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). The hypothesis upon which Kaye’s analysis of talmudic temporality rests is summarized by her as follows: “In the legal, narrative, and exegetical contexts of the Bavli, time describes what sits between and binds conceptual or legal items together. The important items are the events, actions, or intentions. Time is neither a substance nor a concept, nor, in general, the focus of discussion. The notion of time as that which connects events is a hard idea to conceive. … The rabbis had a variety of images for describing varying temporal functions. Their imagery is drawn from many different sematic fields (for example, from agriculture, travel, or the home) and cannot necessarily be combined into a harmonious picture” (pp. 3–​5). The scope of my engagement with the rabbinic material is far more limited in this chapter, but I do not think my generalizations contradict the caution that both Stern and Kaye offer against eliciting a monolithic idea of time from the disparate legal reasoning, folkloristic speculation, and storytelling of the rabbis. 3 On the contrast between Hebrew-​temporal and Greek-​spatial thinking, see Ernst von Dobschütz, “Zeit und Raum im Denken des Urchristentums,” Journal of Biblical Literature 41 (1922): 212–​223; Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared With Greek (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970), pp. 123–​183. On the correlation of Jewish sensibility and time, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s: The Inner Life of the Jews in East Europe (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), pp. 13–​17; idem, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man—Expanded Edition (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), pp. 3–​10, 41, 48, 79–​83, 96–​101; idem, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1955), pp. 200–​201. I am not suggesting that Heschel thought it possible from a Judaic perspective to do away with the spatial coordinate; indeed, he duly recognizes the interrelatedness of space and time. For instance, see Heschel, The Sabbath, pp. 6, 116–​117. It is nevertheless legitimate to conclude that he privileged time over space as the more indigenous religious expression of Judaism, associating the spatial with idolatry and the temporal with monotheism. See Bruce S. Graeber, “Heschel and the Philosophy of Time,” Conservative Judaism 33 (1980): 44–​ 56; Edward Kaplan, Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 23–​24; John C. Merkle, The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1985), pp. 193 and 198. A similar orientation is attested in André Néher, “The View of Time and History in Jewish

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instantiations, beginning in the ancient Near-​Eastern milieu within which the oldest parts of the scriptural legacy began to take shape, continuing through the richly diverse second-​temple period, to the age of formative rabbinic Judaism and beyond through the middle ages, renaissance, and modernity to the present, have cultivated concepts of sacred space and sacred time simultaneously. Indeed, while it is possible to distinguish spatial and temporal coordinates notionally, in lived experience they intersect and converge: time can only be delineated in relation to place and place only in relation to time.4 Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, the sixteenth-​century homilist and exegete, deferentially designated by the acronym Maharal, had this confluence in mind when he noted that “time and place are one matter [ha-​zeman we-​ha-​ maqom inyan eḥad] as is known to those who understand.”5 The specific context in which Maharal insists on the phenomenological indistinguishability of space and time is a discussion on the nature of the revelation of Torah at Sinai in the third month after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. In Maharal’s view, neither the spatial nor the temporal coordinates of the experience were accidental or arbitrary; on the contrary, the place and time of the event were necessitated by the transcendental nature of the truth disclosed; that is to say, Culture,” in Cultures and Time (Paris: Unesco Press, 1976), pp. 149–​167. Finally, it is of interest to recall the conclusion reached by Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 159, that according to Proust “Jewishness,” as opposed to “Judaism,” is an “inspiration for art” insofar as it is “the path of pure time embodied.” Here, too, an innate connection is made between Jewish experience and temporality. 4 Compare the articulation of this point in Goldberg, Clepsydra, p. xiv: “Temporality is approached here in a dual aspect. On the one hand, it is a matter of understanding the questions of time asked during a given era in response to a specific historical, cultural, or social situation; on the other, it is matter of trying to understand how in every era and situation, a dynamic principle is put in place to convey or recreate a truly Jewish temporality, whatever the context. This Jewish temporality, which operates according to liturgical and calendrical rhythms or other ways of appropriating space, is a social fact. As such, it can be studied by the historian with appropriate means.” I would add to Goldberg’s observation that the temporal operates by appropriating space to the extent that the spatial functions by arrogating time. Space and time commingle in the domains of the sacred and the mundane. 5 Judah Loew of Prague, Tif’eret Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2000), ch. 26, p. 390. On the identification of time and body, which is interchangeable with space, see idem, Gevurot ha-​Shem, vol. 3, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2019), ch. 46, pp. 365, 370, 397; idem, Be’er ha-​Golah, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2003), vol. 2, 6:4, p. 187. On the equation of time and space in Maharal’s writings, see Byron L. Sherwin, Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 142.

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both when and where the epiphany occurred approximate as much as is possible the metaphysical constitution of what was divulged in the physical world. As he puts it elsewhere, “Just as [the Torah] was given in the desert, which is the place that is most appropriate and prepared for it … so [the Torah] was given in the moment and time worthy and ready for it. Time and place belong and are related to one another, for place is in the earth and time depends on the celestial order and the spheres.”6 Subsequently, I will return to this theme in the thought of Judah Loew, with special focus on the dimension of time, but for the moment what is most important to emphasize is his insistence on the inseparability of space and time. This insight cuts a path that can lead one to the depths of the religious sensibility that has informed Jewish piety through the generations, an insight enhanced by the philological oddity that the word olam can denote both the spatial measure of the world and the temporal magnitude of eternity. The convergence of space and time that emerges from this dual connotation is enhanced further by the rabbinic etymology that playfully relates the word olam to the root alam, specifically in its pi‘el form illem, to hide.7 The inner depth of worldhood is thus to be thought from the vantage point of concealment; that is, the mystery of being is disclosed from the juxtaposition of space and time that characterizes our experience of the phenomenal world.8 A lucid articulation of this philosophical truism was offered by Hodgson: “Feelings in time are never presented or represented separate from the provisional accompaniment of space. … Consciousness has two formal modes, time and space, different but inseparable and simultaneous; the two senses which reveal space, sight and touch, exist simultaneously with those which reveal time by itself; hence their inseparability in any way except provisionally; and hence the difference in the modes of connection between them, namely, that in all time there is involved space as its accompaniment, in all space there is involved 6 Judah Loew of Prague, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, edited and annotated by Ḥayyim Pardes (Tel Aviv: Makhon Yad Mordecai, 1996), p. 79. On the centrality of the notion of order in Maharal’s thought, see Yoram Jacobson, “The Holiness of Order and the Order of Holiness in the Writings of the Maharal of Prague,” in Maharal: Overtures—​Biography, Doctrine, Influence, edited by Elchanan Reiner (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015), pp. 147–​195 (Hebrew). 7 Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim 50a, Qiddushin 71a. There are some who think the word olam may in fact be connected etymologically to alam, that which is hidden. Through their midrashic playfulness the rabbinic exegetes may have retrieved something of the original intent of the notion of world in ancient Israel. 8 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1955), p. 58.

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time as its element.”9 One might even proffer that the experience of the simultaneity of time, a critical component of the physiological underpinning of our perceptual acuity, is incomprehensible without presuming the brain’s capacity to orient itself in three-​dimensional space and in the tripartite division of time.10 In a more contemporary vernacular, François Jullien, the French philosopher and sinologist, succinctly put it, “le temps et l’espace ne sont pas dissociables l’un de l’autre: aux portions du temps répondent des parties de l’espace, leurs emblèmes sont communs, chaque période est solidaire d’un climat, chaque orient lié à une saison.”11 Even more germane to my analysis of Jewish sources is the entwining of space and time enunciated by Nishida Kitarō: The dialectic of absolute negation, however, must be such that individual determination is universal determination and universal determination is individual determination, time is space and space is time. That an individual thing determines itself means that it becomes itself by negating others and in due time becomes universal by negating itself. And that the universal determines itself means that it individuates itself and in due time becomes an individual thing by negating itself.12 For Nishida, doubtlessly articulating views that resound with centuries of Buddhist speculation on the nature of time, and especially on the

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Shadworth H. Hodgson, Time and Space: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), pp. 117–​118. The codependency of space and time figures prominently in the speculation about the nature of matter according to quantum physics. Many have written on this topic, but here I will mention one relatively readable introduction to the topic by Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also the discussion of “spacetime re(con)figurings” in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 223–​246. See Piotr Jaśkowski, “What Determines Simultaneity and Order Perception?” in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, edited by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2014), pp. 379–​407. François Jullien, Du “temps”: Éléments d’une philosophie du vivre (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2001), p. 35. For a more technical discussion on the analogy between space and time, see Theodore Sider, Four-​Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 87–​98. Nishida Kitarō, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, translated by John W. M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 108.

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momentariness of the present,13 the eternal now is identified as the locus of the active form in which the spatial is temporalized and the temporal spatialized.14 Restating this seminal point, Nishida writes, “The self-​determination of the eternal now wherein absolutely time is space and space is time would thus have to be thoroughly formative and creative as historical life. … We can say that while we are born we are also not born. … Only human beings possess a present.”15 To avow that the human being is both born and not born implies that the proposition that the event of birth is as illusory as the nonevent of death is accorded the same cogency or lack thereof as the proposition that the nonevent of birth is as real as the event of death. From this we may deduce further that there is no past and no future, only the present depleted of being present except as the anticipated remembrance of the remembered anticipation. In that interval of timespace, we are constantly being born and unborn. Moving beyond the bimodal logic implicit in Dylan’s notable aside that “he not busy being born is busy dying,”16 we can say that birth and death occur synchronously and hence the one who is busy being born is the one who is busy dying and the one who is busy dying is the one who is busy being born. As the affirmation of absolute negation that is the self-​negation of the being of negation—​the negation of negation17—​birth and death can be viewed as ruptures that interrupt the causal contiguity that links identity of self to the 13

See the comprehensive study of Alexander von Rospatt, The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of the Doctrine up to Vasubandhu (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995). 14 Nishida, Place and Dialectic, p. 120. 15 Ibid., p. 131. 16 http://​www.bobdylan.com/​songs/​its-​alright-​ma-​im-​only-​bleeding/​. 17 See Hans Waldenfels, “Absolute Nothingness: Preliminary Considerations on a Central Notion in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō and the Kyoto School,” Monumenta Nipponica 21 (1966): 354–​ 391, esp. 387–​ 388, where the decidedly Hegelian interpretation of Takeuchi Yoshinori, a student of Tanabe, is discussed. See also Peter Suares, The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 37–​47, and the summary of the Hegelian idea of the absolute on p. 83: “The absolute consists in this unfolding of finite categories. It is not a system or structure of categories, but rather the process of their transcendence because each category is untenable in itself and serves the whole process only be being transcended and left behind. … It is first in negating itself in its finitude that the finite reveals itself as the other of itself as finite: through that negation it is now infinite, the absolute. The infinite comes forth from the self-​undoing of the finite. Since the finite, as determined, is negation, its self-​undoing is positive: the absolute is a negation of negation” (emphasis in original). See ibid., pp. 149 and 166, where Tanabe’s perspective on the negation of self-​negation and the depth of the eternal moment in relation to the Mahāyāna doctrine of emptiness is discussed.

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nothing that has already disintegrated and the nothing that has not yet materialized.18 It follows that the “self-​determination of the world of the eternal now, in which instants are simultaneous, the world of space-​qua-​time and time-​qua-​ space, must at its core mean reflecting the self within the self.”19 Elaborating elsewhere the universalizing of the first-​person experience, a cornerstone of his phenomenology,20 Nishida explicitly identifies the eternal now with the basho, the place of nothingness, the source of everything, which cannot be described substantively as self-​sufficient: The historical present refers to the basho wherein we can conceive the infinite past and future to be simultaneously existent. We ought to regard what has been determined as actual to be what has been determined by means of the relationship of synchronic existence between past and future, that is, the spatial relationship among the temporal. This is why I speak of the self-​determination of the eternal now and say that the present determines itself. … We ought to regard the historical present as the self-​determination of the eternal now. Therein the temporal is spatial and the spatial is temporal. It is a self-​contradictory world as the self-​identity of absolute opposites.21 The paradox espoused by Nishida—​the self-​identity of absolute opposites—​ should not be construed à la Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, or as the sublation of antinomies posited by Hegel’s dialectic,22 but rather as the

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Nishida Kitarō, Ontology of Production: Three Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Haver (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 99–​101, 113–​117, 121–​128, 136, 145, 158, 164–​166. 19 Ibid., p. 83. 20 See Toru Tani, “Inquiry into the I, Disclosedness, and Self-​Consciousness: Husserl, Heidegger, Nishida,” Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998): 239–​253, esp. 246–​251. 21 Nishida, Place and Dialectic, p. 164. On the topographical dimension of Nishida’s concept of basho as the place of nothingness, see Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarō (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 162–​163, 219–​220; Masao Abe, “Nishida’s Philosophy of ‘Place’,” International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1988): 355–​371; Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (New York: Paragon House, 1989), pp. 16–​57; Robert J. J. Wargo, The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), pp. 90–​178; Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 202–​209. 22 For a comparison of the different ways Nishida and Hegel conceive of the dialectic, see Lucy Schultz, “Nishida Kitarō, G.W.F. Hegel, and the Pursuit of the Concrete: A Dialectic of Dialectics,” Philosophy East & West 62 (2012): 319–​338.

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dialetheic repudiation of the law of noncontradiction based on the assumption that the identification of opposites in the identity of their opposition yields a genuine and irresolvable contradiction; that is, the truth of a statement that presumes the paradoxical form α and ¬α, which translates into the disjunctive syllogism if it is the case that α, then it is not the case that α, is a direct reproach of the more prevalent logic that for every statement either α or ¬α is true but both cannot be true at the same time and in the same relation.23 Applying this notion of dialetheia to the matter of time, we can say that the eternal present is permanently stationary and yet constantly in flux, and hence each moment is both always changing and changeless, indeed its changelessness consists precisely of its changeability—​what does not change is the fact that it is permanently changing.24 In the space of the emptiness of being that is the fullness of nonbeing, the paradox of the discordance of the concordance of the three temporal forms becomes manifest. Moreover, in a manner that is consonant with what I shall argue with respect to the rabbinic-​kabbalistic thinking about temporality, Nishida relates the confluence of time and space to the fact that time must be both linear and circular. What is thus conceived is the temporal as the linear determination or continuity’s determination of the mediation of the continuity of 23

I have taken the liberty to repeat my argument in Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 31, and see reference to the work of Graham Priest on the logic of dialetheism cited on pp. 48–​49 n. 10. Also of interest is the study of Edward Conze, Der Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Theorie des dialektischen Materialismus, published in 1932, and then in English as The Principle of Contradiction: On the Theory of Dialectical Materialism, translated by Holger R. Heine (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), which proffers an understanding of the principle under different historical and social conditions that would necessitate a rejection of the Aristotelian interpretation that has dominated Western logic. Finally, let me call the reader’s attention to the study of Giuseppe Veltri, “Negotiating the Principle of (Non)-​Contradiction: Johann Frischmuth on the Rabbinic Dialectic Discussion,” Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (2017): 107–​119. Bracketing the important historical value of Veltri’s analysis and his contribution to the study of Jewish skepticism, I would suggest that the rabbinic maxim that opposite positions are both sanctioned by revelation, or literally “these and those are the word of the living God” (elu we-​elu divrei elohim ḥayyim) is, in my judgment, better rendered by the term dialetheic than dialectic. 24 Nishida, Place and Dialectic, p. 109. On Nishida’s concept of the temporal flow of consciousness and the eternal present as the flash of timelessness concurrently within and beyond time, see Carter, The Nothingness, pp. 87–​88; James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 51, 58–​59, 63; Wargo, The Logic of Nothingness, pp. 138–​140; Suares, The Kyoto School’s Takeover, pp. 53–​54.

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discontinuity. As I said earlier, time must be both linear and circular. So the circular, as the ground of objective time, must be spatial. It may seem absurd, but contradictorily, objective time or true time can be conceived starting from the fact that the instants that can never return are arrayed simultaneously. … To speak of time in terms of the self-​determination of the mediation of the continuity of discontinuity (temporally speaking) or as the self-​determination of the eternal now, each instant, instant by instant, must be thought as an infinite linear progression without regress.25 Resisting the proclivity to bifurcate too sharply the terms paired in the conjunction timespace, it is more useful to note their diverging convergence within varied socio-​cultural constellations. In this matter, I again note by indebtedness to Heidegger, who transitioned from viewing spatiality as subordinate to temporality to contemplating the horizon of being from the vantage point of the spacing of time.26 Even though the tempocentrism of Heidegger’s earlier thought persists to some degree in his later thought, the idea of timespace conveys the belonging-​together of the temporal and the spatial, which are the same as opposed to being identical; that is, they are the same in virtue of their difference.27 25 Nishida, Ontology of Production, p. 72. 26 Françoise Dastur, Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-​logy, translated by Edward Bullard (London: Athlone, 2000), pp. 12–​13: “For, if what is termed ‘being’ in Being and Time is nothing other than time, after the Kehre (turn) it is not so much a question of thinking on the basis of space what is given increasingly as the ‘exteriority’ of being in relation to a Dasein understood less and less as subjectivity, as it is a question of dissociating time itself from its complicity with ‘inner’ sense. It is no longer a question of referring spatiality to temporality but rather of thinking the spacing of time itself. … This is why, when Heidegger emphasises that the question of the meaning of being, after having become that of the truth of being at the moment of the Kehre, finally took the form of the question of the place or locality of being, one must not see in this last formulation of the ‘topology of being’ a denial of the previous project of a ‘chronology’ but on the contrary its re-​actualisation, time now no longer being determined in a still metaphysical (which means transcendental) way as the foundation of being but as deploying the ‘space’ of a habitation.” For my contribution to this topic, see the chapter on “Temporalizing and Granting Time-​Space” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 255–​298. 27 Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 266–​ 268. On the Heideggerian notion of Zusammengehörigkeit and the distinction between das Selbe and das Gleiche, see ibid., pp. 9–​13, 53 n. 83, 265. The continued privileging of time over space may reflect Heidegger’s theological background and the primacy accorded to the temporal dimension of the historical redemption. Consider, for instance, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3: Life and the Spirit: History and the Kingdom of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 320–​321: “According to the multidimensional unity of all dimensions of

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Turning specifically to Judaism as a religious phenomenon, we can say that it is particularly in the arena of ritualized behavior that one discerns the concomitant spatialization of time and temporalization of space.28 The configurations of time in the geometrical modes of linearity and circularity, the arrow and the cycle, a crucial dichotomy that has shaped conceptions of temporality in Western thought, cannot be easily separated.29 There has been a tendency—​ based, in the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, on a “groundless distinction”30—​to

28 29 30

life, there can be no time without space and, consequently, no historical time without historical space. Space in the historical dimension stands under the predominance of time. The beside-​each-​other-​ness of all spatial relations appears in the historical dimension as the encounter of the history-​bearing groups, their separations, struggles, and reunions. … In the symbol ‘Kingdom of God,’ pointing to the aim toward which historical time is running, the spatial element is obvious: a ‘kingdom’ is a realm, a place beside other places. Of course, the place of which God is ruler is not a place beside others but a place above all places; nevertheless it is a place and not spaceless ‘spirituality’ in the dualistic sense. Historical time, driving toward fulfillment, is actual in the relations of historical spaces. And as historical time includes all other forms of time, so historical space includes all other forms of space. As in historical time the meaning of after-​each-​other-​ness is raised to consciousness and has become a human problem, so in historical space the meaning of beside-​each-​other-​ness is raised to consciousness and has also become a problem. The answer in both cases is identical with the answer to the question of the aim of the historical process.” The priority accorded to time in Heidegger’s earlier thought seems to have influenced Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Sarah Richmond (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 260–​261 (L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, édition corrigée avec index par Arlette Elkaïm-​Sartre [Paris: Gallimard, 2007], p. 220): “Space depends on temporality and appears within temporality, in so far as it can enter the world only through a being whose mode of being is temporalization, because it is the way in which that being ecstatically loses itself in order to actualize being. The spatial property of the this is not synthetically added to the this but is only its “place”, i.e. its external relation with the ground, in so far as this relation may collapse into a multiplicity of external relations with other thises, when the ground itself breaks up into a multiplicity of figures” (emphasis in original). Dag Øistein Endsjø, “To Lock Up Eleusis: A Question of Liminal Space,” Numen 47 (2000): 375–​378. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 10–​16. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 29. See also idem, “A Slip in Time Saves Nine: Prestigious Origins Again,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, edited by John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 68–​70, and Boman, Hebrew Thought, pp. 125–​126: “According to Aristotle, therefore, we must represent time by the image of a line (more accurately: by the image of movement along a line), either a circular line to indicate objective, physical, astronomical, and measurable time, or a straight line as demanded by the grammatical time of past, present, and future in which are laid those actions that we express in temporal terms. It is an illusion to believe that these two ways of looking at time are so different that they cancel each other out; they do have in common the principal feature,

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correlate linear time with the historical and cyclical time with the mythical, and a further association of the former with ancient Israel and Judaism and the latter with either Near Eastern or Hellenistic models of religious philosophy.31 But bolstering the biblical and rabbinic conceptions of time is a convergence of the cyclical and the lineal that endows ritual performance with historical meaning and historical facticity with ritual transcendence.32 Recurrent conception of time by the metaphor of a line, and what form the line takes is epistemologically of no importance or, in any case, only incidental.” For a challenge to the distinction between linear and cyclical modes of time, see Chester G. Starr, “Historical and Philosophical Time,” History and Theory 6 (1966): 24–​35. 31 An influential source for the presumed difference between Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of time was Oscar Cullmann, Christus und die Zeit Die urchristliche Zeit-​und Geschichtsauffassung (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1946); English translation: Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, revised edition, translated by Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). See also S. G. F. Brandon, Time and Mankind: An Historical and Philosophical Study of Mankind’s Attitude to the Phenomena of Change (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1951), pp. 59–​120, 179–​180; S. J. De Vries, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Time and History in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975); idem, “Observations on Quantitative and Qualitative Time in Wisdom and Apocalyptic,” in Israelite Wisdom: Theological and Literary Essays in Honor of Samuel Terrien, edited by John G. Gammie, Walter A. Brueggemann, W. Lee Humphreys, and James M. Ward (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978), pp. 263–​276; Wolfgang Achtner, Stefan Kunz, and Thomas Walter, Dimensions of Time: The Structures of Humans, of the World, and of God, translated by Arthur H. Williams, Jr (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 54–​64. On the privileging of the “primitive circularity of time” in Hellenic cosmological speculation, see the brief but incisive comments of Francis M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiæ: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 168–​171. For a challenge to the presentation of the ancient Greek conception of time as cyclical becoming, see Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 88–​90. According to Vernant, an alternative conception of time as an “irreversible line” emerges with the birth of lyric poetry in the seventh century bce. 32 J. Gordon McConville and J. Gary Millar, Time and Place and Deuteronomy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd, 1994), demonstrate the complex interweaving of past, present and future as it relates to spatial and temporal dimensions of the deuteronomist’s conception of Israelite history. For a critique of the linear-​cyclical models of time predicated on the conclusion that both are chronological accounts, see Paul Ricoeur, “The History of Religions and the Phenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1985), pp. 13–​30; idem, “Myth and History,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1987), pp. 276–​281. In place of the scientific paradigm, Ricoeur suggests a cyclical approach based on mythical time. See also Georges Dumézil, “Temps et mythes,” Recherches philosophiques 5 (1935–​ 1936): 235–​251; Eleazar M. Meletinsky, The Poetics of Myth, translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 158–​163. On the intersection of linear and cyclical impressions of time in the history of Judaism, see P. Steensgaard,

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patterns transpire within the narrative framework of linear succession—​the timelessness of lived time extending in the attenuated circle of return33—​ yielding a temporality where the interminably ephemeral is ephemerally interminable.34 As the philosopher Eric Voegelin observed in his reflections on the historical evolution of the cosmological and eschatological dimensions of the ancient Israelite cult, “When the revelation of the transcendent God has become the experiential center of order and symbolization, the transcendental implications of the compact symbols are set free; and correspondingly the volume of meaning in the symbols shrinks until the ritual renewal of order

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“Time in Judaism,” in Religion and Time, edited by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 63–​108. See also Schweid, The Jewish Experience, pp. 11–​20. The author duly notes that the Jewish calendar is shaped by a synthesis of solar and lunar rhythms as well as the synthesis between the circular nature of cosmic-​mythic time and the linear nature of historic time. The attempt to harmonize the natural and the historical is summarized on p. 19: “Despite the distinction between the cycles, there is no marking of cosmic time that does not have a historic dimension, nor is there a marker of historic time that is not linked to a cyclical event in nature to which a symbolic meaning has been attached.” More recently, Gershon Brin, The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), offers an exhaustive philological, but relatively feeble theoretical, analysis of different terms for time in the biblical and sectarian literature. A more theoretically driven analysis related specifically to the rhythmic nature of ritual time is offered by Bruce Chilton, Redeeming Time: The Wisdom of Ancient Jewish and Christian Festal Calendars (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). Roy A. Rappaport, “Ritual, Time, and Eternity,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 27 (1992): 5–​30, has suggested that ritual provides a mode of organization alternating between time and eternity, the latter being the real mark of sanctity. Compare Meir Sternberg, “Time and Space in Biblical (Hi)story Telling: The Grand Chronology,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, edited by Regina M. Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 81–​145. Sternberg’s presentation proceeds from an entirely different methodological perspective, but my analysis intersects with his on the crucial point of what he refers to as the “self-​division” of “biblical poetics,” “an internal divergence between levels within its composition: between the ordering of narratives (up to episodic units) and of narrative (cycles, books, canonical history), blocks and architectonics, micro-​plot and macro-​plot if you will” (p. 83). Without entering into the details of Sternberg’s discussion, it is sufficient to note that he, too, discerns linear and circular patterns of narrative time at work in the biblical text. See also Goldberg, Clepsydra. Finally, the dismantling of the dichotomization of linear/​historical and cyclical/​mythical modes of time may have implications for undermining another binary presumed by many scholars, mythos versus logos. The bibliography on this topic is vast and I will here mention only the study by Wladyslaw Strózewski, “Logos and Mythos,” in Mythos and Logos: How To Regain the Love of Wisdom, edited by Albert A. Anderson, Steven V. Hickes, and Lech Witkowski (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 175–​188, as it provides an explanatory model that I find congenial to my own thinking: mythos is the way of understanding logos.

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in time becomes a prefiguration of its ultimate restoration in eternity.”35 The entelechy of messianic teleology revolves about hope in the future and faith in the past, but the spoke, which makes possible the spinning of the rim, is belief in an eternal present—​the moment always in semblance of the moment it will have never been—​in which the divine-​human drama is continuously and divergently enacted through Israel’s ceremonial practices and obedience to the covenantal law.36 Interestingly, the ideal set forth by Voegelin corresponds to what he elsewhere depicts in terms of Plato’s idea of metaxy, the “in-​between,” which is neither time nor eternity, but the erotic tension of lingering betwixt the poles of temporal becoming and eternal being.37 In this state, which Voegelin identifies as the “philosophical experience,” the two poles endure in their autonomy, “neither does eternal being become an object in time, nor is temporal being transposed into eternity. We remain in the ‘in-​between,’ in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present. The flow cannot be dissected into a past, a present, and a future of world-​time, for at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time. The concept most suitable to express the presence of eternal being in the temporal flow is flowing presence.”38 It is surely prudent to chronicle more carefully the multiple conceptions of time attested in biblical, post-​biblical, formative and medieval rabbinic texts. Still, a broad view can be legitimately posited if the taxonomic classifications are examined from the retrospective vista of a redactional standpoint, which must take into account textual pluriformity and ongoing maturation of what eventually becomes fixed, albeit relatively so, as an identifiable canonical basis that informs the beliefs and actions of lived liturgical communities. Thus, there is cogency in thinking of biblical time in terms of a providential sense of history, moving from the dawning of creation to the midpoint of revelation and then to the consummation of redemption. But it is not valid to identify this

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Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 1: Israel and Revelation, edited with an introduction by Maurice P. Hogan (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 352. Ibid., pp. 395–​396. At some point in the historical evolution of Christianity as a natural outgrowth from Judaism, the eschatological overwhelms the historical, but the prophets of ancient Israel did not posit the two as antinomical. For an analysis of Voegelin’s views, see Glenn Hughes, Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 40–​53. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, translated by M. J. Hanak, based on the abbreviated version translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 325. Ibid., p. 329.

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simply and unqualifiedly as linear time,39 which is supposedly transformed by the rabbis into what Levi-​Strauss calls the “totemic” view, that is, the causal explanation of events in terms of a mythological past and an eschatological future.40 The rabbis, as we may elicit from dicta preserved in the relevant literary sources, did not uphold a hard and fast distinction between past, present, and future; the present has no reality except as an interlude between idealized past and utopian future, when the matter is considered vertically, or between this world and the world to come, when it is considered horizontally.41 Moreover, 39

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Ricoeur, “History of Religions,” takes issue with the view that the biblical conception of time is exclusively linear, noting that festivals and ceremonial rites partake of a cyclical notion of time. See also Ellen Robbins, “Time-​Telling in Ritual and Myth,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 71–​88. On the cyclical dimension of biblical time, connected especially to the theme of retribution, see G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 116–​178. The rabbinic propensity to divest time of its linearity has been noted by several scholars. See Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), pp. 5–​26, esp. 17: “Unlike the biblical writers the rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will. Where historical specificity is a hallmark of the biblical narratives, here the acute biblical sense of time and place often gives way to rampant and seemingly unselfconscious anachronism” See also Marc Bregman, “Past and Present in Midrashic Literature,” Hebrew Annual Review 2 (1978): 45–​59; Jacob Neusner, History of the Mishnaic Laws of Appointed Times, vol. 5 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983), p. xv; Jeffrey Rubenstein, “Mythic Time and the Festival Cycle,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): pp. 157–​183; and the summary account in Tamar Rudavsky, Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 4–​10. Nissan Rubin, “Historical Time and Liminal Time: A Chapter in Rabbinic Historiosophy,” Jewish History 2 (1987): 11–​12 (Hebrew); Nissan Rubin and Admiel Kosman, “The Clothing of the Primordial Adam as a Symbol of Apocalyptic Time in the Midrashic Sources,” Harvard Theological Review 90 (1997): 156–​159. The effacement of a cogent distinction between past, present, and future in paradigms of a world order proffered in the rabbinic canon is intelligently documented by Jacob Neusner, Handbook of Rabbinic Theology: Language, System, Structure (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 179–​198. I am in agreement with Neusner on the whole, but I do not accept his conclusion that the blurring of the difference between past, present, and future implies that for the rabbinic sages “time is neither linear nor cyclical but unremarkable” (p. 181). See also p. 187: “time in a system of perfection can be neither linear nor cyclical; time in historical dimensions simply is not a consideration in thinking about what happens and what counts. Instead, paradigms for the formation of the social order of transcendence and permanence govern, so that what was now is, and what will be is what was and is.” In my judgment, as I argue in the body of this chapter, it is equally plausible to speak of a convergence of the circular and the linear to account for the rabbinic perspective regarding the timeless nature of time and the timely nature of timelessness.

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the rabbinic conception of time as it pertains to ritualistic matters is not, strictly speaking, a matter of chronometrically measuring the threefold duration of physical events, but rather a gauging that comes forth as a consequence of the intentionality expressed by the agent in relation to these events. Such an idea is typified, for instance, in the ruling that one may add to sacred time by consecrating the profane, the justification for the custom to commence the observance of Sabbath or a holiday prior to sunset or the custom (transmitted in the name of R. Ishmael) to inaugurate the fast of Yom Kippur toward the end of the ninth day of Tishrei.42 Expressed phenomenologically, the ideal of time as the constituted pole of a lifeworld, configured noematically as the intentional structure of noetic consciousness, is concretized in the maxim kol maqom she-​yesh bo shevut mosifin me-​ḥol al qodesh, “In every place that there is respite, one can add to the sacred from the profane.”43 It is of particular interest to mark the application of this principle in a tradition attributed to R. Yudan that the time “in which the creation of the world

42

43

Compare Jacob Neusner, “Paradigmatic Versus Historical Thinking: The Case of Rabbinic Judaism,” History and Theory 36 (1997): 353–​377, esp. 354–​355; idem, The Presence of the Past, The Pastness of the Present: History, Time, and Paradigm in Rabbinic Judaism (Bethesda: cdl Press, 1999); idem, The Theology of the Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1999), pp. 241–​279; idem, The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 45–​68, 193–​230; idem, Theological and Philosophical Premises of Judaism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), pp. 35–​58. For a more elaborate discussion of Neusner’s perspective, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Parting of the Ways that Never Parted: Judaism and Christianity in the Work of Jacob Neusner,” in A Legacy of Learning: Essays in Honor of Jacob Neusner, edited by Alan J. Avery-​Peck, Bruce Chilton, William Scott Green, and Gary G. Porton (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 310–​ 314. Also relevant to this question is the analysis of Aharon R. E. Agus, “Innere Zeit und Apokalyptische Zeit,” in Apocalyptic Time, edited by Albert I. Baumgarten (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 87–​111, and the brief comments regarding the Jewish indifference to time in Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 253–​254. Palestinian Talmud, Berakhot 1:4, 7c (cited according the editio princeps, Venice 1523–​1524); Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 9a; Yoma 81b; Sifra on Leviticus (Jerusalem: Sifra, 1959), Emor 14:5, 107b. In the latter case, the rabbinic ruling is derived exegetically from the scriptural admonition “on the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall observe this your sabbath” (Leviticus 23:32). Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 9a; Yoma 81b. In honor of my father’s memory, I note that the rabbinic concept of mosifin me-​ḥol al qodesh was the theme of the last public sermon he delivered several months before his passing. I never discussed the choice of topic with him, but as I was listening, I said to myself that he chose this subject as a way of dealing with his acute sense that his time on earth was dwindling and he was preparing mentally for the holiness of the postmortem world to come, the day that is entirely Sabbath.

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[mele’khet ha-​olam] was completed” is the “extra hour wherein the sacred is added onto the profane [zo sha‘ah yeterah she-​mosifin me-​ḥol al qodesh].” According to this statement, the completion of creation took place in the luminous shadow of twilight, the moment on the borderline between the mundane and the holy, and hence it is delegated as the hour wherein the sacred can be added to the profane. The dictum of R. Yudan is linked exegetically to the verse “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:9).44 The philosophical understanding of the conclusion of creation overlapping with the inception of Sabbath is tied thematically to the halakhic mandate to initiate the observance of Sabbath on Friday before the official start of the seventh day at sunset. Although other talmudic passages could have been cited to substantiate the point, what I have mentioned is sufficient to assert that from both halakhic and aggadic perspectives the rabbis did not posit a rigorous conception of an autonomous “objective” time, and this in spite of the meticulous concern they demonstrated with respect to establishing the proper temporal frame to determine the Jewish calendar based on the sanctification of the new moon (qiddush ha-​ḥodesh), a ceremonial obligation that is often presented in rabbinic literature as an act that distinguishes the Jews from all other nations who determine their calendar on a solar basis.45 It is reasonable to conjecture, moreover, that the roots for the rabbinic fusion of historical and mythical layers of meaning lie in the view of time implied in the conception of covenantal history proffered in the priestly and deuteronomistic codes embedded in the scriptural canon. If we are to speak of a linear conception of history in biblical sources, as many scholars have insisted, we cannot sever it from a cyclical pattern that is related to the narrative reinscription of the past in sacred text and commemorative ritual anchored to the rhythms of nature. I see no reason to speak of a “change in the treatment of time from the view of the biblical literature to that of the rabbinic literature” 44

45

Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, critical edition with notes and commentary by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965), 9:14, p. 74. See parallel in Pesiqta Rabbati: A Synoptic Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati Based upon All Extant Manuscripts and the Editio Princeps, edited by Rivka Ulmer, 2 vols. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997–​1999), vol. 1, 23:6, pp. 556–​557. For instance, see Mekhilta de-​Rabbi Ishmael, edited by Ḥayyim S. Horovitz and Israel A. Rabin (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970), Bo, 1, p. 7; Pesiqta Rabbati, vol. 1, 15:48, pp. 316–​317. For further discussion, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Face of Jacob in the Moon: Mystical Transformations of an Aggadic Myth,” in The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response?, edited by S. Daniel Breslauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 235–​238.

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as a “transition from a collective historical memory to a collective ahistorical memory.”46 Historical and ahistorical should not to be polarized respectively as dynamic-​optimistic and static-​pessimistic models of time.47 To grasp the concept of time that has informed Jewish religiosity, it is better to speak of linear circularity or circular linearity,48 a mythopoeic conception that prevails in the scriptural texts produced by priests and scribes as well as in the pericopae of the rabbis that inspired the flourishing of the creative imagination over time in the minds and hearts of Jewish poets, philosophers, exegetes, and mystical visionaries. The dual deportment yields the paradoxical depiction of time as an extending line that rotates like a sphere or as a rotating sphere that extends like a line. Hence, time may be compared to a circular ladder, to borrow an expression utilized by Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century,49 or 46 47

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Rubin and Kosman, “Clothing,” p. 158. For an independent analysis of Jewish conceptions of temporality that likewise seeks to avoid the traditional duality of cyclical versus linear time, see Goldberg, Clepsydra; idem, “Questions of Times: Conflicting Time Scales in Historical Perspective,” Jewish History 14 (2000): 267–​286. The coincidence of circularity and linearity in a manner that is consonant with kabbalistic sources was affirmed by Nicholas of Cusa. See, for instance, De Theologicis Complementis 9, in Nicholas of Cusa, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, translated by Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), p. 761. To be more precise, according to Cusanus, within the infinite circle the minimum/​maximum of curvature is equal to the minimum/​maximum of straightness. On the coincidence of the straight line and the infinite circle, based on the insights of Cusanus, see Antonio Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of Giordano Bruno (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 118–​119. For discussion of time and eternity in the writings of Cusanus with special emphasis on his eschatological teaching, see Hans Gerhard Senger, Ludus Sapientiae: Studien zum Werk und zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Nikolaus von Kues (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 162–​180. See the description of the tree of knowledge (eṣ ha-​da‘at) beheld by Raziel, a code name for Abraham Abulafia, in his commentary to Sefer ha-​Meliṣ, ms Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, hebr. 285, fols. 15a-​b (printed version in Abraham Abulafia, Maṣref ha-​Sekhel we-​Sefer ha-​Ot, edited by Amnon Gross [Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001], pp. 30–​31): “Now he desired to form [leṣayyer] for us something of its image, and he said that it is in the image of a circular ladder [sullam agol]. … Thus, I have explained to you the literal meaning of his words in detail, but now I must explain to you their matters, and this is impossible for me without an image of a ladder [ṣiyyur ha-​sullam], and even though it cannot be formed in truth unless it is spherical [kadduri], you can find some benefit from it in this image of the circle [ma‘gal]. … Know that with respect to this ladder you must configure its circularity [leṣayyer iggulo] as if it were standing before the eyes of a person like an extensive sphere rotating frontward and backward before him. … And this spherical ladder [ha-​sullam ha-​kadduri] has two clear lines and a few wide gradations between the two lines.” For the fuller context of this passage, see Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience of Abraham Abulafia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 109–​113; Elliot R. Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia—​Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics,

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according to an anonymous kabbalist, perhaps of late fifteenth-​century provenance, to a tree that is round.50 The geometric anomaly can be explained by the widely proclaimed epistemological insight that human thinking is circular—​an insight that lamentably is perceived as a weakness on the part of those who conceive the path of thinking as a journey commencing at a point of departure and terminating at a point of arrival.51 The yearning to get somewhere notwithstanding, the human mind, it seems, moves more like a spiral, winding this and that way, a circularity of thought that resonates with the event of reading imagined as a mutual round dance, the reader encircling the time of the text encircling the time of the reader.52 In this twofold encircling is the reversibility of the interpretative timeline, the redoubled reflexivity that provides the eidetic basis for any historical sketch, interpreting the past from the standpoint of the

50

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Theosophy, and Theurgy (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2000), pp. 128 n. 92 and 135; idem, “Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with Christianity,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan, edited by David Engel, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Elliot R. Wolfson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 216 n. 111. ms Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Mic. 1990, fol. 106a: “The order of the image of the tree [ṣiyyur ha-​ilan] in accordance with what we have received from our holy teachers, peace be upon them. They instructed first that their image must be a circle to impart about their holiness that they have no beginning or end.” I have also consulted the versions of this text preserved in ms Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Mic. 2030, fol. 12a and ms Oxford-​Bodleian, Christ Church 188, fol. 218a. Concerning this composition, see Jeffrey H. Chajes, “Spheres, Sefirot, and the Imaginal Astronomical Discourse of Classical Kabbalah,” Harvard Theological Review 113 (2020): 231, and idem, “The Kabbalistic Tree,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Marcia Kupfer, Adam S. Cohen, and Jeffrey H. Chajes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 460, 469 n. 16 and 472 n. 69. For a survey of this genre of literature, see also Jeffrey H. Chajes, “Kabbalistic Trees (Ilanot) in Italy: Visualizing the Hierarchy of the Heavens,” in The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, edited by Giulio Busi and Silvana Greco (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2019), pp. 170–​183. For a representative study of this much discussed motif, see Ronald Bontekoe, Dimensions of the Hermeneutic Circle (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1996). See also the chapter on “Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 29–​60. See the articulation of the circle as the structure of meaning and the interpretive understanding as the existential constitution of Dasein in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 32, p. 148 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 153, and compare discussion in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 36–​37, and reference to other scholars on p. 51 n. 52, to which should be added Susan Anima Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundation of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” Journal of Religion 34 (1954): 167.

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present, which is, in turn, informed by the very past one seeks to interpret. Writ large, to decode the meaning of a text, one must be able to read from beginning to end and from end to beginning, a hermeneutical axiom articulated by Franz Rosenzweig in the brilliance of Der Stern der Erlösung.53 Prejudiced by the assumption regarding the irreversibility of time, we privilege viewing the structure of narrative unidirectionally. However, the meaning of a text suggests a reversibility of time corroborated by the fact that—​as the experience of the dream attests54—​we can follow the plot line when the story unfolds in reverse order such that an event that would be considered the effect precedes the event that would be considered the cause. The possibility of reading inversely does not imply a closed circle, as one finds implicit in the ancient Greek belief in the cyclicality of time, typified in the statement attributed by Aristotle55 to Alcmaeon of Croton, “Men perish because they cannot join the beginning to the end.”56 On the contrary, the ability to read bi-​directionally presumes an open circle, which of necessity entails the impossibility of determining the end from the beginning or the beginning from the end. The reversibility of the timeline, consequently, does not imply uroboric closure at either terminus—​ epitomized in the description of the ten sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end” (na‘uṣ sofan bi-​teḥillatan u-​ teḥillatan be-​sofan),57 curiously echoed in the Christologically inflected opening and closing lines of “East Coker,” the second quartet of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end” and “In my end is my beginning”58—​but

53

See Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. xi-​xxxi. Regarding the hermeneutic reversibility in Rosenzweig, see idem, “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology 4 (1997): 55–​63. 54 Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), p. 229. 55 Aristotle, Problemata, 17.3, 916a33. 56 The version I have cited is from Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-​Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 40. See also Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History With a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 235; Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 87. 57 Ithamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yeẓira,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 142, § 6; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation, and Text-​Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 74, § 6. 58 Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015),

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rather an ever-​changing flux that destabilizes a palindromic succession proceeding uniformly from start to finish and inversely from finish to start. The heterogeneity of the homogeneity of the hermeneutic condition sanctions the uncovering of singularity within that which repeats, the novelty within reiteration, the reoccurrence of the unvarying in which the unvarying is nothing but the reoccurrence of variation. The interval of the temporal moment—​the spatial hiatus wherein sameness and difference are juxtaposed in the sameness of the difference of their sameness—​incarnates the present recognition of the future remembered in anticipation of the reproduction of the past.59 In classical rabbinic literature, the idea of temporal commutability and the undermining of an unalterable linear trajectory is encapsulated in the statement ein muqdam u-​me’uḥuar ba-​torah, “there is no before or after in Scripture.”60 On the face of it, this hermeneutical principle conflicts with the commonsensical conception of time, a cogent enunciation of which is offered by Jacob Taubes, no doubt influenced by an eschatological understanding of the course of history construed teleologically:

pp. 185 and 192. See ch. 1 n. 56. Eliot’s view reflects a deep seated Christian belief, as we find codified in the doxological declaration of faith Gloria Patri, “As it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, world without end.” In Greek: καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων, and in Latin: Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. The more common formulation, which may have influenced Eliot, is “As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end.” Matthew 24:37 is often mentioned as the scriptural source for this dictum but that verse actually states “As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man.” Conceptually, this verse embraces the homology between past and future, but terminologically it is not identical to the aforementioned dictum. More pertinent is the description of Christ as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, in Revelation 1:8, 17, 2:8, 21:6, 22:13, which echoes the description of God as the first and the last in Isaiah 41:4, 44:6, 48:12. I note, finally, that in “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets, in Eliot, The Poems, p. 208, there is a formulation that is more resonant with my notion of the return to a past where we have never been: “We shall not cease from exploration /​And the end of all our exploring /​Will be to arrive where we started /​And know the place for the first time.” 59 Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 229, 263, 279. 60 Palestinian Talmud, Sheqalim 6:1, 49d; Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim 6b. See also Mekhilta de-​Rabbi Ishmael, Shirata, 7, p. 139; Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, edited and translated with commentary by Gordon Tucker with Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 240–​243; Margarete Schlüter, “The Creative Force of a Hermeneutic Rule. The Principle ‘There is No Earlier and Later in the Torah’ in Midrashic and Talmudic Literature,” in Creation and Re-​Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 59–​84.

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The nature of time is summed up by its irreversible unidirectionality [Einsinnigkeit]. From a geometrical point of view, time runs in a straight line in one direction [einsinnig]. The direction of this straight is irreversible. This unidirectionality is common to both life and time. Unidirectionality and irreversibility are fundamental to their meaning. The purpose of this unidirectionality lies in the direction itself. The direction is always toward an end; otherwise, it would be directionless. The end is essentially Eschaton.61 The notion of time expressed in this passage—​an irreversible and unidirectional succession of moments lurching forward like a stream rushing over intractable rocks of historical facticity—​breaks under the weight of the rabbinic supposition that the category of before and after is not operative in the text of the Torah and therefore irrelevant to our exegetical strategy. If we follow this premise to its limit, then when we reach the end of the line, we realize the circularity of the path, a return to the beginning that beckons an extending forward of a new progression—​in the pointed formulation of Foucault, “the most direct line is also the most perfect circle, which, in coming to a close, suddenly becomes straight, linear, and as economical as light.”62 To say there is no before or after does not proffer a static conception of the eternality of Torah set in opposition to time and thus resistant to the fluctuation of historical contingency—​a traditional binary well attested in Western thought63—​but rather a conception of temporality that calls into question the linear model of 61 62 63

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated with a preface by David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 3–​4. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, translated by Charles Ruas, with an Introduction by James Faubion, and a Postscript by John Ashbery (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 33. See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 205: “Traditionally, time has been divided into two opposing modes—​irreducible, split, both symptom and cause of schizoid condition. The first is an atemporal ‘basis’ from which there surges an infinitely repeatable, resounding impulse, cutting an inaccessible eternity into uniform or differentiated instants. The second is the, let me call it ‘biblical,’ succession of numbers, chronological development, evolution with an infinite goal; this is generally called historical time” (emphasis in original). I do not think this binary can be exegetically elicited from or eisegetically imposed upon Hebrew scripture or later Jewish literary sources. For a discussion of the paradox of reversible motion in scientific theory, which raises similar questions with regard to the cause and effect relationship, see David Park, The Image of Eternity: Roots of Time in the Physical World (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 45–​65.

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aligning events chronoscopically in a sequence stretched invariably between a now that is no more and a now that is not yet. The hermeneutical principle of the rabbis embraces a notion of time circular in its linearity and linear in its circularity. When the scriptural narrative is viewed within this framework, the most direct line indeed becomes the most perfect circle: after is before precisely because before is after, but before cannot be after unless after is before. Tradition in the rabbinic understanding, amplified by kabbalists, is thus predicated on the paradoxical identification of novelty and repetition, innovation and conservation. I have often conveyed this hermeneutical conundrum that may be expressed as the assumption that the truth already spoken is always a truth yet to be spoken, that the old is envisioned as new to the degree that the new is envisioned as old.64 The paradox is well grasped by Carl G. Jung in his attempt to explain the resolution of the “blind waiting” and “doubtful listening and groping” that ensue from the tension of the movement that has become a standstill: It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. … The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. … It belongs to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. … Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same, but in the manner of its recurring creation at any given time.65

64 Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 5; idem, Language, p. 88; idem, Alef, pp. 69–​70; idem, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 235; idem, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 23. 65 Carl G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, preface by Ulrich Hoerni, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), p. 311. Compare the succinct articulation of this paradox with respect to Jung’s signature idea of the archetypes of the collective unconscious in his letter to Father Victor White, written on April 10, 1954, in Carl G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2: 1951–​ 1961, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, translation by R. F C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). p. 165: “Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux. Thus the self as a monad or continuous unit would be dead. But it lives inasmuch as it splits and unites again. There is no energy without opposites!” (emphasis in original). On the coincidence of opposites in Jung’s thought and its philosophical background, see David Henderson, Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-​Dionysius and C. G. Jung (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 56–​95.

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Pushing against the archaic doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, although most likely as featured in Nietzsche’s work,66 Jung proffers the notion of creativity as the replication of difference, the recasting of the ancient in the semblance of the novel. For the rabbinic sages and the kabbalists, too, what is invariable is the inevitability of variation, which is to say, the deep-​seated belief that the uniqueness of the present is confabulated by a genuine reiteration of the past, that the torrent of time partakes of the paradox that what transpires temporally is steadfastly the same because interminably different, and hence the recovery of the unprecedented is envisaged perforce as the discovery of the antiquated. Underlying the dictum ein muqdam u-​me’uḥar ba-​torah, moreover, is a belief in revelation interpreted as the textualization of sacred language—​the materialization of the text in both graphic and phonic dimensions, to be grasped concurrently and not sequentially—​linked to a moment that has no history, the interval of time that intrudes instantaneously and thereby cuts the timeline from any past or future, the fullness of the moment that is both continuous and discontinuous, recurring and unique, the perpetual creation of what has eternally been.67 On the one hand, the upsetting of the sequential order fosters 66 Jung, The Red Book, p. 311 n. 261. Compare idem, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–​1939, edited by James L. Jarrett, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 191: “Nietzsche had a sort of revelation about the eternal [I have corrected the obvious typo ‘external’ in the printed text] return of things; he was struck by the idea that the world must be finite and therefore the number of possibilities was necessarily finite and so must repeat themselves.” See ibid., pp. 1043–​1044. Speaking about the ring of eternal return, Jung remarks that this is “Nietzsche’s conception of immortality. You see, to him the number of possibilities in the universe was restricted … and therefore it was unavoidable that in the course of infinite spaces of time, the same thing would return, and then everything would be again as it was. That idea filled him with extraordinary enthusiasm. I cannot quite understand it but that doesn’t matter. It belongs with this symbolism of the ring, the ring of rings, the ring of Eternal Recurrence. Now, this ring is the idea of totality and it is the idea of individuation naturally, an individuation symbol.” On Jung’s antipathy toward or disinterest in the eternal recurrence of the same, see Paul Bishop, The Dionysian Self: C. G. Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 46–​47, 292, 365. But consider the evidence adduced, op. cit., pp. 301 n. 6, 339, and 341–​342, about the relationship of this Nietzschean doctrine and the Jungian archetype of rebirth as well as the symbol of individuation and the completeness of self. On p. 341 n. 37, Bishop opines on the possible link between Jung’s idea of synchronicity and a notion of repetition that is at odds with the Kantian forms of spatial and temporal intuition. It behooves me to say that an alternative reading of Nietzsche, such as the one offered by Deleuze, is more proximate to Jung’s own thinking on the dialectical resolution of the dualistic antinomy between being and becoming: the only thing that is permanent is impermanence and the only thing that is impermanent is permanence. 67 On the comparative account of perpetual creation in Islamic mysticism and Zen Buddhism, with specific reference to the depiction of the moment as what is “cut off from

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the possibility of novelty in each moment, since there is no before or after, but, on the other hand, the very same phenomenon problematizes the genuineness of the moment, insofar as the absence of linear order results in circular repetition. In the Hebraic/​Hellenic wisdom of the author of Ecclesiastes, mah she-​hayah hu she-​yihyeh u-​mah she-​na‘asah hu she-​ye‘aseh we-​ein kol ḥadash taḥat ha-​shamesh, “what was is what will be and what occurred is what will occur, and there is nothing at all new beneath the sun” (1:9). The same theme is repeated in two more verses, mah she-​hayah kevar hu wa-​asher lihyot kevar hayah, “whatever was already is, and what will be already was” (3:15), and mah she-​hayah kevar niqra shemo we-​noda asher hu, “that which happened was named already and it was known that it would happen” (6:10).68 To be the moment, the moment, at all moments, must pass as the moment on the way to becoming the moment it is to be, but in passing to become that moment, the moment morphs into the past perfect and thus ceases to be on the way to

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before and after,” see Toshihiko Izutsu, Creation and the Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy, foreword by William C. Chittick (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 1994), pp. 141–​173. On the paradox of the permanence of impermanence in the Buddhist conception of atemporal temporality, see also the analysis of Alex Wayman, “No Time, Great Time, and Profane Time in Buddhism,” in Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long with the collaboration of Jerald C. Brauer and Marshall G. S. Hodgson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 51–​53; Victor Mansfield, “Time in Mādhyamika Buddhism and Modern Physics,” Pacific World Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies 11/​12 (1995–​1996): 10–​27; idem, “Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics,” in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, edited by B. Alan Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 305–​321. On the conception of time as simultaneously temporal and atemporal, which serves as the ontological basis for the psychological notion of “personal nonduality” or the “continuity of discontinuity,” see Gereon Kopf, “Temporality and Personal Identity in the Thought of Nishida Kitarō,” Philosophy East and West 52 (2002): 229–​233. According to the interpretation of this verse from Ecclesiastes in Zohar 3:61a-​b, all that God created in this world preexisted in the divine will, which is linked to the midrashic myth that before God created this world, he created and destroyed other worlds. For a similar interpretation of the words mah she-​hayah kevar hu (Ecclesiastes 3:15), see James T. Robinson, Asceticism, Eschatology, Opposition to Philosophy: The Arabic Translation and Commentary of Salmon ben Yeroham on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 306: “that is, this world, which its Creator created according to one form and one plan; from the time of its creation until our end it abides according to one state as it has been, according to what you witness, and it will be as it was.” It is understandable why some kabbalists anchored the idea of the reincarnation (gilgul) of the soul in this verse, since the idea of previous lifecycles challenges the empirical belief that when a child is born, a new soul inhabits a body in this world. See, for instance, Moses Galante, Qehillat Ya‘aqov (Safed: Abraham Ashkenazi and Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi, 1578), 32a-​b.

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becoming the moment it is to be. It follows that what transpires momentarily cannot truly be of the moment, for what comes to pass previously received its name, and what will come to be subsequently is what it currently has already become. Every now, accordingly, is now in virtue of not being now. In a different terminological register, a similar conception of a timeless time is deducible from a fragment of Parmenides preserved by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. According to the wisdom imparted to and by Parmenides, time is not a flux of becoming with past or future but rather the saturation of being characteristic of that which is, the eternity of the nunc stans: “It was not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, one, continuous.”69 Congruently, Plato depicted the instant as the point of transition between motion and rest, the point through and in which what is at rest comes to motion and what is in motion comes to rest. “When, being in motion, it comes to rest and when, being at rest, it changes to being in motion, it must itself not be in one time. It is simply not possible for it to admit being earlier at rest and later in motion and later at rest without undergoing change.”70 Caught between coming and going, the moment can have no past or future, and, consequently, no present; strictly speaking, there is no moment in time but only time in the moment that is outside the metrics of time. What makes the triadic arrangement of time possible is the positing of a momentary union that defies temporal computation. The discerning ear will detect an articulation of this point in the following passage from Sartre’s L’être et le néant in his explication of “the temporal dynamic” (dynamique de la temporalité) as opposed to the static temporality (la temporalité statique): Let us look more closely: the present cannot pass except by becoming the “before” of a for-​itself [pour-​soi] that thereby constitutes itself as “after”. There is therefore just one phenomenon: the arising of a new present that “pastifies” [passéifiant] the present that it was and, in the wake of the pastification [passéification] of a present, the appearing of a for-​itself for whom that present will become the past. The phenomenon of temporal becoming is a global modification, since a past of noting would no longer

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Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, p. 273, and see the comments on this passage in Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 2: The World of the Polis, edited with an introduction by Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 283. 70 Plato, Parmenides 156e. I have availed myself of the rendering in Robert G. Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy, translation of and commentary on the Parmenides, with interpretative chapters on the Timaeus, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Philebus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 111–​112.

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be a past and since any present must necessarily be the present of this past. This metamorphosis, moreover, does not extend only to the pure present: the past perfect and the future are equally affected.71 The present of the for-​itself is “originarily presence to being in so far as it is its own witness of coexistence, in relation to itself. … We know that the for-​itself is the being whose existence takes the form of witnessing its own being.”72 The presence of the present constituted by the witnessing of the for-​itself is, however, a presence that is not present except as the present of the past that is no more and the present of the future that is not yet. Regarding the being of the for-​itself, therefore, we must conclude that “it bears witness to itself of itself as not being that being [il est à soi-​même témoin de soi comme n’étant pas cet être].” From this we can infer that “our presence to any being implies that we are linked to that being by an internal connection. … But this internal connection is negative: it denies, with respect to a present being, that it is that being to which it is present [il nie de l’être présent qu’il soit l’être auquel il est présent]. … Thus the for-​itself’s presence to being implies that the for-​itself bears witness to itself, in the presence of being, as not being that being [en présence de l’être comme n’étant pas l’être]: presence to being is the for-​itself’s presence, in so far as it is not. … We can express this concisely by saying that the present is not [le présent n’est pas].”73 The nonbeing of the being of the present bears witness to not being the being to which it bears witness. Hence, the for-​itself of the present does not have being because its being is always at a distance from itself in the nonpresence of the presence that is either the present that is the past of the future or the present that is the future of the past. But the present is not only the for-​itself’s presentifying non-​being [non-​ être présentifiant du pour-​soi]. As for-​itself, it has its being outside, in front of and behind itself. Behind it, it was its past; and in front of it, it will be its future. It is the flight out of co-​present being and away from the being that it was, towards the being that it will be. As present, it is not what it is (past) and it is what it is not (future).74

71 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 210 (emphasis in original); idem, L’être et le néant, p. 180. 72 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 183; idem, L’être et le néant, p. 157. 73 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 183 (emphasis in original); idem, L’être et le néant, pp. 157–​158. 74 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 184; idem, L’être et le néant, p. 159.

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Sartre calls the mode of being of the for-​itself in the present always being at a distance in the past or in the future diasporic, a choice of terminology, as he explains, that is based on the use of the term “diaspora” in the ancient world to refer “to the profound cohesion and dispersion of the Jewish people.”75 To label the for-​itself’s mode of being as diasporic, therefore, connotes both a sense of unity and diffusion. The matter is elaborated in a second passage by Sartre in his explanation of the phenomenon of equipmentality, a locution appropriated from Heidegger,76 which names how the correlative of the pure negation that I am discloses a plurality of tasks that are my image: To answer this question, we must remember that the for-​itself is not purely and simply a future that comes towards the present. It also has its past, in the form of “was”, to be. And the ecstatic implication of the three temporal dimensions is such that, if the for-​itself is a being that is acquainted, through its future, with the meaning of what it was, it is—​in the same movement of arising—​also a being that has its “will be” to be, within the perspective of a specific “was” from which it flees. In this sense, we must always seek the meaning of a temporal dimension elsewhere, in another dimension: we named this the “diaspora”, because the unity of diasporic being is not a pure belonging-​together that is given; it is the necessity of actualizing the diaspora by becoming conditioned—​over there, and outside—​within the unity of itself. Therefore the negation that I am and which discloses the this has therefore to be in the mode of “was”. This pure negation which, as a simple presence, is not, has its being behind it, as its past, or facticity. … Negation arises as a non-​thetic negation of the past, in the mode of an internal determination, in so far as it becomes a thetic negation of a this. And it arises within the unity of a twofold “being for”, since negation is produced in existence—​in the reflection-​reflecting mode—​as a negation of a this, in order to escape from the past that it is,

75 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 201; idem, L’être et le néant, p. 172. 76 The expressions Zeugsein and Zeughafte, both rendered in English as “equipmentality,” are used by Heidegger in the essay “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” See Martin Heidegger, Holzwege [ga 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), pp. 16–​21, 23, 24, 32, 43, 53, 57; idem, Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 12–​14, 18, 40, 43. In § 22 of Sein und Zeit, p. 381, Heidegger utilized the expression zeughaften Zugehörigkeit in his description of the antiquities, which are still objectively present, as having a past “because they belong to useful things and originate from a world that has-​been—​the world of a Dasein that has-​been-​there” (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 363).

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and it escapes from the past in order to extricate itself from the this by fleeing from it in its being, towards the future.77 The irreversible reversibility of the timeflow in the manner described here—​ the present presentifying itself as not being the being confronted in the present apart from the possibility of being beyond the being of the nothingness in the past or the nothingness in the future—​is brought into focus through viewing the event of reading as repeatedly hearing anew the text yet to be inscripted, a supposition that rests on the further assumption that text and reader evolve correlatively in the unfurling of time through patterns discerned from the interpretative gesture of continually rendering the old as new initiating the new as old. The intersection of hermeneutics and temporality may be thought from the expectation of novel life germinating from the ground of genuine repetition.78 Heidegger raised this very point when he noted that the “first principle of hermeneutics” is to discern that historical thinking is anchored in the possibility of returning to the past as future; indeed, the past is authentic only to the extent that it is futurally present—​present in the future as the future of the present.79 Deleuze correctly, in my opinion, remarked that with regard to the depiction of history as the retrieval (Wiederholung) of the possible, and the implied disparity inherent to what is repeatable,80 Heidegger is Nietzschean: Repetition in the eternal return never means continuation, perpetuation or prolongation, nor even the discontinuous return of something which

77 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 282–​283 (emphasis in origin); idem, L’être et le néant, p. 238. 78 My thought is indebted to the analysis of the temporality of hermeneutics and the hermeneutics of temporality in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō in Steven Heine, A Dream Within a Dream: Studies in Japanese Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 21–​31. 79 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 20. 80 Deleuze cites the following passage from Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, translated by Richard Taft, fourth edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 139 (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik [ga 3] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), p. 204): “By the retrieval of a basic problem, we understand the opening-​up of its original, long-​concealed possibilities, through the working-​ out of which it is transformed. In this way it first comes to be preserved in its capacity as a problem. … Retrieval of the possible does not just mean the taking-​up of what is ‘customary,’ ‘grounded overviews [of which] exist’ from which ‘something can be done.’ The possible in this sense is always just the all-​too-​real which everyone manages to manipulate in its prevailing mode of operation. The possible in this sense directly hinders a genuine retrieval, and thereby in general it hinders a relationship to history.”

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would at least be able to be prolonged in a partial cycle (an identity, an I, a Self), but, on the contrary, the reprise of pre-​individual singularities which, in order that it can be grasped as repetition, presupposes the dissolution of all prior identities. Every origin is a singularity and every singularity a commencement on the horizontal line, the line of ordinary points on which it is prolonged like so many reproductions or copies which form the moments of a bare repetition. It is also, however, a recommendation on the vertical line which condenses singularities and on which is woven the other repetition, the line of the affirmation of chance. If “being” is above all difference and commencement, Being is itself repetition, the recommencement of being. … This is the constant ambiguity of the notion of origin and the reason for our earlier deception: origins are assigned only in a world which challenges the original as much as the copy, and an origin assigns a ground only in a world already precipitated into universal ungrounding.81 At this crisscross of repetition and innovation—​ to say the same thing differently82—​the grounding of beginning that is always an ungrounding of origin, we can discern the momentous circle in which we are chronically ensconced: the thinking of time must be pondered from the time of thinking, but the time of thinking can be reckoned only from the thinking of time.83 To 81

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 201–​202 (emphasis in original). 82 See the sources cited and discussed in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 40 and 53 n. 83. Compare the analysis of this motif in Heidegger and Derrida in Ned Lukacher, Time-​ Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 139–​159. See my own reflections in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 32, on the Heideggerian (and kabbalistic) inflection in Derrida’s insistence that writing proceeds in accord with the dynamic of the same law commanding things that are always different. 83 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—​Conversations—​Letters, edited by Medard Boss, translated with notes and afterwords by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 125. On time and the hermeneutical enterprise, see Otto Pöggeler, “Temporale Interpretation und hermeneutische Philosophie,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 43 (1989): 5–​32; James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-​reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 119–​138; David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 319–​334; Sandra B. Rosenthal, Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement With Contemporary Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 119–​131. On the close connection between time and consciousness in Buddhist teaching, which displays some phenomenological similarity to Heidegger, see Nyanaponika Thera, Abhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time, edited with and introduction by Bhikkhu Bodhi, fourth edition (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998), pp. 93–​114.

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heed these words is to take to heart the interface of time, truth, and interpretation, an interface effaced in the moment displayed by the ecstatic and the horizonal aspects of temporal threefoldness, arising from and giving birth to the primordial unity of past, present, and future.84 In his reflections on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Deleuze thus expressed the inherent correlation of time and hermeneutics: To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate. But this “explication” is identified with the development of the sign in itself. This is why the Search is always temporal, and the truth always a truth of time.85 The search for truth, the quest to establish meaning, unvaryingly is temporal. Timely truth, at all times, is the gift sent and received as the truth of and in time. 2

Alef/​Mem/​Tau: Time, Truth, Death

The correlation of time, truth, and death, may be educed from works of kabbalistic theosophy. From late antiquity a tradition was transmitted in the name of Simeon ben Laqish emphasizing that the word for truth, emet, is composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (alef, mem, and tau), signifying thereby that truth is comprehensive of all the semiotic ciphers that weave the fabric of the holy language.86 Needless to say, listening to the literary context in which the dictum appears will prove to be crucial in determining the precise meaning that may be excavated from such archaic wisdom. Suffice it here to note that the insight about the orthographic composition of emet appears in a discussion concerning the correct judicial behavior, a discussion that provokes, as is typical for the rabbinic imagination, theological reflection on the nature of divine judgment. The cosmic judge is upheld as the

84 85 86

Karin de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel (Albany: State University of New Press, 2000), pp. 33–​37, 79–​113. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, translated by Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 17. A similar conclusion is reached by Kristeva, Time and Sense, p. 191. Palestinian Talmud, Sanhedrin 1:1, 18a. For alternative versions of this passage, see Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 81:1, p. 971; Midrash Devarim Rabbah, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), 1:10, pp. 7–​8; Midrash Rabbah: Shir ha-​ Shirim, edited by Shimshon Dunasky (Jerusalem: Dvir, 1980), 1:9, p. 38.

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model of behavior for human judges and thus a discussion about the latter will of necessity lead to the former. In the context of these pronouncements, we learn of the “seal” (ḥotam) of God, a seal that seals the judgment, the stamp of truth that makes the edict stand. Hence, the adage that the signet of God is truth whence sprang the further insight that emet is composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet. To think the essence of this matter, to submit to the call of the unthought that must be thought,87 is to discern the correlation of truth and language, or, more precisely, Hebrew, which is depicted in rabbinic lore (and all the more so in the esoteric accretions to the tradition) as the cosmic language, a “pure” or “originary” speech, the proto/​verb inscripted as spoken, spoken as inscripted.88 Medieval kabbalists introduced (or, at least, made explicit) the link between the consonants of emet and the three points that dominate the caricature of

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I am here indebted to the formulation of Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 24. Stambaugh’s rendering of the German es sich Geheiß des zu Denkenden fügt (Zur Sache des Denkens [ga 14] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), p. 25) as the thinking that “submits to the call of what must be thought” is superb as she skillfully captures the nuance and drift of Heidegger’s belief that thinking consists of heeding the ancient word that continually calls forth new readings on the path of listening/​appropriation. The misconstrued rendering of Heidegger’s notion of truth in essentialist terms is curtailed by his further insight (expressed in the same literary context) regarding the “ancient something which conceals itself in a-​letheia.” Inasmuch as that which is ancient (Uralte) hides itself (sich verbirgt) in the un-​covering—​a-​letheia, the word that Heidegger uses to name the event of truth as unveiling—​truth can never be uncovered except by being recovered in the double sense of covering over and discovering. The unconcealment of truth preserves the concealment of truth, and thus we cannot disentangle truth and untruth. What is finally uncovered? The uncovering and hence the recovering. For discussion of the inseparability of truth and untruth in Heidegger’s idea of alētheia, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 48–​52; idem, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 6, 131–​145; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 4, 17 n. 31, 20 n. 61, 39, 94 n. 170, 120, 158, 266, 304–​305, 324 nn. 66 and 72. Needless to say, there are numerous studies on Heidegger’s notion of truth as unconcealedness in which concealedness is preserved. See the sources cited in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 314–​315 n.106, 316 n. 128, 347 n. 339; idem, The Duplicity, pp. 251–​252 n. 1; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 17 n. 29; to which may be added Rudolf Bernet, “Phenomenological Concepts of Untruth in Husserl and Heidegger,” in Husserl: German Perspectives, edited by John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, translated by Hayden Kee, Patrick Eldridge, and Robin Litscher Wilkins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 239–​262. For discussion of this central theme in Jewish esotericism, with particular focus on medieval kabbalah, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 197–​202, 212–​220.

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time in human consciousness.89 Alef induces us to consider the past, mem the present, and tau the future. From the vulgar standpoint, the present is the space positioned between a present that is no more and a present that is not yet. The kabbalistic wisdom elicited from the rabbinic dictum that God’s seal is truth challenges this perception: the correlation of emet and the three points of the curvature of the timeline imparts the coalescence of past, present, and future such that no longer is transposed into not yet and not yet into no longer. It is of interest to note that Gersonides pushed against this very idea on the grounds that it disregards the law of noncontradiction: Firstly, time is such that one part [of it] differs [sequentially] from another part; for this [particular] part of time is different from both the preceding and succeeding part of time. If this were not the case, there would be no difference between past and future time; but this is absurd. Moreover, if time did not have this characteristic, it would be possible for two contrary states to exist in one subject at one time and in the same respect. [But] contraries are by definition such that they can exist in the same subject and in the same respect only at two [different] times. If the times were not different, then the contraries would exist simultaneously in one and the same subject. [But this is absurd].90 The simultaneous coexistence of the contraries in the same subject is precisely the conclusion one must deduce from the kabbalistic collocation of the three letters of word emet and the three temporal modes comprised in the Tetragrammaton. Applying the theosophic gnosis to the human experience of time, we can say that in the present that is now, inasmuch as it is not now present, the past is awaited and the future remembered. Contemplating the belonging-​together of time, truth, and death opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality, the conquering of time through time, to paraphrase the memorable expression of T. S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quarters.91 Utilizing the profound—​I am tempted 89

A correlation between the letters of the alphabet (the beginning and end are explicitly mentioned and the middle presumed) and the presence of God in the past, present, and future, is found in Revelation 1:8. See Wolfson, Alef, pp. 165 and 246 n. 3. 90 Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), The Wars of the Lord, translated and notes by Seymour Feldman, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999), pp. 271–​272. For the original Hebrew, see idem, Milḥamot ha-​Shem (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1923), 6.1:10, p. 329. 91 Eliot, The Poems, p. 181. The fuller context of the poem indicates that the conquering of time by time comes about in the remembrance of the moment, which involves past and future.

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to say abysmal—​imaginative ruminations on time elicited from the wisdom of the kabbalah, we can articulate an ontology of time that is a grammar of becoming. The correlation of truth and divinity underscores that truth, which embodies in its semantic composition the trinitarian structure of temporality, is the mark of the timeless eternally becoming in time, a formulation that is still too dichotomous, as the divine becoming is not an event in time but the eventuality of time, an eventuality palpable in the eruption of the moment wherein life and death converge in the coming to be of that which endures everlastingly and the endurance of that which comes to be provisionally. By heeding the letters of emet, we can discern something of the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that reverberates the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth, the closure that opens the opening that closes. Here we would do well to recall a powerfully poetic account of eternity’s recasting of time offered by Rosenzweig92 in the concluding section of Der Stern der Erlösung: To live in time means to live between beginning and end. He who would want to live outside of time—​and he who wants to live not that which is temporary, but an eternal life in time, must want this—​he who therefore wants this must deny that “between.” Such a denial, however, would have to be active, so that there would result not merely a not-​living-​in-​ time, but a positive living-​eternally. And the active denial would take place solely in the reversal. To reverse a between means to make its after into the before and its before into the after, the end into the beginning, the beginning into the end. And the eternal people does that. It already lives for itself as if it were the whole world and as if the world were finished; it celebrates in its Sabbaths the sabbatical completion of the world and makes it into the base and starting point of its existence. But that which would be temporally only a starting point, the Law, this it sets as the goal. So it does not experience the between, although it naturally, really naturally, lives in it. It experiences precisely the reversal of the between, and so it disavows the omnipotence of the between

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For a preliminary investigation of the similarity between the kabbalistic ontology of time and the view on temporality articulated by Rosenzweig, see Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced,” pp. 51–​63.

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and denies time in this way, and the same time is experienced on the eternal way.93 In the above passage, Rosenzweig articulates his legendary notion of the metahistorical destiny of Judaism set in contrast to the historical fate of Christianity, the surmounting of the eternal way by eternal life. For the one who lives beyond history, there is an inversion of the between and hence the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. The surpassing of time is experienced in the fullness of time, the spontaneous recurrence of what has never been—​only that which has never been can recur—​in the instant that has no before or after.94 Linear time is eternalized in the circular rhythms of the sacred time of liturgy and ritual, a process exemplified especially in the celebration of Sabbath.95 The Jewish Sabbath incarnates the coalescence of past, present, and future, the temporal correlates of the theological categories of creation, revelation, and redemption. In the life of the Jew, who lives in and from the end, time has been proleptically redeemed and the experience of the between fulfilled. The disavowal of time—​or what Levinas called the deformalization of the 93

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Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 443; idem, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften II. Der Stern der Erlösung (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 467. See Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced,” pp. 56–​57. In this matter, one can discern the influence of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, which denies the “timeless eternity” of a supernatural being (in the Platonic-​Christian tradition) and affirms the “eternity of the ever-​creating and destroying powers in nature and man.” See Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972), pp. 130–​131; Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 260–​293; Richard I. Sugarman, Rancor Against Time: The Phenomenology of ‘Ressentiment’ (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980), pp. 56–​96; Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by J. Harvey Lomax, foreword by Bernd Magnus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Lukacher, Time-​Fetishes, pp. 7–​8, 116–​138. To be sure, in contrast to, and perhaps even as a response to, Nietzsche, Rosenzweig sought to affirm the transcendental other, the basis for revelation, which, in turn, legitimates creation and redemption as meaningful theological categories. It is nevertheless the case that the experience of eternity in this world is predicated on a convergence of the same and different that is a crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s doctrine. Moreover, it is not impossible that Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence was itself inspired by and rooted in a personal experience of a mystical nature. See, for example, James Gutmann, “The ‘Tremendous Moment’ of Nietzsche’s Vision,” Journal of Philosophy 51 (1954): 837–​842. See Zachary Braiterman, “Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” in Beginning/​Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, edited by Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), pp. 215–​238.

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abstract aspects of time and the consequent concretization of the structures of experience96—​does not imply an abrogation or even a dialectical surpassing of temporality, but rather its radical deepening, an eradication of time by rooting oneself more profoundly in the ground of time. Eternity, accordingly, is not the metaphysical overcoming of or existential escape from time but rather the merging of the three-​dimensional structure of lived temporality through eternalization of the present in the continuous becoming of the being that has always been what is yet to come.97 The concurrence of past, present, and future is related to Rosenzweig’s view that the three theological processes happen simultaneously within the divine: “Revelation is not later than Creation, and just for this reason even Redemption is not later than the two.”98 Extrapolating, I assume, from the rabbinic tradition that the Tetragrammaton conveys a compresence of the three temporal modes, as well as embracing the Schellingian collapse of the difference between being and becoming within the Godhead,99 Rosenzweig postulates that the “becoming of God is not a self-​transformation for him, nor growth, nor increase but he is from the beginning and is at every moment and is always coming; and it is only because of this simultaneousness of his everlasting-​being all the time and eternally, that the whole must be designated

96

For references to primary and secondary sources related to this Levinasian theme, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 57 n. 123. Despite this crucial affinity between Rosenzweig and Levinas, their respective conceptions of time and redemption are not homogeneous. The difference is especially evident in the emphasis that Levinas places on the future, which is critical to his notion of diachrony. This disparity is well documented by Alexandra Aidler, “Judaism, Ethics, and Time: On Levinas’s Re-​Interpretation of Rosenzweig’s Concept of the Kingdom of God,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 73–​96. 97 Else-​Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of The Star of Redemption (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 11–​12, 184. Rosenzweig’s perspective on time and eternity accords with the following assessment of Heidegger in Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1998), p. 5: “If, on the basis of Heidegger’s approach to time, something like eternity is still thinkable, it would have an entirely different meaning and be based upon a temporary thought in a more original way. Time can no longer be thought of on the basis of eternity, but, on the contrary, eternity must be thought of on the basis of time.” For an elaboration of this affinity, see Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 185–​205. 98 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 277; idem, Der Stern, p. 287. 99 Compare the Schellingian sources cited and discussed in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 104–​105, 206–​207. On the relationship of time and eternity in Schelling, see ibid., pp. 282, 298 n. 228.

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as a becoming.”100 The temporal depiction of the eternality of the divine as the simultaneous and continual becoming of past, present, and future serves as a model for the temporality experienced by the eternal people in the circular linearity of their sacramental life. Without denying the depth and perspicacity of Rosenzweig’s thinking about time, I would argue that the kabbalistic tradition, building on themes and subtleties of thought evident in older rabbinic sources, fosters an understanding of the radical becoming of time-​being in its being-​time, an interruptive narration that militates against the feasibility of constructing a contemporaneous myth in which past, present, and future converge in an absolute that is all-​in-​all. As Rosenzweig puts it elsewhere, Redemption is the “bridge that the connects the two root words” of Creation and Revelation, “the And between the Yes and the No.”101 The veracity of the whole lies in the conjunction of the future that links the affirmation of the past and the negation of the present. Fundamentally, Rosenzweig would have concurred with the insight of Kierkegaard, “Like freedom, truth is the eternal. If the eternal is not, there is neither truth nor freedom.”102 By contrast, the correlation of time and truth that one may elicit from the Jewish esoteric tradition presumes a rupture in being’s center, a tear that opens the prospect of retrieval, restoration, and return to the world that is eternally coming from the origin secreted in the terminus of its exposé.103 “The Visions of Eternity,” wrote Blake in the second chapter of his epic Jerusalem, “by reason of narrowed perceptions, /​Are become weak visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death; /​Till deep dissimulation is the only defence an honest man has left.”104 In the furrow of death, the crevice of being, to borrow the poeticizing language of Walter Benjamin, is the “center of the interval,” the “womb of time, whence the self radiates outward,” the “countermovement

100 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 277; idem, Der Stern, pp. 287–​288. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 44–​45. 101 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 246; idem, Der Stern, p. 255. 102 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 206. 103 The gloss on the rabbinic eschatological idiom, “world to come” (olam ha-​ba), as the “world that is coming” (alma de-​atei), is found in Sefer ha-​Bahir. See The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts, edited by Daniel Abrams with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), § 106, p. 191 (Hebrew). 104 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised edition, edited by David V. Erdman, Commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 198.

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of things in the time of the self.”105 The time of death bespeaks not the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—​between, before, beyond. Dissimulation is the only way this truth can be faced honestly. 3

Timeless Time and the Rotation of the Sefirot

To grasp the deeper intonation of the correspondence of the word emet and the three temporal modalities, we must consider more carefully the metaphysical ruminations of the kabbalists on the nature of time.106 We begin with a negative assertion: from the kabbalists’ vantage point, time is not dependent on the motion of bodies in space (in accord with the Aristotelian definition) nor is it conceived as the fleeting shadow of the eternal forms in the world of matter (following the Platonic model). Time, in its primordiality, which is to be understood ontologically and not chronologically, is the duration that is linked to the ebb and flow of divine energy, the vital force that generates the polarities of motion and rest, light and dark, life and death.107 The idea of temporality that I am attributing to the kabbalists bears resemblance to the theory of time proffered by Ḥasdai Crescas as the mental measure of the continuum (hitdabbequt) of motion or rest between two instants.108 According to Harry Austryn 105 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–​1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 15–​16. On Benjamin’s rejection of a progressive view of history and the implied linear conception of time, see Rolf Tiedmann, “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History’,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, edited by Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 176–​181. 106 For a comparative study of theories of time in theosophic and ecstatic kabbalah, see Moshe Idel, “Some Conceptions of Time and History in Kabbalah,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, David S. Myers, and John Efron (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), pp. 153–​188. As representative of theosophic kabbalah, Idel discusses Cordovero, including some of the passages that I have discussed here, but I have offered my own translations and analyses. 107 With respect to this mythological intuition, an attentive reading of scriptural passages shapes the kabbalistic worldview where the change of times is intimately connected to the divine. See Brin, The Concept of Time, pp. 225–​246. On the ascription of time to God, see S. G. F. Brandon, History, Time and Deity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), pp. 31–​64; Wolfgang Achtner, Stefan Kunz, and Thomas Walter, Dimensions of Time: The Structures of Humans, of the World, and of God, translated by Arthur H. Williams, Jr. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 138–​166. 108 Harry A. Wolfson, “Note on Crescas’s Definition of Time,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10 (1919): 1–​17; idem, Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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Wolfson’s summation of Crescas, “the essence of time is not motion but duration. Unlike motion, duration does not depend upon external objects for its existence, and it does not arise in our mind out of the motion of things outside ourselves. It is rather the continuity and flow of the activity of the thinking mind. … Unlike Aristotle, then, this definition maintains that it is not time that measures motion but it is rather motion that measures time. … In its essence time is duration, and duration is in the mind and is independent of motion.”109 Wolfson suggested, moreover, that this definition of time “may be hewn out of the lengthy discussions of Plotinus, and traces of it may be found in the writings of the Iḥwan al-​Safa, Saadia, and Altabrizi.”110 I suggest that we add to this mix the influence of works of kabbalah.111 Press, 1929), pp. 93–​98, 289, 646–​658 nn. 22–​23. For a criticism of Wolfson’s interpretation, see Shlomo Pines, Studies in Abu’l-​Barakāt al-​Baghdādī: Physics and Metaphysics (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), pp. 159–​169. See also Warren Zev Harvey, “The Term Hitdabbeḳut in Crescas’ Definition of Time,” Jewish Quarterly Review 71 (1980): 44–​47; Tamar Rudavsky, “The Theory of Time in Maimonides and Crescas,” Maimonidean Studies 1 (1990): 143–​162; idem, Time Matters, pp. 46–​49; Haym Maccoby, “Crescas’s Concept of Time,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, pp. 163–​170; Eliezer Schweid, The Classic Jewish Philosophers: From Saadia through the Renaissance, translated by Leonard Levin (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 382–​383; Dov Schwartz, “‘Why Did He Create It in a Certain Time?’ Shemarya Ikriti and Hasdai Crescas on Time and Creation,” in Or ha-​Shem from Spain: The Life, Works, and Philosophy of Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, edited by Esti Eisenmann and Warren Zev Harvey (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2020), pp. 229–​251 (Hebrew). It is well to recall here the view of David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, edited by David Fate Norton and Maty J. Norton, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.2.3, p. 28: “The idea of time, being deriv’d from the succession of our perceptions of every kind, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation, will afford us an instance of an abstract idea, which comprehends a still greater variety than that of space, and yet is represented in the fancy by some particular individual idea of a determinate quantity and quality. As ’tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time, nor is it possible for time alone ever to make its appearance, or be taken notice of by the mind. … From these phænomena, as well as from many others, we may conclude, that time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone, or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover’d by some perceivable succession of changeable objects.” The idea of time is derived from the succession of mental perceptions, but these, in turn, are based on the succession of changeable objects. 109 Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique, pp. 96–​97, and see p. 660 n. 24. 110 Ibid., p. 97, and see pp. 655–​657 n. 23. For a still useful account of the Platonic, Aristotelian, Plotinian, and Augustinian views of temporality, see John Francis Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948). 111 The influence of Azriel of Gerona’s Neoplatonic conception of temporality on Crescas’s formulation in Or ha-​Shem of time as the duration (meshekh) that is measured in the Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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Parenthetically, I note that in his discussion of the philosophic quandary of why God created the world at a particular instant, Crescas mentions two possible explanations, either we accept that it was so ordained by God’s wisdom or we presume that there was some aspect of time prior to the creation. The second opinion is elicited from the rabbinic dicta,112 as cited by Maimonides,113 that God constructed worlds and destroyed them before creating this world or that there was an order of time that preceded this world. According to Crescas, the intent of these dicta “is to indicate that there is soul or in thought was noted by Martelle Gavarin, “The Conception of Time in the Works of Rabbi Azriel of Gerona,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, 3–​4 (1987): 309–​310 n. 3 (Hebrew). The author recounts that she lectured on this very topic in the World Congress of Jewish Studies that took place in Jerusalem in 1984. On the possible influence of the kabbalistic doctrine of sefirot on Crescas’s discussion of the threefold holiness of the divine glory (kavod) based on Isaiah 6:3, see Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique, pp. 459–​461 nn. 92–​93. Wolfson concludes that Crescas combined Maimonides’s discussion of the term kavod with the kabbalistic sefirot. For other studies that have touched on the kabbalah and Crescas, see Warren Zev Harvey, “Kabbalistic Elements in Crescas’ Light of the Lord,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 2 (1982–​1983): 75–​109 (Hebrew); Eliezer Schweid, “The Theology of Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas,” in the facsimile of the Ferrara 1555 edition of Sefer ha-​Shem (Jerusalem: Makor, 1970), pp. 36–​37; idem, The Classic Jewish Philosophers, pp. 364, 392–​393, 399–​404, 414–​415, 420–​421; Moshe Idel, “Divine Attributes and Sefirot in Jewish Theology,” in Studies in Jewish Thought, edited by Sara O. Heller Wilensky and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989), pp. 88, 98–​99 (Idel cites the passage from Meir Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh Qodesh [Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​ Sefarim, 2004], 3:68, p. 460—​I have corrected Idel’s mistaken reference—​in which he claims that Crescas’s discussion of positive attributes is based on Psalms and the well-​ known comment in Sefer Yeṣirah that the sefirot are bound like a flame to the coal); Nathan Ophir, “‘The Secret of the Kaddish’: A Kabbalistic Text Attributed to Rav Ḥasdai Crescas,” Da‘at 46 (2001): 13–​28 (Hebrew); Ari Ackerman, “The Attribution of Sod ha-​ Kaddish to Hasdai Crescas,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 65–​73; Avraham Stav, “The Secret of Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas: The Meaning of ‘Sod Ha-​Tefillah’ and ‘Sod Ha-​Bitaḥon’ in the Work of ’Or Ha-​Shem,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 42 (2018): 1–​15 (Hebrew section). 112 Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 3:7, p. 23. 1 13 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:30, p. 349. After citing the midrashic text, Maimonides remarks, “This second opinion is even more incongruous than the first.” The only rational way to salvage the rabbinic dicta is to say that they presume that the order of time existed eternally a parte ante, but that would entail the belief in the eternity a parte ante of the world, which is rejected by all who adhere to the Torah. Crescas, by contrast, emphasizes that “no one we have encountered disputes” these dicta. See Ḥasdai Crescas, Or ha-​Shem (Jerusalem: Sifrei Ramot, 1990), 3:1, 1.5, p. 316; idem, Light of the Lord (Or Hashem), translated with introduction and notes by Roselyn Weiss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 276–​277.

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a constant creation, but that worlds come to be at a certain instant and pass away at a certain instant, whether [simply] with the coming-​to-​be and passing-​away of individual worlds, or with each world exceeding the preceding one in its level of perfection. It is possible that the world in which we exist will persist forever, and it is also possible that it will pass away and another world will follow it, exceeding this one in its degree of perfection as the animal exceeds the plant in perfection. Here the doors to speculation are locked, but the matters are ancient, [known] to the receivers of the truth.”114 Unquestionably, this passage does not offer a definition of the general nature of time but one would readily agree that it does deal with a question that is directly pertinent to our understanding of the temporal nature of the world. Significantly, Crescas acknowledges that reason cannot resolve the critical question regarding the permanence versus the impermanence of the world, an ancient topic that he believed was known to the kabbalists, the recipients of the truth (meqabbelei ha-​emet).115 Returning to the main point, Crescas’s counter-​definition to Aristotle—​ adopted by Maimonides116 and Gersonides117—​ is encapsulated in the demarcation of time offered by his disciple Joseph Albo as “the inestimable flux imagined in thought” (ha-​meshekh ha-​bilti mesho‘ar ha-​medummeh ba-​ maḥashavah).118 Crescas apparently was also sympathetic to those who upheld the quasi-​divine nature of time, even suggesting that the thinking mind in and by which the continuity of the temporal flow is measured may be God.119 This

1 14 Crescas, Or ha-​Shem, 3:1, 1.5, p. 316; idem, Light of the Lord, pp. 276–​277. 115 In the introduction, Crescas, more or less in consonance with the formulation of Maimonides, refers to the “secrets of the Torah” (sitrei ha-​torah)—​the account of creation (ma‘aseh bere’shit) and the account of the chariot (ma‘aseh merkavah)—​“which were in the hands of a select few modest men who transmitted them to their disciples at special times and under special conditions. But when the generations weakened, so that those who were repositories of the received Oral Torah and of the recesses of its secrets and mysteries lost their vigor, the wisdom of our wise men dissipated, and the understanding of our intelligent ones went into hiding” (Crescas, Or ha-​Shem, Introduction, p. 7; idem, Light of the Lord, p. 23). 116 Maimonides, The Guide, 2:Introduction, p. 237. 117 Levi ben Gershom, Milḥamot ha-​Shem, 6.1:10, pp. 329–​330; idem, The Wars of the Lord, vol. 3, pp. 272–​273. 118 Joseph Albo, Sefer ha-​Iqqarim (Warsaw: Isaac Goldman, 1877), 2:18, 80b. For discussion of Albo’s definition of time in relation to Crescas, see Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique, pp. 97, 656–​658 n. 23. See also Warren Zev Harvey, “Albo’s Discussion of Time,” Jewish Quarterly Review 70 (1980): 210–​238, esp. 215–​216; idem, “The Term Hitdabbeḳut,” p. 47; Rudavsky, Time Matters, pp. 50–​51. See below, n. 194. 119 Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique, p. 97.

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posture resounds with the unnamed sources cited by Fakhr al-​Dīn al-​Rāzī that identify time (zamān) as wājib al-​wujūd, the necessary of existence, a classification that, in effect, makes time equal with the deity.120 The philosophical understanding of time as attributable to the divine nature—​a possibility categorically rejected by Albo121—​is reminiscent of the identification of Allāh as everlasting time (dahr) attested in various theological pronouncements, for example, the sacred tradition (ḥadīth qudsī) in which God proclaims “Man insults Me in blaming time (dahr); I am time (Anā al-​dahr). In My hands is the command (amr), and I cause the alternation of night and day.”122 Or, according to another tradition transmitted in the name of Muḥammad, “Do not say, what a disappointment of time (lā taqūlū khaybata al-​dahr), because God Himself is time (fa-​inna Allāha huwa al-​dahr).”123 Consider also the tradition reported and commented on by Muḥyīddīn Ibn al-​‘Arabī, “Our Master, the Messenger of Allah, said: Do not curse Time, for Allah is Time. Pointing out that Allah’s being is free from likeness or equals or partners, but is manifest in eternal time.”124 120 Y. Tzvi Langermann, “East and West in Hasdai Crescas: Some Reflections on History and Historiography,” in Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction between Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century, Dedicated to Professor Joel L. Kraemer, edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern (Paris: Peeters, 2007), pp. 235–​239. Langermann, following Wolfson, suggests that Crescas may have learned about al-​Rāzī’s identification of time as the necessary of existence from the commentary of Muḥammad b. abī Bakr al-​Tabrīzī to Maimonides’s twenty-​five propositions. 121 Albo, Sefer ha-​Iqqarim, 2:18, 80a: “He has no dependence on time [she-​ein lo hitalut ba-​ zeman], that is, he exists before the existence of time and after the existence of time, and thus his power is without limits [bilti ba‘al takhlit].” 122 Gerhard Böwering, “Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,” in Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700–​1300), edited by Leonard Lewisohn, vol. 1 of The Heritage of Sufism (Oxford: One World, 1999), p. 206. 123 Ibid., pp. 206–​207. 124 Muḥyīddīn Ibn al-​‘Arabī, Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom: At-​Tadbirat al-​ ilahiyyah fi islah al-​mamlakat al-​insaniyyah; What the Seeker Needs: Kitab Kunh ma la budda minhu lil-​murid; The One Alone: Kitab al-​ahadiyyah, interpreted by Shaikh Tosun Bayrak al-​Jerrahi al-​Halveti (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1997), p. 240. For discussion of the ascription of temporality to the divine centered around the terms dahr (aeon) and zamān (time), see William C. Chittick, The Self-​Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 128–​132. In a manner strikingly analogous to the kabbalistic idea, time is treated in Ṣūfi teaching as divine and related more specifically to the nocturnal-​diurnal oscillation. For similar implications in the Zoroastrian depiction of Zurwān, see below n. 260. The impact of the Zoroastrian conception on Islamic perceptions of time is duly noted by Böwering, “Ideas of Time,” pp. 211–​212. See also the comment regarding the Muslim tradition of the snake encircling the throne being “possibly identical with the cosmic snake usually associated with Zervan Akaranan (the god of uncreated time)” in Anton M. Heinen, Islamic Cosmology: A Study

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Eternality can be ascribed to the ones who have reached the awareness that their own being is a manifestation of Allāh’s essence inasmuch as that essence is the only thing that exists. Those who have eradicated themselves in Allāh never cease to be since they never were apart from that essence. Consonant with kabbalistic cosmology, Ibn al-​‘Arabī maintained that all beings are “a reflection of Allah’s revealing His essence and His attributes, every moment, in a different form and shape.”125 As Henry Corbin put it, for Ibn al-​‘Arabī, all creation is a theophany, the manifestation of the unmanifest. In each moment, therefore, the display (tajallī) of the inapparent essence in the manifold beings of the cosmos assumes a distinct appearance. Eternal time is the measure of the ever-​changing appearance of the nonappearance of divine ipseity. Moses Cordovero, the sixteenth-​century Safedian kabbalist, epigrammatically expressed the matter of the eternal temporality of the temporal eternality when he wrote that “time is the secret of the rotation of the emanations [sod gilgul ha-​sefirot], during the day this particular emanation, during the night this particular emanation, and on Sabbath this particular emanation. The time that was from the day that the world was created, and the emanations rotated, is not the time that evolves from now and forward, but rather there are new aspects, for the order of time [seder zemannim] that is before him has no boundary and no end [ein lo gevul we-​lo takhlit].”126 Building on a theme that is attested by kabbalistic sources as early as Sefer ha-​Bahir and other thirteenth-​century texts,127 Cordovero posits the correlation of the divine attributes and the days of the week whence he draws the conclusion that the attributes are under the domain of time (taḥat ha-​zeman), “since the change of time changes the supernal governance [ha-​hanhagah ha-​elyonah], and thus they say that the attribute of the day is Tif’eret and the attribute of night is Malkhut.”128 Cordovero raises the obvious question: how can we avow that the sefirotic emanations are subject to time? He responds by drawing an analogy to the impact of performing rituals corporally on the supernal unity. The theurgical efficacy is empowered by the fact that the physical matters below are influenced by the spiritual entities above. “Hence, it is their nature to arouse

of As-​Suyūtī’s al Hay’a as-​sanīya fī l-​hay’a as-​sunnīya, with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Beirut: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), p. 185. 125 Ibn al-​‘Arabī, Divine Governance, p. 241. 126 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 15 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1987), p. 89. 1 27 For references to the correlation of the weekdays and the sefirotic emanations, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Naḥmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutics,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 14 (1989): 120–​121. 128 Moses Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah (Warsaw: Isaac Goldman, 1883), 55c.

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the supernal sefirot because they are dependent on the sefirot, and when those below are stimulated, the ones above are stimulated.”129 The same assumption can be applied to the phenomenon of time. Cordovero thus offers a detailed account of the diffusion of the temporal currency in the standard four worlds of kabbalistic cosmology, to wit, emanation (aṣilut), creation (beri’ah), formation (yeṣirah), and doing (asiyyah): In this manner is time, which is the matter that extends, rotates, and is bound [ha-​nimshakh u-​mitgalgel we-​niqshar], and its beginning is fixed permanently in its end,130 and it is almost as if it had no end. Existence is ordered in accord with the supernal Wisdom [such that] time corresponds to the supernal time, and the supernal time is aroused and extends from the [world of] emanation, that is, the governance of the sefirot, which is the rotation of the sefirot in jubilees, sabbaticals, years, months, sabbaths, days, and hours131 … and afterwards it expands from [the world of] emanation to [the world of] creation, for this is the secret of rotation [sod gilgul] in the aspect of the throne for the sake of the supernal governance … and the order of the times of [the world of] creation expand and they are garbed in [the world of] formation, and the change of hours that are in [the world of] creation will be in [the world of] formation, and so the change of times that are in [the world of] formation will be garbed as well in the world of doing. … Thus, this time is not established below except through the establishment of the supernal time, and the supernal time necessitated the lower time.132 For our purposes, I am bracketing many of the technical details in Cordovero’s presentation, including what I consider the absurdly vexing, if not surprising, claim that the “essence of this coordinated time” (iqqar ha-​zeman ha-​ mekhuwwan) is found within the borders of the land of Israel and not in the rest of the world, and hence, with respect to this issue, Jews living outside the land are considered to be idolaters,133 a sentiment doubtlessly based on the

1 29 Ibid. 130 Cordovero’s language is based on the description of the ten sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah. See above, n. 57. 131 Cordovero refers here to his discussion of ḥilluq ha-​zemannim bi-​remizatam, the enumeration of the allusive meaning of the different allocations of time, in Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2000), 13:3, pp. 178–​179. 132 Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 55c-​d. 133 Ibid., 55d.

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rabbinic dictum that “whoever lives outside the land it is as if he worshipped the stars.”134 What is crucial for our purposes is his notion of two correlated domains of time, the supernal time (zeman ha-​elyon) of the sefirot and the lower time (zeman ha-​taḥton) of physical entities.135 Needless to say, this is consistent with the double mirroring that informed the symbolic orientation of the kabbalah from its inception: the world below reflects and influences the world above, and the world above reflects and influences the world below. The supernal time is the secret of the rotation of the infinite energy of the divine governance and thus it displays the property of extending endlessly, a quality simulated in the material world by the paradox of time’s intransient transience, the imperishability of its perishability. The ephemerality of time as the constancy of what passes away is associated by Cordovero with the phenomenon of innovative interpretations of the Torah: there are always new meanings to be elicited from the text of the Torah, since, in its mystical valence, the Torah is the incarnate form of Ein Sof, the delimitation of the limitless that is manifest in potentially infinite concealments, the ineffable name gesticulated in potentially endless circumlocutions. “Regarding the secret of the Torah, even if there stood all the worldly righteous in this world and all the righteous in the world to come from the day the first Adam was born until now, forever knowledge is added to their knowledge, and they comprehend more and more, and they still comprehend, and they progress comprehension after comprehension without limit, and they never reach the end because there is no end [ein lo sof].”136 Cordovero’s view relates to an idea affirmed in much older kabbalistic sources: the ability of the Torah to undergo constant change is a symptom of its divine and infinite status.137 As 1 34 Babylonian Talmud, Ketuvot 110b. 135 Compare Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 13:3, p. 178: “The order of time [relates to] the seven sefirot from Ḥesed and below, and the order of time acts through the potency of Binah, which overflows to them like a mother over her sons. Thus, the essence of the tree is Binah, and she is the root of the tree whose roots expand limitlessly.” 136 Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 15, p. 89. 137 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 247. See idem, “Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah,” in Midrash and Literature, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 141–​157; idem, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 80–​110. On the divinization of the Torah in kabbalistic sources, see Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1965), pp. 37–​44; idem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Part I),” Diogenes 79 (1972): 78–​80, and “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Part II),” Diogenes 80 (1972): 178–​180, 193–​194; Moshe Idel, “The Concept of Torah in Hekhalot Literature and Its Metamorphosis in Kabbalah,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 1 (1981): 23–​84, esp. 49–​58 (Hebrew); Isaiah Tishby,

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other sixteenth-​century kabbalists, Cordovero explicitly affirms the paradox that the hiding of the divine light enables its disclosure and hence the dispersal of the sefirot is concomitantly their constriction, an idea that is well captured in the image of the garment that conceals what it reveals by revealing what it conceals. Cordovero deftly gives voice to this paradox in a passage from Pardes Rimmonim: “The cause of disclosure is the cause of concealment and the cause of concealment is the cause of disclosure [sibbat ha-​hitgallut hu sibbat he-​ he‘lem we-​sibbat ha-​he‘lem hu sibbat ha-​hitgallut]; that is, through the concealment of the great light and its being clothed in a garment it is revealed. Thus the light is concealed, and, in truth, it is revealed, for if it were not concealed, it would not be revealed.”138 In the section on the term levushin in his Shi‘ur Qomah, Cordovero reiterates the point: “Now in this manner is also the issue of the garments [malbushim] in the sefirot, for he placed a barrier between himself and the lower existents, and he hid the force of his governance through them … And this matter is addressed in their saying that disclosure is the cause of concealment [ha-​hitgallut sibbat ha-​he‘lem], for what he reveals through the intermediary of these sefirot is the cause of the concealment of his existence and governance that cannot be comprehended at all by the lower beings.”139 Insofar as God and the Torah are identical, an apodictic truth of kabbalah from its inception, it follows that the Torah in its textual embodiment—​the The Wisdom of the Zohar, translated by David Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 1079–​1082; Wolfson, Language, pp. 137, 190–​260, esp. 242–​246. A separate question is whether the initial revelation of the Torah at Sinai was all-​inclusive such that it comprised all the details that would evolve in the course of time, or whether it was only a partial disclosure such that what is revealed in the course of time is revealed de novo. On the minimalist versus the maximalist approaches to the content of the Sinaitic revelation in rabbinic literature, see the extensive analysis in Heschel, Heavenly Torah, pp. 552–​640. For a later reverberation of the maximalist approach, see Ari Ackerman, “Hasdai Crescas and His Circle on the Infinite and Expanding Torah,” Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 11 (2012): 1–​17. 138 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 5:4, p. 63. On the principle in sixteenth-​century kabbalistic sources that concealment is the cause of disclosure and disclosure the cause of concealment, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 110–​114. Regarding Cordovero’s use of this maxim, see also Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 303. 139 Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 6a. For the citation and analysis of other passages wherein this principle is articulated in the works of Cordovero and other sixteenth-​century kabbalists, including his teacher Solomon Alqabeṣ and his student Ḥayyim Viṭal, see Joseph Ben-​ Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), pp. 95–​100, 232 (Hebrew); Bracha Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Beer-​ Sheva: Ben-​Gurion University Press, 1995), pp. 14, 57 n. 2, 169, 256 n. 43 (Hebrew).

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theosophic principle that undergirds the anthropological understanding of corporeality as embodied textuality140—​is the veil that unveils the infinite by concealing the light it reveals, the voice that declaims the ineffable by muting the name it declaims. Precisely from the juxtaposition of disclosure and concealment, expanding and withholding, the texture and shape of time in its ontological comportment can be discerned.141 Cordovero’s linkage of innovative explications of the Torah and the evolving nature of time thus casts light on the intricate connection in kabbalistic lore between phenomenological hermeneutics and ontology of time.142 What is especially noteworthy is the paradox that, on the one hand, the idea of an infinite Torah entails that the text is inherently timeless, for that which is infinite cannot be contained in any temporal frame, which is by necessity finite, but, on the other hand, the meaning of a text that is inherently timeless is manifest only in and through an endless chain of interpretation that unfolds persistently in time. Indeed, in its most basic hermeneutical sense, time is the cadence of the unremitting recitation and explication of the text that is timeless. In this matter, as in so many of the themes that shaped the worldview of traditional kabbalists, the mystical discernment is a deepening of an approach found in older rabbinic sources. One must be on guard about making general claims with respect to the rabbinic sages of the academies both within and outside the land of Israel. I fully accept this caveat and thus I offer the following remarks ever mindful of the suspicion regarding speaking about the rabbinic viewpoint on any particular matter. Yet, I feel confident that it is conceptually 1 40 Wolfson, Language, pp. 242–​255. 141 On the kabbalistic depiction of the Torah as limitless, see Idel, “Infinities,” pp. 141–​157; idem, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 88–​89, 94–​108. Cordovero’s view on the eternally changing character of that which eternally endures was affirmed by kabbalists from earlier periods. For instance, in his Perush ha-​Tefillot, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1938, fol. 206b, Azriel of Gerona observes that in the daily blessing expressing gratitude to God for giving the Torah, the language is noten, in the present, rather than natan, in the past, to instruct us that “in each and every moment he gives [be-​khol et wa-​et noten] its words in our mouths.” The text was published from a different manuscript witness in Martelle Gavarin, “R. Azriel of Gerona—​The Commentary on the Prayer: A Critical Edition—​MS Ferrara 1,” ma thesis, Hebrew University, 1984, part 4, p. 11 (Hebrew). For the French translation of this passage, see Azriel of Gerona, Commentaire sur la liturgie quotidienne, introduction, annotated translation and glossary of technical terms by Gabrielle Sed-​Rajna (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 47. 142 For discussion of this theme in later Ḥasidic sources, see ch. 6 in this volume, pp. 459–​464. On the nexus between the novelty of time and the rabbinic phenomenon of ḥiddush, innovative textual interpretation, see the account of “temps talmudique” as “temps herméneutique” in Marc-​Alain Ouaknin, Méditations érotiques: Essai sur Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Éditions Balland, 1992), pp. 80–​82.

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sound, and even methodologically valid, to speak of a rabbinic notion of time that is intimately connected to an understanding of revelation as a recurring phenomenon. By way of illustration consider the following teaching preserved in the Babylonian Talmud: R. Judah began [to expound] the honor of the Torah, and he explicated the verse “[Moses and the levitical priests spoke to all Israel, saying:] Silence! Hear O Israel! Today you have become the people [of the Lord, your God]” (Deuteronomy 27:9). Was the Torah given to Israel on that very day? Was that day not at the end of the forty years? Rather this is to teach you that the Torah is cherished by those who study it each day as the day it was given from Mount Sinai.143 Bracketing the redactional issues and the judicious demand on the part of historically-​minded text scholars to locate this dictum diachronically on some chronological grid, it is not unwarranted to say that the statement attributed to R. Judah gives voice to a religious belief (for lack of a better term) that lays at the very foundation of the reconstruction of Judaism promoted and sanctioned by Palestinian and Babylonian sages. Fulfillment of the obligation to study the Torah demands that one be able to imagine that each day provides the possibility for a recurrence of the Sinaitic theophany, a reiteration of the past that induces the novelty of the present and in so doing reshapes the past. The conception of time as the moment of unique repetition is elucidated further in the theme of reliving the experience of Sinai as it appears in textual aggregates presumed to be earlier than the aforecited talmudic passage. I will limit myself to two examples that, in my judgment, are noteworthy formulations of the motif in question, though it should be noted that one can find the same approach to time related to other scriptural subjects as interpreted in rabbinic literature.144 The first example centers about the interpretation of the conclusion of the verse “Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day” (Deuteronomy 6:6): “‘With which I charge you this day.’ So that they will not be in your eyes like an obsolete ordinance [ke-​diyoṭagma yeshenah] that a person does not heed, but rather like a new ordinance

1 43 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 63b. 144 For instance, see the interpretation of the formulation connected to the promise of the land of Canaan to the Israelites “and has given it to you” (Exodus 13:11) in Mekhilta de-​ Rabbi Ishmael, Bo, 18, p. 70: “So that it should not be in your eyes like the inheritance of your fathers, but rather it should be in your eyes as if [ke-​illu] it were given to you today.”

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[ke-​diyoṭagma ḥadashah] that all run to read.”145 The second illustration is an anonymous exegesis on the words “on this very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai” (Exodus 19:1): “Did they arrive ‘on this very day’ [ba-​yom ha-​zeh]? Rather when you study my words, they should not be old [yeshenim] in your eyes but it should be as if the Torah were given on that very day [ke-​illu ha-​yom nittenah torah].”146 Whatever alternative conceptions of time one may elicit from rabbinic literature, and surely there are others with which one must contend, the conception I have mentioned has special significance insofar as it exposes a deep-​seated nexus in the rabbinic imaginary between time and text, revelation and interpretation, poetic envisioning and hermeneutic exposition: each interpretative gesture is a reenactment of the revelatory experience, albeit from its own unique vantage point, each moment a novel replication of the past. Repetition and novelty, accordingly, are not antinomical; what recurs is precisely what has been that which will recur as what has never been. Paraphrasing the second midrashic gloss cited above, Solomon ben Isaac, the eleventh-​century talmudic and biblical exegete better known by the acronym Rashi, wrote on the words ba-​yom ha-​zeh, “on this very day” (Exodus 19:1), “words of Torah should be new [ḥadashim] for you as if they were given this day.”147 The medieval commentator adds nothing substantial of his own, but by newly endorsing the rabbinic dictum, more or less verbatim, he clarifies the original intent; indeed, one might say Rashi demonstrates that the principle of the rabbis with respect to the Written Torah can be applied to their own dicta assembled in the Oral Torah: when one studies either the Written Torah or the Oral Torah, the text must be as new to the person as it was on the day the Torah 145 Sifre on Deuteronomy, edited by Louis Finkelstein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969), 33, p. 59. The dictum is transmitted in the name of R. Eleazar in Pesiqta de-​Rav Kahana, edited by Bernard Mandelbaum, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), 12:5, pp. 206–​207. In that context, however, the loan word from Greek to denote the royal decree to which Torah is compared is prozdigma (πρόσταγμα) instead of diyoṭagma (διάταγμα). See ibid., 12:12, p. 213. For an alternative expression of this idea, see Midrash Debarim Rabbah, edited from the Oxford Ms. no. 147 with an introduction and notes by Saul Liebermann, second edition with additional notes and corrections (Jerusalem: Shalem Books, 1992), p. 117. 146 Pesiqta de-​Rav Kahana, 12:21, p. 219. For parallel, see Midrash Tanḥuma, edited by Salomon Buber, 2 vols. (Vilna: Romm, 1885),Yitro, 13, 38b. 147 Solomon ben Isaac, Perushei Rashi al ha-​ Torah, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1983), p. 238 (ad Exodus 19:1). See ibid., pp. 213 (ad Exodus 13:11), 530 (ad Deuteronomy 6:6), 537 (ad Deuteronomy 11:13), 576 (ad Deuteronomy 27:9). Needless to say, Rashi draws on earlier rabbinic sources; see references above, nn. 143–​146.

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was revealed to the Israelites who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. The source that likely influenced Rashi’s formulation makes this point exactly: Ben Zoma said: Why is it written “In the third month [after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on this day they entered the wilderness of Sinai]” (Exodus 19:1) “On that day” [ba-​yom ha-​hu] is not written here [but rather ] “on this day” [ba-​yom ha-​zeh], as if [ke-​illu] on this day they came from the wilderness of Sinai. Every day that you are occupied [oseq] with Torah, you should say, “It is as if we received it from Sinai on this day” [ke-​illu ba-​yom ha-​zeh qibbaltiha mi-​sinai], and it says, “This day [ha-​yom ha-​zeh] the Lord your God commands you to observe” (Deuteronomy 26:16).148 The claim made with respect to Torah study represents a more generic understanding of ritual time proffered by the rabbis, a notion of temporality that requires an imaginal transport that connects past and present by way of enfolding one in the other rather than by connecting them with a line. The past can be experienced as present because the present can be experienced as past, but the present can be experienced as past only because the past can be experienced as present. The point I am making is rendered more clearly if we consider Maharal’s explication of Rashi’s construal (based on a midrashic precedent)149 of the words “and has given it to you” (Exodus 13:11) as “it should be in your eyes as if it was given you on this day”: And similarly the Torah is beyond time in accord with the gradation of the Torah [we-​khen ha-​torah hi al ha-​zeman le-​madregat ha-​torah], for time depends on the sun and the movement of the sphere [ki ha-​zeman hu toleh ba-​shemesh bi-​tenu‘at ha-​galgal], and the Torah is above [the sun] … And with respect to all matters that are beyond time, the matter of time is indifferent [we-​khol ha-​devarim asher hem al ha-​zeman kol inyan ha-​zeman shaweh], and nothing is in time except for time [we-​eino bi-​zeman zulat zeman]. Therefore, they said that each man is obligated to look upon himself as if he left Egypt,150 for the cause [that redeemed] 148 Midrash Tanḥuma ha-​Yashan, printed in Midrash Tanḥuma, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Eshkol, 1972), 1: Appendix, p. 109. 149 See the passage from Mekhilta cited above, n. 144. The source is noted by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1991), p. 254. 150 Mishnah, Pesaḥim 10:5.

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those who left is the same cause in each and every generation, and there is here no distinction.151 With respect to the other things that are under time, since they fall beneath time they are dependent on time, and it is not said about them that one should see oneself as if it were constantly so. However, with respect to the few divine matters [devarim elohiyyim] it is said thus, with respect to the gradation that is above time and that is independent of it, it is spoken of in this way.152 It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss comprehensively the view of time promulgated in Maharal’s voluminous corpus, which may be described as a massive exposé of the spiritual depths of rabbinic aggadah and a defense of the wisdom of the ancient sages against contemporary critiques like that of Azariah de Rossi’s Me’or Einayim.153 Stylistically, these compositions are marked by copious repetition and reformulation, and hence it would be impossible in this setting to do justice to his religious philosophy. The passage I have cited, however, can serve as a means to illumine the position of the rabbis preserved by Rashi’s words. According to Maharal, the rabbinic insistence on the need to experience the reenactment of the Sinaitic epiphany when one studies Torah is grounded in the belief that the latter is of an eternal nature impermeable to the vacillations and contingencies of time. The matter is on occasion cast by him in terms of the contrast between miṣwah, which is “in the body” and thus “temporal” (li-​zeman), and Torah, which is “not physical” and thus “eternally redemptive” (maṣelet le‘olam); that is, it draws one out from the snare of nature and leads one to the final felicity, the life of the world to come, which, following older philosophic and kabbalistic texts, Maharal depicts both 151 Compare Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2017), ch. 36, pp. 651–​653: “Moreover, know that it was impossible for Israel to depart from servitude except by means of the blessed holy One himself, and not from the side of a constellation [mazzal] and not by any other aspect except this. … Therefore Israel did not go out by means of a gradation in which there is time but by means of a gradation that has no time, for all things fall under time and are created in time except for God, blessed be he, who does not fall under time. … Israel went out to freedom through the divine gradation that has no time.” 152 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, vol. 3, pp. 254–​255. 153 See Jacob Elbaum, “Rabbi Judah Loew and His Attitude to the Aggadah,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 29–​31; André Néher, Le Puits de l’exil; Tradition et modernité: la pensée du Maharal de Prague (1512–​1609), new edition, revised and enlarged (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1991), pp. 81–​94; Giuseppe Veltri, “Science and Religious Hermeneutics: The ‘Philosophy’ of Rabbi Loew of Prague,” in Religious Confessions and the Sciences in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Jürgen Helm and Annette Winkelmann (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 128–​132.

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as the conjunction of the human and the divine intellects, the absorption of the particular (peraṭi) in the universal (kelali),154 and as the restitution of the sundry discriminate entities in the material world to the immaterial essence of nondifferentiated unity to the point that there no longer is any discernible separation between the spiritual and the physical, God and the cosmos.155 As he puts it in one of his many treatises, “The Torah is rational [sikhlit], and everything that is rational does not fall under time. Therefore, they say that the Torah protects forever, as it is appropriate for the thing that is not temporal and does not change, but the commandment [miṣwah] protects temporarily for it comes to be by the bodily gesture [ma‘aseh ha-​guf] … and the body is dependent on and belongs to time.”156 The Torah is variously described as the “absolute intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​gamur),157 the “supernal intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​elyon), or the “divine intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​elohi),158 that comprises the “rational order” (seder sikhli) or “intelligible order” (seder ha-​muskal)159 by means of which the world was created, and thus it belongs to the “intelligible matters [ha-​inyanim 154 See, for instance, Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 39, p. 597, and references to other sources cited in n. 33 ad locum. 155 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1997), ch. 47, p. 789; idem, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 14, pp. 217–​218, 221–​223. Maharal’s ascetic interpretation bears close resemblance to the standpoint articulated in Ḥabad philosophy; see the passage from Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s Liqquṭei Torah cited below at n. 422. 156 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netivot ha-​Torah, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, Berkowitz edition (Jerusalem: Tif’eret Hoṣa’ah le-​Or, 2015), p. 8. Compare ibid., p. 13; ch. 3, p. 17; idem, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 14, p. 217; ch. 25, p. 376; ch. 39, p. 597. 157 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 26, p. 391; see the passage from Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag cited below, n. 159. 158 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netivot ha-​Torah, ch. 3, p. 17. 159 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 8, p. 132; idem, Derekh Ḥayyim: Perush le-​ Massekhet Avot, edited and annotated by Ḥayyim Pardes, third edition (Tel Aviv: Makhon Yad Mordecai, 1993), pp. 356, 434, 641. See also idem, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, p. 31, where Torah is called sekhel iyyuni, the “theoretical intellect.” See ibid., pp. 8, 49, and esp. 54–​55, where the rabbinic maxim that the Torah is not sustained except by one who kills himself over it (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 83b) is interpreted in the following way: “Since the Torah is the absolute intellect [sekhel gamur], and the intellect is entirely separate from the body, how is it possible for two opposites to be in one subject, that is, the Torah, which is an absolute intellect, and man who is corporeal? Therefore, it is impossible for the Torah to exist except in one who kills himself and removes his body entirely. However, when one removes his body entirely, then surely the rational Torah will subsist in him, and if not the Torah will not subsist in him.” See parallel interpretation in Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, p. 434, and idem, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, pp. 54–​55. Compare Avinoam Rosenak, “The Unity of Opposites in Maharal’s Writings and Its Implications for Jewish Thought,” in Maharal: Overtures, pp. 449–​487 (Hebrew).

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ha-​sikhliyyim] whose actions are not in time, since they do not fall under time, and they do not act by means of the movement from which there is time, and according to the gradation of their importance they act without time … the act of God, blessed be he, is completely without time.”160 Prima facie, the position articulated by Maharal seems to be at odds with what is implied in the rabbinic dicta and reiterated in the paraphrase of Rashi. However, if one examines the works of Maharal more assiduously, a case can be made that his view, though largely garbed in medieval philosophical language, is a reaffirmation of the stance proffered by the rabbis of old: the portrayal of the Torah as intellect beyond time serves as the ideational basis for the belief that revelation of what is received and reception of what is revealed are ongoing; one can, indeed must, reexperience the Sinaitic theophany continuously, for in every moment both text and interpreter are fashioned anew, fashioned anew precisely because they were conceived long ago.161 Judah Loew’s periodic statements that the Torah does not fall under time do not signify that the law is atemporal, but rather that it embodies the measure of time that transcends the tripartite division into past, present, and future; in the moment of revelation, what was and what will be are compresent in what is always never the same. From the rabbinic notion of mattan torah or qabbalat torah, expressions that convey the double gesture of the gift of revelation, the giving that is receiving and the receiving that is giving, we comprehend the property of time that is independent of body, and consequently independent of space, a time that can be attributed without contradiction to incorporeal beings.162 Support for this interpretation may be elicited from the following remark of Maharal: “Just as there are actual days for physical human beings, so there is a time for entities that are not corporeal and it is not actually time [kakh yesh 1 60 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh, vol. 3, p. 215. 161 Maharal’s appropriation of the rabbinic notion of an ongoing revelation of the Written Torah is expanded by him (based, of course, on allusions in the rabbinic corpus itself) to include the Oral Torah. At the same time, however, Maharal adamantly insists that there is a decline in generations that has created a chasm distancing the reader of his own time from the wisdom expressed by the rabbis. On this theme, see Elbaum, “Rabbi Judah Loew,” pp. 30–​31; Veltri, “Science,” pp. 133–​134. The possibility of recovering this wisdom is predicated, it seems to me, on the hermeneutical bridging of past and present, a possibility buttressed by the ontological presumption concerning the time of the moment and the novel recurrence of what has been. 162 To be more precise, Maharal distinguishes three different levels of immaterial being, which correspond to three forms of holiness implied in the Trisagion (Isaiah 6:3): the soul (nefesh), which has a force (koaḥ) in the body; the intellect (sekhel), which has a connection (heqsher) with the body; and God who is completely separate from all things bodily. See Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Perishut, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, p. 420.

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zeman li-​devarim she-​einam gashmiyyim we-​eino zeman mammash].”163 What kind of time is a time that is not actually time? We learn more of this time that is not time from a second passage that is especially significant since the matter at hand is the revelation of the Torah, the pristine form of intellect beyond temporal demarcation, in historical time: With regard to the body that falls under time, it is appropriate to say “For every time” [la-​kol zeman] (Ecclesiastes 3:1), but [in the case of] the thing that is exclusively intellect [sekhel], as the revelation of the Torah [qabbalat ha-​torah], which is not a corporeal entity [davar gufani], it does not fall under time. Concerning this it is said “a moment for every desire” [et le-​khol ḥefeṣ] (Ecclesiastes 3:1), for the present [attah] that conjoins the past and the future is not time [zeman]. That is to say, the matter that is intelligible [muskal] does not fall under time; it comes to pass in the present [na‘aseh be-​attah].164 In the above citation, Maharal distinguishes between zeman, the mode of temporality that applies to corporeal beings subject to generation and corruption, and et, the mode of temporality that may be attributed to intelligible beings not subject to generation and corruption. The latter is described more specifically as the present (attah) that unites past (avar) and future (attid). The time in which the Torah is given, the time of revelation, reveals something axiomatic about the revelation of time: in the time of the moment, which is experienced at all times as the moment of time, the present, attah, is the middle or third term that bridges past and future; here we discern a particular instance of a structure that Maharal applies to various speculative schema in his philosophical presentation of Jewish piety.165 According to another passage in his expansive oeuvre, this is the inner significance of the fact that the Sinaitic theophany took place in the third month from the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt (Exodus 19:1): Since the Torah does not fall under time and its category, as every rational matter [davar sikhli] is not under the category of time, it was not 163 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Ḥiddushei Aggadot, Berkowitz edition, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Tif’eret Hoṣa’ah le-​Or, 2015), 2:160. 164 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 25, p. 376. 165 On the dialectic role of the “middle” or “intermediary” (emṣa) in Maharal’s thought, see Néher, Le Puits, pp. 47–​56, 133–​143; Benjamin Gross, Le Messianisme juif. “L’Eternité d’Israël” du Maharal de Prague (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969), p. 94 n. 28.

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appropriate for it to be given except in the third month, for as we already know every [aspect of] time is divided into past and future, and the present [attah] is the third that mediates between them and that fastens time together, for by means of it the past and the future time are conjoined. … The term et is suitable for the rational matter since it does not fall at all under time. … Hence, the present unites the time [of past and future] for the end of the past and the beginning of the future is the present, as is known to those who know [and comprehend] the matter [and the content of the substance] of time. The present, therefore, is the third that joins together the time that is divided into two parts, past and future, but it is not essentially time [zeman ba-​eṣem]. Thus, the third month alone was selected for the giving of the Torah, as it is written “a moment for every desire” (Ecclesiastes 3:1), for the moment [et] is the intermediary and the third that is in between the two boundaries of time.166 Now we can attempt an explanation of Maharal’s paradoxical expression zeman we-​eino zeman mammash, “time that is not actually time,” which he ascribes to the Torah and other incorporeal entities. The time of which he speaks is the time (et) of the present (attah) that links past and future and thereby provides cohesiveness and coherence to the narrative of history—​both collectively and individually—​with a beginning, middle, and end. This corresponds theologically to creation, revelation, and redemption, the narratological conception of history that distinguishes the Jewish people from other nations whose time is bound to the sun or to the rotation of the sphere,167 the eternal cycle of return that has no beginning or end, and, consequently, no possibility for authentic novelty or creativity in the middle.168 The esoteric significance of the scriptural account that links the epiphany at Sinai to the third month is to highlight that the temporal modality apposite to the Torah, which as intellect does not fall under the category of time, is signified scripturally by the word az, the “singular present wherein there is no division of time at all” (he-​attah ha-​meyuḥad she-​ein bah ḥilluq zeman kelal).169 The timelessness of the moment accounts for its singularity and volatility, the instant marked, as in the Sabbath at the

1 66 Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, pp. 79–​82. 167 For instance, see Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1990), pp. 19–​20; idem, Gur Aryeh ha-​ Shalem, vol. 3, p. 255, idem, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1992), pp. 24–​26. 168 Gross, Le Messianisme juif, pp. 322–​323. 169 Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem, vol. 3, ch. 47, p. 470.

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end of creation, by the “reception of form [qabbalat ha-​ṣurah], which is being without movement [hawayah beli tenu‘ah] … a spontaneous being in which there is no being [hawayah pit’omit we-​ein ba-​zeh hawayah], for every being is in time. … for the reception of form is the completion of being [hashlamat ha-​hawayah] … and this matter is not called ‘work’ [mela’khah], for there is no work here that has movement; on the contrary, this matter is the acquisition of completion and rest [qinyan ha-​sheleimut u-​menuḥah] … for the reception of form is on the Sabbath … and, consequently, the reception of form has no need for a temporal reality [hawayah zemanit], and this is not called ‘work,’ for work involves movement, and movement is related to the body, but the completion of the world in its totality … is not in time at all [eino bi-​zeman kelal].”170 The spontaneity of revelation is manifest in the sabbatical rest that seals the act of creation and this prefigures the salvific repose of messianic redemption. In this model of time, what is new cannot be surgically severed (either in experience or in theory) from what is old. One of the better known formulations of this belief in rabbinic sources is the aphorism transmitted in the name of R. Joshua ben Levi that the Written Torah (miqra) and all the parts of the Oral Torah (mishnah, talmud, tosefet, haggadah), and “even what an exceptional student [talmid wattiq] will say in the future,” were “all spoken to Moses at Sinai, as it says, ‘Look, this one is new!’ (Ecclesiastes 1:10), but his friend responds to him, ‘it occurred long ago’ (ibid.)”171 The excitement that something genuinely novel is uttered, contained in the enthusiastic explosion, “Look, this one is new!” (re’eh zeh ḥadash hu), is immediately countered with the sobering “it occurred long ago” (kevar hayah le‘olamim). To utilize the distinction made by Maharal, we might say that from the perspective of zeman, the conventional idea of linear time, the two statements are contradictory, for what occurred long ago cannot be new nor can what is new have occurred long ago; however, from the perspective of et, the timeless time of the eternally recurring present (attah) that is the middle, the statements are not contradictory at all, as only that which occurred long ago can be new and only that which is new could have occurred long ago. That which transpires in

1 70 Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 40, pp. 615–​616. 171 Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah, edited by Mordecai Margulies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993), 22:1, pp. 496–​497. Parallels in other rabbinic sources are cited by Margulies in his expository apparatus ad locum. Talmid wattiq literally means a “veteran student” but I have rendered it as “exceptional student” because I think what is intended by this expression is the extraordinary nature of the student’s homiletical skills, which one would expect from someone who has had long experience in the art of textual interpretation.

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the moment—​na‘aseh be-​attah—​does not fall under the category of time, for, as I noted previously, the three-​way division of time is no longer applicable when past is experienced as future that is present, present as past that is future, and future as present that is past. Like the wisdom that Nietzsche’s imaginary prophet Zarathustra imparted to the dwarf in the section entitled “On the Vision and the Riddle” (Vom Gesicht und Räthsel), the “vision of the loneliest,” a seeing of the abyss, an abysmal seeing, the moment is a “gateway” (Torweg) wherein two paths meet without contradiction, one stretching back eternally to the past and the other stretching ahead eternally to the future.172 From this one may deduce that the truth of time, disclosed always in the time of truth, is not made up of straight lines but rather of what is crooked; indeed, in the same section of Nietzsche’s composition, we learn that “time itself is a circle,” and just as the “spirit of gravity” from a spatial perspective necessitates that what is thrown up must come down, so from a temporal perspective it necessitates that what has come to pass will come to be again, all that has taken place will be cast up by the sea of eternal return.173 In a world of constant change, the only constant is change, the perpetual unbecoming of the becoming that is the permanent flux of impermanence.174 Needless to say, there are critical differences between the sixteenth-​century Jewish homilist and the nineteenth-​ century German philosopher, which I do not mean to ignore or to minimize. It does seem to me, however, that Nietzsche’s depiction of the moment as the meeting-​point of eternal past and eternal future provides a useful way to interpret the view articulated by Maharal. Moreover, for the latter, as for the former, the recurrence of the past in the present does not entail the quantifiable and hence predictable 172 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For All and None, translated with a preface by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. 156–​158. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, a new translation by Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale, edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), § 1066, p. 548: “Nothing can prevent me from reckoning backward from this moment and saying ‘I shall never reach the end’, just as I can reckon forward from the same moment into the infinite.” See Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 35–​41; Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), pp. 119–​122. 173 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 158. Compare Nietzsche, The Will To Power, § 1065, p. 548. 174 Although Nietzsche steadfastly rejected the traditional metaphysical presumption regarding an enduring substance or subject, his embrace of a doctrine of the eternal return of the same functionally approximates such a conception. See, for instance, The Will to Power, § 462, p. 255: “In place of ‘metaphysics’ and religion, the theory of eternal recurrence (this as a means of breeding and selection).”

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repetition of the same, but rather the indeterminable and incalculable recapitulation of an original occurrence, an iteration of the interminable that opens up the possibility of thinking about the relation of time to eternity in a manner that is decidedly nonbinary; that is, eternity denotes neither timelessness nor the endless duration of time, but the mutual simultaneity and succession of past, present, and future in the moment that is a replication of the identically different that comports always as differently identical.175 The lexical term in the aforecited rabbinic statements that conveys an analogous intemporal traversing of temporal boundaries is ke-​illu, “as if,” a linguistic device (employed equally in legal and non-​legal, halakhic and aggadic, contexts) that has the analogical power to juxtapose seemingly divergent concepts, to connect disparate spheres of being, or to bridge the historical chasm separating two periods of time.176 In the particular example under discussion, the benchmark set by the rabbis is that one who studies must be able to experience the Sinaitic theophany as if it occurred anew, an experience that is possible only if what is new is experienced as if it were old. The kabbalistic approach to time, which I have elicited from the writings of Cordovero, can be seen justifiably as an embellishment of the rabbinic perspective outlined above. Of numerous passages that I could cite to illustrate the point, I have chosen the following comment of Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth master of the Lubavitch dynasty, so renowned for his sophisticated philosophical presentation of Ḥabad lore that he is known as the Maimonides of Ḥasidism: By means of Torah and commandments the light of Ein Sof is drawn forth from above the order of concatenation [lema‘lah mi-​seder hishtalshelut], and even above the grade that is the source for the order of concatenation, for even though Torah comes forth from Ḥokhmah, it is known that this is only what comes forth from Ḥokhmah, but in its root it is higher, for it extends from the aspect of Ḥokhmah that is in Keter, which is the inwardness of Keter that is above the order of concatenation. Therefore, the Torah is not garbed in time or place, as in the dictum “whoever is engaged in the teachings about the burnt offering, it is as if he sacrificed a burnt offering,”177 for even though now is not at all the time or place [for 1 75 Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thought, pp. 103–​112. 176 See Bregman, “Past and Present,” pp. 47–​49; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Iconic Visualization and the Imaginal Body of God: The Role of Intention in the Rabbinic Conception of Prayer,” Modern Theology 12 (1996): 141, and other references cited on 157 n. 37. 177 Babylonian Talmud, Menaḥot 110a.

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offering the sacrifice], even so by means of engagement with the Torah as it pertains to this law, it is as if he actually sacrificed a burnt offering. Since the Torah emanates from Ein Sof, which is above the order of concatenation, it is not garbed at all in time or place.178 Inasmuch as the Torah comes forth from Ein Sof, it cannot be subject to the laws of space and time. The contention is demonstrated by the fact that the destruction of the Temple, and the consequent cessation of the offering of sacrifices, in no way diminished or altered the expitiatory effectiveness of Jewish ritual. In a rhetorical quip that captures the rabbinic conception of imaginal time, study of the laws pertaining to sacrifices is placed on equal footing with offering sacrifices. The attitude expressed in terms of this particular rite is illustrative of the larger claim regarding the fact that the timeless character of the Torah thwarts the restriction of the commandments to spatial or temporal preconditions. But it is precisely this quality that necessitates that the quest for meaning proceed timelessly in time—​not as a linear sequence subject to calculation and charting, but as a spontaneous flash, a crack in the spatial spread of the timeline, completely in and of the moment—​what Ṣūfis call waqt, the instant in which, according to ‘Abd al-​Karīm Ibn Hūzān Abū al-​Qāsim al-​Qushayrī, the “dispositions of the real” (tasrīf al-​ḥaqq) come involuntarily and inadvertently upon the person.179 In this interval of time, 178 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5663, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2003), p. 199. Compare idem, Yom Ṭov shel Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 5666, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), p. 301: “It is this way with respect to time and place—​when there shines upon them an illumination from the aspect that is above time and place, then time and place are nullified. … In this way we find in the Torah, as it is written ‘there did not arise in Israel a prophet like Moses’ (Deuteronomy 34:10). Prima facie, it should have said ‘there will not arise’ [lo yaqum], the language of what is to come, so why does it say ‘did not arise’ [lo qam], whose meaning is the language of the past, since the intention, too, was that none would arise in the future? Rather, it is because the Torah illumines [the aspect] above time where past and future are both as one, and this is the matter of the aspect of Israel, which is the disclosure of the name yhwh.” In the same context, the Beshṭ is described as someone for whom time and space were not applicable, and thus he could see in the present what would take place in the duration of time and he could perceive matters that were at a great physical distance from him. For a list of Ḥabad sources where this ability is attributed to the Beshṭ, see, op. cit., p. 301 n. 115. 179 Al-​Qushayrī thus referred to the Ṣūfi as the “son of his moment,” ibn waqtihi, that is, the Ṣūfi is distinguished by the fact that he lives fully in the moment in which he must fulfill his religious duty. See Michael A. Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur’an, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings, preface by Carl W. Ernst (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), p. 100; Jalal al-​Din Rūmī, The Mathnawī of Jalālu’ddīn Rūmī, edited by Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Luzac & Co. Ltd, 1968), 1:132–​133, 3:1426. The intrinsic connection between Ṣūfism and being-​in-​the-​moment is repeated elsewhere by al-​Qushayrī. See, for instance,

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which “consists in effacement (mahw) and confirmation (ithbāt),”180 the two are conjoined not as the conflation of binary opposites but as antinomies that coexist in the space of their difference, the moment effaced in its confirmation and confirmed in its effacement,181 “the instant of rupture with duration, ‘Abd al-​Karim Ibn Hawazin Qushayrī, Principles of Sufism by al-​Qushayri, translated by Barbara R. von Schlegell with an introduction by Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1990), p. 41: “They say concerning the meaning of renunciation, ‘Each speaks from his own moment [waqt] and indicates his own limit.’” And, ibid., p. 303: “‘Amr b. ‘Uthman al-​Makki was asked about Sufism, and he asserted, ‘It is that the servant acts according to whatever is most fitting to the moment.’” Also pertinent is the remark of al-​Junayd accounting for the different presentations of the teachings of al-​Bistamī, translated in Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 214: “The accounts passed down from Abū Yazīd are various and the raconteurs differ in what they heard. That might be—​God knows best—​ because of the difference in the moments (awqāt) that had come upon him and the difference in stationings (mawātin) alternating in what was bestowed specially upon him.” On the term waqt, see the comments of Abu ’l-​Ḥasan ‘Alī Ibn ‘Uthmān al-​Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-​Mahjūb: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson, new edition (London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1976), pp. 96–​104. The use of the term waqt by Ṣūfis to denote the moment of epiphany was probably inspired by the use of the term in the Qur’ān to refer to the “appointed time” of the day of judgment (15:38; 38:8; 56:50) as well as another term derived from the same root mīqāt, which refers in some verses to a meeting with God (7:142, 143, 155) or to the time appointed for the last judgment (44:40; 78:17). See Louis Gardet, “Moslem Views of Time and History: An Essay in Cultural Typology,” in Cultures and Time (Paris: Unesco Press, 1976), pp. 198–​199. The Ṣūfi use of waqt should be considered in light of the atomistic conception of time attested already in qur’ānic verses. According to this occasionalist perspective, time (zamān) does not exhibit continuous duration but consists rather of discrete atoms or instants (ānāt or awqāt); every moment, therefore, is considered an accident of ephemerality that is a product of a constant re-​ creation (khalq fī kull waqt). See Louis Massignon, “Time in Islamic Thought,” in Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 108–​114; J. R. T. M. Peeters, God’s Created Speech: A Study in the Speculative Theology of the Mu‘tazilī Qādī l-​Qudāt Abū l-​Hasan ‘Abd al-​Jabbār ibn Ahmad al-​Hamdānī (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), p. 130; Shlomo Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism, translated by Michael Schwarz, edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997), pp. 29–​31, 32–​33, 57–​64, 112–​114. 180 Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 128. 181 From this vantage point, waqt is the temporal instantiation of the dialectic of fanā’ and baqā’ according to Ṣūfi psychology, that is, the passing-​away of the discrete self and the abiding in what is real. Just as the moment exemplifies the dialectic of effacement and confirmation, so the awakened heart must abide in passing away and pass away in abiding. The ultimate attainment, fanā’ al-​fanā’, the passing of passing, entails the double negation that is the ultimate affirmation of baqā’. The process can be expressed in other images as well, including especially moving from the world of separation (farq) to union (jam‘), and then to the union of union (jam‘ al jam‘), which is the oneness of all beings experienced through the separation, that is, the coincidence of opposites such that there is no more distinction between union and separation. See Izutsu, Creation, pp. 14–​19.

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the return of the same without identity.”182 The time of the moment is so fully present it is wanting representation, so binding it releases one from all causal links to past or future,183 a split second wherein and wherewith the superfluity of truth divests one of all memory and expectation,184 the “Time which has The nexus between the conception of mental entities as momentary and the doctrine of metaphysical selflessness is attested in Buddhist sources as well, as noted by von Rospatt, The Buddhist Doctrine, p. 117. 182 Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 109–​110. 1 83 Gerald T. Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Book of the Fabulous Gryphon (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 230 n. 22. On the mystical pilgrimage of the heart to the heart, symbolized by the Ka‘ba, as liberating one from the “bondage of time” (riqq al-​awqāt), see the passage from Ibn ‘Arabī in Elmore, op. cit., pp. 171 and 247. Consider also the formulation of Muḥyīddīn Ibn ‘Arabī, Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat, with notes from a commentary by ‘Abdul-​Karim Jili and an Introduction by Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak al-​Jerrahi, translated by Rabia Terri Harris (Rochester: Inner Traditions International, 1989), p. 60: “When the influence of the Moment befalls him, he will receive it. Let him beware of becoming enamored of [the influence of the Moment] but let him remember it, for it will be necessary to him if he instructs. … The Moment lengthens and shortens in accordance with the presence of the one who partakes in it.” The full implications of Ibn ‘Arabī’s remarks are drawn out in the commentary of ‘Abdul-​Karim Jili cited, op. cit., pp. 99–​100 n. 40: “‘The Moment’ (waqt) is an expression for your state in time. The state does not attach itself to the past or the future. It is an existent between two nonexistents. And if your Moment is the wellspring of your state, you are the son of your Moment, and your Moment determines what you are, because it is existent and you are nonexistent, you are illusory and it is affirmed. … And whoever mourns over the past and fills the present moment with the past, he is one of those made distant. For he lets slip by what the current state demands, engrossed in what will not return. This is the essence of nonexistence. And whoever occupies himself with the future is in the same state.” For further discussion of the problem of time in Ibn ‘Arabī’s writings, see Franz Rosenthal, “Ibn ‘Arabī Between ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Mysticism,’” Oriens: Journal of the International Society for Oriental Research 31 (1988): 28–​30; Gerhard Böwering, “Ibn ‘Arabī’s Concept of Time,” in Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit: Festschrift für Annemarie Schimmel zum 7. April 1992, edited by Alma Giese and J. Christoph Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 71–​91. 184 Al-​Hujwīrī, Kashf al-​Mahjūb, p. 367: “Waqt is that whereby a man becomes independent of the past and the future, as, for example, when an influence from God descends into his soul and makes his heart collected (mujtami‘) he has no memory and no thought of that which is not yet come. All people fail in this, and do not know what our past has been or what our future will be, except the possessors of waqt, who say: ‘Our knowledge cannot apprehend the future and the past, and we are happy with God in the present (andar waqt)’.” Al-​Hujwīrī goes on to say that occupation with the future is a “great distraction” that veils one from God. It is of interest to recall here the account of “eternity” offered by Plotinus, The Enneads, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, translated by George Boys-​Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.7.5, p. 339: “If, then, that which has eternity in this way and always is, not declining in any respect into a different

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(ever) been void of time” in Rūmī’s felicitous expression,185 or what Dōgen called jiji, the temporal occurrence of each moment, unprecedented, unpredictable, not susceptible to repetition, neither cyclical nor linear,186 the time of dharma’s arising, shihō-​kiji,187 non-​duality of “being-​time,” uji, permanence of impermanence.188 For the mystically enlightened, time is not illusory as some nature, with a life which it already has in its entirety, never having supplemented or supplementing or about to supplement itself, such a thing would be everlasting; everlastingness would be that sort of state in a substrate, existing from and in the substrate; eternity would be the substrate along with the state of the kind that has manifested itself. … And if one were to call eternity in this way life that is unlimited from the start because it is whole and does not expend anything of itself due to the fact that it has no past and no future—​for if it did, it would not be whole—​one would be getting close to a definition.” The description of eternality as a simultaneous whole is affirmed as well by Proclus, The Elements of Theology, a revised text with translation, introduction, and commentary by Eric R. Dodds, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), prop. 52, p. 1; see Andrew Smith, “Eternity and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 202–​203. The Neoplatonic depiction of time as the One in the succession of the many—​and hence its connection to the hypostasis of the Soul, which bears the imprint of unity in difference—​can be seen as the application of Plato’s characterization of time as the moving image of eternity. See Arthur Hilary Armstrong, “Plotinus,” in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 251. 185 Rūmī, The Mathnawī, 1:1440. 186 Masao Abe, Zen and Comparative Studies, edited by Steven Heine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 163–​169. Consider the description of enlightenment of the Bashashita in Keizan Jōkin, The Denkōroku or The Record of the Transmission of the Light by Zen Master Keizan Jōkin, translated by Rev. Hubert Nearman, O.B.C., with an introduction by Rev. Master P.T.N.H. Jiyu-​Kennett, M.O.B.C. (Mount Shasta: Shasta Abbey Press, 2001), p. 134: “At this point we should not say that the physical body breaks up and scatters whilst something tranquilly continues on as an eternal spirit. What kind of thing could such an ‘eternal spirit’ possibly be? It is only a matter of manifesting the abandonment of one body and the receipt of another, therefore we should say that ‘before’ and ‘after’ are not two separate things for past and present are not different. Thus, it should not be called the body nor should it be called the mind. Since it is not divided into body and mind, we should not divide it into past and present. Therefore, it is that which is.” 187 Hee-​Jin Kim, “‘The Reason of Words and Letters’: Dōgen and Kōan Language,” in Dōgen Studies, edited by William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), p. 65. 188 Taigen dan Leighton, Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 112–​116. For fuller discussions of the rich insights into the nature of time and being in Dōgen, and particularly the comparison of his thought and Heidegger’s conception of ecstatic temporality, see Steven Heine, Existential and Ontological Dimensions of Time in Heidegger and Dōgen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); Hee-​Jin Kim, Dōgen Kigen: Mystical Realist, foreword by Robert Aitken (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), pp. 137–​157; Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-​nature: Dogen’s Understanding of Temporality (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Masao Abe, A Study of Dōgen: His Philosophy

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theologians would have it nor is it dependent solely on the motion of physical bodies as the philosophers would have it, but “it is Eternity itself (‘azlī’), time without beginning; and abdī, time without end … ‘Before-​ness’ and ‘after-​ness’ of things are only relational; otherwise creation and annihilation are in one and the same moment. Time is the eternal attribute of God.”189 In this moment of confluence wherein time is eternal and eternity temporal, the epiphany of what cannot be calibrated appears, the showing of what cannot be is previewed. Uncovering of truth is necessarily the contingent recovery of what is enduringly momentary, for only the enduringly momentary reveals the return

189

and Religion, edited by Steven Heine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 77–​144; Nico Jenkins, Echoes of No Thing: Thinking between Heidegger and Dōgen (Santa Barbara: punctum books, 2018), pp. 71–​146. For an alternative perspective on Heidegger’s conception of time and a Buddhist perspective, see David Loy, “What’s Wrong with Being and Time: A Buddhist Critique,” Time and Society 1 (1992): 239–​255. The contrast between the attempt to overthrow the privilege granted to the present in Heidegger and Derrida and the critique of Nāgārjuna’s middle way is explored as well in David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 252–​255. For a learned discussion on the nature of time in different but related historical-​literary contexts in the history of Buddhism, see von Rospatt, The Buddhist Doctrine. The central contention of the author is that “the doctrine of momentariness is primarily based on the analysis of change in terms of substitution and on the conviction that things are always changing” (p. 217). On the notion of the moment (khana) as a central component of the Buddhist conception of timeless time, that is, the instantaneous awakening (ekaksanābhisambodhi) of the now that eternally endures as that which has no duration, see also Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2001), pp. 43–​48; Dainin Katagiri, Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, edited by Andrea Marin (Boston: Shambala, 2007). See also the discussion of Buddhist perspectives on time in Leighton, Visions, pp. 106–​112. On the related Chinese concept of wujiu, literally, “without duration,” in Mohist doctrine, see Jean-​Paul Reding, Comparative Essays in Early Greek and Chinese Rational Thinking (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), p. 99: “We can safely assume that the concept of wujiu is not to be understood in the sense of a time-​atom, but rather as a boundary for periods of time … This interpretation of wujiu as a boundary is also the more plausible one on the ground that the Later Mohists have developed a theory of potential infinity to solve the paradoxes of infinite divisibility.” On the Buddhist theory of atoms, see the brief but insightful discussion in Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism, pp. 118–​121. There are also grounds, both philological and conceptual, for studying Heidegger’s thinking in relation to the view of the moment as the fullness of eternity articulated by Meister Eckhart. See Sonya Sikka, Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 177–​180. For a different view, see John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 216–​217, 225–​226. Ibrāhīm Gazūr-​I-​Ilāhī, Secret of Ana’l-​Haqq: Being 300 Odd Irshādāt (or Sayings) of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Gazūr-​I-​Ilāhī, translated from Persian with notes and introduction by Khan Sahib Khaja Khan, foreword by Maulana M. Badiul Alam, second edition (Lahore: Ashraf Press, 1935), pp. 54–​55.

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of the momentarily enduring.190 No event in time is either completely unique or completely repetitive. The middle path dictates that truth hovers between extremes; each moment is the same in virtue of being different and different in virtue of being the same.191 It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed account of the sources that may have influenced Cordovero, but it is necessary to delve more deeply into his representation of time as the “secret rotation of the emanations.” According to Scholem’s assessment, in contrast to other kabbalists who “maintained that the concept of time had no application to the process of emanation,” Cordovero “held that this process occurred within ‘non-​ temporal time,’ a dimension of time which involved as yet no differentiation into past, present, and future.”192 The full implication of Scholem’s view can be gleaned from another comment. In support of his (eminently sensible) claim that theogony and cosmogony are two aspects of one continuous reality, the rhythm of creation mirroring the inner movement of divine life, Scholem writes: “The act which results beyond and above time in the transformation of the hidden into the manifest God, is paralleled in the time-​bound reality of every other world.”193 I do not take issue with the main point Scholem is making in the second citation, but his distinction between the world of emanation “above-​time” and the “time-​bound” nature of all the other worlds in the cosmic chain is problematic. Moreover, I am not certain of the defensibility of Scholem’s attempt in the first citation to contrast Cordovero and other kabbalists on this score; it seems to me that the notion of nontemporal time, a time that is before the differentiation of past, present, and future, but that is time nonetheless, is affirmed by many kabbalists and thus it should not be trumpeted as a feature that distinguishes Cordovero’s thought. The disagreement is not simply a pedantic squabble between specialists, but rather involves a central issue in comprehending the religious philosophy and worldview promoted by kabbalists. If time is understood exclusively in terms of the material universe, then surely it would be suitable to ascribe to kabbalists the view frequently affirmed in philosophical literature that God is, strictly speaking,

1 90 This account is an elaboration of my comment in Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” p. 115. 191 My explication of the kabbalistic conception has benefited from the discussion in Thera, Abhidhamma Studies, p. 96. See also Loy, Nonduality, pp. 216–​224. 192 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1974), p. 103. In the same passage, Scholem does mention that, according to Azriel of Gerona, all the sefirot with the exception of the first “had a beginning in time.” I do not think this conception of nontemporal time is uniquely Cordoverian. 193 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), p. 223.

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beyond time (intemporale tempus) and beyond space (illocalis locus);194 just as the divine is omnipresent, everywhere present and hence nowhere present, so God is eternal, not in time but containing all times.195 As Maimonides, following in the footsteps of Aristotle, put it, “time is consequent upon motion, and motion is an accident in what is moved.” Since God is not a mutable body, there is no substratum in which the accident of time can inhere. Envisaging a succession of time before the creation of the world, even if the time is the “infinite duration” of God’s existence, is “due to a supposition regarding time or to an imagining of time and not due to the true reality of time. For time is indubitably an accident.”196

194 For example, Abraham bar Ḥiyya, Hegyon ha-​Nephesch ha-​Atzuvah, edited with introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1971), pp. 40–​41, and see editor’s remarks on pp. 18–​19; Maimonides, The Guide, 2:12, p. 276; 2:15, p. 288; Albo, Sefer ha-​Iqqarim, 2:18, 80a. It is worth noting that in the aforecited section of Sefer ha-​Iqqarim, 80b, Albo does refer to the rabbinic notion of seder zemannim, which he contrasts with zeman: the latter is the time that is measurable in accord with the movement of the heavenly sphere, and thus it can be characterized in terms of before and after, whereas the former is not subject to measurement since it is the flux or duration that precedes the existence of the sphere (ha-​meshekh she-​hayah qodem meṣi’ut ha-​galgal). According to Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique, p. 658 n. 23, we can draw the following conclusion from this passage: “According to Albo, pure duration is not true time. True time is only that which is measured by physical motion. Unmeasured duration is only what Maimonides describes as supportive and imaginary time … and it has not that order and succession which are implied in the old rabbinic expression ‘the order of the divisions of time’ … According to Crescas, pure duration, even though not measurable by physical motion, can still be called true time, inasmuch as it can be measured by conceptual motion. To that extent, too, pure duration has order and succession. We thus find that while Crescas states, in opposition to Maimonides, that the order of time existed prior to the creation of the world, Albo maintains, evidently in opposition to Crescas, that the order of time did not appear until after the creation of the celestial spheres.” See Wolfson, op. cit., pp. 663–​664 n. 33. 195 My formulation is indebted to Irven Michael Resnick, Divine Power and Possibility in St. Peter Damian’s De Divina Omnipotentia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 94–​95. For a philosophical appraisal of the intelligibility of ascribing “timelessness” to God, see William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 144–​185. 196 Maimonides, The Guide, 2:13, p. 281. For this reason, Maimonides is perplexed by the rabbinic dicta (see following note) that posit an order of time before the time of creation or a series of alternate worlds that were created and destroyed. See Guide, 2:30, pp. 349–​350. The Aristotelian understanding of time is well-​captured in a passage in the Be’ur Ṣurat ha-​Otiyyot—​a commentary in which the form of the Hebrew letters are correlated with the separate intellects—​in ms London, British Library Add. 27173, fol. 6b. The comment is made in connection to the letter samekh: “Similarly, time can be imagined, for time is an accident that is consequent to motion, and it is conjoined to it, and you will not find one of them without the other. You will not find motion except with time and you cannot cogitate time except with motion.”

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Here it is apposite to mention a passage in which Cordovero articulates a position that resonates with the Maimonidean perspective and would seem therefore to validate Scholem’s claim: “The sefirot preceded the creation of heaven and earth and they do not fall under time [einam noflim taḥat ha-​ zeman]; on the contrary, they are the root of time [hem shoresh el ha-​zeman], for the six sefirot are the root of the six days, and the seventh the day of Sabbath. … And concerning them the [sages], blessed be their memory, said,197 ‘This teaches that there was a prior order of time [seder zemannim].’”198 Cordovero adopts the philosophical approach even more stringently when delineating the difference between Ein Sof and the sefirot: First, the emanated beings fall under time but he does not fall under time. I do not wish to speak of “time” as it seems from the straightforward meaning of our words, but rather the intent is that there was a time when they had not yet emanated as in “prior to the emanation,” and this is one of the things that cannot be in Ein Sof, since he is not an existence that could not exist [meṣi’ut she-​lo yimṣa], but he is the necessary of existence [meḥuyav ha-​meṣi’ut], and he brought about the existence of time and he is not a temporal being [ba‘al zeman]. … And this is illustrative of the power of the magnitude of Ein Sof, king of kings, blessed be he, for it instructs about his being, which does not fall under time, but, on the contrary, he brings about the existence of time, and the being of his privation cannot be imagined in any manner in the world. This is one of his many advantages over his emanations, for all of them fall under the existence in which there was already a time in which Ein Sof existed apart from them as in “prior to the emanation.”199 The expression meḥuyav ha-​meṣi’ut, the technical philosophical designation of God that Maimonides200 arrogated from Avicenna’s wājib al-​ 197 Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 3:7, p. 23. Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, translated by Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), pp. 211–​221, suggests that the notions of a “sequence of times prior to the world and worlds that preceded our world” found in rabbinic literature is a response to the Gnostic conception (influenced by Platonic philosophy) of a world of eternity set in diametric contrast to the created world of time. 198 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 6:6, p. 75. For analysis of this theme, see Ben-​Shlomo, The Mystical Theology, pp. 246 and 260. 199 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 3:1, p. 25; Ben-​Shlomo, The Mystical Theology, p. 56. 200 Maimonides, The Guide, 1:57, p. 132, and 1:63, pp. 154–​155 (in that context, the expression ehyeh asher ehyeh signifies the necessary existence); Altmann, “Essence and Existence in Maimonides,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 35 (1953): 294–​315, reprinted in

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wujūd,201 is ascribed to Ein Sof, the one being about whom it can be said unequivocally that its existence is necessary. Insofar as the nonexistence of Ein Sof is inconceivable, there can be no time that Ein Sof does not exist, but if there can be no time that Ein Sof does not exist, time cannot be applied meaningfully to Ein Sof. Alternatively, inasmuch as “all existence is one” in the nondifferentiated unity of Ein Sof, it follows that “all times are equal,” 202 which is equivalent to saying that time does not apply to Ein Sof. Cordovero, and every kabbalist I have studied, would have surely assented to the following comment in the anonymous work, Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut, composed in all likelihood in the beginning of the fourteenth century by someone from the school of Solomon Ibn Adret, the disciple of Naḥmanides: “The negation of corporeality entails that God is not limited, and not a body or a force in a body, and included in the negation is that [God] is not constricted by place or time, but rather ‘he was, he is, and he will be’ [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh].”203 All corporeality is to be removed from the divine and, consequently, God cannot be bound spatially or temporally, a view expressed in terms of the exegetical gloss on the Tetragrammaton well-​attested in medieval rabbinic literature: God is the being who was, is, and will be.204 To say that God is all three tenses in tandem is equivalent, therefore, to saying that God is beyond temporal ascription. As Ḥayyim Viṭal, one of the most prominent sixteenth-​century kabbalists, disciple of both Cordovero and Luria, put it: “The great name, which is the Tetragram, yhwh, is called as such to indicate his eternal being and his everlasting existence [hawayato ha-​niṣḥit we-​qiyyumo la‘ad], he was, he is, and he

201

2 02 203 204

idem, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 107–​127. And see, more recently, Diana Lobel, “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh and the Tetragrammaton: Between Eternity and Necessary Existence in Saadya, Maimonides, and Abraham Maimonides,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 23 (2020): 89–​126. See Amélie-​Marie Goichon, La distinction de l’essence et de l’existence d’après Ibn Sînâ (Avicenne) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937); Falzur Rahman, “Essence and Existence in Avicenna,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 1–​16; Parviz Morewedge, The Metaphysica of Avicenna (ibn Sīnā): A Critical Translation-​commentary and Analysis of the Fundamental Arguments in Avicenna’s Metaphysica in the Dānish Nāma-​i ‘alā’ī (The Book of Scientific Knowledge) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 206–​249; Robert Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 200, 204–​205, 219–​225, 239–​243, 245–​249; Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 156–​159. Moses Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati (Jerusalem: Nezer Shraga, 2013), p. 12. Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut (Jerusalem: J. Becker, 2003), ch. 2, p. 4. See, for instance, Baḥya ben Asher, Be’ur al ha-​Torah, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1981), 2:29 (ad Exodus 3:13); Zohar Ḥadash, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), 17b (Midrash ha-​Ne‘lam); and the passage from Naḥmanides cited below at n. 224.

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will be [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh], prior to the creation, during the time of the subsistence of creation, and after it reverts to what it was. And had the worlds and all that is in them not have been created, it would not have been possible to see the truth of the manifestation of his eternal being, blessed be he, in the past, present, and future, and he would not have been called by the name yhwh at all.”205 It seems to me plausible to apply to Ein Sof the following description of Durgā-​Kālī, the Mother Goddess in Śākta Hinduism, as “the ultimate trans-​ theistic symbol of Timelessness—​the Not-Time,” on account of which she merits the name Ādyakālā.206 Tabling the important divergence between the Jewish and Indian materials with respect to the gender construction of the formless form of ultimate reality,207 the characterization of the latter as a “trans-​theistic symbol of Timelessness,” the “Not-​Time,”208 well suits the depiction of the infinite in kabbalistic lore, rendered paradoxically by Isaac of Acre, as ‫הר״ב ר׳ אב״א‬, ha-​ri’shon beli re’shit aḥaron beli aḥarit, “the first without beginning, the last without ending.”209 Ein Sof is the formless that transcends all form even the form of formlessness, the incomprehensible and ineffable not-​being—​the being that is neither being nor nonbeing—​beyond image and word. In this spirit, Cordovero insists that the quality of primordiality can be attributed to Ein Sof, whereas all other entities, including the sefirot, are considered temporal and contingent in nature. There is, however, a crucial difference between the temporal causality of the sefirot vis-​à-​ vis Ein Sof and the temporal causality of matters in the spatio-​temporal sphere: in the case of the latter, an interval separates cause and effect, but in the former there can be no such hiatus because that would imply an alteration in the divine will.210 To avoid the theological problem of suggesting that there is a change in God’s volition, which would imply a state less than perfect, Cordovero utilizes the 2 05 Ḥayyim Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2013), 1:1, 11a. 206 Wendell Charles Beane, Myth, Cult and Symbols in Śākta Hinduism: A Study of the Indian Mother Goddess (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 152. 207 See discussion in Wolfson, Language, pp. 67–​68. 208 Compare the language in Maitrāyana-​Brāhmana-​Upanishad, 6:15, cited in F. Max Müller, The Upaniṣads, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), 2: 317: “There are two forms of Brahman, time and non-​time. That which was before the (existence of the) sun is non-​ time and has no parts. That which had its beginning from the sun is time and has parts.” 209 Efraim Gottlieb, Studies in the Kabbala Literature, edited by Joseph Hacker (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1976), p. 231 (Hebrew). 210 An argument along these lines is found in Jacob ben Sheshet, “Sefer Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim (The Book Gate of Heaven) by Rabbi Yacov Ben Sheshet Girondi: Scientific Edition Including Foreword and Annotations,” edited by Nahora Gabay, ma thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1993, p. 116.

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paradoxical expression et lo et, the “moment that is no moment,” to delimit the transition from the temporal eternity of Ein Sof, the “primordial being that has no primordiality” (qadmon beli qadmut),211 to the eternal temporality of the sefirot.212 Cordovero fervently insists that Judaism, the “faith that believes in creation” (kat ha-​ma’aminim be-​ḥiddush), categorically rejects the possibility of there being anything but Ein Sof prior to the emanation. “For there is no matter that exists together with him in necessity but he alone exists. The truth of his essence is alone without any other cause at all, but rather all the other causes are brought about from him in an absolute creation [ha-​ḥiddush gamur], for there was no prior existence at all, God forbid. However, in the time that was no time and in the moment that was no moment [bi-​zeman she-​eino zeman u-​ve-​et she-​eino et], he brought about every beginning for the created entities, and they have no prior beginning, God forbid, other than Ein Sof alone, for he is the origin and beginning [ro’sh we-​hatḥalah] of all that exists.”213 The temporal eternity of the infinite is depicted as the time that is no time, zeman she-​eino zeman, a state of timelessness, not in the sense of being bereft of time, but in the sense of being replete with time, a time in which all moments are indistinguishably the same in the reality that is one (kol ha-​ittim shawim we-​khol ha-​meṣi’ut eḥad),214 a present that has no past that is not future nor a future that is not past—​a position reminiscent of Augustine as well as of the notion of sempiternitas posited by later Neoplatonists215—​whereas the eternal temporality of the sefirotic emanations begins in the moment that is 211 Even the attribution of “primordiality” to Ein Sof is problematic inasmuch as this characteristic is a correlative term and hence to speak of Ein Sof as primordial is to place it within a temporal sequence. To avoid this dilemma, Cordovero uses the phrase qadmon beli qadmut, which I have rendered as “primordial without primordiality.” Cordovero is thus in basic agreement with the apophatic position adopted by Albo, Sefer ha-​Iqqarim, 2:18, 80a: “The matter of primordiality and eternity [inyan ha-​qadmut we-​ha-​niṣḥiyyut] spoken with respect to him is a negative matter, the negation of privation qua beginning and qua end.” 212 Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, p. 6; Ben-​Shlomo, The Mystical Theology, pp. 194–​195, 202, 212, 224. 213 Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, pp. 12–​13. Again, we can detect the influence of Albo on Cordovero. See the discussion about time in relation to God in Sefer ha-​Iqqarim, 2:18, 80a: “If time delimits his existence, time will of necessity precede him, and thus he will be found in existence in time apart from time [we-​yihyeh nimṣa bi-​zeman zulat zeman], and privation would precede him, and with respect to anything that is preceded by privation, it is a possible existence and not the necessary of existence.” 214 Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, p. 12. 215 As noted by Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 103. For discussion of the Neoplatonic influence on conceptions of space and time in Renaissance kabbalistic texts, see Neuser, “Raum und Zeit,” pp. 93–​101.

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no moment, that is, the beginning of time that is marked in this seemingly incongruous phrase, et she-​eino et, an interval that is not subject to the contingencies of physical time, the beginning that has no end and consequently no beginning.216 As Cordovero puts it in another passage: “Thus, in the beginning of the disclosure of the emanation of the existents from him [teḥillat gilluy hitpashsheṭut ha-​nimṣa’ot me-​itto], there was no moment that is no moment but rather all the moments were equal [ein et lo et ella kol ha-​ittot shawwot]. However, the emanation from the will of wills [hitpashsheṭut me-​raṣon ha-​ reṣonot] was dependent on the moment that is no moment [be-​et lo et] because it was necessary that the vessel be prepared to receive the emanation.”217 Cordovero’s perspective is elaborated in the eighteenth century by Joseph Ergas in a passage in the second part of Shomer Emunim where six principles of faith (iqqarei ha-​emunah) are enunciated to Shealtiel by the interlocutor, Yehoyada, a name, incidentally, that connotes gnosis of God. In the context of explicating the fifth of these principles, Yehoyada explains why it is legitimate to apply the metaphor of light to the sefirot when they are spiritual and not physical entities: “Light is bound to its source and its cause, and it does not separate from it. On account of this the sefirot are described as lights, for they proceed and emanate from the divine sun, and they are not separated from it, God forbid, but rather the emanated is forever bound to its source, and the potency of the emanator is continuously in the emanated.”218 The axiom that the cause is inseparable from the effect of necessity entails the corollary that the effect is inseparable from the cause,219 and taking both together it follows that the agency of divine causality cannot be understood in ordinary temporal terms. Ergas articulates the matter in Yehodaya’s response to Shealtiel’s question concerning why the world was created at the moment it was and not before: Know that prior to the creation of anything when God, blessed be he, was alone, there was then no reality of time at all [lo hayah az meṣi’ut zeman kelal], for time itself has no reality, as it is an accident that is conjoined to and is consequent to the motion of something that has been generated and continues to exist, for it falls under time and three aspects of time are distinguished with respect to it, namely, past, present, and future. However, when there was nothing but God alone, blessed be his name, then there was no time. … He exists permanently in one manner; 2 16 Ben-​Shlomo, The Mystical Theology, pp. 293, 308–​309. 217 Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, p. 66. 218 Joseph Ergas, Shomer Emunim (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 2010), 2:11, p. 99. 219 Ibid., 2:21, p. 109.

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before the world was created and after the world will be destroyed, time does not alter him …. and even though he was [hayah], he is [howeh], and he will be [yihyeh], nevertheless he has no relation to time, for his having been has not elapsed [he-​hayah shelo lo avar], his being at present is not momentary [ha-​howeh shelo eino rega], and his being to come is not in the future [ha-​yihyeh shelo eino attid].220 Ergas is adamant in his insistence that time in its triune division is not applicable to God. Echoing the Aristotelian conception of time, Ergas maintains that time is an accident of a substance that is subject to coming-​to-​be and passing-​ away. God is impervious to change and hence temporal qualities cannot be attributed to him. From that standpoint the question regarding why the world was created at a particular moment and not before or after is erroneous, since prior to the creation there is no before or after and thus no response would be adequate.221 The traditional understanding of God encompassing past, present, and future all at once, which is linked exegetically to the Tetragrammaton, does not challenge the philosophical claim that time cannot be assigned to God, for to say that God was (hayah), is (howeh), and will be (yihyeh) does not imply a past that is no more, a present that is short-​lived, or a future that has not yet come to pass. In the continuation of the above passage, Ergas cites in support of his view the interpretation of Naḥmanides to R. Isaac’s remark that the name Ehyeh occurs three times in God’s response to Moses (Exodus 3:14) to assure Israel that it is the same God who was, is, and will be with them in 2 20 Ibid., 2:17, pp. 106–​107. 221 In Sefer ha-​Beri’ah, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 1581, fol. 1b, Nathan of Gaza reports the following response to this philosophical question, which he claims to have received from Sabbatai Ṣevi: “And I heard an answer from the mouth of Amirah [adonenu malkkenu yarom hodo, “our master, our king, his majesty be exalted,” a fixed title used by Sabbatians to refer to the presumed Messiah] that had he created them previously, you would have asked ‘why did he create them now and not before?’ And thus in this way there is no end to this question, and since it was necessary for there to be a beginning, thus all times are equal, and it is certainly within the range of his capability to give a time for bringing forth his thought into actuality.” See now Nathan Ghazzati, Sefer Habri’a (The Book of Creation), a critical edition and analysis by Leor Holzer (Jerusalem: Holzer Sefarim, 2019), pp. 170–​171. Nathan’s argument is reproduced in Jonathan Eibeschütz, We-​ Avo ha-​Yom el Ein ha-​Ḥokhmah, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 955, fol. 113a. See now idem, And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, critically edited and introduced by Pawel Maciejko, second revised edition (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2016), pp. 15–​16 (Hebrew). For the influence of Nathan of Gaza’s Sefer ha-​Beri’ah on Eibeschütz, see Moshe Arie Perlmuter, Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz and His Attitude Towards Sabbatianism: New Researches Based on the Manuscript of the Book “Va’Avo Hayom el Ha‘ayin” (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1947), pp. 111–​119, 123–​130 (Hebrew).

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their historical travails.222 “The explanation of the opinion of R. Isaac,” writes Naḥmanides, “is that the past and the future time are wholly in the Creator in the present, for there is no change or set term in relation to him,223 and no days at all have passed from him. Therefore, all the tenses [zemannim] in him are designated by one name, which instructs about the necessary of existence [ḥiyyuv ha-​meṣi’ut].”224 Naḥmanides frames the explication attributed to R. Isaac on the name Ehyeh in medieval philosophical language: the expression “necessary of existence,” as I noted above, is adopted from Maimonides for whom the idiom, in consort with Avicenna, signifies that God is the one being whose existence is identical with his essence; that is, God is the being of whom it cannot be said that he does not exist and thus existence is not an attribute added to his essence but rather an expression of what advances from it. The inseparability of essence and existence precludes the possibility of any change or modification, and hence all three aspects of time converge in the nunc stans of the eternal present. Ergas provides an opening to qualify the categorical rejection of ascribing temporal qualities to God. To avoid misunderstanding, let me state unambiguously that I am not suggesting that Ergas wavers on the essential point that ordinary or physical time, that is, time subject to quantifiable measure and calibration, cannot be applied to God; on the contrary, he consistently maintains that it is only the imagination that leads human beings to entertain the possibility of time prior to creation; reason, however, discloses the spuriousness of such imaginings as the divine being is not subject to temporal oscillation.225 Citing the view of Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Ergas insists that neither “time” (zeman) nor even the “order of time” (seder zemannim) can be attributed in anything but a figurative and imprecise way to the sefirotic potencies.226 Notwithstanding the validity of this assertion, I still contend that it is valid to propose that Ergas would have assented to the distinction between conventional time, which is divided into three modalities based on the presumption of the mutability of an immutable subject, and sempiternal time, a time that 222 Midrash Shemot Rabbah, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), 3:6, p. 62. 223 Based on Job 10:17. 224 Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah le-​Rabbenu Moshe ben Naḥman, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1984), 1: 292 (ad Exodus 3:13). 225 Ergas, Shomer Emunim, 2:17, p. 107. 226 Ibid., pp. 107–​108. The relevant passages of Menaḥem Azariah da Fano that Ergas cites or alludes to are from Yonat Elem, chs. 2, 12, and 20. See Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Sefer Ma’amerei ha-​Rav Menahem Azariah mi-​Fano, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yismaḥ Lev—​Torat Moshe, 1997), 1:3, 16, 25.

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is not measured by duration or change, common traits associated with matters temporal. God’s existence can be characterized, accordingly, as either timeless time or unending time, the former signifying the negative assertion that divine time has no past, present, or future, and the latter the assertive negation that there is no past, present, or future in which God does not exist. Let us consider the following comment on the nature of time and divinity offered by Viṭal: It is known that the supernal light above is without limit and it is called Ein Sof. Its name attests that with respect to it there is no grasping, not in thought [maḥashavah] nor in contemplation [hirhur] at all. He is separate and apart from all thoughts, and he is prior to all things emanated [ne’eṣalim], created [nivra’im], formed [yeṣurim], and made [na‘asim], and in him there is no time of origin and beginning [zeman hatḥalah we-​re’shit], for he exists permanently [tamid] and persists forever [la‘ad], and in him there is no commencement or termination at all [ro’sh we-​ sof kelal]. From Ein Sof there emanates subsequently the existence of the great light, which is called Adam Qadmon … The emanation of this Adam Qadmon, and all the more so the other worlds beneath him, have a beginning and an end, and they have a beginning of the time of their being and their emanation, which is not the case with regard to Ein Sof, as was stated above. From the moment [et] and time [zeman] that the emanation and concatenation of the abovementioned lights and worlds began, the being of all the existents began, one after the other, until the matter reached existence as it is now, which comes about according to the order of emanation and the concatenation corresponding to the order of time, and it was not possible to advance or to delay the creation of this world, for each and every world was created after the world above it. All the worlds were created, emanated, concatenated, and went forth, one following the other, in various and successive times, one after the other, until the time of the creation of this world arrived, and then it was created in the time appropriate to it after the creation of the supernal worlds above it.227 In consonance with a long-​standing kabbalistic tradition, traceable to the thirteenth century, Viṭal begins by asserting straightforwardly that Ein Sof is beyond human comprehension. Notwithstanding this unmistakable assertion of ineffability, Viṭal describes Ein Sof as the “supernal light” that is “without 227 Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:2, 11b.

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limit,” an apophatic utterance that is kataphatic in its apophasis, that is, a negative proposition as opposed to a negation of proposition.228 Be that as it may, what is crucial for this discussion is Viṭal’s remark that time differentiated by beginning and end cannot be applied to Ein Sof, since “he exists permanently and persists forever.” Note the precise language: the eternality of the infinite is not set in opposition to time, but it is rather the embracing of a sempiternal time that cannot be marked in a linear fashion by commencement or termination, a time that is continuous and everlasting. By contrast, all existents beneath Ein Sof in the ontic chain, beginning with Adam Qadmon, can be characterized by beginning and end, and hence time can be positively attributed to them.229 Not only is the emanation of the sefirot not outside time, it is the paradigmatic pattern of temporality, the order of time that gives shape to all that exists. It should be recalled that Cordovero likewise affirms an apophatic approach with respect to Ein Sof, which impedes the possibility of speaking about God in temporal terms: “Concerning him we cannot speak or form an image, or ascribe to him either judgment or mercy, rage or anger, change, boundary, or any attribute, neither before the emanation nor now after the emanation.”230 The apophasis extends to the point that one cannot inquire as to why Ein Sof

228 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35. For discussion of this theme in medieval kabbalistic literature, see Steven T. Katz, “Utterance and Ineffability in Jewish Neoplatonism,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 279–​298; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Negative Theology and Positive Assertion in the Early Kabbalah,” Da‘at 32–​33 (1994): v-​xxii. 229 It is of interest to mention here the following comment in Jonathan Eibeschütz, Shem Olam, edited with an introduction by Asher S. Weissmann (Wien: Abraham ben David Alkalai, 1891), p.12: “The words of the Ari, blessed be his memory, attest that the emanation was in time [bi-​zeman] … If this is so, then the beginning of the name yhwh is also in time. This is not the opinion of the Zohar or Pirqei Rabbi Eli‘ezer, which prove that the name yhwh is eternal in its primordiality [qadmon be-​qadmuto] and it does not fall under time [we-​eino nofel taḥat zeman], God forbid.” See ibid., p.159: “The emanation, which [consists of] the garments [ha-​malbushim], was not from eternity [mi-​qedem], for they fall under time, as the Ari, blessed be his memory, wrote.” Ibid., p. 245: “If you say that the sefirot are eternal [qadmonim], you contradict the words of the Ari, blessed be his memory, who said that the emanation was in time [bi-​zeman], and even Adam Qadmon of [the world of] creation [beri’ah] was in time, as is known.” On the eternality of the sefirotic emanations, see ibid., pp. 142 156, 158, 174. The view that the ten sefirot were comprised in the potency of Ein-​Sof is expressed in another work attributed to Eibeschütz, We-​Avo ha-​Yom el Ein ha-​Ḥokhmah, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 955, fol. 112a; idem, And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, pp. 12–​13. 230 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 4:4, p. 42.

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did not emanate Keter at an earlier moment. Before everything came into being, the infinite was alone and it took delight in the contemplation of its essence (hayah ha-​ein sof levad we-​hayah mishta‘ashe‘a be-​hassagat aṣmuto),231 and there came the “time for the existence of the emanation” (et meṣi’ut ha-​ aṣilut), beginning with Keter, which is deemed as other (zulato) vis-​à-​vis Ein Sof. We can say of this transition that it falls under the “priority of gradation” (qadimat ma‘alah)—​that is, the logical precedence we accord to the cause over the effect—​but not under the “priority of time” (qadimat zeman).232 It follows, moreover, that we cannot inquire about the temporal nature of the state wherein Ein Sof existed and the sefirot did not “because time there is no time” (ki zeman sham eino zeman).233 Note the full force of the paradox: there is no denial of time with respect to the infinite but rather a depiction of a time that is no time, that is, a time that is not the temporal calibration of either the sefirotic entities of the supernal world or of the physical substances of the

231 On the use of the myth of the erotic-​noetic gesture of sha‘ashu‘a in Cordovero, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 100, and references cited on pp. 124–​125 nn. 37–​39; Ben-​Shlomo The Mystical Theology, pp. 60–​61, 174, 187, 239 n. 202; Scholem, “The Name of God,” p. 182 n. 62; Bracha Sack, “The Doctrine of Ṣimṣum of R. Moses Cordovero,” Tarbiṣ 58 (1989): 226–​227 (Hebrew); idem, The Kabbalah, pp. 73–​76, 150–​76; Daniel Abrams, The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature: Embodied Forms of Love and Sexuality in the Divine Feminine (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004), p. 113 (Hebrew); Sharron Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-​Cordoverian Encounter,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 164–​174. For the influence of Cordovero on the Saruqian notion of sha‘ashu‘a, see also Yehuda Liebes, “Towards a Study of the Author of Emek ha-​Melekh: His Personality, Writings and Kabbalah,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 11 (1993): 105 n. 24 (Hebrew); Ronit Meroz, “The School of Sarug—​A New History,” Shalem 7 (2002): 154 (Hebrew); Miguel Beltrán, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 33–​39. 232 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1974), p. 20. 233 Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 6, p. 20. I would like to take this opportunity to correct my citation of this passage in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 270. My inexact rendering “there is there no time” obscured the full force of the paradox that Cordovero wished to communicate with the expression ki zeman sham eino zeman; that is, the infinitivity of the divine is marked not by the absence of time but rather by the presence of a time that is no time. See the citation from Pardes Rimmonim below at n. 235. On the advice not to inquire about why Ein Sof did not emanate Keter at a previous moment, see Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 10b. As Cordovero states in that context, it is a “great sin” to attribute primordiality (qadimah) to Keter, a mistake inspired by the misreading of the dictum in Pirqei Rabbi Eli‘ezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 3, 5b, that before the world was created he and his name were alone. Compare Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, p. 59. See also idem, Pardes Rimmonim, 3:1, p. 25. Concerning Cordovero’s interpretation of the aforementioned aggadic dictum, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 272, and references cited on p. 293 nn. 150–​152.

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lower worlds. In the chapter in Pardes Rimmonim dedicated to the philosophical problem if Ein Sof should be identified with Keter, Cordovero notes that Ein Sof brings forth time but does not itself fall under the category of time, whereas the emanations—​including Keter—​do fall under time, and hence we must attribute to them a “time when they were not emanated like prior to the emanation.” This cannot be said of the infinite, since it is the necessary of existence and therefore it is impossible to say of it that “there is an existence that does not exist.”234 In another passage from the Pardes Rimmonim, Cordovero alludes to this paradox in slightly different terminology: “Thus, it is necessary that prior to the emanation of the edifice [qodem ha-​aṣilut ha-​binyan] there will be time approximately but not time [zeman mah we-​lo zeman], God forbid, but rather a primordiality [qadimah] in the way of other primordialities, which are a primordiality of gradation [qadimat ma‘alah] like the primordiality of the cause in relation to the effect [ke-​qadimat ha-​illah al ha-​alul].”235 Elsewhere in the same treatise, Cordovero states explicitly that temporal images used to describe the divine potencies must be construed figuratively because “the divinity does not fall beneath time.” In the same context, however, he refers to Tif’eret and Malkhut, the sixth and tenth emanations, as the “crux of the governance” (iqqar ha-​hanhagah) and the “order of time” (seder ha-​zeman), “for time comes to be by means of the circumference, which is the waw, the six extremities, and Malkhut is he, the two of them being the attribute of day and the attribute of night. Therefore, Tif’eret and Malkhut were in thought prior to the emanation.”236 The critical expression seder ha-​zeman is derived from an aggadic annotation, which Cordovero explicitly cites, on the scriptural refrain “it was evening and it was morning,” wa-​yehi erev wa-​yehi voqer (Genesis 1:5): “R. Judah bar Simon said: It is not written ‘it will be evening’ [yehi erev] but ‘it was evening’ [wa-​yehi erev]. From here [it can deduced] that there was an order of time [seder zemannim] prior to this.”237 Underlining the rabbinic teaching is not only the assumption that there was existence prior to the creation of the world, an idea reiterated in the teaching of R. Abbahu placed immediately after the dictum of R. Judah that God created worlds and destroyed them until he created this world, but also the conjecture that time is not dependent on the physical universe, or, at least, not on the physical universe of our sentient experience. The 2 34 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 3:1, p. 25. 235 Ibid., 4:7, p. 50. On the distinction between qadimat ma‘alah and qadimat zeman, see also ibid., 20:11, p. 245. 236 Ibid., 18:3, p. 216. 237 See above, n. 197.

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fuller ideational background of the rabbinic notion of seder zemannim is not quite obvious. What is clear, however, is that the idea served as grist for the mill of the imagination of kabbalists by providing them with a term to convey the concept of “time out of time,”238 that is, a time, in Cordovero’s own language, “that has no boundary and no end,” the time of limitless delimitation, delimited in the delimited limitlessness, of the ten emanations, the world of unity (olam ha-​yiḥud, alma de-​yiḥuda). The time of the immeasurable is measured, more specifically, by the lower seven gradations comprised in the attributes of day and night, Tif’eret and Malkhut, the last two letters of the Tetragrammaton (waw-​he), which existed in thought, that is, Ḥokhmah, the second sefirah represented by the first letter of the name (yod), prior to their emanation.239 Time, in its timeless becoming, is expressed, most fundamentally, in the alternating pattern of night and day, contracting darkness and expanding radiance, rendered respectively as the feminine and masculine aspects of the divine androgyny.240 Cordovero affirms the temporalizing depiction of the sefirotic pleroma, at least the lower seven emanations, in other passages in his literary oeuvre. I cite here one text wherein the liturgical distinctiveness of the Jewish people and their ontological connectedness to the divine are expressed in precisely these terms: The matter of the change of times [shinnuy ha-​zemannim] depends on the supernal sefirot and the governance [hanhagah] that ensues from them to us, for concerning us, the nation of the Lord, all our behavior [hanhagatenu] and our time cycles [gilgulei zemanneinu], we rotate verily by means of the spheres of the emanations [galgallei ha-​sefirot], since we are in the secret of our minds, spirits, and souls, sparks hewn from the 2 38 I borrow this expression from Rappaport, “Ritual,” p. 12. 239 On the symbolic identification of the rabbinic idiom seder zemannim as Tif’eret and Malkhut, see Moses Cordovero, Or Ne‘erav (Beit Shemesh: Tamar, 2011), 7, p. 82, s.v. ot samekh. Needless to say, Cordovero is not the first kabbalist to adopt this symbolism. See, for instance, Meir Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2004), 1:22, p. 60; 4:5, p. 487. 240 This understanding of temporality underlies the comment of Cordovero’s student Abraham Azulai, Ḥesed le-​Avraham (Jerusalem: Makhon Sha‘arei Ziw, 1996), 6:4, p. 244, that the reality of the different gradations of soul (nefesh, ruaḥ, and neshamah) is “dependent on the time of the supernal coupling [zeman ha-​ziwwug ha-​elyon].” Azulai’s point is that the precise disposition of the soul, created as a consequence of the union in the divine will, is determined by the alignment of forces above at the precise moment of conception below. This idea rests on the understanding of time articulated in the body of this chapter.

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light of the emanations [or ha-​sefirot], and all of our effort is to be like that which is above as far as it is possible, to be bound to the supernal roots, to cleave to our Creator as far as it is possible, and this was the intent of our creation, as it says “Let us make man in our image and in our likeness. And God created man in his image etc. in the image of God he created him” (Genesis 1:26-​27).241 Therefore, our essence is to become like the supernal emanations … and the Torah reveals to us the variations of the emanations [shinnuyei ha-​sefirot] and the division of their providential aspects [ḥilluqei beḥinatam lehanhagatam], and the blessed holy One made physical vessels like their matter so that through them we could know the supernal governance [ha-​hanhagah ha-​elyonah]. And this is what it says “They shall serve as signs for set times—​the days and the years” (Genesis 1:14). He set the seasons of the years [tequfot ha-​shanah] and the motions of the stars [mehalkhei ha-​kokhavim] so that [we may] know from their signs the supernal providence according to their manner in the land of Israel.242 241 On the gender assumptions underlying Cordovero’s kabbalah, see the expanded discussion in Appendix 3. 242 Moses Cordovero, Tefillah le-​Moshe (Przemyśl: Zupnik, Knoller, and Hammerschmidt, 1892), 190a. On Cordovero’s approach to prayer, see Bracha Sack, “R. Moshe Cordovero’s Theory of Prayer,” Da‘at 9 (1982): 5–​12 (Hebrew); idem, “Some Remarks on Prayer in the Kabbalah of 16th Century Safed,” in Prière, mystique et judaïsme: Colloque de Strasbourg (10–​ 12 septembre 1984), textes rassemblés par Roland Goetschel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), pp. 179–​186; idem, “Some Remarks on Siddur Tefillah le-​Moshe,” Da‘at 44 (2000): 59–​84 (Hebrew); idem, The Kabbalah, pp. 193–​202; idem, From the Fountains of Sefer Elimah by R. Moshe Cordovero and Studies in His Kabbalah (Beer-​Sheva, Ben-​Gurion University Press, 2014), pp. 75–​103 (Hebrew); Nicolas Sed, “La ‘Kawwanāh’ selon le XXXIIe chaiptre du ‘Pardes Rimōnim’ de R. Moïse Cordovero,” in Prière, mystique et judaïsme, pp. 187–​205; Moshe Idel, Hasdisim: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 159–​162, 165–​166, 178–​180, 195–​196, 215–​216; idem, “The Liturgical Turn: From the Kabbalistic Traditions of Spain, to the Kabbalistic Tradition of Safed, to the Beginning of Hasidism,” in Jewish Prayer: New Perspectives, edited by Uri Ehrlich (Beer-​Sheva: Ben-​Gurion University Press, 2016), pp. 22–​26 (Hebrew); idem, Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba‘al Tov’s Mysticism (New York: Herder & Herder, 2020), pp. 59–​60, 79–​80, 83, 86, 94, 107–​109, 131–​132, 241–​277; Alan Brill, “Meditative Prayer in Moshe Cordovero’s Kabbalah,” in Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Cultural Histories, edited by Halvor Eifring (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 45–​60; Jonathan Garb, Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 31–​32. In Vocal Rites, Idel names Cordovero’s approach to the drawing down of the spiritual forces of the sefirot as astro-​magic theosophy, an orientation that he called in Hasdisim, pp. 87–​88, the magical or the hermetical understanding of the ideal of devequt. See ibid., p. 233: “In any case, the magical model that Cordovero absorbed in his writings allows for more of an emphasis upon the significance of inner processes than the purely theosophical-​theurgical model.

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Cordovero presents divine providence in the natural world, the overflow from the sefirotic pleroma, in strictly temporal terms. Natural time—​marked as the “change of times” (shinnuy ha-​zemannim) and as the “seasons of the year” (tequfot ha-​shanah)—​comes to pass according to the motion of the celestial lights and it is related to the ritual behavior and time cycles (gilgulei zeman) of the Jewish people, which are in the pattern of the rotations of the emanations (galgallei ha-​sefirot). For Cordovero, repeating a sentiment broadly attested in previous kabbalistic treatises, time in its essential nature, that is, sacred as opposed to mundane time, is a unique property of the Jews, for their souls alone are rooted ontologically in the sefirotic pleroma, the perpetuity of time in its primordial permutation. Holiness itself is intricately connected to the covenantal incision in the fabric of time. Insofar as the Jew alone—​ and the Jewish male in particular—​bears the stigmata of that incision in the flesh, the Jew has the capacity to intertwine the threads of expectation and retention in seizing the moment of what comes to be in having been. The raison d’être of the people of Israel is to emulate and thereby be conjoined to God, a divine status that guarantees an intrinsic nexus between ceremonial conduct (hanhagah) of the Jews below and supernal governance (ha-​hanhagah ha-​elyonah) determined by the emanations above. Temporal changes are thus related to the “variations of the emanations” (shinnuyei ha-​sefirot) revealed by the Torah, which, in the mind of the kabbalists, is indistinguishable from the divine essence encoded in the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet comprised in the Tetragrammaton.243 In light of these passages, I think it better, contra Scholem, to distinguish two vectors of time according to kabbalistic teaching, one that applies to the physical universe, the world of discriminate beings (olam ha-​nifradim, olam ha-​perud, alma di-​peruda), and the other to the unfolding of the enfolded The combined influences of ecstatic Kabbalah, of the school of R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi, and of talismatic [sic] magic opened the way to creating another focus of mystical activity, one that strives to valorize the reflection of the theosophical structure onto the human psyche and body.” I willingly admit that the passage I have cited from Tefillah le-​Mosheh can fit these descriptions. 243 It is of interest to compare Cordovero’s view on the relationship of time and the Torah to the explanation of the phrase seder zemannim in Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh, 1:23, p. 63: “Time is subservient and compliant to the Torah, for it was created by means of it, and thus it and everything that is beneath it is ready to be submissive to keepers of the Torah. Before Israel stood [at Mount Sinai] it was in the hands of the blessed holy One, but after Israel stood and received the Torah, which is above time [al ha-​zeman], it was given to them to abrogate his warnings from evil to good, to remove his judgment, and to restore it to its nature as it was prior to the primal sin by means of the Torah, which is above the order of time [lema‘lah mi-​seder zemannim].”

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light of the divine pleroma, the world of unification (olam ha-​yiḥud, alma de-​ yiḥuda). Surely, I am not advocating a dualism nor do I deny that kabbalistic tradition presumes an analogical relation between the two spheres such that one gains knowledge of the latent from the manifest and of the manifest from the latent, an ancient Hermetic teaching with roots in Platonic philosophy that had a profound impact on the esoteric teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as they evolved in the middle ages. It is worthwhile mentioning one excerpt from Cordovero where the kabbalistic teaching is framed in these terms: “From the lower beings we discern the supernal beings, as it says ‘From my flesh I would behold God’ (Job 19:26), and by means of them a man can discern divinity. After a man contemplates the supernal beings from the lower beings, he will return from above to below, and he will discern the greatness of the lower beings for they are dependent on the supernal beings; hence the order of the comprehension of hidden matters is from posterior [ha-​me’uḥar] to anterior [ha-​qodem] and subsequently from anterior [ha-​qodem] to posterior [me’uḥar].”244 In the cosmological progression, the world of emanation (aṣilut) is “prior” to the worlds of creation (beri’ah), formation (yeṣirah), and doing (asiyyah), but from the epistemic point of view, buttressed by the presumption regarding a continuous chain of being extending from and unified within the supreme “cause of all causes” (sibbat kol ha-​sibbot), knowledge of the sefirot is adduced from the cosmos. The hierarchical relation is problematized, however, by the fact that the mundane is discerned from the divine in the same measure that the divine is discerned from the mundane. The subversion of the hierarchy is expressed in the inversion of chronological time affirmed at the conclusion of the passage in language that is reminiscent of the hermeneutical dictum discussed above, ein muqdam u-​me’uḥar ba-​torah. Just as the reader need not assume an absolute temporal order operative in Scripture that would prevent undermining the criterion of before and after, so one need not presume that in the nature of existence anterior and posterior are aligned in an unwavering causal relationship. Encircling the linear pattern holds the key to comprehending the kabbalistic notion of timeless time, the time devoid of time, that is, the void of time prompting the time of the void that reverses the sequential pattern of antecedent and aftereffect. If we were to consider temporality only from the perspective of the corporeal world, then we would have to uphold Scholem’s point that for kabbalists the realm of emanation is not subject to time. However, there is no reason to be 244 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 4:6, p. 47.

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so restricted, as we can plausibly speak of another dimension of temporality, a “metaphysical” as opposed to “physical” conception of time that well applies to the eternal;245 indeed, I would go so far as to say that in kabbalistic teaching time in its primordiality is not extrinsic to God but is the radiance of divine becoming recounted in the narratological telling of enumerated duplication. The twofold depiction of sefirot as line and circle246 suggests that the interminable telling of the timeless time proceeds linearly but in a succession that is subject to disruption by the eruption of the cycle of the eternal return of the moment that has perpetually never been. In this linear circularity, the emanations, in the words of Cordovero, “are unified in a true unity in their connecting beginning to end and end to beginning,”247 and hence the distinction between beginning and end is destabilized. The aforecited comment is derived from a passage in Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim where he interprets the depiction of the sefirot in the first part of Sefer Yeṣirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end.”248 This uroboric symbol notionally and visually conveys the fusion of the linear and the cyclical, the innovative and the repetitive. In one of the earliest kabbalistic commentaries on Sefer Yeṣirah, a text that ostensibly preserves the teachings of the Provençal master, Isaac the Blind,249 one can already find an

245 The distinction between “physical” time and “metaphysical” time that I have applied to kabbalistic ontology resonates with Newton’s concept of absolute time, which he distinguishes from relative time. The latter is the measurable time kept by human devices whereas the former is rooted in the everlasting duration of God’s eternal being. See William Lane Craig, “Relativity and the ‘Elimination’ of Absolute Time,” in Time, Reality, and Transcendence in Rational Perspective, edited by Peter Øhrstrøm (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2002), pp. 91–​127; J. E. McGuire, “Predicates of Pure Existence: Newton on God’s Space and Time,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, edited by Phillip Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1990), pp. 92–​94. 246 For discussion of this theme in kabbalistic literature, see Mordechai Pachter, “Circles and Straightness—​A History of an Idea,” Da‘at 18 (187): 59–​90 (Hebrew); English translation in idem, Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), pp. 131–​184. 247 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 4:5, p. 45. Concerning the union of the first and the last of the emanations, Keter and Malkhut, see Reuven Kimelman, The Mystical Meaning of Lekhah Dodi and Kabbalat Shabbat (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003), pp. 47–​48 (Hebrew). 248 See above, n. 57. 249 For an extensive discussion of this text and its presumed author, see Mark B. Sendor, “The Emergence of Provençal Kabbalah: Rabbi Isaac the Blind’s Commentary on Sefer Yezirah,” 2 vols., PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1994, 1: 25–​50, and more recently, Avishai Bar-​Asher, “Illusion versus Reality in the Study of Early Kabbalah: The Commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah attributed to Isaac the Blind and Its History in Kabbalah and Scholarship,” Tarbiṣ 86 (2019): 269–​384 (Hebrew).

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articulation of the paradoxical notion of time connected to the image of the end fixed in the beginning: “A wellspring that spreads forth—​all that spreads forth is from the source, and if the source ceases, everything ceases, and since they emanate in every moment [be-​khol et], the beginning has no end [teḥillah ein lah sof]. Therefore it says ‘their end in their beginning’.”250 In his own commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah, Cordovero explicates the matter of “the bond of the emanations, the first in the last and the last in the first [qesher ha-​sefirot ri’shon be-​sofan we-​sofan be-​ri’shon],” in terms of his doctrine of the two types of light, the “straight light,” or yashar, that issues from Keter to Malkhut, and the “restored light,” or ḥozer, that is reflected back from Malkhut to Keter.251 “This is the way the wheel turns and rotates without end or limit [we-​khen derekh ha-​galgal ḥozer u-​mitgalgel ad ein sof we-​takhlit].”252 According to a passage in Tiqqunei Zohar, the incorporation of the tenth in the first effectuates the circularization of the linear edifice of the divine, and hence the supernal crown (keter elyon) is identified as the crown of kingship (keter malkhut), a transformation supported textually by the verse “I foretell the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10).253 Cordovero draws out the implications of this older text: Now, it comes to explain with respect to the matter of Keter why Malkhut is called “mouth,” for she is above in the head, fixed in the skull, which is Keter. Therefore, the head is called keter malkhut because the two of them are united, crown of kingship, in the secret of “I foretell the end from the beginning” [maggid me-​re’shit aḥarit]. The beginning is Keter and the end is Malkhut, and her extension and her emanation is from the supernal crown.254

250 Isaac the Blind, Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, appendix in Gershom Scholem, The Kabbalah in Provence, edited by Rivka Schatz (Jerusalem: Akkademon, 1970), p. 6 (Hebrew). 251 See Ben-​Shlomo, The Mystical Theology, pp. 268–​274. 252 Moses Cordovero, Sefer Yeṣirah im Perush Or Yaqar (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1989), p. 70. 253 Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), Introduction, 17a. Compare Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, edited by Yehudah Ohad Turjeman (Jerusalem: Makhon Ḥakhmei Yerushalayim we-​ha-​Ma‘arav, 2020), p. 7: “You already know that the tenth sefirah from above to below is called Aṭarah and the tenth from below to above is called Keter, and the matter of Keter and Aṭarah is one.” See ibid., p. 87, commenting on the statement “They will bestow on you a crown,” the opening of the qedushshah according to the Sephardic liturgy: “The crown refers to Keter, and the intention is to elevate Tif’eret and Aṭarah to Keter, so that they will be restored [to] Keter, and [the verse] ‘the light of the moon will be like the light of the sun’ (Isaiah 30:26) will be fulfilled, ‘and the Lord will be king over all the earth’ (Zechariah 14:9).” 254 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 4:6, p. 47. See ibid., 15:1, p. 191.

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Needless to say, the images of turning and rotating suggest a circular motion indicative of the sefirotic activity, but the forms of the straight and the restored light by which the latter is also described are manifestly linear. Insofar as the world of discrete entities continues to exist, a condition to which Cordovero refers in blatantly apocalyptic terms, “as long as the world is impaired on account of the filth of the serpent and the shell [kol od she-​ha-​olam be-​qilqul me-​zohamat ha-​naḥash we-​ha-​qelippah],” the providential power of God is manifest under the guise of the “time of action,” zeman ha-​ma‘aseh, which wavers in accord with the dual movement of procession and return. However, when the semblance of all particularity is obliterated and everything is brought back to the primal unity of nondifferentiation, then the “time of action” gives way to the “time of perpetuity,” zeman ha-​qiyyum, the “time of resurrection,” zeman ha-​teḥiyyah,255 that is, the time of eternity, the eternal time, so resolute that it timelessly endures the duration of time, extending circuitously, revolving sequentially. In an earlier study dedicated to a close reading of the kabbalistic teachings ascribed to Elijah ben Solomon, the Gaon of Vilna, I explored the intricate interweaving of temporality and textuality in kabbalistic theosophy; the emanation of the sefirot can be viewed concurrently as the narrative recitation of time and as the temporal inscription of narrative.256 It is precisely this hermeneutical assumption that underlies the kabbalistic perushei ma‘aseh bere’shit, commentaries on the first chapter of Genesis, which is read in a twofold sense as a tale with theogonic and cosmogonic application, in the words of Naḥmanides, ha-​katuv yagid ba-​taḥtonim we-​yirmoz ba-​elyonim, “Scripture speaks of lower matters and alludes to supernal matters.”257 I thus concur with Idel’s assessment that Cordovero “envisions time, zemannim, as pointing simultaneously to theosophical powers and to their mundane, temporary manifestations. … ‘Time’ is conceived to be but another term for the historia divina.”258 Just as events below are in the mold of what is above, so time itself may be viewed on two planes of reality: the transitory patterns in the physical universe partake of the “timeless time” of divine energy in which everything is contained

2 55 Ibid., 2:6, p. 21. 256 Elliot R. Wolfson, “From Sealed Book to Open Text: Time, Memory, and Narrativity in Kabbalistic Hermeneutics,” in Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age, edited by Steven Kepnes (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 145–​178. 257 Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah, 1: 15 (ad Genesis 1:2). See Wolfson, “By Way of Truth,” pp. 110–​111 n. 25. On the problem of creation and commentaries on ma‘aseh bere’shit in thirteenth-​century kabbalah, see Gottlieb, Studies, pp. 18–​28, 59–​87. 258 Idel, “Some Conceptions,” pp. 163, 165.

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contemporaneously, the fullness of time calibrating the never-​ending depletion of the infinite will. In the language of one zoharic passage: R. Ḥezeqiah began to expound and said, “There is a time for everything, and a moment for every desire under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Come and see: With respect to everything that the blessed holy One made below, he established a fixed instant and time. … What is [the meaning of] “a moment for every desire?” A time and occasion for everything, for the whole of the will that is found below.259 Affixed to every temporal event below is an appropriate time above that is expressive of the eternal will revealed in the procession of the sefirotic potencies from the infinite. Time and eternity, accordingly, are not to be construed as logical antinomies resolved by a dialectic synthesis that effaces difference in the affirmation of the nonidentity of identity, but as ontic variations held together in the identity of nonidentity, an indistinctiveness that preserves the distinctiveness of one and the other, the time of eternity manifestly concealed in the eternity of time.260 Already in Sefer ha-​Bahir, long considered one of the most important early textual aggregates to espouse the mytho-​theosophic orientation that has been identified as the singular contribution of the medieval kabbalistic tradition, the days of creation are interpreted as ciphers of the divine attributes.261 Building on the ancient wisdom transmitted in the Bahir, subsequent kabbalists made

259 Zohar 1:194a. For an extended discussion of the kabbalistic notion of time as an expression of the divine will, see Ḥaviva Pedaya, Naḥmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003), pp. 274–​313 (Hebrew). 260 I am here influenced by the description of sacred time in William Brede Kristensen, The Meaning of Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion, with an introduction by Hendrik Kraemer, translated by John B. Carman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 377–​388, esp. 386–​387. Kristensen focuses on the example of Zurwān, the supreme God of Zoroastrianism, who is identified as infinite time and in whom opposites are united, transforming finitude into infinity and temporality into eternity. See Robert C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, second edition (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1972). It is of interest to recall in this connection the comments of Salomon Rubin, Heidenthum und Kabbala. Die kabbalistische Mystik, ihrem Ursprung wie ihrem Wesen nach, gründlich aufgehellt und populär dargestellt (Wien: Commissions-​Verlag von Bermann and Altmann, 1893), pp. 33–​34, on the temporal implications of the designation Attiqa, the “ancient one,” one of the zoharic terms for the uppermost emanation. Rubin links the kabbalistic symbol to archaic traditions regarding the divine nature of time, including the Zoroastrian deity, Zurwān, and the Greco-​Roman Chronos or Saturn. 261 The Book Bahir, § 55, p. 151.

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a point of locating the ontological root of time more specifically in the seven lower attributes, the sefirot ha-​binyan, “emanations of the edifice,”262 that is, the potencies that correspond to the temporal dimensions of finitude, which are sometimes called yamim ri’shonim, “primordial days” (Deuteronomy 4:32),263 yemot olam, “days of old” (ibid. 32:7),264 or, in the language of the zoharic kabbalists based on these earlier formulations, yomin ila’in, “supernal days,”265 and yomin qadma’in, “primeval days.”266 The tenor of this temporality is brought into clearer focus in the following passage from the thirteenth-​century work, Sefer ha-​Yiḥud, by the Provençal kabbalist, Asher ben David: On the basis of the tradition all of these attributes in the six extremities are also called “garden” [gan], as it says, “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east” (Genesis 2:8), that is to say, from before [mi-​qedem]267 the creation of the world … and, in truth, Eden refers to Ḥokhmah, the inception of all the emanations [ro’sh le-​khol ha-​sefirot], which is intimated in the word bere’shit (ibid., 1:1), and the Targum 262 On the use of the term binyan to denote the sefirotic edifice, see Ezra of Gerona, Perush Shir ha-​Shirim, in Kitvei Ramban, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1964), 2: 483; Georges Vajda, Le commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone sur le cantique des cantiques (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1969), pp. 169–​170; Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​ Aggadot le-​Rabbi Azri’el, edited with emendations, notes, introduction, and indexes by Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982), p. 49; idem, “Seridim ḥadashim mi-​kitvei Rabbi Azri’el mi-​Gerona,” edited by Gershom Scholem, in Sefer Zikkaron le-​Asher Gulak we-​li-​Shemu’el Klein(Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1942), p. 222; commentary on creation by Joseph ben Samuel in Jacob ben Sheshet, Sefer Meshiv Devarim Nekhoḥim, edited by Georges Vajda, introduction by Georges Vajda and Ephraim Gottlieb (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1968), p. 193. 263 For instance, Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León, R. Moses de León’s Sefer Sheqel ha-​Qodesh, critically edited and introduced by Charles Mopsik with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1996), p. 6 (Hebrew); Zohar 2:22a, 232a. 264 Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah, 1: 30–​31 (ad Genesis 2:1); 2: 166 (ad Leviticus 25:2), 413–​414 (ad Deuteronomy 15;11), 486 (ad Deuteronomy 32:7). On the use of the related expression yemei olam, see Perushei ha-​Torah, 1: 18 (ad Genesis 1:7), 32 (ad Genesis 2:5), 416 (ad Exodus 21:6), and 2: 166 (ad Leviticus 25:20), 394 (ad Deuteronomy 11:18). On the technical terminology used by Naḥmanides to denote the divine conception of time manifest in creation, see Pedaya, Naḥmanides, pp. 213–​232. 265 Zohar 1:3b. In Zohar 3:89b, the attribute of Binah, the third from the top, is called shiv‘at yamim, “seven days,” since it comprises the lower seven sefirot, which are the supernal days that correspond to the days of creation. 266 Zohar 3:134b. See Tishby, The Wisdom, p. 283. 267 The expression mi-​qedem can assume two connotations, “from the east” (the sensus literalis of the verse) and “from before” (the meaning assumed by Asher ben David).

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Yerushalmi translates it as be-​ḥokhmata [“by means of wisdom”], and the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said,268 “even [the word] bere’shit is [to be considered] a saying” [in the tally of the ten sayings by means of which the world was created]. Hence, Eden is the inner Wisdom [ha-​ḥokhmah ha-​penimit] in which are engraved the thirty-​two paths of wisdom, and it is like a spring and like the root for all of them and for the garden. And the garden is like a tree that has many branches, from its head to its foundation, and it is nourished constantly from the root, which is the spring that comes forth from Ein Sof, and it spreads forth from the source without separation and without cessation, without day or hour, even a second, and this is the intent of what is written “the river goes forth from Eden to irrigate the garden” (Genesis 2:10). River [nahar] is from nehora, and this is the inner light [ha-​or ha-​penimi] that issues constantly from Eden. Therefore it says “goes forth” [yoṣe] and it did not say “went forth” [yaṣa], for it does not cease, and in every moment it emanates in the attributes [we-​khol et hu mitpasheṭ ba-​middot].269 Along similar lines, Azriel of Gerona applied the aforementioned rabbinic idiom seder zemannim to the sefirotic emanations as they are the “orders of creation,” sidrei bere’shit, manifest in the phenomenal plane of existence: “The order of the emanations [seder ha-​sefirot], which is a boundary without boundary [gevul mi-​beli gevul], is called270 in Bere’shit Rabbah the ‘order of times,’ as the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said [the verse] ‘it was evening and it was morning’ [wa-​yehi erev wa-​yehi voqer] indicates that there was an order of time before this,271 and they are called the ‘orders of creation’ [sidrei bere’shit].”272 2 68 Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 32a. 269 Asher ben David, R. Asher ben David: His Complete Works and Studies in his Kabbalistic Thought, edited by Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1996), p. 75 (Hebrew). 270 This word is lacking in the printed edition that I have consulted (see reference below, n. 272). I have restored it on the basis of the citation of Azriel’s passage in Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh, 1:8, p. 20. 271 See above, n. 197. 272 Azriel of Gerona, Be’ur Eser Sefirot, in Ma‘yan Moshe, edited by Moshe Schatz (Jerusalem, 2011), p. 90. Azriel’s text resembles a catechism and thus it is also known as Sha‘ar ha-​ Sho’el. It was also copied in some manuscripts as She’elot u-​Teshuvot ba-​Qabbalah. See, for example, ms London, British Library Add. 27173, fol. 15a. See Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​ Tefillot, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1938, fol. 213b: “The ordered elevated things [devarim elyonim ha-​seddurim], which are called the ‘orders of creation’ [sidrei bere’shit], the times [zemannim] that are from the potency of mercy [koaḥ raḥamim].” For a slightly different version, see Gavarin, “R. Azriel of Gerona—​Perush ha-​Tefillah,” part 4, p. 22 (the most significant variant is the apparent corruption at the beginning devarim elyonim harim); and compare the translation in Sed-​Rajna, Commentaire, p. 71: les choses d’en haut appelées

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The divine emanations—​whether understood in essentialist or instrumentalist terms—​embrace a fundamental paradox enunciated in Azriel’s evocative expression gevul mi-​beli gevul, “boundary without boundary,” that is, the sefirot are bounded from the perspective of being limited in number—​they are ten and not eleven, ten and not nine, and so forth—​but they are unbounded inasmuch as they embody/​enclothe the light of the infinite.273 Analogously, the expression seder zemannim communicates the paradox in temporal terms, the sefirot may be described as the time without time, a fourth dimension of time beyond the three dimensionality of mundane time.274 The matter is clarified from another remark of Azriel in his commentary on select talmudic legends. In consonance with one of the philosophical approaches that prevailed in the Middle Ages, Azriel asserts that “time [zeman] is in the class of things that are created, and before the world was created there was no moment [et] and no time [zeman].”275 How, then, is one to understand ‘ordres de la création’: les cycles temporels qui relèvent de la puissance de Miséricorde. Sed-​Rajna translates zemannim as les cycles temporels based on the parallel text from Azriel’s Perush Eser Sefirot that applies the midrashic idiom seder zemannim to the sefirot. Compare the explication of Genesis 1:5 in Ezra of Gerona, Perush Shir ha-​Shirim, p. 506. See Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Tefillot, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1938, fol. 223a, where the term dorot, glossed as generaciones (‫)גינרשיאנש‬, is interpreted as the “supernal causes that surround the days of the generation” (sibbot elyonot ha-​maqqifot yemot ha-​dor). See Gavarin, “R. Azriel of Gerona—​Perush ha-​Tefillah,” part 4, p. 34 (the Spanish term is there transcribed as ‫ ;)גינירסונש‬Sed-​Rajna, Commentaire, p. 97. Commenting on the meaning of this passage, Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, translated by Allan Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 421 n. 134, writes that the reference is to “the primordial depths of becoming, ‘the supreme causes of everything temporal.’” It behooves me to say that Scholem’s remark is a paraphrase rather than a verbatim translation of Azriel’s text, but I do think he captured the authorial intent. For a learned presentation of the philosophic (mostly Neoplatonic) and gnostic elements that may have contributed to the representations of time in Azriel’s treatises, see Gavarin, “The Conception of Time,” pp. 309–​336. 273 This paradox is reiterated by Azriel in his explanation of the term eser sefirot belimah in Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, in Kitvei Ramban, 2: 453: They are called sefirot “because they are the potency of everything delimited in the quantity of ten,” and the adjective belimah denotes that “they are the opening to the infinite, for God cannot be fathomed, he has no substance [mahut], and he is without-​whatness [belimah].” 2 74 See the comment of Judah Loewe of Prague, Be’er ha-​Golah, vol. 1, 4:16, p. 533: “The time that was before [creation] is the order of time [seder zemannim], not a particular time [zeman meyuḥad], for if there were a particular time, Scripture would have mentioned it, but rather the order of time, that is, the matter of time [inyan ha-​zeman].” For other relevant passages in Maharal’s oeuvre, see the sources provided by the editor, op. cit., nn. 1278–​1279. 275 Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Aggadot, p. 101. On the inability to classify the divine in terms of our notions of space or time, see the Iggeret le-​Burgos attributed to Azriel and

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the words “a source of delight [sha‘ashu‘im] every day [yom yom]” (Proverbs 8:30), the prooftext utilized in rabbinic dicta276 to anchor the idea that the Torah was created two thousand years prior to the world’s coming into being? Those days are not the days of humanity [yemei adam], for the measure [middah] of the days of humanity was not yet made, and those days were from the days whence are the years that cannot be probed, as it is written, “God is greater than we can know; the number of his years cannot be counted” (Job 36:26), and it is written, “Are your days the days of a mortal, are your days the years of a man?” (ibid., 10:5). Rather, when it arose in thought to bring the will that does not cease [ha-​raṣon she-​eino poseq] into actuality [le-​ma‘aseh], the Torah was created, which preceded [the world] by two thousand years, which are the two days. … These years and days that cannot be probed already were prior to the apportioning of the splendor of wisdom to create therefrom the Torah that comprises its paths … and in its power are found the moments [ittim] and times [zemannim] that are for the need of this world. … It says in Bere’shit Rabbah, “R. Judah bar Simon said: It does not say ‘let it be evening,’ but rather ‘and it was evening.’ From here [we can deduce that] there was an antecedent order of time.” The order of time refers to the years that cannot be probed, as it says, “your years never end” (Psalms 102:28). … And the import of seder zemannim according to the opinion of the sages is that the order does not cease since they emanate from a cause that does not cease, but the finite times [ha-​zemannim ha-​mugbalim] cease since they are from the potency of a finite order [seder mugbal], and they resort to being as they were initially, and thus it will be permanently, for in their end they return to their beginning.277 It would appear that the distance separating the divine and the mundane modes of temporality is not traversable: the duration (meshekh) that can be spoken of in conjunction with the sefirot is a timeless time, a temporal surge that is the measure of the immeasurable stream of light issuing forth without pause from the infinite source; by contrast, the time (zeman) that is ascribed to corporeal bodies is, as the bodies themselves, finite and calculable. Yet, there published by Gershom Scholem, “The Traditions of R. Jacob and R. Isaac the Sons of R. Jacob ha-​Kohen,” Madda‘ei Yahadut 2 (1927): 233 (Hebrew). 276 Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 1:1, pp. 1–​2, 8:2, p. 57; Midrash Shemot Rabbah, 30:9, p. 326; Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah, 19:1, pp. 412–​413; Midrash Rabbah: Shir ha-​Shirim, 5:7, p. 131. 2 77 Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Aggadot, pp. 101–​102.

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is one aspect of the latter that mirrors the former, the circular quality of the lifecycle, the arc extending backward to the beginning that reverts forward to the end. In another passage, which may have been the fitting continuation of the above citation,278 Azriel explicates the following midrashic comment on the verse “On the day that Moses finished” (Numbers 7:1): “Rav said that in every place where it says ‘and it was’ [wa-​yehi], it refers to something that stops for many days and it returns to what it was.”279 According to Azriel, “From here we can learn that even though the times cease because they have reached the end of their limit, and they cease in the cessation of everything finite, the order that causes them does not cease from being, for there is no end to its cause, and even the finite times [ha-​zemannim ha-​mugbalim] revert to what they were, and it causes them to return to their beginning.”280 For Azriel, then, seder zemannim is interpreted as a terminus technicus to denote what I have been calling timeless time, the measure of the order of the sefirot that “does not cease since they emanate from the cause that does not cease, but the finite times cease since they are from a finite order, and they revert to what they were in the beginning, and thus it is permanently such that in their end they return to their beginning.”281 Mundane time approximates the ceaselessness of timeless time in the nature of cosmic cyclicality, things returning in their end to their beginning, the luminal emanations themselves often depicted in medieval kabbalistic literature by the description of the sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah mentioned above, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end.” In the final remark concerning the “permanent” return of all things to their beginning, Azriel alludes to the eschatological doctrine of apokastasis, the return of the many to the one, which, in this context, is formulated in temporal terms.282 However, as Azriel explicitly notes in another passage, it is possible to view the lower sefirot through the prisms of place (maqom) and time (zeman), 2 78 See comment of Tishby in Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Aggadot, p. 102 n. 17. 279 I have translated the passage as it appears in the published version of Azriel’s text; see following note for reference. The text reconstructed in Buber’s edition of Midrash Tanḥuma, Naso, 24, is slightly different (parallel sources are noted by Buber, p. 37 n. 121). The interpretation attributed to Rav is ascribed therein to Simeon ben Yoḥai, which is posed as an alternative explanation attributed to Rabbi, “in every place that it says ‘and it was’ [wa-​ yehi], it is something novel [davar ḥadash].” 280 Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Aggadot, p. 113. 281 Ibid., p. 102. 282 On apokastasis in the early kabbalah, see Scholem, Origins, pp. 298, 470; idem, Major Trends, pp. 224 and 402 n. 65. See also the more recent analysis in Pedaya, Naḥmanides, pp. 233–​273.

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attested, for instance, in the fact that they are referred to as “seven extremities of place,” sheva qeṣawwot maqom,283 and/​or as “seven days of creation,” shiv‘at yemei bere’shit.284 From this vantage point time and space cannot be separated.285 Certainly, no kabbalist would predicate either space or time as coordinates of the physical world to God, since God is thought to be beyond the material universe,286 but there is an alternative understanding of space and time that emerges from the use of spatial and temporal metaphors to describe the divine; indeed, for the kabbalist, time and space in the mundane sphere ideally should be understood from this symbolic perspective. The realm of sefirotic potencies is constructed imaginally as a continuum of events that can be pictured either as an externalization of the internal or as an internalization of the external, the former yielding the idea of space that is without boundary and the latter the idea of time that is without limit. A formulation of the early-​romantic poet Novalis is especially pertinent, even though it is obviously reflective of a different hermeneutical perspective: Zeit ist innerer Raum—​ Raum ist aüßere Zeit, “Time is inner space—​space is external time.”287 The 283 The expression sheva qeṣawwot maqom is attested in a manuscript version (ms Moscow, Guenzburg 133, from the late-​fifteenth or early-​sixteenth century Germany) of the long recension of Sefer Yeṣirah 4:3. See Gruenwald, “Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 157, § 38; Asher ben David, R. Asher ben David, p. 84. The more accepted reading is sheva qeṣawwot, which correspond to the seven double letters, one of the three divisions of the twenty-​ two Hebrew letters according to the second part of Sefer Yeṣirah. As the relevant passage makes clear, the seven extremities comprise the six directions (above, below, east, west, north, and south) and the holy palace that is set in the middle. Azriel’s usage is preceded by Ezra of Gerona, Perush Shir ha-​Shirim, pp. 488 and 507. It is of interest to note that in the commentary to this passage in Sefer Yeṣirah, which preserves the teachings of Isaac the Blind, the seven doubles are described as the “inner realities,” penimiyyot, which have branches, anafim, corresponding to the “seven days, seven weeks, seven years, and seven sabbaticals.” The author of this statement places the focus on the temporal as opposed to the spatial implied by the “seven extremities of place.” See Gavarin, “The Conception of Time,” p. 310. 284 Azriel of Gerona, Perush ha-​Aggadot, pp. 80–​81. 285 The convergence of time and space in kabbalistic doctrine has been noted independently and with a different emphasis by Ḥaviva Pedaya, “The Divinity as Place and Time and the Holy Place in Jewish Mysticism,” in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land—​Proceedings of the International Conference in Memory of Joshua Prower, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1998), pp. 84–​111. 286 This is not to deny that some kabbalists expressed a monistic orientation, but, in my judgment, those who did so were more inclined to an acosmism that denies the independence of the world vis-​à-​vis God rather than to a pantheism that undermines the transcendence of God vis-​à-​vis the world. 287 Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon, cited in Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism From Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History (Albany: Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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dimensionality of each instant/​point charted in the timespace of the sefirotic graph can be demarcated as duration of a blink or as extension of a swerve. 4

Temporal Ontology/​Eventful Grammar

The correlation of the seven days of creation and the seven lower sefirot, widely attested in kabbalistic literature, would seem to suggest that the upper three sefirot transcend the temporal categorization altogether. Ṭodros Abulafia, a Castilian kabbalist active in the second half of the thirteenth century and possibly a member of the zoharic circle, perhaps even serving as the historical model for the fictional master of the imaginary fraternity, Simeon bar Yoḥai, known honorifically by the acronym Rashbi,288 appears to have adopted this view: “It is known that the sefirot are called ‘days’ [yamim] and they are called ‘sayings’ [ma’amarot]. There is no day that can be applied to the first three, but six of them correspond to the days of creation in which all supernal things emerged from potentiality to actuality and corresponding to them in the lower things, and the seventh is the ‘sabbath to the Lord’ (Exodus 20:10) ‘for in it he rested from all his labor’ (Genesis 2:3).”289 What inspired this comment is the obvious discrepancy between two symbolic images applied to the divine emanations, the biblical motif of the seven days of creation, on the one hand, and the rabbinic doctrine of the ten sayings by which the world was created, on the other hand. How can the emanations be called both “days” and “sayings” when there are seven of the former and ten of the latter? To maintain the symmetry of the two symbolic grids, not to mention avoiding a division within the Godhead, it is necessary to conceptualize the ten sayings and the seven days under one rubric that combines the characteristic of time implied by the

State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 222. For an alternative rendering, see Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 136: “Time is inner space – space is outer time. (Synthesis of these) Time figures etc. Space and time originate at the same time. The energy of temporal individuals is measured by space – the energy of spatial individuals by time (duration)” (emphasis in original). See ibid., p. 134: “Time and space come into being together and are therefore probably one, like subject and object. Space is enduring time – time is fluid, variable space. Space – the basis of everything enduring – time – the basis of everything changeable. Space is the schema – time the concept – the action (genesis) of this schema. For every moment my thinking must add a moment before and after.” 288 Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephane Nakache, and Penina Peli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 130, 135–​138. 2 89 Ṭodros Abulafia, Sha‘ar ha-​Razim, edited with introduction and annotation by Michal Kushnir-​Oron (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1989), p. 58. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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concept of “days” and the characteristic of language implied by the concept of “sayings”—​an ontology of temporality that discloses a grammar of eventality. Precisely at the coupling of the temporal and the linguistic, the autogenesis of that which always is, which fosters the redemptive possibility of return to what has never been, must be thought. It is no surprise, then, that some kabbalists have explicitly maintained that the concept of time extends to all ten sefirot. An interesting formulation of this idea is found in Joseph Karo’s sixteenth-​century mystical diary, Maggid Mesharim, in a passage where the author explicates the traditional qaddish prayer. Commenting on the words “in your days,” Karo writes, “the unifications of the sefirot, which are called ‘days,’ that is, the flux of life in Tif’eret, and from there is the overflow of life to all the sefirot and through this they are all unified.” Even more telling is Karo’s interpretation in the continuation of the text of the words “in a proximate time,” “in the drawing close and union of the sefirot, which are called ‘time’ [zeman], in the secret of ‘this instructs that there was an order of time [seder zemannim] before this,’ which is said about the sefirot.”290 In a second passage from his diary, Karo elaborates the conception of divine temporality as it relates specifically to the issue of ritual purity illustrated by the case of the leper: If so the import of “in the day of his cleansing” (Leviticus 14:2) is that on the day that his cleansing is attained he will be cleansed, for matters are not renewed each day, as it says, “There is a time for everything, and a moment for every desire” (Ecclesiastes 3:1), that is, all the emanations overflow to Yesod, for “everything” [kol] refers to Yesod, and “time” [zeman] refers to the sefirot that are above it in the secret of [the rabbinic dictum] “this teaches that there was an order of time [seder zemannim] prior to this.” And the “moment” [et] refers to the Assembly of Israel [kenesset yisra’el], and “desire” [ḥefeṣ] refers to the sefirot above her, that is, an overflow comes to the Assembly of Israel from the sefirot that are above her. Thus, there are days and gradations allocated for this matter and others for other matters. And this is [the import of] “under heaven” [taḥat ha-​shamayim] (Ecclesiastes 3:1), that is, in the seven emanations of the edifice [sefirot ha-​binyan] that are beneath the supernal heavens, which are the three upper ones, for there everything is unified and there is no differentiation of gradations [perishu de-​dargin].291 290 Joseph Karo, Sefer Maggid Mesharim, edited by Yeḥiel Bar Lev (Petaḥ Tiqvah, 1990), pp. 53–​54. 291 Ibid., p. 245.

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In this text, Karo presents the emanative overflow from above to below as a temporal process, linking it more specifically to the verse la-​kol zeman we-​et le-​khol ḥefeṣ taḥat ha-​shamayim, “There is a time for everything, and a moment for every desire under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Parsing the verse kabbalistically, Karo remarks that zeman, “time,” denotes the influx of light to Yesod, designated by the term kol, an idea that he connects (following much older sources) with the rabbinic notion of seder zemannim, the order of time prior to creation. Karo also deduces from this verse that Shekhinah is et, the “moment,” which likewise receives the influx from above, the desire (ḥefeṣ) expressive of the execution of the divine will. The sefirotic pleroma is thus divided: the lower seven, which correspond to the days of creation, are marked by the transition from night to day, whereas the upper three are unified in a manner that is beyond differentiation, a time that allows for no temporal distinctions. To illustrate the point, I will cite and analyze a passage from Pitḥei She‘arim, a treatise composed by the Lithuanian kabbalist Isaac Eisik Ḥaver Wildmann, which highlights the link between temporality and textuality in the theosophic ruminations of the Gaon of Vilna to which I briefly alluded above.292 This is the principle of time, which is divided into three stages, past, future, and present, and there are three books by means of which the world was created, which are the three names of yhwh, for each book [sefer] is a name [shem] … and this is the secret of the threefold Torah. It says, “days were formed” (Psalms 139:16), the secret of created time, the seven days of creation, wherein everything is contained [ha-​kol bi-​khelal] … and they are dependent on the six primordial ones. These are alluded to in the seven words of the verse “In the beginning etc.” (Genesis 1:1), and from there volition is suspended. “And to him one belongs” (ibid.),293 the secret of the first three aspects of the head that is not known, for there he is above time [lema‘lah me-​ha-​zeman] and there he is in the secret of the unity [sod ha-​yiḥud], for the revealed time [ha-​zeman ha-​galuy] of the six days of creation is hidden there in the alef, for, as it is known, alef is the most hidden of all the letters, and it instructs about the secret of the unity of the three aspects of the head that is not known concerning which there is no comprehension. Thus, the Torah did not begin with alef but with beit, bere’shit, for it is from the secret of the lower seven aspects 2 92 For reference, see above, n. 256. 293 That is, following the oral tradition of the masoretic reading (qeri), we-​lo eḥad ba-​hem, “and to him one belongs,” as opposed to the orthographic tradition (ketiv), we-​lo eḥad ba-​ hem, “and not one of them.”

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of Attiq and below. Therefore [the word lo] is vocalized orally with a waw, and it is written with alef, in thought and not in speech.294 The longstanding assumption on the part of kabbalists that time depicts the dynamic recounting of the divine potencies is expressed in the above citation through the symbolic correlation of the three tenses of time, the triple repetition of the Tetragrammaton, and the three books by means of which the world was created, an idea based on the numerical equivalence of sefer, “book,” and shem, “name,” that is, both words equal 340, and also on the opening paragraph of Sefer Yeṣirah, where it is stated that God created the world by means of three books.295 The tripartite temporal structure is associated as well with the rabbinic idiom oryan telita’ah, “threefold Torah.”296 The utilization of this terminology is predicated no doubt on the presumed identity of Torah and God, a belief affirmed axiomatically by kabbalists through the ages. Insofar as Torah is identical with God, it follows that the three divisions of Scripture depict a triunity within the divine. In the beginning of the section from which the above citation was extracted, Wildmann distinguished between the upper three and lower seven aspects of the highest configuration (parṣuf) of God, which is called Attiq, the “ancient one.” The upper three—​the “head that is not known” according to the zoharic jargon297—​are “fixed” in the “temporal deportment everlastingly [hanhagot ha-​zeman le-​niṣḥiyyut] … since they arise to the secret of the primal anthropos [adam qadmon] in which there is a disclosure of the secret of unity in truth [gilluy sod ha-​yiḥud be-​emet].” In that place, we can locate the attributes of

294 Isaac Eisik Ḥaver Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1964), pt. 1, Seder ha-​parṣufim, § 10, 84a. 295 Gruenwald, “Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 140, § 1. 296 The expression is derived from the Aramaic blessing uttered by a Galilean (galila’ah) before Rav Ḥisda as it is preserved in Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88a: Berikh raḥamana dihav orya’n telita’i le-​am telita’i al yedei telita’i be-​yom telita’i be-​yarḥa telita’i, “Blessed be the merciful one who gave the threefold Torah to the tripartite nation through the agency of the one who is third on the third day of the third month.” This motif is found elsewhere in rabbinic texts, expressed, however, in the equivalent Hebrew formulation torah meshulleshet. See Midrash Tanḥuma, Yitro, 10, 1: 317; Pesiqta de-​Rav Kahana, 12:13, pp. 213–​ 214; Midrash Mishle, edited by Burton L. Visotzky (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), ch. 22, pp. 153–​154. From these passages it is clear that the threefold character of Torah refers to the Tanakh, the tripartite division of the canon, torah, nevi’im, and ketuvim. 297 Zohar 3:288b, 289a, 289b (Idra Zuṭa). In Zohar 1:65a, there is reference to the “will that is not known,” which is also depicted as the “head that is more concealed above.”

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knowledge (yedi‘ah) and volition (beḥirah), matters that are described en passant as objects that the “wise of heart” (ḥakhmei lev) desire. Concerning the former, we can only say that it is inscrutable and thus it is associated symbolically with the upper three aspects. By contrast, the matter of volition is linked to the lower seven aspects of Attiq, for it stems “from the secret of the union of forty-​five and fifty-​two that is in each and every soul.” Forty-​five and fifty-​two connote two permutations of yhwh, yw”d h”a wa”w h”a (10 + 6 + 4 + 5+ 1 + 6 + 1+ 6 + 5 + 1) and yw”d h”h w”w h”h (10 + 6 + 4 + 5 + 5 + 6 + 6 + 5 + 5), two gesticulations of the name that correspondingly symbolize overflowing masculine mercy and constricting feminine judgment. The temporalizing of the supernal will is manifest in the dyad of gender dimorphism,298 but the male and female potencies comprise the lower seven aspects, which correspond to the seven days of creation, also associated with seven of the eight kings of Edom. In contrast to the lower seven, in the upper three, the “temporal deportment” (hanhagot ha-​zeman), which is identified as well as the “root of time” (shoresh ha-​zeman), is fixed everlastingly. In that root, temporality and eternality are not set as polar opposites but as two facets of one reality. The matter is elaborated in another passage from Pitḥei She‘arim, “in every day new emendations are produced, and after all the emendations are expended, then the six thousand years will be completed, and they will all ascend to the Mother in the seventh millennium, to the secret of eternality [sod ha-​niṣḥiyyut], and there they will receive their reward and they will rise from level to level until Arikh Anpin who is above time, for his growth is not by way of time as in the case of Ze‘eir Anpin. The division of time into five gradations—​minutes, hours, days, months, and years—​is a deep matter, for time is in the male and female, the secret of the forty-​five and fifty-​two.”299 Kabbalistically interpreting the eschatological conception of the cosmic sabbatical cycle transmitted in the name of R. Qaṭina, six thousand years of history followed by a thousand years of desolation,300 Wildmann characterizes the seventh millennium as the elevation of everything to the mother, a stock designation of the third emanation, Binah, the womb whence the lower seven sefirot emerge and whither they shall return. A similar account of the eschatological return of everything to Binah in the seventh millennium is presented in the commentary on Sifra di-​Ṣeni‘uta attributed to Elijah ben Solomon:

2 98 Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, Gadlut di-​ze‘eir anpin, § 36, 53b. 299 Ibid., Seder ha-​parṣufim, § 10, 83b. 300 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a.

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The matter is that the six thousand years are the six days wherein the six extremities [Ḥesed to Yesod] are operative, and the seventh is Malkhut, and Malkhut depends on Binah, and she returns to her source. And this is the secret of Sabbath and the sabbatical year [sod ha-​shabbat u-​shemiṭṭah] in which work is forbidden, and the secret of the Jubilee [sod ha-​yovel] … and the world to come, which is in the secret of Aṭarah returning to Binah, and she is “the woman of valor, crown of her husband” (Proverbs 12:14). Then Binah rules and everything returns to Binah, to the womb of their mother, and this is the secret of the destruction of this world [ḥurban ha-​olam ha-​zeh], which is governed by means of Binah, the supernal world. … Thus, in the end of the sixth millennium, all of them are rectified by means of the eighth king,301 the mercy that is revealed in the world, and afterwards in the seventh millennium all of them will return to their mother, and the earth will be destroyed for it will be restored to its mother … And this is the secret of Sabbath, but Sabbath does not return to her root, to Binah, but rather Binah illumines her, not by means of the six extremities, the six days of creation, and she is equivalent to her, and thus the time for copulation [zeman ha-​ziwwug] is in it. The world to come, however, is in the pattern of Yom Kippur … and then the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads,302 the “crown of her husband” [aṭeret ba‘lah], and then there is no eating, no drinking, no procreation, as on Yom Kippur, the gradation of Binah, as it says in the Tiqqunim,303 for then she is in the secret of the crown [taga], a diadem [aṭarah] on the head, and “whoever makes use of the crown perishes” [we-​khol ha-​ mishtammesh be-​taga ḥalaf],304 for there is no intercourse [shimmush] when Malkhut is on the head of her husband, and there are no new souls, therefore “there is in it no eating etc.” And this is the secret of “the earth was destroyed,” and Binah remains alone, for all of them are concealed in her midst.305

301 That is, Hadar, the last of the eight kings that reigned in the land of Edom according to the delineation in Genesis 36:31–​39. 302 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 17a. 303 Tiqqunei Zohar, Introduction, 11b, and compare the passage from Ra‘aya Meheimna in Zohar 2:116a. 304 Mishnah, Avot 1:13. 305 Elijah ben Solomon, The Commentary of the Gaon Rabbi Elijah of Vilna to Sifra di-​Zeni‘uta, edited by Bezalel Naor (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 38 (Hebrew).

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The eschatological state of redemption, characteristic of the seventh millennium, the cosmic Sabbath or the desolation that follows the cycle of six millennia, is characterized both as the return of all things to the womb of Binah, the maternal fountainhead in the sefirotic pleroma, and as the escalation of Malkhut to the head of her husband; the latter image conveys the asceticism appropriate to redemption, a point exploited by the symbolic connection of Binah, the world to come, and Yom Kippur. In her transformed condition, the female is a crown on the male rather than a separate vessel to receive the seminal fluid, and consequently there is no intercourse. The transposition of the female to the status of the crown signifies, therefore, the ascetic eroticism suitable to the final phase of salvation.306 The temporal dimension of this transfiguration is accentuated by the fact that the seventh millennium is associated with the secret of eternality, the cosmic Sabbath, attained with the restitution of the six millennia, which correspond typologically to the six days of creation, to their ontic root, an ascent that culminates not with Binah but with Arikh Anpin, literally the “long-​ faced” and metaphorically the “long-​suffering,” the supreme manifestation of the Godhead, Keter, which is “above time.” The “root of time” is positioned in Ze‘eir Anpin, literally the “short-​faced” and metaphorically the “impatient,” the lower gradation that, in contrast to Arikh Anpin, is characterized by the opposition of left and right, judgment and mercy, female and male, night and day. We may deduce from this that temporality is connected inherently to a binarian structure, the fluctuation from darkness to light, personified in kabbalistic literature as feminine and masculine, whereas the attribute that is beyond polarity, including the dimorphic interplay of gender, the moment/​ place characterized by the coincidence of opposites, is above time. Expressed geometrically, the time above time is the linear circle or the circular line, which presumes a conjunction of male and female, the squaring of the circle and the circling of the square.307 The matter is rendered more complex, 3 06 See discussion in Wolfson, Language, pp. 365–​366. 307 It is of interest to note here the formulation in the stanza “New-​Bereshit” in the apocalyptic poem Metatron, published in 1922, by Aaron Zeitlin, translated in Nathan Wolski, Kabbalistic Yiddish: Aaron Zeitlin’s Mystical-​Messianic Poetics, with a foreword by Yitskhok Niborski (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2020), p. 53: “The square is not circle—​yet it is! The circle—​not square, yet it is!” The original Yiddish appears on p. 160. As Wolski points out, the epigraph to the stanza is an apparently pseudo-​zoharic statement “A circle emerging from a square” (iggula de-​nafiq mi-​go ribbu‘a). The expression iggula de-​nafiq mi-​go ribbu‘a is used in Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 76b, and compare Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 8a. Perhaps Zeitlin also had in mind the explication of the word sheveṭ in The Book Bahir, § 83, p. 169: “It is impossible to have a square within another square. Rather, the circle runs within the square [agullah be-go ribbu‘a de-​rahaṭei], and if it were a square within

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Chapter 2 a square, it would not run.” In the continuation, the circle is identified as the vowel point and the square as the face of the letter. Wolski suggests that a possible source for Zeitlin may have been the passage in Zohar Ḥadash, 57a (Qaw ha-​Middah), where the line-​of-​ measure is described as both a circle and a square. For citation of this text, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 67–​68. The circle symbolizes the masculine and the square the feminine. It is likely that this is implied in Zeitlin’s poem where the identity of the two geometric shapes presages the identity of male and female in the messianic future. The gender implications are evident in the passage from Simeon Lavi cited by Wolski, p. 54. Lavi interprets the use of the images of the circle and the square to refer respectively to Binah and Malkhut in the explication of “My Sabbaths you are to observe” [et shabbetotai tishmoru] (Leviticus 19:30) in Zohar 1:5b: “I heard from my father who thus said precisely that [the word] et is to include the parameters of Sabbath [teḥum shabbat]. My Sabbaths—​this is the circle and the square within [da iggula we-​ ribbu‘a di-​lego], and they are two.” The language echoes Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 76b, and may also reflect the aforecited bahiric passage. On the identification of the circularity of the samekh as Binah and the squareness of the final mem as Malkhut, see Zohar 2:127a. Compare Zohar 2:180a, and see the description of the ring within the square in Zohar Ḥadash, 58b. A variation on this theme is the decoding of the word mi, which stands symbolically for Binah, as the yod within the final mem. See Tiqqunei Zohar, § 70, 134b, and Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei ha-​Zohar im Be’ur ha-​Gra (Vilna: Shemaryahu Zuckerman, 1867), 158a. I will retranslate the text from Simeon Lavi, Ketem Paz al Zohar Bere’shit, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Dorot, 2014), p. 56: “Know that the matter of the circle and the square by the masters of the secret is according to the way that was mentioned, and it is that they, peace be upon them, compared the supernal, concealed world to a circle, for the circle instructs about a matter that has no beginning or end as we know from its form … which is not the case with the form of the square, for its form is composed of four lines corresponding to four corners. This form instructs about the boundary of place, for each line begins in one corner and ends in another corner. Therefore, they attributed the square to Aṭarah because from her and below the corners were bounded in magnitude and measure, and they attributed the circle to the supernal, concealed world.” For a different interpretation of the gender valence of these geometric images, see my earlier surmise in Wolfson, Circle, pp. 66 and 185 n. 153. See, however, the various texts cited and analyzed, ibid., pp. 224–​226 n. 152, which proffer an interpretation that is closer to what I have adopted here. It should be evident that the title of my book was based on the assumption that the circle and the square are symbolic of male and female. Regarding this symbolism, see also Abrams, The Female Body, p. 47 n. 51. Compare Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Ma’amar Qesiṭah, in Sefer Ma’amerei ha-​Rav Menahem Azariah mi-​Fano, 2: § 63, p. 88: “The secret of this square, as the sage explained in Sefer Elimah, alludes to Binah, for under the governance [ha-​hanhagah] there are eight sefirot from Binah to Malkhut, and the two of them are together. The circle that comes forth from it is Tif’eret and the six extremities from Ḥesed to Yesod. From within this circle there emerges a small square [alluding] to Malkhut. … And in Sefer ha-​Bahir they said the circle runs [iggula rahiṭ]; that is, this is the secret of Tif’eret through the dominion of mercy, which is perpetual and without cessation … the square does not run [ribbu‘a lo rahiṭ], the secret of Malkhut in the dominion of judgment. … According to this way, we have found a circle within a square, a square within a circle we have not found.” The source to which Fano refers is the entry on “the circle and the square” in Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, p. 75: “Thus, we find a circle that comes forth from a square and a square that comes forth from a circle. With respect to the

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however, by the fact that, according to the mythologic deployed by kabbalists through the generations, attested already in thirteenth-​century texts, Keter is the indifferent one, the source wherein all things are unified in an identity of in-​difference, that is, the same is identically different in the difference that is identically the same.308 From this dialetheic as opposed to dialectic perspective—​predicated on the correlational juxtaposition of opposites in contrast to their coincidental identification—​it can, nay must, be said that eternity is not in opposition to temporality, but it is rather a more subtle manifestation of time, a timeless time, zeman she-​eino zeman, according to the formulation of Cordovero mentioned previously; that is, a time beyond the nocturnal/​diurnal division, a time that arises from an act of volition so spontaneous, so fully in the moment, that it can have no past or future, and, consequently, no representable present. An allusion to this conception of time that is no time, the timeless time of the moment that is all-​time, is found in a remark from Tiqqunei Zohar, the literary strata of zoharic literature composed in all likelihood in the first half of the fourteenth century in Castile. The passage I will cite occurs in the context of an exposition of the theosophic principle (well-​entrenched by the time of the composition of this text) that the various names of God are correlated with different limbs of the imaginal body, the term I have employed to describe the visual construction of the sefirot in the imagination of the kabbalist:

circle that comes forth from the square, the square is more important than the circle and greater than it, and with respect to the square that comes forth from the circle, the circle is more important than the square and greater than it. … Hence, Binah is the square, that is, the one that possesses eight sefirot, which are Binah, Ḥesed, Gevurah, Tif’eret, Neṣaḥ, Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut, and Tif’eret is the circle that emerges from the square [iggula de-​nafiq me-​ribbu‘a], and there is naught in him but the six extremities, which are Ḥesed, Gevurah, Tif’eret, Neṣaḥ, Hod, Yesod. The matter is that this circle is the circle constantly mentioned in Qaw ha-​Middah, that is, the emanation of the six extremities, which is the circular governance [hanhagah me‘uggelet], for the matter is not like the square, not the supernal square but the square that emerges from within the circle, that is, Malkhut. … Thus, in Sefer ha-​Bahir, they explained that the circle runs and the square does not run. The matter is that Tif’eret, the master of mercy, comports in the six extremities with a governance that draws the mercy perpetually without any impediment. … However, Malkhut is squared, that is, they are the secret of the four antinomical governances. … Therefore, the square does not run, that is, according to this, the line-​of-​measure is meted out sometimes in a circle, that is, the secret of the six extremities in the circular governance from the side of Tif’eret, or it is meted out in the square, that is, the secret of the four squared governances by the aforementioned way from the side of Malkhut.” 308 Wolfson, Language, pp. 95–​105.

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Ehyeh [Keter] [is set] atop being [al hawayah], and this breath-​of-​the-​ heart [hevel de-​libba] governs309 the voice of yhwh [Tif’eret]; it is the cause of all causes [illat al kol ha-​illot], hidden and concealed, and it is not revealed, and it governs and rules [rakhiv u-​shaliṭ] over everything. Ehyeh indicates that the cause of causes [illat ha-​illot] was, is, and shall be [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh], and it is the breath that rises to Ein-​Sof by means of which the cause of all causes governs [hevel de-​saliq ad ein sof u-​veih rakhiv illat al kol ha-​illot].310 Without exaggeration one could devote a whole chapter to the elucidation of this passage. Withstanding that temptation, however, I will confine my remarks to points most essential to our analysis. The name Ehyeh, which is assigned to Keter, the uppermost of the ten emanations, is described as being “beyond being,” al hawayah. The term hawayah may have a double signification in this context: first, as a generic noun that denotes the composite of being as such, that is, the being that comprises all beings, and, second, as a proper name assigned to that which can have no proper name, the (in)effable name, shem ha-​meforash, the Tetragrammaton (yhwh consists of the same letters as hwyh), but, in this case, as in numerous other sources, it is ascribed to Tif’eret. Confirmation of this interpretation may be elicited from the continuation whence we learn that Keter is the breath-​of-​the-​heart, hevel de-​libba, which governs the “voice of the Tetragrammaton,” qol yhwh, a symbolic reference to Tif’eret. Ehyeh is, moreover, the supernal cause that executes providence (literally, “rides upon”) all that exists, the supreme concealment that shows the way to the infinite, entitled the “cause of causes” (illat ha-​illot), in an effort to distinguish the foundation from Keter, the “cause of all causes” (illat kol ha-​illot). The first of the emanations renders visible an aspect of Ein Sof inasmuch as it conveys the paradoxical compresence of the three tenses comprised in the name; that is, the ineffable name, whether declaimed as Ehyeh or as yhwh, alludes symbolically to the fact that in the infinite was, is, and, will be, hayah howeh we-​yihyeh, past, present, and future are unified, the mystery of the threefold unity that is a unified trinity, a mystery apprehended as mystery by the spirit carried on the wings of the upward breath, the breath of the heart, that ascends to and vanishes in the impenetrable infinite.311 309 The expression I have translated as “governs” is rakhiv al, which literally means “rides upon.” My rendering reflects a metaphorical meaning of the root rkhb known in the time of the composition of this kabbalistic treatise. A likely source would have been Maimonides, The Guide, 1:70, p. 171; see discussion in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 44–​45. 310 Tiqqunei Zohar, § 70, 122b. 311 Both connotations, “ascend to” and “vanish in,” are implied by the root slq.

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The conception of temporality proffered in the aforecited passage is enhanced by considering the interpretation of it in the commentary on Tiqqunei Zohar that purports to transmit the teachings of the Vilna Gaon: “Ehyeh is upon hawayah,” that is to say, upon being [al meṣi’ut], for Ehyeh connotes being [hu leshon meṣi’ut], and as the commentators have explained, the verse ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exodus 3:14) instructs about what was, is, and shall be [moreh al hayah howeh we-​yihyeh]. That is to say, Ehyeh is iterated there three times, as it says, ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I was with you etc. and I shall be with you etc.”312 And afterwards it says, “ehyeh [sent me to you]” (ibid.), this [alludes to] the redemption in the present [ha-​ge’ullah be-​howeh].313 The name Ehyeh, in particular, illumines the secret of time as it pinpoints the junction of eternality and temporality instantiated in the moment wherein past, present, and future are no longer distinguishable. The Gaon of Vilna perceptively remarked that the third occurrence of Ehyeh alludes symbolically to “the redemption in the present.” The intent of this comment, I propose, is that salvation beckons the release from time through time.314 The paradoxical nature of the intemporal temporality exhibited by Keter is captured as well in the observation of Menaḥem Azariah da Fano that the number seven is linked to the “seven primordial kings,” the “beginning of the aspect of time in the supernal beings [teḥillah li-​veḥinat ha-​zeman ba-​elyonim], as it is written, ‘inquire about the first days’ (Deuteronomy 4:32), and above them are Ḥokhmah and Binah, concerning which the Torah said ‘I was a delight every day’ (Proverbs 8:30), in the secret of the day of the blessed holy One consisting of one thousand years, thus the Torah preceded the world by two thousand years, and these are the order of the times [seder zemannim] specified by the Torah without doubt, for Keter has no relation whatsoever to the aspect of time on account of its hiddenness, and this is the reason [the word] bere’shit is also a saying [ma’amar], for it is naught but the principle [kelal] of what consequent to it is action [ma‘aseh].”315 The lower seven sefirot correspond to the seven days of creation, Binah and Ḥokhmah to the order of time (or the two thousand years) prior

3 12 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 9b. 313 Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei ha-​Zohar im Be’ur ha-​Gra, 141b. 314 The kabbalistic gnosis, it seems to me, is conveyed by the Vedic wisdom expressed in the Maitrāyana-​Brāhmana-​Upanishad, 6:14, cited in Müller, The Upaniṣads, 2: 317: “he who worships time as Brahman, from him time moves away very far.” 315 Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Yonat Elem, ch. 38, in Sefer Ma’amerei ha-​Rav Menaḥem Azariah mi-​Fano, 1:48.

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to the creation, and Keter to the principle (kelal) of action (ma‘aseh) that is before any and all differentiation, the first of the ten sayings (ma’amarot) by means of which God created the world, according to the ancient rabbinic teaching,316 which were interpreted kabbalistically as one of the symbolic ways to depict the ten gradations of the pleromatic fullness of divine wisdom. Significantly, Keter is encoded in the opening word of the Torah, bere’shit, “in/​at the beginning,” the primary utterance that contains the other nine utterances, the boundless will manifestly hidden in the temporal unfolding of the eternally enfolded light hiddenly manifest in the eternal enfolding of the temporally unfolded light. Time proceeds timelessly from the beginningless inception of the origin coterminous with the before that has no after but the after that has no before. We can gain a better sense of this notion of time that is no time from the following remark of David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, another kabbalist that may have been part of the circle responsible for the early stage of the literary production of the zoharic anthology317: The secret of the venerable prayer is that it grows stronger, and it ascends from sefirah to sefirah until it reaches the will [raṣon] that is conjoined to Keter. Therefore, it is said at the end [of the prayer] yihyu le-​raṣon imrei fi (Psalms 19:15). When prayer reaches the place of the will [maqom ha-​raṣon], then all the gates from above to below are opened before him, and there is there no obstacle or impediment to his demands, for he is conjoined to the world of mercy [olam ha-​raḥamim] and, consequently, he can exact all his needs and requests. There is nothing opposing him, for he draws forth from the source of the will [maqor ha-​raṣon], and he is able to renew new miracles and wonders [leḥaddesh otot u-​moftim ḥadashim] as if in that very hour [sha‘ah] the world was created, and nothing stands opposing him. This is the secret of the dictum of the rabbis, blessed be their memory, “Progeny, livelihood, and sustenance are not dependent on merit [zekhuta] but on fortune [mazzla],”318 for everything depends on the world of mercy, which is the source.319 3 16 Mishnah, Avot 5:1, and see above, n. 268. 317 Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, pp. 89, 107, 111, 112, 114–​115, 119, 123, 126–​134. 318 Babylonian Talmud, Mo‘ed Qaṭan 28a. 319 David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, The Book of Mirrors: Sefer Mar’ot ha-​Ẓove’ot, edited by Daniel Chanan Matt (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), pp. 266–​267. On Keter as the source of time, see the comment of David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, op. cit., p. 194. I will not concern myself with the aspect of temporality linked to the kabbalistic conception of cosmic cycles (shemiṭṭot). For a brief background of this idea, see the comments of Matt in The Book of Mirrors, Introduction, pp. 31–​33.

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Through the plaiting of rabbinic and mystical themes that make up the fabric of this text, the reader is afforded an opportunity to consider some of the key hermeneutical assumptions that have informed the ontology of time proffered by kabbalists. The initial thing to note is the connection between temporality and prayer320—​if one plumbs the depth of the mystery of worship, one will comprehend the dynamics of time, a theme to which I will return below. Reiterating what was by his time the standard kabbalistic understanding of prayer, David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid characterizes the liturgical rite as an ascent of the worshipper’s will through the sefirotic pleroma to the will that is conjoined with Keter. The will is the expression of the infinite potency of Ein Sof in the ten sefirotic gradations whence it overflows to the chain of being that extends from the angelic to the mundane worlds.321 The mystical dimension of prayer, therefore, entails the contemplative elevation of the will to the “source of the will” (maqor ha-​raṣon), the dimension of infinity that is bound to Keter. The telos of worship is captured in the words from Psalms 19:15, yihyu le-​raṣon imrei fi, “May the words of my mouth be acceptable to you,” which are part of the meditation recited after the conclusion of the amidah, the traditional standing-​prayer. When the worshipper has climbed to the top of the ladder of prayer, the scala contemplativa, and he is bound to and absorbed in the “source of the will,” all his petitions are fulfilled since this source is the “world of mercy” (olam ha-​raḥamim)322 that has no opposing force of judgment, the 320 The thematic connection between liturgical worship and temporality expounded by medieval kabbalists should be seen as a sensitive attunement to the rabbinic institution of three daily statutory prayers. This is not the opportune place to elaborate on this issue, but suffice it to say that from a phenomenological standpoint the rabbinic conception of prayer, modeled on the priestly sacrificial rite, is intricately bound with the diurnal and nocturnal patterns of time. For discussion of the historical development of this rite, see Ezra Fleischer, “On the Beginnings of Obligatory Jewish Prayer,” Tarbiṣ 59 (1990): 397–​441 (Hebrew). 321 On the relationship of Ein Sof and Keter in the thought of David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, see the summary of Matt, in The Book of Mirrors, Introduction, p. 22. 322 Mention should be made of the fact that in David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, The Book of Mirrors, p. 264, the expression olam ha-​raḥamim, “world of mercy,” is applied to the upper three sefirot, as opposed to the first one exclusively. Compare David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Sefer ha-​Gevul, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2193, fol. 19a: “The white snow alludes to the supernal crown [keter elyon], which is called ‘snow,’ for it whitens in the whiteness of snow in which there is no redness.” See now the printed version, David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Sefer Hagevul, edited with annotations and commentaries by Bentsion Ben Levi Hacohen (New York: Bentsion Cohen, 2016), p. 98. For a criticism of the position taken by David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, see Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, p. 384: “I have found a clear proof for what I received from my teacher, the pious one, that there is no complete mercy [raḥamim gemurim] in the ten ineffable

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coincidentia oppositorum wherein all demerits are rendered meritorious, all guilt transmuted into innocence.323 In this place of conjunction—​a place tellingly described in one zoharic passage as “the place that is no place”324—​there is perfect harmony, indeed convergence, of the human and the divine wills. Moreover, in this place that is no place, the space of pure mercy, there is no opposite, nothing contrary, the place whence one can ascertain the temporal pulse of divine creativity, identified as fortune (mazzla), which the rabbis contrasted with merit (zekhuta), that is, the superfluity of grace that exceeds in its will to overflow every computable measure of justice, every circumscribed boundary of law. One who is conjoined to that spot is able “to renew new miracles and wonders [leḥaddesh otot u-​moftim ḥadashim] as if in that very hour [sha‘ah] the world was created.” Within the confines of fate is enshrined the secret of creation, a mystery that may be discerned further by considering David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid’s formulation, leḥaddesh otot u-​moftim ḥadashim, “to renew new miracles and wonders.” How does one renew that which is new? At first glance, this exhortation seems to be contradictory: if something is to be renewed, it cannot be new, and if new, it cannot be renewed. Yet, the language of renewing what is new is well suited to express the paradoxical nonidentification of change and permanence, novelty and repetition, characteristic of time. The one conjoined to the infinite through prayer comprehends time as the momentous and momentary renewal of what has always never been, an understanding that entails the ability to act miraculously, wondrously, in a manner unbound to causal sequence, recreating the moment in which the world was brought into being from nothing. The matter may be clarified by considering a passage in the Idra Rabba section of the zoharic compilation where the verse “But there shall be a continuous day [yom eḥad]—​it will be known to the Lord—​not day nor night, and

sefirot, to remove from the hearts of those who say concerning Keter that it is complete mercy. Rather, with respect to the ten ineffable sefirot, each one is comprised of judgment and mercy such that the ten will be twenty.” See ibid., p. 126, where the quality of “complete mercy” is applied to Ein Sof, referred to as ha-​ri’shon beli re’shit aḥaron beli aḥarit, “the first without beginning, the last without ending” (see above. n. 209), whereas “everything else is mercy and judgment, even Keter, for mercy and judgment were in Keter potentially.” On the attribution of the expression olam ha-​raḥamim to Ein Sof, the place of the “complete mercy” or the thirteen attributes of mercy, see the anonymous Be’ur ha-​Ilan shel Aseret Sefirot in ms Moscow, Guenzberg 90, fol. 29a. The position rejected by Isaac of Acre is attested in some zoharic passages. For my previous analyses of a selection of these texts, see references cited below, n. 327. 323 Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 222–​231. 324 Zohar 1:161b; Wolfson, Language, pp. 233 and 375.

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at the time of evening shall be light” (Zechariah 14:7) is applied exegetically to Arikh Anpin or Attiqa Qaddisha, the highest manifestation of the divine, also referred to as Attiq Yomin, the “Ancient of Days,” a title derived from the vision of the enthroned deity in Daniel 7:9. In the moment [zimna] that Attiq Yomin is aroused in the supernal arrayments, that one [ha-​hu] is called the “continuous day” [yom eḥad], for in the future his beard will be glorified [de-​veih zammin le’oqir diqneih] by means of it, as it is written, “But there shall be a continuous day—​ it will be known to the Lord” [yom eḥad hu yiwwada la-​yhwh]. “It” [hu] alone, more than everything else, that which comprises all [hu de-​khalil kolla], that which is called by the name that is known [hu de-​itqerei bi-​ shema yedi‘a]. As it has been taught: In the place that there is day there is night, for there is no day without night, and because that moment to come [zimna zeman] will be the glory of the beard [diqara de-​diqna], and it [hu] alone will be found, it is not called either “day” or “night.”325 An attentive reading of this passage yields important and fundamental insights into the kabbalistic conception of time. The first thing to note is that time is not set in diametric opposition to eternity; rather, one discovers two tiers of temporality that correspond to two formations of the divine, Arikh Anpin (or Attiq Yomin), which is in the position of Keter, and Ze‘eir Anpin, which comprises the sefirot from Ḥokhmah to Yesod;326 insofar as opposites coalesce in Arikh Anpin, the world wherein judgment is contained fully in mercy, the feminine in the masculine, an idea mythopoeically conveyed by the symbolic image of the single eye situated in the middle of the forehead,327 it is appropriately labeled the “continuous day,” yom eḥad, that is, the interval of time that is beyond the polarity of night and day, a temporal span that is continuously diurnal—​all

3 25 Zohar 3:134b (Idra Rabba). 326 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 270; Tishby, The Wisdom, p. 297. 327 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Gender and Heresy in the Study of Kabbalah,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 6 (2001): 247–​249 (Hebrew); idem, Venturing Beyond, pp. 219–​223. The kabbalistic notion of the single eye may be compared favorably to a similar symbol utilized by Böhme to depict the primal manifestation of the Ungrund, the mirror in and through which the imageless Absolute is manifest. See Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, third edition (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1979), pp. 331–​336. On the possible influence of kabbalah in the writings of Böhme, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Holy Cabala of Changes: Jacob Böhme and Jewish Esotericism,” Aries—​ Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018): 21–​53, and reference to other scholars cited on p. 22 n. 1.

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shadows of dark dissolved in the shimmer of light. By contrast, the lower form, Ze‘eir Anpin, contains judgment and mercy as distinct attributes, and thus it is characterized by the sequence of night and day. What is critical to emphasize is that even though there is neither day nor night in Arikh Anpin, the event of its arousal is demarcated by the temporal term zimna, which I have rendered “moment” to capture the sense of spontaneous diremption or recurrent irruption, that is, the summoning of what will be in the expectation of what has been the summoning of what will be, zimna zeman, the moment that is to be momentarily.328 Ḥaver, in accord with the symbolic language of Luria, positions Adam Qadmon, the “primordial human,” above the world of emanation, which is divided into five personifications [parṣufim], Arikh Anpin, Abba, Imma, Ze‘eir Anpin, and Nuqba. Let us consider the following description of Adam Qadmon: Root of roots [shoresh ha-​shorashim] … above the aspect of temporal governance [hanhagat ha-​zeman]. Yet, he is the root for the temporal governance [shoresh le-​hanhagat ha-​zeman] … and everything is in the aspect of roots and the disclosure of the supernal wills to attain the end of the intention of the order of the governance of the emanation [takhlit ha-​kawwanah shel siddur hanhagat ha-​aṣilut] wherein there is the aspect of vessels [kelim] and attributes [middot], that is, there is a vessel [keli] that instructs about measure [middah] and boundary [gevul] … for just as a vessel constricts the matter placed within it, the actions of the lights of governance of emanation [pe‘ulot orot ha-​hanhagah shel aṣilut] are ordered according to time and boundary; they are called “attributes” [middot] and “vessels” [kelim] for they give boundary to the dissemination of the disclosure of the soul [hitpashsheṭut gilluy ha-​neshamah] that is within them. However, Attiqa Qaddisha is above the category of boundary, measure, and time. Therefore, there is no aspect of vessel or measure there at all; rather, they are eternal [lefi ha-​niṣḥiyyut]. Yet, it is impossible to reach the quality of limitless perfection and the matter of eternality, which is the reward for the souls, except by means of volition [beḥirah] and temporal governance [hanhagat ha-​zeman]. Consequently, 328 An illustration of this conception is found in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Qunṭres u-​ Ma‘yan mi-​Beit ha-​Shem, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2002), p. 84: time is linked to the emanative process from Ḥokhmah to Malkhut, the garbing (hitlabbeshut) of the light of intellect (or ha-​sekhel) from the head to the feet of the divine anthropos; the will, which is linked to Keter, is not connected to any particular vessel or limb, and thus acts instantaneously and concurrently in the head and the foot.

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the root for vessels [shoresh la-​kelim] is there, but they are not disclosed, only potentialities [hakhanot].329 On the one hand, Adam Qadmon is beyond space and time, and hence it is inappropriate to ascribe a “vessel” to it. Just as there is no aspect of the left in Arikh Anpin, according to the language of the Idra Rabba, so in Adam Qadmon there is only the aspect of the right. In the world of emanation, by contrast, where the characteristics of space and time prevail, we can speak of the duality of container and contained. On the other hand, since there is no way to reach the imaginal plenum of the boundless and timeless except through the emanations that exhibit boundary and temporality, it is possible, indeed necessary, to speak of the potentiality for a vessel in Adam Qadmon. If this were not the case, there would be deficiency in the infinite, but since the infinite comprises everything, it cannot be deficient in any manner, it cannot lack anything even the lack of lack, and thus we can ascribe to it the potentiality to receive, rendered metaphorically by the image of the vessel. In the root (shoresh), the universal (kelal), which contains the vessel (keli), is the perfect unity beyond time (lema‘lah min ha-​zeman), the interminable temporal deportment (hanhagot ha-​zeman le-​niṣḥiyyut), whence there is a transition to the flow of revealed time (ha-​zeman ha-​galuy). Significantly, the three stages of time, symbolized as well by the three books through which the world was created according to the opening section of Sefer Yeṣirah,330 the three occurrences of yhwh in the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24–​26), and the three parts of the masoretic division of the scriptural canon, derive from the place of unity above time. It follows, therefore, that the fullness of divine temporality consists of the lower seven aspects together with the upper three aspects. 5

In this Moment: Engendering Time and Feminine Indeterminacy

Time marks the ebb and flow of the pulsation of absence coming-​into-​ presence as the nameless revealed in the veil of the ineffable name.331 In the

3 29 Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, Netiv orot aḥor u-​fanim de-​attiqa qaddisha, 23a. 330 Gruenwald, “Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 140, § 1; idem, “Some Critical Notes on the First Part of Sefer Yeẓira.” Revue des Études juives 132 (1973): 483. 331 Compare the depiction of time in kabbalistic thought in Shlomo Giora Shoham, The Bridge to Nothingness: Gnosis, Kabala, Existentialism, and the Transcendental Predicament of Man (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1994), p. 238, as the “breaking of the vessels, which signifies the exile into demiurgical temporality.”

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circumspection of this circumscription, each moment appears unique, singular, wholly other in relation to what comes before and to what comes after, no past, no future, no present. The secret is alluded to in the divine name proclaimed to Moses, “I will be as I will be,” ehyeh asher ehyeh, a name that names no-​thing we can know since this name denotes that what it is to be for this divinity is to become what it will be in having been what it is to become, every manifestation a congruence of the infinite simplicity of simple infinity, the “metasemantic matrix”332 that comprises the predictably unpredictable possibility of each moment, the persistent presence of the unprecedented present that makes possible awaiting the past in recollecting the future.333 In its character as enduring flux, it would seem that time should be portrayed as masculine, the élan vital, which, when formulated within a phallocentric frame of reference, will be linked to the fecundity of the membrum virile. There are surely kabbalistic texts that support this interpretative stance: time as pulsating forward and resurging backward—​or yashar and or ḥozer, extending light and returning light, in Cordoverian terminology—​is troped in phallic symbolism, whereas space as the curbed receptacle, the emptiness gauged by the degree of its vacuity, is gendered as feminine, the capacity to receive that gives structure through imposing limit on the limitless power to overflow.334 Despite the multiplicity and diversity that a scholar may elicit from kabbalistic teaching, the theoretical construct that informs the gender symbolism is relatively homogenous and simple. I offer one of countless ratifications of the point from the description of the sefirotic emanations in Assis Rimmonim, Samuel Gallico’s abridgement of Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim: “All of the aspects in them were etched in the image of male and female, that is, the one that bestows [mashpi‘a] and the one that receives [mushpa], for this is the way of each and every aspect and each and every point in the gradations of emanation, the supernal one overflows to the one beneath it and the lower one receives from the one above it. Each one is called ‘masculine’ in relation to 332 Stéphane Mosès, L’Éros et la Foi: Lectures bibliques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999), pp. 43–​ 64, esp. p. 55 where the author employs the expression that I have borrowed, “la matrice métasémantique.” 333 Charles D. Isbell, “The Divine Name Ehyeh as a Symbol of Presence in Israelite Tradition,” Hebrew Annual Review 2 (1978): 101–​118. 334 The correlation of the spatial and the feminine is a well-​attested trope in Western thought. Of special significance is the analysis of woman as the material aspect expressed as the place of place in Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–​55. Her reflections on the female as the physical receptacle that receives the male jouissance can be applied interpretatively to kabbalistic texts. See Wolfson, Circle, p. 90.

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the aspect of the one beneath it and ‘feminine’ in relation to the aspect above it.”335 The passage attests to the fluidity and relativity of gender in the kabbalistic mindset—​each attribute can be either male or female.336 However, what the 335 Samuel Gallico, Assis Rimmonim (Venice: Daniel Zanetti, 1601), 20a. It is of interest to note the variant in the second printing of Assis Rimmonim, edited by Menaḥem Azariah da Fano (Mantua: Yehuda Shmuel and Yehoshua of Perugia, 1623), 19a: “Every point and every aspect is comprised of ten [sefirot], and they are etched in the image of male and female, not in the way of the forms of an androgyne [ṣurat anderoginos], God forbid, for there is no deficiency of form [hefsed ha-​ṣurah] greater than this. … Rather, in each of these pillars, from its midsection and below it is surely masculine in the secret of that which bestows [mashpi‘a] and from its midsection and above it is feminine, which is the secret of that which receives [mushpa].” A similar disclaimer is found in Joseph Giqatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, edited by Joseph Ben-​Shlomo, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1981), 1:237: “The one who understands this secret will comprehend that all the chariots and all the levels of emanation are in the form of that which receives and that which bestows [meqabbel u-​mashpi‘a], and this is the secret of the androgyne [sod anderoginos]. It is not the case that there is there the form of an androgyne, God forbid that one should believe something like this. … Rather, it is like we said above with respect to all the parts of the chariot and the supernal archons that their aggregate is called adam, not that they are in our form or like us, God forbid, but there are great and hidden levels, filled with brilliance, splendor, and forms of lights.” Whereas Giqatilla emphasizes that the image of the androgyne cannot be applied literally to the spiritual entities, Fano is concerned with the fact that from the perspective of halakhah the androgyne is imperfect. 336 The possibility of the female overflowing like the male is often connected to the verse “When a woman conceives and gives birth to a male” (Leviticus 12:2), and particularly as it is interpreted in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 60a and Niddah 31a. The words ki tazri‘a ishshah are read as “when a woman ovulates,” and the ovulation corresponds to the man emitting semen. In the second of the aforementioned contexts, the exegesis of the verse leads to the conclusion that “Scripture thus ascribes the males to the females and the females to the males.” Concerning the interpretation of Leviticus 12:2 in Ḥabad literature, see, for example, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot mi-​Kol Shanah, 2 vols., revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2019), 201a; Wojciech Tworek, Eternity Now: Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady and Temporality (Albany: State University of Albany Press, 2019), p. 129. See also Dovber Shneuri, Be’urei ha-​Zohar, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2015), 12d-​13b. The fact that the female is also referred to as mashpi‘a (based on the hyperliteral reading of ki tazri‘a ishshah) purportedly complicates the depiction of heterosexual cohabitation as the joining of the one that overflows and the one that receives. If one attends carefully to Dovber’s technical discussion, however, the phallocentric hierarchy is reaffirmed insofar as the power of the female to overflow—​related anatomically to both the formation of the fetus and the act of birth—​is said to derive from the drop of the male that she receives, and hence we can continue to affirm “the aspect of union of the one that overflows and the one that receives that is in the unification of male and female” (beḥinat yiḥud mashpi‘a u-​meqabbel she-​yesh be-​yiḥud dekhar we-​nuqba). Compare Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2008), 48c-​d, where it is emphasized that the power of the woman to give birth derives from her female waters (mayyin nuqvin)

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passage also confirms is that there is no ambiguity with respect to these characterizations, an attribute performs the masculine quality when it overflows to that which is beneath and, conversely, an attribute performs the feminine quality when it receives from that is above it.337 Although this symbolism is, activated after she receives the seminal drop of the male waters (mayyin dukhrin). See ibid, 49b: “However, the extension from nothing to something is only like the coupling of male and female, which are two substances [mahutim], and the substance of the one that receives [mahut ha-​meqabbel] is not in need of the substance of the one who overflows [mahut ha-​mashpi‘a], and the reception [ha-​qabbalah] of the one who receives is not the body of the influx [guf ha-​shefa] because the new body [guf ha-​meḥuddash] comes from the potency of the one who receives itself, as we mentioned above with respect to the matter of ‘When a woman at childbirth etc.’, it is only that he bestows on her the power to give birth, which is in the male waters, and by means of the power of both of them in the male waters and the female waters this new entity comes to be verily from nothing to something.” I can appreciate Dovber’s emphasizing that the power of childbirth belongs to the woman, which of course makes a lot of sense empirically, but he still insists that the power is bestowed on the woman through the man, and this, in my judgment, preserves the androcentrism. See ibid., 187b: “‘When a woman at childbirth bears etc.’ this power to give birth comes to her specifically from the male and not from herself.” And see ibid., 191a: “The verse makes the females dependent on the males [ki talah ha-​katuv neqevot bi-​zekharim], a man emits semen first she gives birth to a female, and the aspect of Ze‘eir Anpin, which is male. Concerning this it says ‘When a woman conceives and gives birth to a male,’ for the woman ovulates first.” See Dovber Shneuri, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1995), Sha‘ar ha-​Emunah, 55a: “Now the aspect of the feminine receives from the masculine, but there is in her the power to give birth through her female waters, as it is written ‘When a woman conceives and gives birth,’ for this is the aspect of the creation of something from nothing as it is known that every birth is the aspect of a complete creation from nothing. … Therefore, in the coupling of male and female souls, one must ascend to the aspect of the feminine as she is in her root above the masculine with respect to the power of creation of birth, and this elevation cannot be except if they descend and plunge to the aspect of the male, which is now higher as the feminine is the aspect of the one who receives from the masculine because the woman cannot conceive and give birth without receiving the male waters of the masculine, and thus it says ‘he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16).” See ibid., 57b: “Thus it says ‘For the Lord has created something new on earth’ (Jeremiah 31:21) precisely, and the meaning is entirely new [ḥadashah legamrei], and this is ‘the female shall encircle the male’ (ibid.), for the feminine will not receive from the masculine in the way of male waters and female waters as the rain of the heavens irrigates the earth, and the woman who conceives receives from the male waters the power to give birth … rather she will encircle the male in the aspect of the crown.” The androcentric undercurrent of this theme is attested as well in Schneersohn, Yom Ṭov shel Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 5666, pp. 532–​533. The woman is extolled for being endowed with the power to give birth but that power is a consequence of her receiving from the man just as the moon, which has no light of her own, can shine only when she receives from the light of the sun. 337 An interesting variation of the typical kabbalistic symbolism is found in Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, p. 285: “And thus it is known in the secret of illicit sexual relations [be-​sod

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to a great degree, a translation of the much older correlation of matter with the feminine and form with the masculine, receptivity for the kabbalists is not a pejorative evaluation; on the contrary, just as the rabbis preserved the idea that divine creativity depends on the conjunction of the qualities of mercy and judgment, the former signified by yhwh and the latter by Elohim, so the kabbalists insist that the energy of the infinite permeates the different planes of being through the interchange between the active impulse to bestow and the passive willingness to receive. The hylomorphism embraced by the kabbalists is such that feminine passivity is as crucial as masculine activity. Analogously, in the anthropological domain, kabbalists insist—​following rabbinic precedent—​ that human perfection consists of the conjunction of male and female, and hence the divine presence dwells only in the place where the two are united. The indisputable avowal of heteroeroticism, however, is itself an expression of the overriding androcentrism. To suggest otherwise is to assume naively that the celebration of the matrimonial union of man and woman implies that there is equivalency of the two or even the more exaggerated and indefensible claim of ascribing a privileged status to the feminine.338 To be sure, the unification of male and female impacts both attributes, but there is no question that the preponderant purpose of that pairing is the amelioration of judgment by its containment in lovingkindness and not the depreciation of lovingkindness ha-​arayot] that Tif’eret and Aṭarah, son and daughter, correspond to Ḥokhmah and Binah, and if you say to Gedullah and Paḥad, you would speak the truth, for all that overflows [mashpi‘a] is called ‘father’ and the one that receives [we-​ha-​meqabbel] is called ‘son’ or ‘daughter,’ and the son and daughter are called ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in relation to the one that receives from them, for all that overflows [in the masculine form mashpi‘a] is called ‘father’ and all that overflows [in the feminine form mashpa‘at] is called ‘mother,’ and all that receives [in the masculine form meqabbel] is called ‘son,’ and all that receives [in the feminine form meqabbelet] is called ‘daughter.’” Utilizing the fourfold personification of the divine as father, mother, son, and daughter—​the kabbalistic intent of the rabbinic secret of illicit sexual relations—​Isaac affirms a bestowing that is male and female, the father or Ḥokhmah and the mother or Binah, and a receiving that is male and female, the son or Tif’eret and the daughter or Aṭarah. In other passages, Isaac follows the twofold distinction according to which the male is the agent of overflowing, linked to the attribute of Ḥesed whence Tif’eret draws his power, and the female is the instrument of receiving, linked to the attribute of Paḥad whence Aṭarah draws her power. For instance, see Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, pp. 28, 33. One can surely elicit from kabbalistic sources textual support for the claim that there is no mercy without judgment just as there is no judgment without mercy, but mercy is correlated consistently with the masculine or yhwh and judgment with the feminine or Elohim. See ibid., p. 384. Compare the text of Isaac of Acre cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Language, pp. 61–​62. 338 I am alluding here to Moshe Idel, The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019). See Appendix 2.

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by its containment in judgment. This asymmetry is basic to the kabbalistic construction of gender and whatever positive valence is accorded the feminine must be assessed from this vantage point. For all the talk of Cordovero representing a kabbalist who displayed a relatively more positive valorization of female anatomy and sexuality when discussing the divine feminine or the earthly woman,339 I will cite a passage from the sixth chapter of his Tomer Devorah that typifies the androcentric interpretation of matrimonial coitus, which has unfailingly informed the worldview of kabbalists, no matter how unpleasant this seems to some scholars: How should a man train himself with the attributes of power? Know that all the actions that arouse the evil inclination actually arouse the strong powers. Hence, one should not stir up the evil inclination, so as not to arouse the power. The reason is man is created with two inclinations, the good inclination and the evil inclination, the one is lovingkindness and the other is power. Nevertheless, it is explained in the Zohar, the section on Genesis,340 that the good inclination is created for the man himself, for his need, and the evil inclination for the need of his wife. See how sweet are its words, for Tif’eret, the one that possesses lovingkindness, is inclined to the right, and all of his conduct is on the right, the good inclination, and the female is of the left and all of her conduct is with power. It is thus appropriate not to arouse the evil inclination for his benefit because it arouses the power of the supernal man and he destroys the world. … Yet, the evil inclination must be bound and tied down so that it is not incited to any bodily action in the world, not for the passion for intercourse, nor the desire for money, not towards anger, and not towards honor at all. However, for his wife’s need he should arouse his inclination mildly to the side of the sweetened powers, like clothing her, fixing a house for her. And he should say, “By clothing her, I am adorning Shekhinah”. … Therefore, all arrayments of the house [tiqqunei ha-​bayit] are arrayments of Shekhinah, for she is arrayed from the side of the evil inclination, which is created to do the will of his Creator and for nothing else. … From this perspective he should arouse the evil inclination to love her, and he should intend that the left be aroused to draw her close in the secret of “his left arm is under my head” (Song of Songs 2:6). She is not bound at first except from the side of the left, and afterward “his right

3 39 See Appendix 3. 340 Zohar 1:49a.

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arm embraces me” (ibid.). He should intend to sweeten all those arrayments by his good inclination, to rectify her from joy to happiness in the matter of the commandment for the sake of the supernal unity. Thus, he sweetens all the powers and rectifies them with the right. In this manner should be all the types of desire that come from the side of the evil inclination. They should be principally for the rectification of the woman whom God has established to be his helping mate. He should transform all of them afterward to the worship of God, to bind them in the right.341 This composition of Cordovero, usually thought of as a classic example of kabbalistic ethics or musar,342 is structured around the motif of imitatio dei, that is, the theurgic aligning of the activities of a Jewish male and the corresponding sefirotic potencies. The focus of the aforecited passage is to explain how a Jewish man should relate specifically to the divine attribute of power (gevurah). To explicate this matter, Cordovero, following earlier sources, including zoharic homilies, associates the rabbinic idea of the good and the evil inclinations respectively with the masculine quality of lovingkindness (ḥesed) and the feminine quality of power or judgment (din). Given the connection between the attribute of power and the evil inclination, it is incumbent on the Jewish man to be careful with respect to the former. Indeed, the only arousal of the evil inclination that is permissible must relate to the needs of one’s wife. The circumstance in the anthropological plane is corroborated by the parallel in the theosophic plane wherein the masculine Tif’eret is said to be inclined to the right or the good and the feminine Shekhinah is said to be inclined to the left or the evil. The man bears the responsibility to attend to his wife’s needs—​an obvious androcentric affront—​and this can be accomplished only by arousing the left side initially and then incorporating it into the right. In gender terms, the containment of the left in the right—​the underlying ethos of kabbalistic theurgy—​translates into the masculinization of the feminine. This scenario does entail that the Jewish woman is the symbolic enfleshment of Shekhinah. Some may consider this a privileging of the female, but the role of the woman

3 41 Moses Cordovero, Tomer Devorah (Jerusalem: Qolmos, 2002), ch. 6, pp. 50–​51. 342 For a still useful discussion of this Cordoverian text, see Moses Cordovero, The Palm Tree of Deborah, translated with an introduction and notes by Louis Jacobs (New York: Hermon Press, 1974), pp. 16–​45. For a more recent analysis of the taxonomy of kabbalistic ethical literature with a thorough review of previous scholarship, see Patrick B. Koch, Human Self-​Perfection: A Re-​Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-​Literature of Sixteenth-​Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2015), pp. 1–​45. For the many reference to Cordovero’s treatise in Koch’s monograph, see the index, s.v. Tomer Devorah.

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is instrumental at best, since she serves as a conduit that accommodates man’s effect on the divine feminine.343 Along similar lines, the irrefutable fact that we find in kabbalistic literature references to the female anatomy is not a serious challenge to the prevailing phallogocentrism. Just because a scholar can point to texts where women’s bodies—​even the genitalia—​are not only addressed by male kabbalists but assigned with the theurgical intent to lift the female to a higher position than the male,344 this does not mean that there is a crack in the androcentric worldview.345 As I myself have noted in various studies, the eschatological vision that we can elicit from kabbalistic sources is one in which there is a transposition of masculine and feminine such that the capacity to receive is hoisted above the potency to overflow, a transposition that is often depicted as the ascent of Malkhut to Keter and linked to the verse neqevah tesovev gaver, “the female shall encircle the male” (Jeremiah 31:21).346 However, this 3 43 Wolfson, Language, pp. 169–​171. 344 Abrams, The Female Body pp. 45–​68; Idel, The Privileged, pp. 63–​64. 345 See my extensive response in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 439–​442 n. 65. 346 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 301–​343, esp. 327–​332; idem, Open Secret, pp. 148, 200–​223. It is worth noting here the following passage in Moses Cordovero, Sefer Gerushin (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1962), §28, pp. 30–​31: “Here I innovated the matter of ‘the female encircling the male’ [neqevah tesovev gaver]. The matter is understood with respect to the issue of from below to above, and from above to below, as we explained in the book Pardes Rimmonim, the chapter on ‘from below to above.’ We elaborated there in the matter that from the side of the bestowing male [ha-​zakhar ha-​ mashpi‘a] the light descends and strikes, and the spark returns to its source from the side of the receiving female [ha-​neqevah ha-​meqabbelet]. Hence, since the returning light [ha-​or ha-​ḥozer] ascends to receive, it is female, and insofar as the descending light [ha-​or ha-​ yored], which is male, descends diminutively and constrictively [bi-​me‘aṭ u-​ve-​ṣimṣum], it is clothed and cloaked in the returning light, and the female, which is the ascending light, surrounds, crowns, and encompasses the male, which is the receiving light [ha-​or ha-​mushpa]. The reason for this is because of the transgressions, and the descending efflux and the emanating light do not overflow until they exert power over the ascending light. Therefore, this is the matter of … the female encircling the male. However, in the time of the redemption, the descending and bestowing light will be strengthened to the point that it will be abounding and it will overpower the returning light, and the ascending light will be wrapped within the descending light, and the descending light, the potency of the male, will encompass the female, which is the ascending and returning light.” In contrast to other kabbalists who apply the language of Jeremiah 31:21 to the transposition of the messianic future wherein the feminine ascends from the bottom to the top and surrounds the masculine like a diadem, Cordovero applies the verse to the exile. According to his interpretation, the female crowning the male is a sign that the appropriate order is askew. The purpose of coitus is for the man to uplift and restore the woman but the exilic condition is such that the man is not in control and therefore the restoration can only be partial. Compare

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transposal—​the inversion of the order such that the last assumes the posture of the first, an idea buttressed by the language of Sefer Yeṣirah describing the ten sefirot to which we have referred several times in this chapter, the end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end,347 and that the unity of the pleroma is delineated by the expression keter malkhut, the “crown of kingship,” thereby according primacy to the kingship over the crown—​is not proof of a transvaluation of the roles that determine the functional nature of masculinity and femininity.348 While there is abundant evidence in kabbalistic lore of the masculinization of the female and the feminization of the male,349 I have yet to find a text that undermines the pivotal principle of the kabbalistic hermeneutic of gender: a female can actively overflow, but when she does, she is transformed into a male, and a male can passively receive, but when he does, he is transformed into a female. The crossing of gender boundaries, therefore, preserves the phallogocentric hierarchy that it upends, since the female that bestows (mashpi‘a) assumes the persona of the male and the male that receives (meqabbel) assumes the persona of the female. It is possible for the tables to be turned such that the vessel ascends to the position of the crown—​this reversal, which is most typically affiliated with the messianic epoch, can be formulated in terms of Irigaray’s petition for the progression of looking at the female as the “physical receptacle for the penis” to her becoming “the enveloping of a receptacle that is less tangible or visible”350—​but this evolution does not eradicate the respective values assigned to each gender. Cordovero, Tefillah le-​Moshe, 204a: “There is no return at night, and the reason is because the return is in the world of the masculine, and night is feminine, and there is no return in her. For this reason there is some return on Sabbath to show that the night of Sabbath is not like the night of the other days. … The male is conjoined with the female, and thus there is some return but not a complete return, for the male is not dominant [she-​ein ha-​zakhar manhig].” By contrast, in the future, the augmentation of the masculine potency will abet a more perfect and complete restoration of the feminine, and the male will assume its proper place on top as the bestowing light and thus will no longer express its power as the light that receives its sovereignty from the returning light of the female. So much for those who have upheld Cordovero as a kabbalist that espoused a privileging of the feminine or even a more egalitarian perspective on gender. For a different attempt to explain the passage from Sefer Gerushin, see Kimelman, The Mystical Meaning, pp. 168–​169. 347 See above n. 57. 348 See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 248–​249 n. 170. 349 Wolfson, Circle, pp. 79–​121; idem, “Phallic Jewissance and the Pleasure of No Pleasure,” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte E. Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-​Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, Moulie Vidas, in collaboration with James Adam Redfield (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 305–​306. 350 Irigaray, An Ethics, p. 55. I have taken the liberty to repeat my argument in Wolfson, “Phallic Jewissance,” p. 299.

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Insofar as time is marked by the dialectic of contracting and extending, it stands to reason that it will exhibit both male and female characteristics, and that these will correspond respectively to light and darkness, day and night. Yet, as the image utilized in one bahiric passage suggests—​the precious pearl that is the inseminating seed and the inseminated womb that gives birth351—​ the nocturnal and diurnal aspects are both localized in what I have called the androgynous phallus, an expression that is meant to indicate that masculinity and femininity are ontologically—​as opposed to ontically—​located in the attribute that assumes the function and role of the membrum virile in the divine body.352 To elucidate the point, I will focus on a zoharic homily that 351 The Book Bahir, § 49, p. 145, and see analysis in Wolfson, Circle, pp. 86–​87. See also Allen Offerman, Kabbalah and Consciousness (Riverdale on Hudson: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992), p. 53 n. 15: “The matriarchs are the spiritual or soul sources for space-​consciousness, the patriarchs are the source of time-​consciousness in the psyche.” It is plausible to consider the kabbalistic perspective in light of the general Western perception encapsulated in the slogan Father Time, which is conjoined to Mother Nature. For discussion of this image, see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 69–​91, and, more recently, Jay Griffiths, Sideways Look at Time (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), pp. 294–​318. It is also pertinent to recall here the image of truth as the daughter of time. See Fritz Saxl, “Veritas Filia Temporis,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, edited by Raymond Kiblansky and Henry J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 197–​222; Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 80. In Tiqqunei Zohar, § 69, 101b, the androgynous nature of time is cast in terms of the distinction between the “hour” (sha‘ah), which is feminine, and the “day” (yom), which is masculine. See Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei ha-​Zohar im Be’ur ha-​ Gra, 115b: “Man [adam] and time [zeman] correspond to male and female, spirit and soul [ruaḥ we-​nefesh] … in time itself the day [ha-​yom] is male and the hour [sha‘ah] female. Therefore yom is grammatically masculine and sha‘ah feminine.” 352 I have explored this matter in many studies. Here I shall note one essay, which has the merit of making more explicit the connections between kabbalistic phallocentrism and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory: Elliot R. Wolfson, “Circumcision, Secrecy, and the Veiling of the Veil: Phallomorphic Exposure and Kabbalistic Esotericism,” in The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite, edited by Elizabeth Mark (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), pp. 58–​70, and the expanded version in Wolfson, Language, pp. 111–​141. Much of the criticism of my work rests on the failure to maintain the difference between the symbolic nature of the phallus and the ontic nature of the penis. In this regard, consider the provocative remark in Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, translated by Richard F. C. Hull, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 442–​443. After referring to Scholem’s observation that “the Zohar makes prominent use of phallic symbolism in connection with speculations concerning the Sefira Yesod,” and his adding that there is “ample room here for psychoanalytical interpretation” (Major Trends, p. 228), Jung writes: “In so far as the Freudian school translates psychic contents into sexual terminology there is nothing left for it to do here, since the author of

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deals with the mysterious demise of the two sons of Aaron “when they drew near before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:1). Following an age-​old exegetical pursuit, the author of this passage seeks to comprehend why Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, suffered such a fate. To uncover the notion of time expressed in the homily, one must attend more carefully to the biblical verse interpreted by the anonymous kabbalist, “And the Lord said to Moses, Speak to Aaron your brother and do not come at any moment to the shrine,” we-​al yavo be-​khol et el ha-​qodesh (Leviticus 16:2). From this prohibition one may assume, although it is not stated explicitly, that the entry of Nadab and Abihu into the sanctuary was ill timed. At an earlier point in the scriptural narrative the reader is told that Aaron’s sons offered a “strange fire” (esh zarah) before the Lord (Leviticus 10:1; see also Numbers 3:4, 26:61), but we still do not know how this relates to the question of what constitutes the “wrong” or “right” moment.353 Through the voice of R. Abba, a member of the fraternity clustered about Rashbi, the zoharic homilist begins the discourse by eliciting the following moral from the biblical text: it is suitable to ask one’s requests during propitious times when divine beneficence is found in the world and not at other times when severe judgment reigns.354 To pray effectively one must be attuned to the different time zones, which are reflective of disparate states within the divine mirrored in the providential forces that govern the world, primarily the alternating periods of judgment and mercy, which correspond to the altering templates of night and day. The author of the zoharic passage, through the mouthpiece of Rashbi, draws the obvious conclusion: We have established the matter in interpreting “[to give them food] in his moment” [latet okhlam be-​itto] (Psalms 104:27), and this is certainly so. Thus, the blessed holy One came to warn Aaron not to err in the the Zohar has done it already. This school merely shows all the things that a penis can be, but it never discovered what the phallus can symbolize. It was assumed that in such a case the censor had failed to do its work. As Scholem himself shows and emphasizes particularly, the sexuality of the Zohar, despite its crudity, should be understood as a symbol of the ‘foundation of the world.’” I note, finally, that Jung also availed himself of the symbol of the androgynous phallus related to Christ and to the Cross, the tree of the Crucifixion. See Jung, Letters, vol. 2: 1951–​1961, p. 166 (cited in ch. 8 of this volume, n. 210). On the androgyny of Adam and Christ, see idem, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 373, 393, 404–​405. 353 It is worth mentioning the injunction to the priests (Exodus 28: 42–​43) to wear linen breeches to cover their genitals, literally, the “flesh of nakedness,” besar erwah, lest they enter the tabernacle in an immodest posture and bring upon themselves a death decree. Perhaps it would be fruitful to consider these verses and the account of the death of Nadab and Abihu. 3 54 Zohar 3:58a-​b.

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transgression with respect to which his sons erred, for this moment [hai et] is known. Therefore, they should not err by joining the other moment [et aḥara] to the king, as it is written, “do not come at any moment [be-​ khol et] to the shrine,” that is, even though he sees that it is the time that the other hand has been given power to rule in the world, and it has been given to him to unite with it and to draw it close to the holy, for “I and my name are one” [ana u-​shemi ḥad hu]. Therefore, “do not come at any moment to the shrine.” If you want to know by means of what he should enter—​“through this” [be-​zo’t]. “Through this Aaron shall enter into the shrine” [be-​zo’t yavo aharon el ha-​qodesh] (Leviticus 16:3), this zo’t is the moment [et] that is attached to my name, through this yod, which is inscribed in my name, you will enter the shrine. It has been taught: R. Yose said, it is written, “He has made everything beautiful in its moment” [et ha-​kol asah yafeh ve-​itto] (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This word was established by the holy flame [Rashbi], and thus it is, as it has been taught, “He has made everything beautiful in his moment,” and thus it is verily [wadda’i]. “Everything” [et ha-​kol]—​verily. “He made it beautiful in his moment,” one in the other, so that the others will not be mixed in with them. “In its moment,” precisely [mammash], and not in another. Therefore, there was a warning to Aaron, “do not come at any time to the shrine.” Through what should he enter? “Through this” [be-​zo’t], as it has been established, “Through this Aaron shall enter into the shrine.”355 The secret of the correlation of time and prayer—​a correlation, I note in passing, suggested by the evocative scriptural expression wa-​ani tefillati lekha yhwh et raṣon, “As for me, may my prayer come to you, O Lord, at a favorable moment” (Psalms 69:14)356—​the “propitious time,” et raṣon, the necessity of 355 Ibid., 58b. It is instructive to compare the thematic link between prayer and the mystery of time related to the divine in zoharic texts and the comments in Muḥyīddīn Ibn al-​ ‘Arabī, Mysteries of Purity: Ibn al-​‘Arabî’s asrâr al-​ṭahârah, translated by Eric Winkel (Notre Dame: Cross Cultural Publications, 1995), pp. 184–​185. Ibn al-​‘Arabī relates the esoteric gnosis to the qur’ānic verse “Allah’s is the command before and after; and on that day the believers shall rejoice” (30:4). 356 Also relevant is the verse koh amar yhwh be-​et raṣon anitikha u-​ve-​yom yeshu‘ah azartikha, “Thus said the Lord: In a moment of favor I will answer you, and on the day of salvation I will help you” (Isaiah 49:8). It is of interest to consider the principle derived or linked exegetically to this verse by Abraham bar Ḥiyya, Hegyon ha-​Nephesch ha-​Atzuvah, p. 80: “The blessed holy One does not heed the prayer of man in accordance with the will of the worshipper but rather in accordance with the will of his Creator, as it is written ‘As for me, may my prayer come to you, O Lord, at a favorable moment’ (Psalms 69:14), a moment in which the will is before you [et she-​yihyeh raṣon mi-​lefanekha].”

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which is deduced from the injunction given to Aaron, be-​zo’t yavo aharon el ha-​ qodesh, “Through this Aaron shall enter into the shrine,” offered as a corrective to the lethal misdeed of Nadab and Abihu, a violation that brought about the interdiction “do not come at any time to the shrine,” we-​al yavo be-​khol et el ha-​ qodesh. But what did the sons of Aaron do wrong? The author of this homily assumes that their transgression consisted of trying to join the other moment to the king. To comprehend the import of the expression “other moment,” et aḥara, it is necessary to mull over the meaning of the word et.357 The connotation of the latter may be discerned from the remark that Rashbi had established the intent of this term when interpreting the expression be-​itto in the verse latet okhlam be-​itto, “to give them food in his time” (Psalms 104:27): “This is the Matrona who is called the ‘time of the righteous one’ [itto de-​ṣaddiq], and thus all await this moment.”358 We may deduce, therefore, that the word et is one of the indexical markers of Matrona, a commonly used designation of Shekhinah or Malkhut in zoharic derashot, the tenth of the sefirotic emanations, a point that we encountered above in the exposition of a passage in Karo’s mystical diary. This is the intent as well of the expression “moment of the righteous one,” itto de-​ṣaddiq, that is, the moment, engendered as feminine, belongs to the ṣaddiq, the righteous one, a standard reference in kabbalistic lore to the ninth emanation, Yesod, the phallic potency of the divine.359 The “moment of the righteous one” symbolizes the union of Shekhinah and Yesod, an incorporation that portends the messianic redemption, which seems to be the implication of the comment at the conclusion of Rashbi’s words, “all await this moment,” kullehu meḥakan le-​hai itto. With this symbolism in hand we can decode the rest of the homily. If the word et denotes Shekhinah, then et aḥara, the “other moment,” will refer to the corresponding force on the “other side,” siṭra aḥara, the technical name 357 Needless to say, the word et has a long history in Hebrew texts, beginning in scripture where it is used to delineate events of time perceived not chronologically but as distinct manifestations of divine volition. See Brin, Concept of Time, pp. 39–​48, 294. 358 Zohar 3:58a. 359 See, by contrast, Tiqqunei Zohar, § 21, 43a, where the expression itto de-​ṣaddiq refers to Yesod and not to Shekhinah. In Tiqqunei Zohar, § 69, 101b-​102a, there is a lengthy discourse built around the symbolic identification of Shekhinah and time, related especially to the word et. The monthly lunar cycle is divided into 28 ittot, 14 from the side of mercy and 14 from the side of judgment, which are linked exegetically to the 28 occurrences of the word et in Ecclesiastes 3:2–​8. On the association of the term et and Shekhinah, and a decoding of the expression itto as referring to the union of Shekhinah and Yesod, in the thirteenth-​ century Spanish kabbalist, Joseph Giqatilla, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Fore/​giveness On the Way: Nesting in the Womb of Response,” Graven Images: A Journal of Culture, Law, and the Sacred 4 (1998): 165–​166 n. 11.

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of the demonic realm coined by some of the Castilian kabbalists whose views have been preserved in the zoharic compilation. The sin of Nadab and Abihu consisted of their attempt to unite the demonic feminine, elsewhere identified as Lilith, with the king on the side of holiness, which in this case refers to Tif’eret. Although not stated explicitly, it is likely that the zoharic interpretation was inspired by the expression esh zarah, “strange fire,” used in conjunction with Nadab and Abihu in several verses, as I noted above. The “strange fire” they offered before the Lord, rendered symbolically, denotes their desire to mix the unholy and holy—​a reading that is attested in other zoharic passages. For example, the following appears in the stratum of Zohar known as Sitrei Torah: There is a holy fire [esha qaddisha], the feminine [nuqba], and a foreign fire [esha nukhra’ah], the “strange fire” [esh zarah], and thus it is written “do not come at any moment to the shrine” (Leviticus 16:2), this is the feminine from the evil inclination [nuqveta min yeṣer ha-​ra]. The holy spirit [ruaḥ qaddisha] is male [dekhar], and there is a spirit of impurity [ruaḥ mesa’ava], which is the evil inclination [yeṣer ha-​ra], as it says, “From the stock of the serpent sprouts an asp” (Isaiah 14:29). There is holy ground [afar qaddisha] and unholy ground [afar mesa’ava]. 360 As may be culled from still other zoharic comments, the symbolic ascription of the strange fire to the feminine aspect of the demonic is enhanced by the exegetical link made to the expression the “estranged woman,” ishshah zarah. “It is written ‘they offered a strange fire before the Lord’ (Leviticus 10:1); it is written here ‘strange fire’ and it is written there ‘to guard you from the estranged woman’ (Proverbs 7:5), and it is all one matter.”361 In the symbolic imaginary of the kabbalists responsible for this text, the expression from Proverbs ishshah zarah alludes more specifically to the Christian woman, for Christianity, the prototypical idolatrous religion—​the faith and piety of siṭra aḥara—​is associated with sensual lust, the power of eros from the left, which parallels the power of eros from the right, manifest most ideally in the yearning to cleave to the divine through prayer and study. Indeed, there is a homology between the lure of Christianity as idolatry in the theological plane and as the crux of sexual seduction in the social sphere.362 Moreover, as Yitzhak Baer observed long 3 60 Zohar 1:80a. 361 Zohar 1:73b, and compare 148b. 362 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Re/​membering the Covenant: Memory, Forgetfulness, and History in the Zohar,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, David S. Myers, and John Efron (Hanover: Brandeis

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ago, zoharic homilies attest that for kabbalists in northern Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one of the greatest challenges for the male Jew was not to succumb to the attraction of Christianity in either domain.363 Nadab and Abihu are exemplary of biblical figures—​with a pedigree no less impressive than being in the lineage of the high priest—​who were not able to overcome the sexual compulsion of the other side. It is likely, then, that the zoharic rendering of the intent of their offering a “strange fire” was that they cohabited with gentile women.364 The point is drawn explicitly in the following passage. R. Judah began to expound and he said: “It is the moment to do for the Lord, for they have broken your Torah” (Psalms 119:126). “It is the moment to do for the Lord” [et la‘asot la-​yhwh]. What is [the gist of] this? It has been established that et refers to the Assembly of Israel, which is called et, as it says, “do not come at any moment to the shrine” (Leviticus 16:2). What is the meaning of “do not come at any moment” [we-​al yavo be-​khol et]? It is, as it is said, “to guard you from the estranged woman” (Proverbs 7:5), and this is [alluded to in the words] “they offered a strange fire before the Lord” (Leviticus 10:1). What is the reason for et? For there is a moment [et] and time [zeman] for everything, to come close, to be illumined, to be united, as is appropriate, as it is said, “But as for me, my prayer is to thee, O Lord, at a propitious moment” [wa-​ani tefillati lekha yhwh et raṣon] (Psalms 69:14).365 The mixing of unholy and holy has dire repercussions. In line with the scriptural maxim of justice, measure-​for-​measure, the sons of Aaron were consumed University Press, 1998), pp. 214–​246. For a traditionally learned discussion of the halakhic repercussions of identifying Christianity as idolatry, see Asher Turin, “A Positive Light on the Nations: R. Moshe Isserles’ Revisionistic Views on Christianity,” edited by Jonathan L. Milevsky, Ḥakirah, the Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 28 (2020): 101-​128. 363 Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, translated by Louis Schoffman, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), 1:256–​257, 259–​260. See also Yom Tov Assis, “Sexual Behavior in Medieval Hispano-​Jewish Society,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, edited by Ada Rapoport Albert and Steven Zipperstein (London: P. Halban, 1988), pp. 25–​59, esp. 27. 3 64 Zohar 3:57b. See the passage from the Ra‘aya Meheimna stratum in Zohar 3:33b-​34a where the “strange fire” is interpreted as cohabiting with a menstruating Jewish woman; insofar as Christian women are always in the status of menstruating women, the interpretations are thematically congruous; in Zohar 3:37b, the different explanations of the sin of Nadab and Abihu are cited. 365 Zohar 1:116b. See ibid., 194a.

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by the holy fire of Shekhinah, the medium that executes divine judgment, for, symbolically, having intercourse with the estranged woman is on a par to offering strange fire on the altar. Yet, in spite of the blatant demand to separate the two realms, one may also discern between the lines of the zoharic text recognition of the spiritual proximity and kinship between idolatry and worship, sexual temptation and erotic piety. The one who is captivated by the ecstatic fervor of the epiphanic moment will recognize the duplicitous nature of that moment, holding forth the possibility that one will succumb to the allure of et aḥara to combine what should be kept separate as well as the possibility that one will seize the moment of et raṣon to worship the divine with no admixture of evil. One might say, accordingly, that the moment of ecstasy, et la‘asot la-​yhwh, is the two-​edged sword, ḥerev pifiyyot (Psalms 149:6), not only in the sense that the instant diremptively breaks into time in such a manner that it is severed from the succession of “before” and “after,” as I discussed above, but also in the sense that it has the potential to sever one’s connection to the path. I am here reminded of the following description of the moment, al-​waqt, in the eleventh-​century treatise on the basic principles of Ṣūfism composed by al-​Qushayrī: They say: “The moment is a sword,” that is, just as the sword is cutting, so the moment prevails in what the real brings to pass and completes. It is said: “The sword is gentle to the touch, but its edge cuts. Whoever handles it gently is unharmed. Whoever treats it roughly is cut.” Similarly for the moment, whoever submits to its decree is saved, and whoever opposes it is thrown over and destroyed. In this regard they composed the following verse: Like a sword—​if you handle it gently its touch is gentle, but its edges, if you treat it roughly are rough. When the moment favors someone, the moment for him is just a moment. When the moment opposes someone, the moment for him is loathing.366 366 Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 100–​101; Böwering, “Ideas of Time,” p. 88. A similar image is attested in the Buddhist tradition where the weapon of Indra, the thunderbolt or diamond cutter (vajra), is utilized to depict the “nonconceptual, ever-​fresh awareness, supreme and indestructible,” the discerning vision that cuts through obstructing elements to make a space for the “primordial state of pure and total presence.” See Manjusrīmitra, Primordial Experience: An Introduction to rDzogs-​Chen Meditation, translated by Namkhai Norbu and Kennard Lipman in collaboration with Barrie Simmons (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), pp. 73–​74.

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Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me state emphatically that I acknowledge that there are important and irreducible differences between the kabbalistic and Ṣūfi views on the nature of the moment and its visionary propensities. The common element nonetheless is that both discern an implicit danger brought about by the encounter with the truly real that is always in and of the moment. As the twelfth-​century Persian visionary Suhrawardī, the shaykh al-​ishrāq, “master of illumination,” put it, flashes of light come forth from the divine presence “like a sudden lightning-​bolt that comes unexpectedly and swiftly departs.” These “flashes” are called “times,” for time in its elemental form displays the quality of incisiveness, erupting as a knife that cuts the fabric of its sheath. “It is for this reason,” continues Suhrawardī, “that one says ‘Time is sharper than a sword.’ It is also said, ‘Time is a cutting sword.’”367 Commenting on the same dictum several centuries before Suhrawardī, ʿAlī al-​Hujwīrī, the author of what is considered the oldest Persian treatise on Ṣūfism, Kashf al-​Mahjūb, wrote, “The Shaykhs have said, ‘Time is a cutting sword,’ because it is characteristic of a sword to cut, and ‘time’ cuts the root of the future and the past, and obliterates care of yesterday and to-​morrow from the heart.”368 The aspect of time that merits being compared to a sword is the moment (waqt), for the one who lives fully in the present is cut off from the burden of recollecting the past and anticipating the future. The ordinary timeline is undercut by the time of the moment, eternally renewed as what has eternally never been. In kabbalistic gnosis as well, the moment, aligned with the feminine, is a two-​edged sword, the temporal interval that opens and closes, binds and unbinds.369 The twofoldness is captured in the zoharic comment on the scriptural expression ḥerev ha-​mithappekhet, “ever-​turning sword” (Genesis 3:24), which is applied to Shekhinah: “It changes from this side to that side, from good to evil, from mercy to judgment, from peace to war, it changes in everything, good and evil, as it is written, ‘the tree of knowledge of good and 367 Shihābuddin Yaḥya Suhrawardī, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihābuddin Yaḥya Suhrawardī, translated by Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (London: Octagon Press, 1982), p. 91. 368 Al-​Hujwīrī, Kashf al-​Mahjūb, p. 369. 369 In some zoharic passages, the sword functions as an androgynous symbol, and thus it is associated with Yesod, the phallic gradation, which comprises male and female. In other contexts, the image of the sword is associated more specifically with Shekhinah in the feminine façade of divine judgment, though even in this case the female is portrayed in decidedly masculine, even phallic, terms, the “sword that shall execute the vengeance of the covenant,” ḥerev noqemet neqam berit (Lev 26:25); expressed otherwise, the symbolic figuration of judgment is the feminine dimension of the male. See Tishby, The Wisdom, p. 1365; Wolfson, Circle, pp. 87 and 204 nn. 36–​37.

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evil’ (Genesis 2:17).”370 The alternation between good and evil attributed to the divine presence presages the incisive quality of time, the fullness of the moment realized in the cut that binds, the fork in the road that splits into a path to the right and a path to the left. The sojourner on the way knows, however, that the two paths are not to be construed dichotomously as they spring forth from one and the same font. I suggest that this insight underlies the statement from the zoharic homily with which I began, “even though he sees that it is the time that the other hand has been given power to rule in the world and it has been given to him to unite with it and to draw it close to the holy.” The remark is offered as the rationale for the restriction imposed on the priests not to enter “at any moment into the shrine,” for when pondering entry into the shrine the priest apprehends that even the demonic is not absolutely other in relation to the divine. The experience of God’s oneness discounts the possibility of ontological dualism—​an idea expressed by kabbalists, as mystics in other traditions, by the image of the coincidence, and in some cases, identity of opposites—​ hence the high priest is tempted to draw the strange fire into the shrine, to transverse the boundary and thereby unite demonic and divine, to affirm, in the zoharic language, God’s declaration, ana u-​shemi ḥad hu, “I and my name are one.”371 Although the monistic claim is metaphysically true, in the unredeemed world, the mandate for the pious Jew is to keep the pure and the impure separate. To utilize a botanical image, the function of the shell may be to protect the fruit, and therefore can be considered as part of the divine design, but the obligation still is to eat the fruit and to cast away the shell.372 When confronting the sacred in the form of the erotic energy of the feminine, the priest must forbear the enticement to render conjunctive the disjuncture of the moment—​the slashing of the instant—​by blurring the boundaries separating holy and unholy.

370 Zohar 1:221b. In a section from the Tosefta stratum printed in Zohar 2:27b-​28a, the scriptural image of lahaṭ ḥerev ha-​mithappekhet, “fiery ever-​turning sword” (Genesis 3:24), is applied to both Binah and Malkhut, the former insofar as “it changes from judgment to mercy to bestow upon the righteous their reward in the world to come,” and the latter insofar as “it changes from mercy to judgment to judge the wicked in this world.” 371 Zohar 3:58b. 372 The rabbinic paradigm is R. Meir about whom it was said that when he found a pomegranate, he ate the fruit and discarded the husk. See Babylonian Talmud, Ḥagigah 15b. The monistic propensity of the kabbalistic symbolism did express itself in more subversive ways in the Sabbatian and Frankist movements where crossing the boundary entailed consuming the husk as an integral part of the fruit.

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Phallic Fecundity and the Spatio-​Temporal Enshrining of Prayer

There is one more layer of meaning to expose from the zoharic homily, the layer that will help us uncover the most recondite dimension of the ontology of time and the kabbalistic phenomenology of prayer. We have established that the moment, et, corresponds to Shekhinah, the feminine potency of the divine. The matter of gender construction, however, is more complex than meets the eye. Let us recall the following comment: “If you want to know by means of what he should enter—​‘through this’ [be-​zo’t]. ‘Through this Aaron shall enter into the shrine’ [be-​zo’t yavo aharon el ha-​qodesh] (Leviticus 16:3), this zo’t is the moment [et] that is attached to my name; through this yod, which is inscribed in my name, you will enter the shrine.”373 The intent of this passage is to relate that the ascription of the temporal category et to the feminine is dependent on her receiving the seminal efflux of divine energy from the supernal sefirot, which are fashioned imaginally as male, through the phallic marking of the yod, the sign of the covenant, which is the first letter of the Tetragrammaton.374 The point is enunciated in slightly different terms in the following comment of David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid in Sefer ha-​Gevul, a commentary on the zoharic stratum Idra Rabba: “This is [the import of] ‘Your garments should be white in every moment’ (Ecclesiastes 9:8), verily ‘in every moment’ [be-​khol et], and the secret ‘do not come at any moment to the shrine’ (Leviticus 16:2), for all the lights of the supernal crown [keter elyon] illumine this moment [me’irim le-​hai et], as it says, ‘It is the moment to do for the Lord’ [et la‘asot la-​yhwh] (Psalms

3 73 Zohar 3:58b. 374 The point is made in slightly different terminology in the commentary of Naḥmanides to the scriptural expression “this is the blessing,” we-​zo’t ha-​berakhah (Deuteronomy 33:1), Perushei ha-​Torah, 2: 491: “By way of truth, ‘this’ [we-​zo’t] is the ‘blessing’ [ha-​berakhah], ‘for from the Lord this [zo’t] was’ (Psalms 118:23), and, similarly, with respect to Jacob it is said ‘and this [we-​zo’t] is what their father said to them’ (Genesis 49:28). ‘This is the blessing’—​this is what was spoken by David, ‘This [zo’t] has been my lot, for I have observed your precepts’ (Psalms 119:56). This alludes to Zion, the city of David, ‘there the Lord ordained blessing, everlasting life’ (ibid., 133:3), and the enlightened will comprehend [we-​ha-​maskil yavin].” Naḥmanides reads the expression we-​zo’t ha-​berakhah as an appositive rather than a constructive, that is, zo’t is the berakhah, thereby forging an essential link between Shekhinah and blessing, a link that is dependent, moreover, on the fact that Shekhinah is like a vessel that holds the overflow of the blessing received from the emanations above her. At the end of the relevant passage, Naḥmanides draws the obvious conclusion, “for the word ‘this’ [zo’t] alludes to the blessing [berakhah], which is the Torah, and this is the covenant [berit], as it is written ‘this is my covenant’ [zo’t beriti] (Isaiah 59:21).”

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119:126), as it says, a moment ‘for every time and a moment for every desire’ [la-​ kol zeman we-​et le-​khol ḥefeṣ] (Ecclesiastes 3:1).”375 To comprehend the full implications of this remark, it is necessary to bear in mind that the context in which it occurs is an exposition of the words “he does not remit all punishment,” we-​naqqeh lo yenaqqeh (Exodus 34:7), which appear in the biblical verses whence rabbinic interpreters eisegetically derived the thirteen attributes of divine mercy. Building on previous rabbinic texts, the medieval kabbalist accords theurgic power to these verses; their recitation by Israel induces the bestowal of a “gratuitous gift” (matnat ḥinnam)376 on God’s part in the form of his forgiving all transgressions through the conduit of “the attribute of whiteness [middat ha-​lavan], which is the whiteness of the skull [loven shel ha-​gulgolet].”377 As we can ascertain from parallel passages in two other works by David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Or Zaru‘a378 and Mar’ot ha-​Ṣove’ot,379 375 David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Sefer ha-​Gevul, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2197, fol. 25b. For a slightly different version, see ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2193, fol. 19a. The latter manuscript recension has been published in Sefer Hagevul, p. 108. I have taken the liberty to rework my analysis in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Imago Templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-​Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007): 132–​134. 376 The expression is used as a poetic representation of divine grace in various rabbinic and liturgical contexts. See Sifre on Deuteronomy, 26, pp. 38–​39; Midrash Tanḥuma, Wa-​ etḥannan, 3, 2:853. The formulation that seems to have influenced David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid the most is the paraphrase of the midrashic text in the biblical commentary of Solomon ben Isaac, Perushei Rashi al ha Torah, p. 524 (ad Deuteronomy 3:23): “Wa-​ etḥanan, in every place ḥinnun connotes a gratuitous gift [matnat ḥinnam]. Even though the righteous could rely on their good deeds, they request of God only a gratuitous gift.” 377 David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Sefer ha-​Gevul, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2197, fol. 25b; Sefer Hagevul, p. 108. 378 Compare David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Or Zaru‘a, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2203, fol. 41b: “‘I will bless the Lord in every time’ (Psalms 34:2), that is, I will bless Aṭarah, which is the house of my kingship, from the place of the supernal well [Keter]. ‘In every time’ [be-​khol et], that is, in Aṭarah, which is called et, as it is written ‘It is the moment to do for the Lord, for they have violated your Torah [et la‘asot la-​yhwh heferu toratekha] (Psalms 119:126), and it is written ‘do not come at any moment’ [al yavo be-​khol et] (Leviticus 16:2).” See now the printed version of this text, David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Or Zaru‘a, edited with comments and annotations by Bentsion Ben Levi Hacohen (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2009), p. 176. 379 David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, The Book of Mirrors, p. 235: “Therefore, it is written ‘I pleaded with the Lord at that time’ [wa-​etḥannan el yhwh ba-​et ha-​hi] (Deuteronomy 3:23), that is, he [Moses] entered and ascended from attribute to attribute, and he began to enter from the tenth attribute, which is the attribute of the moment [middat et], as it says ‘do not come at any moment’ [al yavo be-​khol et] (Leviticus 16:2). Thus, he ascended from attribute to attribute until the attribute of the supernal crown [keter elyon], which

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the secret of prayer—​imparted by the scriptural depiction of the supplication of Moses, “I pleaded with the Lord at that time,” wa-​etḥannan el yhwh ba-​et ha-​hi (Deuteronomy 3:23)—​is that the worshipper rises to the supernal aspect, the attribute of grace, whence divine beneficence issues impartially and indiscriminately for the wicked and the righteous, the attribute of indifference wherein opposites coincide in the identity of their difference. The petition of Moses, as prayer more generally, is thus linked to a particular moment, ba-​et ha-​hi, which corresponds symbolically to the tenth of the emanations to the degree that it incorporates the benevolence of the first of the emanations. The worshipper enters through Aṭarah, which is the moment, and climbs to Keter, the source of the gratuitous gift, the divine efflux that proceeds boundlessly in an act of pure grace. Thus, we can better comprehend the interpretation of the verse “Your garments should be white in every moment” (Ecclesiastes 9:8), that is, the nature of the moment, which corresponds to Aṭarah, can be fathomed from Keter, the ancient one, coterminous with the infinite and yet renewed, albeit unremittingly, as that which has eternally been what is yet-​to-​become; inasmuch as the supernal emanation is depicted as the “attribute of whiteness” or as the “whiteness of the skull,” it is incumbent that an individual’s garment be white in every moment. The mechanics of prayer, rendered theosophically, involves the conjunction of Keter and Aṭarah, a juxtaposition that signals the commingling of the linear and the circular representations of the sefirotic emanations—​in accord with the archaic Heraclitean wisdom, the way up and the way down are one in the same, for the descent of the first to the last is concomitantly the ascent of the last to the first, a dual movement that results in the joining of beginning and end that transforms the line into a circle. In the aforecited zoharic passage, the gender transmogrification of this process is brought into sharper relief. Shekhinah assumes the posture of the moment (et) when she receives from and is thereby incorporated into the male. The transposition is alluded to in the claim that the word zo’t, the feminine demonstrative pronoun, is the yod that is inscribed in the divine name. The reference obviously is to the first letter of yhwh, but in this context, the yod should also be decoded as the letter/​sign of circumcision; through that letter Shekhinah is attached to the name. To appreciate the full import of this claim, it is necessary to recall that zoharic homilists, as other kabbalists of their time, linked Shekhinah, which is called aṭarah, with the corona of the phallus, aṭeret berit. As I have discussed this symbolism in several studies, I will not belabor

bestows a gratuitous gift [matnat ḥinnam] to the righteous and to the wicked.” Compare ibid., p. 279, translated in Wolfson, Language, pp. 506–​507 n. 234.

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the point here, but what I want to emphasize is the particular relevance of this transposition to understanding the correlation of time and prayer. The et, which initially was identified as the female aspect, the Matrona, in the end is assimilated into part of the male organ, the yod that is inscribed in the name. By what means does the priest enter the shrine? Through zo’t, which is the yod, the sign of circumcision. And with this we reach the point of perfect symmetry in the homiletical rhetoric exhibited by the zoharic author: Nadab and Abihu cohabited with gentile women and thereby placed the sign of the covenant in an unworthy place. From this transgression the high priest is to learn that he can only go into the shrine through the potency of zo’t, the letter of the name inscripted on the flesh, the yod, the feminine dimension of the phallic potency, identified as aṭeret berit.380 Exposure of the corona permits access to the sacred space in the sacred moment at hand, be-​zo’t yavo aharon el ha-​ qodesh, for the site of the covenantal incision is the ontological root of time in its alternating phases of night and day. In this manner, the erotic ecstasy of the instant, whose incisive cut tears the fabric of time, is properly restrained by means of the restoration of the female to the male in the form of the sign of circumcision, zo’t reincorporated into zeh. The containment of the female in the male ensures that boundaries will not be traversed and that the distinction between holy and unholy will be preserved. When the potentially threatening force of the unruly, transgressive feminine is properly reigned in, then crossing the threshold at the propitious moment—​indeed, the moment that is the threshold that one crosses, entering and departing, not as sequential acts but as one contemporaneous gesture—​occasions the meeting-​point of time and space, a concurrence that bespeaks the mystery of prayer, which serves as the paradigm for human worship more generally. The kabbalistic secret is captured pithily in the words of Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, “The worship of man is to join time and place and to unify them in divinity” (leḥabber zeman u-​maqom u-​leyaḥadam ba-​elohut).381

380 In Zohar 2:51a, the verse be-​zo’t yavo aharon el ha-​qodesh (Leviticus 16:3) is cited to anchor the idea that the way to approach the king is through the angelic mediator, sheliḥa de-​ malka be-​kholla, “the messenger of the king in all things.” This angelic being, also designated by the technical terms “angel of God,” mal’akh ha-​elohim (Genesis 31:11; Exodus 14:19, Judges 6:20, 13:9; 2 Samuel 14:20), and “guardian of Israel,” shomer yisra’el (Psalms 121:4), alludes to Shekhinah, the symbolic referent of the pronoun zo’t. While there is nothing explicit or implicit in this passage that necessitates positioning the divine presence in the corona of the phallus, it seems to me nevertheless justifiable to presume that the gender of the angelic glory, which is the glorious angel, is masculine. 381 Schneersohn, Qunṭres u-​Ma‘yan, p. 113.

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This association accounts for the essential link between time and memory affirmed frequently by kabbalists, the masculine (zakhrut) branded as the locus of memory (zikkaron).382 The generative force is visualized, moreover, as the twenty-​two Hebrew letters, which are comprised within the name yhwh. These letters, in turn, allude to the ten sefirot, the luminous emanations variously arrayed in the imagination of the visionary, including especially in the image of an anthropos. Philosophically speaking, envisioning the invisible entails the paradox of delineating the limit immeasurable in its delineation, enunciating the word unspoken in its enunciation, recollecting the trace forgotten in its recollection. This insight, which characterizes the kabbalistic orientation from early on, is well expressed by Immanuel Ḥai Ricchi, the eighteenth-​century Italian kabbalist and poet. Ricchi notes that the three numerical groups—​the ones (aḥadim), tens (asiriyyot), and hundreds (me’ot)—​reveal the root and the power of its cause hidden within it. The ones instruct about the unity (aḥdut) prior to the ṣimṣum, the contraction of the divine essence, which is removed even from the order of times. The tens instruct about the eternality (niṣḥiyyut) revealed in the order of times after the ṣimṣum. The hundreds instruct about the ten “moments of evil” (ittim le-​ra‘ah), which were caused by the judgment whose potency came to be through the contraction (ha-​din she-​nithawweh koḥo be-​ṣimṣum), multiplied by the ten “moments of good” (ittim le-​ṭovah), which were caused by the munificence of the extension of the line (ḥesed ha-​hitpashsheṭut ha-​qaw). It is instructive that Ricchi has framed the most recondite of kabbalistic mysteries—​the delimitation of the limitless—​in temporal terms rather than the more common framing of the matter in the spatial terms of the infinite creating a vacuum (ḥalal) or an empty place (maqom panuy) within which to bring the various worlds into being.383 In the first state, prior to the ṣimṣum, the name ascribed to the nameless is howeh, a word that denotes the present; in the second state, after the ṣimṣum, the infinite assumes the ten letters hyh hwh yhyh, that is, hayah of the past, howeh of the present, and yihyeh of future; in the third state, there is a combination of howeh, the name of the perpetual present before the constriction, and hayah howeh we-​ yihyeh, the designation of eternity after the constriction, to form the expression howeh hu hayah howeh we-​yihyeh, which has the numerical value of one 382 For a more detailed exploration of this theme, see Wolfson, “Re/​membering,” pp. 224–​226; idem, “The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse,” in God’s Voice From the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 103–​106 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 443–451). 383 Ḥayyim Viṭal, Mavo She‘arim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2016), 1:1, pp. 4–​5; idem, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:2, 11c.

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hundred (5+6+5+5+6+1+ 5+10+5+5+6+5+6+10+5+10+5).384 The eternal present of the infinite is thus identified with the compresence of the three temporal modes typically proposed as the esoteric meaning of yhwh. Moreover, following earlier Lurianic sources, Ricchi asserts that the letters, which can be imagined as both masculine and feminine, emerge in the space that comes to be in the aftermath of the ṣimṣum. The primal act of withdrawal is related to the “secret of judgment, which weakens this place like a female385 when his cause goes out from him, and he separates the place of the contraction [maqom ha-​ṣimṣum] so that it will be filled afterward with the loving­ kindness of the extension of the line that will be distended and augmented in it.”386 The paradox of the letters materializing in the place of the contraction propagates another paradox (or perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of 3 84 Immanuel Ḥai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Ṣafed: Alei Ayin, 2010), pp. 53–​54. 385 The idiom “his power has grown feeble like a female” (tashash koḥo ki-​neqevah) is used in connection with Moses in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 32a. It is explained in various ways by kabbalists. For example, Baḥya ben Asher, Be’ur al ha-​Torah, 3:88 (ad Numbers 14:13), writes: “And this is what the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, ‘his power has grown feeble like a female,’ for the female is passive and receives power from the male. Thus, they say that the power of Israel is not the cause of causes insofar as there is another force that is empowered over him and acts upon him like the power of masculinity that acts upon the female.” For other kabbalists, the expression signifies the process by which the limitless mercy is delimited by judgment, which in gender terms denotes the feminization of the masculine potency. Compare the use of the talmudic expression in Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 34:3, 47c, where the distinction between the aspect of forces in the male (gevurot zekharim) and the aspect of forces in the female (gevurot neqevot) is expounded: “And another reason when these forceful lights [ha-​orot shel gevurot] issue from the male towards her [Nuqba], they pass verily through the body of Ze‘eir Anpin from his hinder parts [ha-​aḥoriyyim], and thus necessarily as he passes by way of the partition [meḥiṣah] his power was weakened and his light was diminished, and therefore these lights are called females. And this is the secret of what they always say in every place, ‘his power has grown feeble like a female,’ for the weakening of the power is an epithet for the female.” See Ḥayyim Viṭal, Sha‘ar ha-​Pesuqim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2017), p. 31: “It is known that the crown of lovingkindness is masculine and the crown of power is feminine. How is it possible for male souls to come forth from the crown of the feminine power? To comprehend this it is necessary also to explain to you this matter in its first source, regarding why there is difference and variation between the supernal lights such that this one is called male and this one is called female. The matter in brief is that when the supernal light extends below, the whole time it is not weakened and enfeebled, it called male, but when it reaches the place where its power is weakened, it is called female, in the secret of his power was weakened like a female.” The implication of Viṭal’s teaching is that the original ontological status of all souls is masculine; the feminization occurs when the masculine light is enfeebled. See Viṭal, Mavo She‘arim, 6:10, p. 389. 386 Ricchi, Yosher Levav, p. 54.

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another facet of the same paradox): the infinite is absent from the very absence from which it is absent, a triple absence that alone can represent the nonpresence beyond representation, the nonpresence that is neither an absence that is present nor a presence that is absent. Ricchi articulates the matter with specific reference to the relationship between God and the Tetragrammaton: Insofar as we have proven that the force of the first cause is in the letters of the Torah, for they were the first generated being [yesh ha-​meḥudash ha-​ri’shon] that came to be in all the created beings, which were created by means of them, and since their force is found in them, we do not have to search anymore for the root of their existence and perdurance, to know who he is, for it is known that he is Ein-​Sof, blessed be he, who has concealed his force in the letters of the Torah with which all created beings have been created. From the abundance of his concealment he did not reveal the name of his essence in any matter from the matters of the Torah and not in any name from the holy names, for even the holiest of names is created. However, his first cause shines its light in it more than in the other names. Therefore, it is superior to all of them, for it is called by his name all the time that he illumines it. Thus, when the force of his cause is removed from it, even this name is removed.387 Ein-​Sof conceals the limitless force in the delimited letters of the Torah whence all things were created. This concealment, as I noted above, results from the paradoxical withdrawal of the infinite from itself into itself, a withdrawal that creates the space within which the secret comes forth in the secretion of letters. The letters, therefore, can be construed collectively as the veil that unveils what is not to be seen by veiling what is to be seen. Ricchi formulates the absence in radical terms (recapitulating the view expressed in earlier sources such as the fourteenth-​century anonymous Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut) by stating that no word or letter in the Torah scroll and none of the divine names refer to the substance of Ein Sof.388 The distinctiveness of the Tetragrammaton, denominated alternatively as shem ha-​meyuḥad, the “unique name,” or shem ha-​meforash, the “explicit name,” is that the light of Ein-​Sof glistens in it more than any other name, but even with respect to this name the light is manifest therein only to the extent that it is occluded. In the place of the contraction, the erasure is erased and the name of the nameless inscripted. Time is precisely

3 87 Ibid., pp. 54–​55. 388 Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut, ch. 7, p. 94.

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the measure of this “narrative space” arising from the infinite withdrawing into the sheltering-​open of its hidden disclosure,389 the alef secreted in the opening of the beit. From a kabbalistic vantage point we can speak of the overcoming of time but only in the timelessness of time’s perseverance as that which lingers in the lapsing of lingering and lapses in the lingering of lapsing. There is no eternity set over and against time, but rather the timeless time of temporal eternity calculated against the timelessness of eternal temporality like the halo of silence enveloping the periphery of the verbal, the haze of invisibility permeating the showground of the visible.390 7

Day That Is Entirely Long: Temporal In-​difference

I turn now to an excursus of a rather lengthy discourse on the kabbalistic meaning of time and eternity in a composition penned by Dovber Shneuri of Lubavitch, the second master of the Ḥabad dynasty founded by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, as this particular discussion pulls together many of the themes I have laid out in this chapter. The critical comment is found in Dovber’s interpretation of the rabbinic motto,391 “David, the king of Israel, shall live everlastingly” (dawid melekh yisra’el ḥai we-​qayyam): “For this is the elevation of Malkhut to the essence of the light of Ein Sof that is in the kingship of the infinite [malkhut de-​ein sof] prior to the withdrawal [ṣimṣum].” 392 The messianic proclamation of David’s everlasting existence is interpreted theosophically as the ascent of Malkhut to Ein Sof, or more specifically, to the essence marked as malkhut 389 For an elaboration of the philosophical underpinnings of my thought, see David Wood, “Time-​shelters: An Essay in the Poetics of Time,” in Time & the Instant: Essays in the Physics and Philosophy of Time, edited by Robin Durie (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), pp. 224–​241. 390 The kabbalistic conception of time is based on the intermingling of temporality and luminosity; the motion of the infinite light refracted through the prism of the emanations produces the sense of duration. For an interesting conceptual analogue, see René Huyghe, “Color and the Expression of Interior Time in Western Art,” in Color Symbolism: Six Excerpts From the Eranos Yearbook 1972 (Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1977), pp. 129–​165. 391 Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 25a. 392 Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, 63b. Compare idem, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 89c. See ibid., 127a, where the days of Messiah are characterized as the “ascent of Malkhut in Arikh Anpin in the Keter that is in the Keter within it.” See ibid., 233c. On the depiction of Malkhut as concealed in and concealing Ein Sof, see Shaul Magid, “The Metaphysics of Malkhut: Malkhut as Eyn Sof in the Writings of Ya’akov Koppel of Mezritch,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 27 (2012): 245–​267.

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de-​ein sof, identified elsewhere as the “last aspect in the essence of the light of the infinite,”393 or as the “beginning of the line and the thread” (re’shit ha-​ qaw we-​ḥuṭ),394 that is, the potential for boundary within the boundless, which 393 Dovber Shneuri, Aṭeret Ro’sh (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2003), 53b. See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), pt. 4, ch. 20, 130b: “Indeed, it is known that the essence of the generation of the something and the matter that is entirely separate [hithawwut ha-​yesh we-​davar nifrad legamrei] is from malkhut de-​aṣilut … and also the multiplication of the created beings and their division, which was created by the power of Ein Sof … was by means of the multiplication of letters that came forth from Malkhut … and thus it is called the ‘revealed world’ [alma de-​itgalya], for the power of the light of Ein Sof is revealed in her to create something from nothing and not by means of cause and effect. … And thus it is written ‘their end is fixed in the beginning’ [above, n. 57], for Keter is an intermediary between the emanator and the emanated, and there is in it the final aspect of Ein Sof, therefore it is called the crown of kingship [keter malkhut], as there is no crown except for a king. Inasmuch as the final aspect of Ein Sof is malkhut de-​ein sof, malkhut de-​aṣilut is also called Keter from below to above.” On the nexus between or ein sof, malkhut de-​ein sof, and ṣimṣum, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2001), 39a. The likely source for the Ḥabad symbolism is Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 42:1, 89b-​c: “However, the limit of what we can speak about it is that Keter is the aspect of the intermediary between the emanator and the emanated. The reason is that the most final aspect that is possible in Ein Sof has emanated one aspect in which is the root of all the ten sefirot in concealment and great subtlety with regard to which there can be nothing more subtle in what is emanated, for it is the chaos [tohu] above which there is nothing else but the absolute nihil [ha-​efes ha-​muḥlaṭ] as was said above. It follows that there is in this aspect two gradations. The first is the bottommost and lowest aspect of all the aspects of Ein Sof, and it is as if it was said by way of analogy that it is the aspect of malkhut she-​be-​malkhut, even though it is not like this since there is no image or sefirah there at all, God forbid, but we speak this way only to smooth the ear. In this lowest gradation that is Ein Sof, there is the totality of all that is above it and it receives from all of them, as it is known that Malkhut receives from all of them. This lowest gradation emanates the second gradation, which is the supernal gradation of all that is in what is emanated, and there is in it the root of all the emanated beings, and it overflows to all of them in the manner that the lowest of the emanator emanates the most superior of all the emanated beings.” The expression kingship of the infinite (malkhut de-​ein sof) corresponds to what Viṭal called kingship within kingship (malkhut she-​be-​malkhut). 394 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit, 66b. According to this passage, the aspect of the line and the thread is the source of the internal light (or penimi) as opposed to the aspect of the circle, which is the source of the encompassing light (or maqqif). From this standpoint the circle is above the line. See Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2003), 24a-​b, 450b. And compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2 vols. (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1996–​1998), 2: Shir ha-​Shirim, 1c: “The extension is not from the aspect of his name by means of cause and effect, for if so, then everything would be the aspect of Ein Sof. Rather, the extension is by means of the contraction and the leap [ṣimṣum we-​dillug] until only the aspect of the line and thread [qaw we-​ḥuṭ] extends from malkhut de-​ein sof, and several other contractions and concealments without number.” The linear configuration is illumined from the kingship of the light of the infinite and not from the essence of the light itself. See ibid., 42b, and analysis in Amos

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brought about the withdrawal that, in turn, enabled the beginning of the extension of the luminescence (ma’or)395 that has no extension,396 the concealment that occasioned the disclosure of the essentiality beyond disclosure, the dissemination of the inexhaustible mercy of yhwh through the circumscribed judgment of Elohim.397 The process of delimitation of the limitless is also portrayed metaphorically as the materialization of the letters of the infinite—​in zoharic terms, the letters engraved in the supernal lustre (otiyyot de-​galif bi-​ ṭehiru ila’ah)398—​prior to the emergence of the letters in the primordial Torah

395

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397 398

Funkenstein, “Imitatio Dei and the Concept of Tsimtsum in the Teaching of Chabad,” in Studies in Jewish History Presented to Professor Raphael Mahler on His Seventy-​Fifth Birthday, edited by Shlomo Yeivin (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1974), 85–​86 (Hebrew). For a more extensive discussion of the nexus between the leap as a form of acausal causality beyond the binary of cause and effect, ṣimṣum, and the incarnation of the infinite light, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad,” in Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, edited by Jonatan Meir and Gadi Sagiv (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2016), pp. 45–​86, esp. 46–​56 (English section). Beginning with Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the Ḥabad masters distinguish between ma’or and or ein sof, that is, the former denotes the luminescence whence the latter emanates. The superiority of the female over the male is expressed by the assumption that the source of Malkhut is the essence of the luminescence (aṣmut ha-​ma’or), which is the essence and substance (aṣmut u-​mahut) of Ein Sof, whereas the source of Ze‘eir Anpin is the light of Ein Sof. See the passage from Shalom Dovber Schneersohn cited below at the end of n. 409. The luminescence is a described paradoxically as the light that is beyond the polarity of light and dark and hence a light that is not contained in the aspect of light. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 70–​71, 107. The point is stated lucidly by Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, 3 vols., revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), p. 768: “Concerning the matter of the four letters in the name yhwh, which is in the light of Ein Sof before the ṣimṣum, the essence of the matter of ṣimṣum is in the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof … and the ṣimṣum is when the light of Ein Sof, which was radiating openly before the ṣimṣum, is concealed and there remained only the aspect of Malkhut of malkhut de-​ein sof.” For similar language, compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Hosafot, 53b-​c. The hosafot were first added by Shneur Zalman’s grandson, Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, to the edition of Liqquṭei Torah published in Zhitomir 1851. See the reference to this passage from Liqquṭei Torah in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Hagahot le-​Dibbur ha-​Matḥil Pataḥ Eliyahu 5658, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), pp. 59–​60. Compare idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5660–​5662 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2013), p. 325. Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), p. 89. Dovber Shneuri, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or, Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud, 119a; Schneersohn, Hagahot, pp. 60–​61. In the latter context, the supernal lustre (ṭehiru ila’ah) is identified explicitly as the aspect of the kingship within the kingship of the infinite (beḥinat malkhut she-​be-​ malkhut she-​be-​ein sof) as well as the aspect of the trace (beḥinat ha-​reshimah).

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that emanates from the supernal Wisdom (ḥokhmah ila’ah).399 The effort to articulate this matter in a logically coherent way leaves the misimpression that the contraction is followed sequentially by the expansion; a deeper grasp of the truth, however, requires a logic that opens the path to discerning that within the contours of infinity, which has no contours and therefore should

399 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Hosafot, 52d-​53a: “Thus, in this way, the matter of the disclosure of the initial light that was before the ṣimṣum will be understood. That is, parabolically, it is as if one said that it was garbed in the letters and the aspect of these letters is called the aspect of ‘speech’ [dibbur] vis-​à-​vis the superior letters called ‘thought’ [maḥashavah]. The ṣimṣum entails the withdrawal of the light from radiating in the letters of speech and being contained in the letters of thought. Even though in truth speech and thought are not appropriate there at all … but to soothe the ear we must speak this way, in order to depict the matter of the disclosure and concealment in the light and the splendor also before Adam Qadmon was created. Moreover, according to what is written in the books, ṣimṣum was in malkhut de-​ein sof, and the aspect of Malkhut in every place is speech.” Compare the explication of this matter in light of the doctrine of the malbush in Naftali Bachrach’s Emeq ha-​Melekh in Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Wayyiqra, vol. 4 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2013), pp. 1163–​1164. For citation and discussion of other relevant sources related to the theme of the letters of the infinite, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 59–​61, 259–​260; idem, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu—​The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013):109–​113, and the primary sources cited on p. 109 n. 144. On the connection between the point of the trace, which comprises all the aspects of the essence of the light that has been withdrawn, and the letters of the light of Ein Sof before the ṣimṣum, see Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, pp. 207–​208. Compare Schneersohn, Hagahot, p. 60: “The taw is the last of the letters, that is, the totality of the letters is the final aspect, that is, the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof, for Malkhut is the aspect of the letters, as is known.” On the identification of Malkhut as the aspect of the letters, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 4c; idem, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: We-​Zo’t ha-​Berakhah, 99d; idem, Seder Tefillot, 23a, 279a-​b. Just as the source of the letters of speech (otiyyot ha-​dibbur) is in malkhut de-​ein sof, so the last of the sefirot, the kingship of emanation, malkhut de-​aṣilut, is identified as the speech (dibbur) by which the light of the infinite is revealed in the lower worlds. See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 1, ch. 52, 73a. On the distinction between “letters of thought” (otiyyot ha-​maḥashavah) and “letters of speech” (otiyyot ha-​dibbur) in both the divine and human planes, see ibid., pt. 2, ch. 11, 88a and pt. 4, 108a-​b; Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Hosafot, 53a-​b. Concerning this distinction in Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s teacher, the Maggid of Mezhirech, see Ariel Evan Mayse, Speaking Infinities: God and Languages in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsch (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), pp. 54–​58, 78–​93. On Shneur Zalman’s utilization of the Beshṭian teaching concerning the creation of the world by means of the permutation of the Hebrew letters that constitute the speech of God, see Moshe Idel, “‘Your Word Stands Firm in Heaven’—​An Inquiry into the Early Traditions of R. Israel Baal Shem Tov and Their Reverberations in Hasidism,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 20 (2009): 239–​243 (Hebrew).

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not even be designated as infinity,400 the contraction is itself an expansion and the expansion a contraction. Just as the concealment of the concealed can be revealed only to the extent that it is concealed, so the light can be given only to the extent that it refuses to be given; every bestowal of what is withheld is concurrently a withholding of what is bestowed. The articulation of this subtle point by Shalom Dovber Schneersohn is worth citing: However, in the future to come, there will be disclosed the aspect of the potency of the essential concealment [koaḥ ha-​he‘lem ha-​aṣmi] of Malkhut as it is from the perspective of the essential concealment of Ein Sof. And this aspect will be decisive, for there will be a disclosure of the aspect of the essence and substance of Ein Sof. However, the aspect of the essential concealment will be extended also by means of the potency of disclosure [koaḥ ha-​gilluy] so that there will be a disclosure of the light. This is by means of the aspect of the disclosure of the essence, which is precisely the potency of disclosure.401 The status of Malkhut changes from the present wherein the potency to reveal alone is what is manifest to the future wherein the aspect of the potency of the essential concealment will be openly disclosed. In the messianic state, the essential potency (koaḥ ha-​aṣmi) of the concealment of the infinite essence—​ the ontological root of Malkhut—​will be unconcealed as the concealment of the unconcealment. From a gender perspective, in Ḥabad thought, following precedent in Lurianic sources and especially the Sarugian version transmitted by Naftali 400 Compare Hillel ha-​Levi Malisov of Paritch, Liqquṭei Be’urim al Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud, in Dovber Shneuri, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or, 178c: “The holy name, by contrast, instructs about the aspect of the nullification [shelilah] from every type of description and definition [to’ar we-​hagbalah]. Furthermore, it instructs about the nullification even from the name Ein Sof, for the name Ein Sof, although it is incomposite and divested [pashuṭ u-​mufshaṭ] from the aspect of the source of the overflowing of the particularization [maqor le-​hashpa‘ah peraṭiyyut] but rather it has the capacity to emanate and to extend without measure. Even so it instructs about the source of the extensions of light and about the source of the expansion, and thus it is possible to say there is no end to his expansion [ein sof le-​ hitpashsheṭuto]. All this is not apposite except with respect to the aspect of the light of Ein Sof, which is called malkhut de-​ein sof, but not with respect to the aspect of the essence [ha-​aṣmut] because his essence and his substance is holy and entirely separate from the category of the disclosure of light to the point that it is not possible to say concerning it even the name Ein Sof.” 401 Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 93. For the continuation of this passage, see below, n. 410.

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Bachrach, malkhut de-​ein sof denotes the aspect of the feminine within the world that is entirely masculine, the potential for limit in the incomposite light (or pashuṭ) that has no limit, the capacity for otherness in the essence of which it must be said that there is no other.402 As a consequence of the ṣimṣum, there comes forth from the essence of the infinite (aṣmut ein sof) the dyad of light (or) and vessel (keli), the latter originating from the trace (reshimu), the “aspect of the potential for boundary in the light of the infinite that is boundless” (beḥinat koaḥ ha-​gevul she-​be-​or ein sof ha-​bilti mugbal), and the former from the line-​of-​measure (qaw ha-​middah) by which all measurable things are measured.403 The aspect of kingship within infinity, therefore, can be delineated as the source of the vitality of everything created from nothing by means of the contraction and withdrawal of the light.404 What is envisioned as the messianic rectification after the completion of the purification (sheleimut ha-​berur), therefore, is the ascent of Malkhut in the aspect of the crown of kingship (keter malkhut),405 that is, the return of Malkhut to the state of 402 Ibid., pp. 88–​89. For reference to and analysis of other pertinent sources, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 106–​107, 128, 218, 256, 344 nn. 221, 224 and 225, 376 n. 45. The need to distinguish between the attribution of gender identity and the marking of anatomical sexuality is attested, for instance, in Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 195a, where the rationale for locating the soul of Moses in malkhut de-​ein sof is that “it is like the aspect of the true something of the essence of the light of the infinite verily as it is without any garment at all” (she-​hu kemo bi-​veḥinat yesh ha-​amitti de-​aṣmut or ein sof mammash kemo she-​hu beli levush kelal). We think of Moses biologically as male and yet the root of his soul is in the kingship of the infinite. Conversely, we should not assume that this kingship is aligned with the female anatomy, as we see from Dovber Shneuri, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or, Sha‘ar ha-​Emunah, 76a: based on a zoharic distinction, malkhut de-​aṣilut is identified as the “lower king” (malka tata’ah) or the “small king” (melekh zuṭa), whereas malkhut de-​ ein sof is identified as the “upper king” (malka ila’ah) or the “great king” (melekh rav). The feminine potency in both of its aspects is designated as a king and not a queen. 403 Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, 63a-​b. On the derivation of the trace from malkhut de-​ein sof, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Re’eh, 21d. 404 Dovber Shneuri, Aṭeret Ro’sh, 50b. Compare idem, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or, Sha‘ar ha-​ Emunah, 51a: “Yet, in malkhut de-​aṣilut, which is called the ‘end of everything’ [sof ha-​kol], is the aspect of the activity [ha-​ma‘aseh] in which there is the power of the beginning of the infinite essence [koaḥ hatḥalah de-​aṣmut ein sof], which is in the light of keter de-​ aṣilut, to create something from nothing in actuality.” 405 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit, 90d-​91a. Compare idem, Ner Miṣwah we-​Torah Or, Sha‘ar ha-​Emunah, 24b: “Malkhut will ascend further to rise to the head of everything, and it will be in the aspect of Keter … and it is known that their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end [above, n. 57], and thus it is said [above, n. 253] that the crown of kingship [keter malkhut] is the supernal crown [keter elyon], and a proof for this is the elevation of Malkhut to the interiority of Attiq Yomin in the concluding rite [ne‘ilah] of Yom Kippur as is known.” Compare Schneersohn, Yom Ṭov shel Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 5666, p. 404: “However, Israel is the aspect of the disclosure of the name yhwh by means of

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affairs prior to the inceptual act of withdrawal that eventuated in the splitting of the male androgyne into discrete masculine and feminine potencies, a rupture that was necessary for there to be worlds outside infinity in relationship to which there is outside. In the boundlessness of Ein Sof, there is no autonomous female standing over and against the male; on the contrary, the potentiality for femininity—​the kingship of the infinite—​is contained fully in the male, and, to be even more specific, it is located in the corona of the phallus,406 not the phallus of the genital area but the phallic potency situated in the head, identified already in early kabbalistic sources as the yod in the brain that corresponds to the yod inscribed on the circumcised penis.407 Admittedly, the phallocentric element is not belabored in Dovber’s comment,408 but it is implied by the fact that the eschaton is characterized by the Torah and commandments, for the whole matter of the Torah and commandments is the aspect of the disclosure of the name yhwh, which is called the ‘teaching of the Lord’ [torat yhwh] (Exodus 13:9) and the ‘commandments of the Lord’ [miṣwot yhwh] (Numbers 15:39). And it is known that the Torah was given so that there would be a disclosure of the aspect of the essence of the light of Ein Sof that was before the withdrawal [ha-​ṣimṣum], which is high above the aspect of the source of the worlds, and this is the aspect of Israel, which is the aspect of the disclosure of the essence of the light of Ein Sof that is high above the name Elohim, and the name Elohim does not conceal this at all. And this is the aspect of the illumination of the face [he’arat panim], ‘the Lord will make his face shine upon you’ (Numbers 6:25), for by means of the Torah there extends the aspect of the illumination of the face of the countenance of the supernal Adam, and it also illumines the face of the lower Adam … and the illumination of the face is from the aspect of the interiority of Attiq. … And thus the worship of the aspect of Israel is the aspect of the light of Ein Sof that is above the aspect of the withdrawals [ha-​ṣimṣumim], that is, the aspect of the disclosure of the name yhwh that is above the aspect of withdrawal of the name Elohim, and in the root of its root it is the aspect of the essence of the light of Ein Sof that is above the category of connection to the worlds.” The passage confirms both the androcentrism and the ethnocentrism in the traditional Ḥabad thinking: Israel alone through the Torah and its commandments is able to connect to and thereby facilitate the disclosure of the essence of the light of infinity in the world, and this aspect of the essence of the light of infinity is linked to yhwh, which is above the name Elohim, the aspect of limitation or judgment that makes possible the existence of worlds purportedly outside the infinite. Although not stated explicitly, we can presume that Elohim is engendered as feminine and yhwh as masculine even if it is also the case that this name should be beyond the polarity of male and female; that is, the gender dimorphism is overcome by the absorption of Elohim in yhwh, the name that cannot be concealed by any withdrawal of the light. On the ascent of Malkhut to Keter in Ḥabad thought, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 200–​209. 406 Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” pp. 121–​135; idem, “Gender and Heresy,” pp. 254–​262; idem, Language, pp. 181–​186, 382–​388. 4 07 See, for instance, Isaac the Blind, Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, p. 2. 408 The phallic implication, however, is palpable in Dovber Shneuri, Aṭeret Ro’sh, 14b, where we find the following comment on the liturgical utterance “This day is the beginning of your works, the commemoration of the first day,” zeh ha-​yom teḥillat ma‘asekha

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him, as it is by Ḥabad masters more generally, as the elevation of Malkhut, the last of the divine emanations, to the rank of malkhut de-​ein sof, the “aspect of the inwardness of Keter,”409 an elevation that entails the ostensible equalization of the gender roles of masculine overflowing (mashpi‘a) and

zikkaron le-​yom ri’shon (Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 27a), which made its way into the zikhronot section of the musaf service for Ro’sh ha-​Shanah (Maḥzor la-​ Yamim ha-​Nora’im, edited by Ernst Daniel Goldschmidt, 2 vols. [Jerusalem: Koren, 1970] 1:151): “Thus, ‘the commemoration of the first day,’ in general and in particular, in every world to join and to bind the upper in the lower. Everything is done by means of the commemoration of the inner covenant [zikkaron ha-​berit ha-​penimi], and this is by means of the cutting of the covenant for Israel [keritat ha-​berit le-​yisra’el], who arose in thought, which is verily in the essence [she-​be-​aṣmut mammash]. It is an intermediary to join that which is high with that which is low, and the upper with the lower, up until the exalted of levels [rom ha-​ma‘alot], up until malkhut de-​ein sof, in the line and the thread [be-​qaw we-​ḥuṭ]. … Thus, through the [transmission of] the essence from the  first Adam to Abraham and his descendants, and it is called the commemoration of the covenant in its inwardness, the light and the efflux extend also in the external conjunction so that malkhut de-​ein sof becomes the source of the worlds, and that which is high is joined with that which is low until the lowest, for the light of the soul of Abraham descended below and by means of this the essence of the light of the infinite from above joined that which is below, from world to world in the concatenation of [the worlds of] emanation, ­creation, formation, and doing.” The phallic nature of Keter is implied in the description of Yesod drawing from Keter to overflow to Malkhut in Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5732 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2020), p. 107. 409 Dovber Shneuri, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​ Emṣa‘i: Qunṭresim (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1991), p. 101: “However, in the future to come, the aspect of Malkhut will ascend higher than Ze‘eir Anpin, for she is called ‘a crown of her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4) … and she will ascend more in the aspect of the inwardness of Keter, and then she will be called ‘a crown for her husband’ also in relation to the aspect of Ḥokhmah, which is called ‘father’.” Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Neṣavim, 53b: “Thus, the root of the souls of Israel is from malkhut de-​aṣilut because their beginning is fixed in their end, for the root of Malkhut is from Keter, as in the saying ‘the supernal crown [keter elyon] is the crown of kingship [keter malkhut]’ … that is, from the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof. Therefore, by means of repentance they can draw down the thirteen attributes of mercy from the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof for it is the inwardness of Keter.” Compare Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, pp. 89–​90: “The root of Malkhut is in the aspect of the essence and substance [aṣmut u-​mahut] of Ein Sof, the aspect of the essence of the luminescence [aṣmut ha-​ma’or], and the root of Ze‘eir Anpin in general is in the expansion and disclosure [ha-​hitpashsheṭut we-​ha-​gilluy] of the light of Ein Sof. … And the matter of ‘the story of heaven and earth’ (Genesis 2:4) is that the disclosure of the aspect of Malkhut will be like she was in her root in the essence and substance of Ein Sof, and she will be ‘the woman of valor is a crown for her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4). … This is the disclosure that will be in the future to come, the higher aspect that is in Malkhut, for it will be in the aspect of a diadem [aṭarah] on his head.”

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feminine receiving (meqabbel),410 or, more extremely, the reversal of these functions such that the female capacity to receive is positioned above and thereby transmuted into the male potency to overflow,411 a disruption of the 410 Dovber Shneuri, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Emṣa‘i: Qunṭresim, pp. 100–​101: “It is known that the benevolences of the masculine [ha-​ḥasadim di-​dekhura] overpower the forces of the feminine [ha-​gevurot de-​nuqba] as the saying ‘and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16), and thus the extension was done below. Yet, all this was when she was in the aspect of malkhut de-​aṣilut, the Community of Israel, which is the aspect of ‘my sister, my beloved, my dove’ (Song of Songs 5:2). However, when she ascends to the aspect of ‘my faultless one’ (ibid.), which is the aspect of one crown for both of them, then the forces of Malkhut themselves change into benevolences, and then the will to receive will also be in the aspect of descent and extension below. And this is [the meaning of the] one crown for both of them, that is, one will for both of them to be in the aspect of the descent and extension below. … Afterwards it says ‘for my head is drenched with dew, my locks with the damp of night’ (ibid.), for it is known that the essence of the matter of the union of the one that overflows and the one that receives to the extreme that they are equal in their stature [she-​iqqar inyan yiḥud mashpi‘a u-​meqabbel be-​takhlit ad she-​hen shawin be-​qomatan] is so that the aspect of the essence of the light of the infinite that is above overflowing and receiving [beḥinat aṣmut or ein sof she-​lema‘lah mi-​beḥinat mashpi‘a u-​ meqabbel] will be revealed to them.” For a somewhat more equivocal description of the gender roles in the messianic future, see Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 93: “In the future to come, there will be the aspect of the unity of male and female, and the two of them will be overflowing, like now, but at present the overflowing of Ze‘eir Anpin is decisive, for this one radiates openly, and the overflowing of Malkhut is hidden. However, in the future to come, she will be in the aspect of ‘the woman of valor is a crown for her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4), that is, the root of Malkhut, which is in the aspect of the essential concealment of Ein Sof, will radiate and extend itself in Ze‘eir Anpin, and by means of Ze‘eir Anpin there will be the disclosure of the essence. It follows that the aspect of Ze‘eir Anpin will receive from the aspect of Malkhut, and it will also overflow, for the aspect of the essential concealment of Ein Sof will radiate openly below by means of it.” According to this passage, even though the feminine will be empowered in the messianic future, the male is still upheld as the bestowing agency by which the concealment of the infinite will illumine the lower worlds. For a similar point of emphasis, see ibid., p. 106. By contrast, in other contexts, Malkhut is characterized as the agency through which there is a disclosure of the light in the world when all the purifications will have been completed and the primal transgression will be rectified. See, for example, ibid., p. 157. 411 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot, 197b: “In the future, Malkhut will ascend … to her root in the aspect of chaos [ha-​tohu], which long preceded the aspect of rectification [ha-​tiqqun]. … And this is what is written ‘the woman of valor is a crown for her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4), that is, the crown [ha-​aṭeret] is the aspect of encompassing [maqqif] of the forty-​five letter name of Ze‘eir Anpin, which will derive precisely from the aspect of Malkhut. Thus, the one that overflows will then be in the aspect of the one that receives, to receive from the aspect of Malkhut, which was the aspect of the one that receives from Ze‘eir Anpin and was called her husband.” In the continuation of this passage, Shneur Zalman writes about the equalization of the male and female in similar language to the text of Dovber cited in the previous note. On the two models in Shneur Zalman and Dovber of identifying male and female versus the privileging of the female vis-​à-​vis the

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standard order also expressed as the soul being sustained by the body.412 This transposition is signified primarily in Ḥabad thought, in consort with earlier kabbalistic sources, by the scriptural images of we-​hayah or ha-​levanah ke-​or ha-​ḥammah, “And the light of the moon shall become like the light of the sun” (Isaiah 30:26), neqevah tesovev gaver, “the female shall encircle the male” (Jeremiah 31:21), and eshet ḥayil aṭeret ba‘lah, “the woman of valor is a crown for her husband” (Proverbs 12:4),413 and occasionally by the aggadic

male, see Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 200–​205, and see my brief comments in Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 376 n. 44. The gender dynamics in Shneur Zalman are also discussed by Tworek, Eternity Now, pp. 132–​143. 412 Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5732, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2019), p. 169. On the spiritual purification and illumination of earthly matter in the future, expressed as the shining of the infinite without any concealment, see Shmuel Schneersohn, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5637, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2013), pp. 63–​64; idem, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5637, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2013), pp. 621-​522; Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, pp. 102–​103; idem, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​ Hiqdimu 5672, p. 783. For additional citation and analysis of sources on the messianic elevation of the body over the soul, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 130–​160. 413 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot, 87d, 164a, 201b, 205c, 208c; Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5732, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2019), p. 218. Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Shir ha-​Shirim, 15c: “Thus, regarding the future, it is written ‘the female shall encircle the male’ (Jeremiah 31:21), that is, the aspect of the one that receives will ascend and it will be above the aspect of the male that overflows, ‘the woman of valor is a crown for her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4), since the end of action is first in thought.” Regarding the use in Ḥabad literature of the dictum sof ma‘aseh be-​maḥashavah teḥillah from the Lekhah Dodi hymn of Solomon Alqabeṣ, placed in juxtaposition to the statement in Sefer Yeṣirah about the sefirot that “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end,” see Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 1117–​1118; Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5732, pp. 277–​278; and other references cited in Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 371 n. 160. On the transposal of gender roles implicit in the imagery of the female encircling the male or the woman of valor as a crown for her husband, see Dovber Shneuri, Aṭeret Ro’sh, 40b, 49b; idem, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit, 16d, 212a; idem, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Emṣa‘i: Qunṭresim, pp. 3, 101; Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 24. For other sources, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 176, 178, 194, 203, 204, 219, 375 n. 41. Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 5b: “With all of this it is understood what is said in the blessing of the bridegrooms [birkat ḥatanim] in the blessing sameaḥ tesamaḥ ḥatan we-​khallah [Grant abundant joy to the bridegroom and the bride] and in the last blessing, which is asher bara [who created], it says mesameaḥ ḥatan im ha-​kallah [who gladdens the bridegroom with the bride]. That is, the bride is the aspect of Malkhut. Initially, she received the light from the bridegroom, which extends from the world of the masculine into the world of the feminine. And this is ḥatan we-​khallah. However, afterward it is mesameaḥ ḥatan im ha-​ kallah because by means of the bride he gladdens the bridegroom, for verily she is made

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image of the righteous in the world to come sitting with their diadems on their heads.414 The innovative element in Dovber’s teaching surfaces in his explication of the symbol of malkhut de-​ein sof in terms of time and eternity. The aforementioned eschatological teaching occurs in the context of a lengthy account of the monotheistic proclamation, shema yisra’el yhwh elohenu yhwh eḥad, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4), and the liturgical utterance that immediately follows it, barukh shem kevod malkhuto a ‘helpmate’ [ezer] to him, and the additional light is from the aspect of ‘opposite him’ [kenegdo] … and this is [the import of] she becomes a crown for her husband.” See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen: Hanaḥot ha-​Ra”p z”l (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 64–​65. As is often the case, the Ḥabad perspective is stated succinctly by Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5745, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1986), p. 1644: “This is the connection with the future redemption—​for then there will (not only be the ‘voice of the bridegroom,” but) also the ‘voice of the bride,’ that is, the aspect of the feminine will ascend to be in the aspect of the one that overflows like a male himself, and on the contrary, ‘the female shall encircle the male” (Jeremiah 31:21), ‘the woman of valor is a crown for her husband’ (Proverbs 12:4).” Even though the female capacity to receive is portrayed as being higher than the male potency to overflow in the infinite essence, the transposition does not amount to a transvaluation as the phallocentric gaze is still determinative of the valorization of the respective gender identities. For a similar critique, see Shaul Magid, “The Ritual Is Not the Hunt: The Seven Wedding Blessings, Redemption, and Jewish Ritual as Fantasy,” in Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption, edited by Randi Rashkover and Chad C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 188–​211. I note, finally, the study of Julia Schwartzmann, “From Mystical Visions to Gender Equality Aspirations: A Hermeneutical Journey of Two Biblical Verses,” Journal of Jewish Studies 66 (2015): 138–​156. The author examines the “growing sensitivity” of modern Orthodox society toward the status of women in Judaism by examining the use of two verses, Genesis 1:16 and Jeremiah 31:21, to establish a social sense of gender parity. Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s interpretation of the verse from Jeremiah is discussed on pp. 152–​153, but there is no effort to contextualize his perspective in light of the six masters in the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch dynasty, who similarly interpreted the verse as a sign of the gender transposition to take place in the messianic era. On the social status of women in Ḥabad communities under the leadership of the seventh Rebbe, see the sources cited in Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 379 n. 81, including the study of Naftali Loewenthal, “Women and the Dialectic of Spirituality in Hasidism,” which has now been republished in his Hasidism Beyond Modernity: Essays in Habad Thought and History (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020), pp. 261–​304. To the references I listed in Open Secret, one might add the nuanced study of Ada Rapoport-​Albert, “From Women as Hasid to Woman as ‘Tsadik’ in the Teachings of the Last Two Lubavitcher Rebbes,” Jewish History 27 (2013): 435–​473. 414 See above, n. 302. Compare Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 195a, 450b. The aggadic image of the righteous sitting with their crowns on their heads is used more frequently in Ḥabad sources to depict the pneumatic transformation of the body in the world to come. See Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 783, 1259.

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le‘olam wa‘ed, “Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever.” The former corresponds to the supernal unity (yiḥuda ila’ah) and the latter to the lower unity (yiḥuda tata’ah). We may deduce from Dovber’s analysis, the relevant portion of which I shall presently cite, that the compresence of the three modes of temporal eternality within yhwh—​what was, what is, and what shall be (hayah howeh we-​yihyeh)—​parallels the compresence of the three tenses of eternal temporality within Malkhut—​past, present, and future (avar howeh we-​attid). For the root of the becoming of time [shoresh hithawwut ha-​zeman] is in the aspect of Malkhut, which is specifically the aspect of the feminine [nuqba],415 and this is the matter [of the rabbinic principle] that women are exempt from time-​dependent positive commandments, for time is in the feminine,416 but the name yhwh, that is, what was, what is, and what will be as one [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh ke-​eḥad], is above the aspect of past, present [and future] time … for the essence of the light of infinity, which is entirely above time [aṣmut or ein sof she-​lema‘lah min ha-​zeman legamrei], shines through the temporal aspect of the feminine [ya’ir bi-​ veḥinat ha-​zeman de-​nuqba] … and, consequently, the aspect of time will also be without limit [bilti mugbal] and it will be eternal without cessation [niṣḥi beli yufsaq], and this is [the intent of the expression at the end of the liturgical formula barukh shem kevod malkhuto] “forever” [le‘olam wa‘ed], in the eternality [niṣḥiyyut] of Ein Sof, for it is itself verily the aspect and gradation above time, but it is garbed in time. And this is [the meaning of the rabbinic slogan] “David, the king of Israel, shall live everlastingly” [dawid melekh yisra’el ḥai we-​qayyam], eternally [le‘olam]. And this is specifically in the future to come, as is known, as it is written in Daniel, “The Ancient of Days [attiq yomin] was sitting” (Daniel 7:9) 415 On the connection between the female personification of Malkhut and time, see Tworek, Eternity Now, pp. 131–​132. 416 Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot, 120c, and the hosafot added by Dovber Shneuri to Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 111b. On the exclusion of women from time-​ bound commandments in Shneur Zalman’s teaching, see Tworek, Eternity Now, pp. 144–​ 148. See the passage from Ḥayyim Viṭal cited in Wolfson, Circle, p. 202 n. 31. Regarding this rudimentary tenet of rabbinic halakhah, see Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person: The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 152; Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 164–​165; Elisabeth Shanks Alexander, Gender and Timebound Commandments in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 25–​63.

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and then “his kingdom will be an eternal kingdom [malkhuteih malkhut alam]” (ibid., 27). And this [is the intent of the claim that] barukh shem kevod malkhuto le‘olam wa‘ed will be above the yhwh of the supernal unity [shema yisra’el yhwh elohenu yhwh eḥad], for the name yhwh comprises past, present, and future as one, but even so it is not in the aspect of that which is entirely above time; on the contrary, it is the source of time. However, when time is without bound, as described above, that which is entirely above time, the essence of the light of Ein Sof, illumines it as it was before the withdrawal [ṣimṣum] … and this is in the seventh millennium, which is called the “day that is entirely long”417 [yom she-​ kullo arokh].418 Three levels are distinguished in the above passage: the root of the becoming of time in its triple emplacement—​past (avar), present (howeh), and future (attid)—​linked to the aspect of Malkhut; the compresence of the three temporal modalities—​what was (hayah), what is (howeh), and what will be (yihyeh)—​as one unity, which is associated with yhwh, the ineffable name that is symbolic of the rest of the sefirotic gradations; and, finally, the light of Ein Sof that is utterly beyond time. In the infinite, “the two parts, past and present, are equal, and there is no before with respect to the past nor after with respect to the future, but the two of them are as one in the Nothing, and the antecedent is consequent and the consequent antecedent, as it is devoid of the 417 The phrase “day that is entirely long,” yom she-​kullo arokh, which is attested in earlier medieval sources (for instance, Tosafot ha-​Ro’sh, Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 13a), is based on the more frequently used rabbinic designation for the eschatological state, the “world that is entirely long,” olam she-​kullo arokh, which parallels the expression “world that is entirely good,” olam she-​kullo ṭov, terminology that is linked exegetically to the reward mentioned in conjunction with the command to honor one’s parents, “that you may endure, and that you may fare well,” lema‘an ya’arikhun yameikha u-​lema‘an yiṭav lakh (Deuteronomy 5:16). See Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 39b; Ḥullin 142a. And compare Palestinian Talmud, Ḥagigah 2:1, 77b, where the related turn of phrase “future that is entirely long,” attid she-​kullo arokh, appears as a parallel to “the world to come that is entirely good,” le-​olam ha-​ba she-​kullo ṭov. In that context, the exegetical reference is the scriptural reward for sending the mother bird free when taking the fledglings from the nest, “in order that you may fare well and have a long life,” lema‘an yiṭav lakh we-​ha’arakhtta yamim (Deuteronomy 22:7). Mention should also be made of the related eschatological expression “day that is entirely Sabbath,” yom she-​kullo shabbat. See Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 31a; Sanhedrin 97a; Tamid 3b; Avot de-​Rabbi Natan, edited by Solomon Schechter (Wien: Ch. D. Lippe, 1887), version A, ch. 1, 3a. On the designation of the world to come as the “elongated world,” olam arokh, see the passages from the Ra‘aya Meheimna stratum of zoharic literature in Zohar 3:215b, 232a, 252b. 418 Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, 63b-​c. Compare ibid., 76c-​d.

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aspect of time.”419 Dovber’s position is rendered more clearly in the following comment of his father and mentor, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, which is based on the passage of Viṭal cited previously in this chapter: Thus, in truth, “For I, the Lord, have not changed” (Malachi 3:6), for there is no alteration in him, blessed be he, from before the world was created when he and his name were alone420 … (and, similarly, prior to the coming-​to-​be of the aspect of time [hithawwut beḥinat ha-​zeman], for time likewise was created and generated anew, but there was an order of time [seder zemannim] prior to the creation of this world, that is, from the moment of the emanation and coming-​to-​be of the spiritual worlds [et aṣilut we-​hithawwut olamot ha-​ruḥaniyyim] … but prior to this no order of time was appropriate [qodem lazeh lo hayah shayyakh shum seder zemannim], for he, blessed be he, is entirely beyond time [lema‘lah me-​ha-​zeman legamrei]), and so it will be after the world is destroyed, and also now in the time of the creation of the world and its subsistence, before him, blessed be he, everything is verily considered to be nothing [kolla mammash ke-​la ḥashiv]421 just as it was actually before the world was created. … However, with respect to us the world is considered as something and as a thing unto itself, and it hides the divinity, and hence it is called by the name “world” [olam] on account of “the concealment” [ha-​he‘lem], for it conceals the divinity and hides it.422 419 Ibid., 40d. Cf. Dovber Shneuri’s formulation in Derushei Ḥatunah (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1991), p. 676: “And it is known that this is the aspect of the effluence [beḥinat ha-​hamshakhah] that surrounds the supernal Keter, which is called by the name yhwh, it was, it is, and it will be [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh], above the aspect of time and place [lema‘lah mi-​beḥinat zeman u-​maqom], for it has not yet come in the aspect of the disclosure of the light and overflow for the sake of the coming-​into-​being of the worlds from nothing to something [beḥinat gilluy or wa-​shefa bishevil hithawwut ha-​olamot me-​ayin le-​yesh].” 420 Pirqei Rabbi Eli‘ezer, ch. 3, 5b. 421 The idiom ke-​la ḥashiv is derived from the expression ke-​lah ḥashivin used in Daniel 4:32 to denote the powerlessness of the nations vis-​à-​vis God, but the source that is likely to have influenced the acosmic orientation of Ḥabad is the following description of God in Zohar 1:11b: “Because he is master and ruler, the root and source of all worlds, and everything before him is considered as nothing [we-​kholla qameih ke-​la ḥashivin], as it is said, ‘all the inhabitants of the earth are considered as naught’ (Daniel 4:32).” For similar language, compare the depiction of the splitting of the sea in Zohar 2:170a-​b, “When the will rose before him, everything was considered before him as nothing [kolla qameih ke-​ayin hu ḥashiv].” 422 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Balaq, 70c. Compare ibid, 2: Shir ha-​Shirim, 1a; idem, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 1, ch. 20, 25b-​26a. On the wordplay between ha-​olam and he‘lem, which conveys the paradox that the world is the concealment that reveals

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One can speak properly of the coming-​into-​being of time with the emanation of the sefirot, the temporal unfolding/​enfolding of the spiritual entities that cannot be situated in corporeal space, a process encoded semiotically in the Tetragrammaton, which conveys the compresence of what was, what is, and what shall be.423 The coalescence of the three tenses is indicative of the temporal transcendence of the temporal as masters of Jewish esoteric lore often claimed with respect to the deeper connotation of the Tetragrammaton. As Shneur Zalman of Liadi put it in Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud we-​ha-​Emunah, “For the name yhwh indicates that he is above time [lema‘lah min ha-​zeman], for he was, is, and will be in one moment [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh be-​rega eḥad] … and he also is above the aspect of place [lema‘lah mi-​beḥinat maqom], for he constantly brings into being the entire aspect of place from above to below, and to the four sides. Even though he, blessed be he, is above place and time, he is found also below in place and time; that is, he is united in the aspect of his kingship [she-​mityaḥed be-​middat malkhuto] whence there issue and come to be place and time.”424 The ascription of temporal characteristics to God is categorically the hiddenness of the light of infinity, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 26–​27, 52, 93, 103–​114, 128–​129, 132, 215, 218. 423 On the justification of applying spatial and temporal images to the world of sefirotic emanations, see the comments of Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 338–​340. 4 24 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 2, ch. 7, 82a. The passage is cited more fully in ch. 5 of this volume at n. 108. Regarding the theme of the infinite transcending the temporal and the spatial in Ḥabad thought, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 62, 279, 325 n. 168, 396 nn. 65–​66; idem, “Achronic Time,” p. 51. It is of interest to compare the Ḥabad perspective on the relationship between that which is beyond time and space to the spacetime continuum and the description of the two levels of reality in David Bohm, “The Super-​Implicate Order,” in The Essential David Bohm, edited by Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 147–​149: “The higher one is called non-​linear, mathematically, and the lower one is linear. That means of course that the linear organization of time and thought characteristic of the ordinary level will not necessarily be characteristic of the higher level. Therefore what is beyond time may have an order of its own, not the same as the simple linear order of time. … This higher order is not basically the order of space and time, but the order of space and time unfolds from it and folds back into it. … We are going to say that it is possible to have an implicate order with regard to time as well as to space, to say that in any given period of time, the whole of time may be enfolded. It’s implied in the implicate order when you carry it through: the holomovement is the reality and what is going on in the full depth of that one moment of time contains information about all of it. … So let me propose that also for consciousness; let me propose that consciousness is basically in the implicate order as all matter is and therefore it’s not that consciousness is one thing and matter is another. Rather consciousness is a material process and consciousness is itself in the implicate order, as is all matter, and consciousness manifests in some explicate order, as does matter. … Consciousness is possibly a more subtle form of matter and movement, a more subtle aspect of the holomovement. In the nonmanifest order there is no separation in space and time.” Compare the conversation

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denied, but it is precisely the sempiternity implied by the ineffable name that ignites the regeneration of the invariable in the capriciousness of the variable. From that vantage point, eternality (niṣḥiyyut), signified by the copresence of past, present, and future in the Tetragrammaton, is itself an aspect of temporality, the limitless extension of the limit that cannot be extended. The moment is thus pinpointed as the convergence of time and eternity in the confluence of the three temporal modalities. This cardinal point in the ontological underpinning of the Ḥabad phenomenology of time can be seen clearly in the following passage of Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, the grandson of Shneur Zalman and successor to Dovber, commenting on the verse “Let the name of the Lord be blessed now and forever” (Psalms 113:2): Malkhut is called “now” [attah], the “moment of the Lord” [et h], for the root of time begins in her, as it is written in Liqquṭei Amarim, part 2,425 concerning the matter of “he reigns [melekh], he reigned [malakh], and he will reign [yimlokh],” and thus she is also called “temporal existence” [ḥayyei sha‘ah]. … Therefore, Malkhut is called … “now,” which is in the present tense [howeh], and its meaning is a minute moment [rega qeṭannah], concerning which the expression “now” applies, which is not the case when there is some temporal extension [yumshakh zeman mah], for the expression “now” does not apply, as there is also past, future, and present. However, now is naught but a “little while” [rega qaṭan]426 in which the language of now, that is, this second [zo ha-​rega], is possible. In relation to the infinite, blessed be he, all the days of the world, and the six millennia, which are the six attributes that emanate from Malkhut, are only like the minute moment.427 From this passage we learn that another crucial facet of the identification of Malkhut as the root of time relates to the fact that this divine gradation is linked to the present that is not subject to the triadic dissection of the timeline.428 We

4 25 426 427 428

on “Cleansing the Mind of the Accumulation of Time” in Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm, The Ending of Time: Where Philosophy and Physics Meet, revised and expanded edition (New York: HarperOne, 2014), pp. 35–​59. See below, n. 435. Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 2, ch. 7, 82a. Isaiah 54:7. Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 151a–​b. I have previously cited and analyzed this passage in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 277–​278. The Ḥabad description of the timelessness of the moment can be compared to the comment in The Essential David Bohm, p. 148, that “the moment is atemporal, the connection of moments is not in time but in the implicate order.”

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can speak of the now, therefore, as an atemporal present in which the three temporal modalities of past, present, and future coalesce, just as we say of the divine that he reigned, he reigns, and he shall reign—​not sequentially but concurrently, since God is entirely above time and the chain of concatenation. The paradox is symbolically embedded in the word attah, whose consonants (ayin, taw, he) can be rearranged to spell et h, that is, the “moment of the Lord,” an expression that invokes the conjunction of the unlimited in the delimited, the everlasting in the transitory. From the standpoint of the infinite, all time is comprised in the “little while” (rega qaṭan), the smallest of demarcations, the infinitesimal point that contains all difference indifferently. The attribution of time to the divine is related more specifically in Ḥabad philosophy, including the aforecited passage, to the quality of governance and therefore it is ascribed to Malkhut, the point of liminality situated between the world of unity and the world of multiplicity. Given the centrality of this notion, it will not be extraneous or digressive to cite another comment of Shneur Zalman of Liadi: And this is [the import of] “Your kingship is an eternal kingship and your dominion is for all generations” [malkhutekha malkhut kol olamim u-​memshaltekha be-​khol dor wa-​dor] (Psalms 145:13), “eternal” [olamim] refers to the aspect of place [maqom] and “for all generations” is the aspect of time [zeman]. Everything issues forth from the aspect of “your kingship” [malkhutekha], for time and place are created and come to be from nothing to something [me-​ayin le-​yesh]. Prior to the creation of the world there was no aspect of time or place at all, and there could be no created entities, which are delimited [ba‘alei gevul] in the aspect of time and place, except by means of the aspect of his kingship [malkhuto], may he be blessed, to which the aspect of time belongs, “he reigned [malakh], he reigns [melekh], and he will reign [yimlokh],”429 which is not the case

429 Based on the refrain yhwh malakh yhwh melekh yhwh yimlokh le‘olam va‘ed, which appears in the prayer uttered before the taking out of the Torah from the ark that begins ein kamokha va-​elohim adonai we-​ein ke-​ma‘asekha /​ malkhutekha malkhut kol olamim u-​memshaltekha be-​khol dor wa-​dor. See Massekhet Soferim, edited by Michael Higger (New York: Debe Rabbanan, 1937), 14:4, pp. 156–​157; Seder Avodat Yisra’el, edited by Seligman Baer (Berlin: Schocken, 1937), p. 222. The refrain appears as well in yehi khevod yhwh le‘olam yismaḥ yhwh be-​ma‘asaw, which is part of the section of the morning liturgy known as pesuqei de-​zimra. See Seder Avodat Yisra’el, p. 68; Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, edited by Yoḥai Makbili (Ḥaifa: Or wi-​Yeshu‘ah, 2009), Seder Tefillot, 1:4, p. 151. See Zohar 1:34a, 2:223a (Ra‘aya Meheimna), 252a (Ra‘aya Meheimna).

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in the light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, itself, for just as his name, so he has no limit.430 The identification of Malkhut as the ontological source of time is supported by the liturgical formula yhwh malkah yhwh melekh yhwh yimlokh le‘olam wa‘ed—​ usually abbreviated as malakh melekh yimlokh—​which affirms God’s dominion in the past, present, and future, an idea repeated often in Ḥabad literature.431 Space and time cannot be applied to any of the divine attributes except for Malkhut, for this is the attribute that most precisely conveys the sense of divine governance (adnut). An inherent correlation of temporality and the feminine is thus established. It must be noted, however, that there are statements offered by the various Ḥabad masters that problematize this characterization by locating the root for time in the masculine potency that bestows the efflux upon the feminine. Thus, for example, Dovber writes, “Evening and morning is the time of night and day whose root is in Ze‘eir Anpin, which is called the ‘source of the coming-​to-​be of time that is in Malkhut’ [meqor hithawwut ha-​zeman she-​ be-​malkhut], ‘[he ruled], he rules, and he will rule,’ as it has been explained in another place with regard to the explanation of the name yhwh, ‘he was, he is, [he will be],’ for it comprises everything that is in the past, present, and future in the aspect of the time of Malkhut.”432 This distinction is sometimes framed in terms of the rabbinic notion of seder zemannim, which is set in contrast to zeman proper, the former linked to Ze‘eir Anpin and the latter to Malkhut.433 The matter is rendered even more

430 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 37a. See also Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 2, ch. 7, pp. 162–​163. See ibid., pt. 1, ch. 25, p. 62, where the divine light, garbed in the souls of Israel, is described as “not being in the aspect of time and the hour at all [beḥinat zeman we-​sha‘ah kelal], for it is above time [lema‘lah me-​ha-​zeman], and it governs and rules over it as is known.” See ibid., pt. 4, ch. 7, p. 219. 431 See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Devarim, 2c; idem, Seder Tefillot, 120c, 229b; the hosafot added by Dovber Shneuri to Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 111b; Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, 63b, 66c, 76c; Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​ Torah: Bemidbar, revised edition, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1998), pp. 884, 996; idem, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 73a, 151a, 198b; Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu, pp. 160, 340, 1095, 1345. 432 Dovber Shneuri, Perush ha-​Millot (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 59c. 433 Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5685 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1986), p. 186: “The existence of place and time is from the aspect of Malkhut, as it is written, ‘Your kingship is an eternal kingship and your dominion is for all generations’ [malkhutekha malkhut kol olamim u-​memshaltekha be-​khol dor wa-​dor] (Psalms 145:13), ‘eternal’ [olamim] is the aspect of place and ‘generations’ [dor wa-​dor] the aspect of time. Everything is from the aspect of Malkhut, and the root of roots is the aspect of Ze‘eir Anpin, as they said, ‘there was a prior order of time’ [she-​hayah seder zemannim qodem lakhen].”

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complex by the fact that, according to the acosmic naturalism or apophatic panentheism of Ḥabad philosophy,434 there is only one reality, the light of Ein Sof, but this light, the translucence of consciousness that cannot be delimited either spatially or temporally, assumes the semblance of the nothingness of independent beings subject to the physical laws of space and time. Inasmuch as there is no thing outside the nothing, the finite world itself is consubstantial with the insubstantiality of the infinite essence.435 Shneur Zalman ardently 434 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 87–​103. My perspective should be contrasted with earlier portrayals of Ḥabad’s acosmism as we find, for example, in Scholem, Major Trends, p. 341. 435 Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 213. Ḥabad’s approach to cosmology and psychology can be profitably compared to David Bohm’s hypothesis that the multidimensional implicate order of the undivided wholeness of being presumes a common ground of matter and consciousness. See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 262–​271, esp. 267: “Whatever may be the nature of these inward depths of consciousness, they are the very ground, both of the explicit content and of that content which is usually called implicit. Although this ground may not appear in ordinary consciousness, it may nevertheless be present in a certain way. Just as the vast ‘sea’ of energy in space is present to our perception as a sense of emptiness or nothingness so the vast ‘unconscious’ background of explicit consciousness with all its implications is present in a similar way. That is to say, it may be sensed as an emptiness, a nothingness, within which the usual content of consciousness is only a vanishingly small set of facets” (emphasis in original). The Ḥabad notion of the essentiality of the light of infinity (aṣmiyyut or ein sof) is parallel to Bohm’s undivided wholeness—​or what he calls the “immense multidimensional ground” (ibid., p. 268)—​that assumes the form of consciousness and matter in the implicate order of being. See above, n. 424. For further development of this approach, which also bears kinship to the Ḥabad worldview, see Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, third edition (Berlin: Springer, 2009); idem, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer, second edition (Berlin: Springer, 2011). Analogous to Bohm’s assumption that the implicit content of the explicit manifestation in both planes of reality is emptiness or nothingness, so in Ḥabad teaching, it is often emphasized that the scriptural assertion “there is none beside him” (Deuteronomy 4:35) implies that all discrete beings are negated in relation to the infinite essence. Compare the elucidation of the seemingly contradictory expression apophatic body in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 67–​68: “In speaking of body, the body spoken is no longer the lived body of which one has (un)spoken. The body, one might say, is precisely what cannot be spoken but as the no-​longer-​spoken-​once-​spoken, an apophatic body, spoken in its unspokenness. The texture, the touch, of what we confront and what confronts us in our materiality, however we are to construe the latter, resists the reduction of the corporeal to the linguistic. We face being, and name it, but, in so naming, we discern the opposition of that which we face, the discreteness and distinctiveness of what must remain other to consciousness as it is part of consciousness as the other just as consciousness is part of it as other. One may be critical of thinking consciousness in terms of the structure of intentionality, the for-​itself and for-​the-​other, but there seems to be no way around the taint of the mirror image. Language, on this score, is not a bridge that connects mind and matter, a communication of the linguistic being of things, in Benjamin’s telling formulation; it is, rather, an open enclosure—​a circumscription—​that

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insists, therefore, that in relation to the “substance” (mahut) and “essence” (eṣem) of the infinite, the aspects of place and time “are verily nullified in existence [beṭelim bi-​meṣi’ut mammash] … in the way that the light of the sun is nullified in the sun [ke-​viṭṭul or ha-​shemesh ba-​shemesh].”436 When viewed reveals the twofold inflection of the apophatic body. To mull over a matter so ponderous in its immateriality, one would be wise to calibrate one’s thinking in accord with contemporary quantum physics, as a mundane orientation is not amenable to rendering the stuff of being most abstract at the basest level of concreteness and most concrete at the highest level of abstraction.” The perspectives of Ḥabad and Bohm resonate as well with a central tenet of Mahāyāna Buddhism that the emptiness of the being of nonbeing is the ground of the suchness of the nonbeing of being. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 109–​114. Finally, just as the Bohmian perspective challenges Niels Bohr’s claim that the quantum state is an unanalyzable whole (David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory [London: Routledge, 1993], pp. 23, 94, 137), so the apophaticism in Ḥabad applied to the essence of the infinite is intertwined with the kataphatic assumption that through the plurality that constitutes the oneness of that essence the unknowable is rendered knowable even as the knowable is rendered unknowable. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 47–​49, 58–​59, 73–​74, 80–​81, 90–​93, 100–​101. I gather that Ḥabad masters would concur with the following statement on the relativity of scientific truth and the inherent aporia of the accumulation of verified knowledge offered by David Bohm, The Special Theory of Relativity, with a foreword by Basil Hiley and a new preface by John D. Barrow (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 270–​271: “If such knowledge could constitute a set of absolute truths, then it would make at least some kind of sense to regard its accumulation as the main purpose of science. As we have seen, however, it is the fate of all theories eventually to be falsified, so that they are relative truths, adequate in certain domains, including what has already been observed, along with some as yet further unknown region that can be delimited, to some extent at least, in future experiments and observations. But if this is the case then the accumulation of knowledge cannot be regarded as the essential purpose of scientific research, simply because the validity of all knowledge is relative to something that is not in the knowledge itself. So one will not be able to see what scientific research is really about without taking into account what it is to which even established and well-​tested scientific knowledge must continually be further related, if we are to be able to discuss its (necessarily incompletely known) domain of validity.” This is a matter that deserves a separate analysis. 436 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 2, ch. 7, 82a. See op. cit., pt. 1, ch. 33, 42a, and pt. 2, ch. 6, 81a; idem, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Bemidbar, 79b; Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Bemidbar, vol. 3, p. 918; idem, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq 5614–​5615 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1997), p. 82; Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 932. A particularly interesting formulation is found in Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 124b: “He, blessed be he, is one, and the existence of the world and all that is in it is annihilated [baṭel bi-​meṣi’ut] to the point that God, blessed be he, is the only thing that exists. It is not that we are saying that there is here no world at all, God forbid, but that according to the truth the annihilation of the world is like the annihilation of the splendor of the sun when it is in the body of the ball of the sun [lefi ha-​emet biṭṭul ha-​olam hu ke-​viṭṭul ziw ha-​shemesh ke-​she-​hu be-​guf kaddur ha-​shemesh].” See below, n. 441.

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through this prism of apophatic embodiment,437 the material cosmos (olam) should be understood as the concealment (he‘lem) that reveals the immaterial light that cannot be revealed but through concealment.438 Menaḥem Mendel proficiently elaborated this feature of Ḥabad thought, restating almost verbatim the language of Shneur Zalman: The root of time comes to be only in the aspect of Malkhut, for the aspect of Malkhut has the aspect of “he reigned, he reigns, and he shall reign” [malakh melekh yimlokh] … but above the aspect of Malkhut time does not apply at all [lema‘lah mi-​beḥinat malkhut ein shayyakh zeman kelal]. In the midrash it says that “this teaches that there was an order of time before this.”439 The intent is that [the expression] “before this” applies to this world, prior to this world’s generation, but prior to the emanation of the supernal worlds even the order of times was not at all suitable. Therefore, it is not appropriate to ask why the creation of the world was not earlier since there was no time, and it does not apply at all either before or after, for before or after there only applies an aspect of time. What emerges from this is that he and his name were alone prior to [the creation] and after the world will be destroyed as well, and there will be no time. Therefore, even now in the midst of time before him [everything] is considered as nothing, and everything that is closer to being before him is considered more as nothing, and only in relation to us it

4 37 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 66–​129. 438 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Shelaḥ, 37d: “As it has been explained in another place [with reference to] ‘the Lord is God’ [yhwh hu elohim] (Deuteronomy 4:35, 39; 1 Kings 8:60, 18:39; 2 Chronicles 33:13), the contraction [ṣimṣum] of the name Elohim is itself an aspect of yhwh. … Thus, with the proliferation of the concatenation, the complete contraction comes to be and the great concealment that is concealed in the aspect of the divine potency that sustains the world and it is garbed in many and abundant garments, for [the word] olam is from the term he‘lem, as is known.” Compare Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Torat Menaḥem: Derushei Ḥatunah (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2000), p. 36: “This is [the meaning of] ‘He planted a tamarisk [at Beer-​sheba], and there he invoked the name of the Lord, the everlasting God [wa-​yiqra sham be-​shem yhwh el olam]’ (Genesis 21:33), for the world [olam] and divinity [elohut] are one, for the world is nature [ṭeva], but the truth is that nature itself is divinity, and this is [the import of] ‘and there he invoked the name of the Lord, the everlasting God,’ yhwh and Elohim are wholly one, as yhwh is disclosure and Elohim is numerically equivalent to ha-​ṭeva, for it is the divine light that is hidden like a matter that is submerged in water … nature covers the divine light but the essence is divinity.” 439 See above, n. 197.

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becomes concealment [he‘lem] and occlusion [hester], and thus the [cosmos] is called olam from the word he‘lem.440 Time is associated uniquely with Malkhut, the attribute of the divine to which governance in the world is assigned, but since the world is not accorded an independent status—​the playful etymology that links olam and he‘lem drives home the point that the world is a garment that reveals the light of the infinite by concealing it, for had the light not been concealed the world would have been extinguished in the infinite like the ray of sunlight absorbed in the orb of the sun441—​time itself should be thought of as an illusion. Just as prior to creation it is meaningless to speak of time when musing about the divine, so it is pointless to speak of time when considering what will be after the world is destroyed. We may conceive of time, therefore, as a bridge suspended over an abyss bounded by the nothing that is everything at one end and the everything that is nothing at the other end. The release from time is possible, however, even in the middle, in the course of one’s lifetime, when the emptiness of being is contemplated from the standpoint of the infinite. Attaining this state of annihilation, turning yesh back to ayin, is the eschatological consciousness through and in which time as the primordial pulse of creation is covertly revealed, openly concealed. It will be recalled that according to the passage from Dovber cited above, the messianic moment, rhetorically expressed in the rabbinic slogan “David, the king of Israel, shall live everlastingly” (dawid melekh yisra’el ḥai we-​qayyam) and in the liturgical formula “Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever” (barukh shem kevod malkhuto le‘olam wa‘ed), is characterized as the elevation of Malkhut to Ein Sof, but also as the illumination of Malkhut by Ein Sof, two figurative ways of describing her restoration to the position she

4 40 Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Bemidbar, vol. 3, p. 996. 441 See references cited above, n. 436. See Shmuel Schneersohn, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5627 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2000), p. 435: “If existence were by means of the name yhwh alone, the worlds could not have come to be in the aspect of a being that is a separate entity [yesh we-​davar nifrad] as they are now, but rather they would have been utterly nullified [beṭelim be-​takhlit ha-​biṭṭul] like the annihilation of the ray of the sun in the sun. In order for the worlds to be in the aspect of a being that is a separate entity, it is by means of the name Elohim, which conceals and hides the name yhwh, even though ‘yhwh is Elohim’ [see above, n. 438], and everything is one.” And see op. cit., p. 96; idem, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5632, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2000), p. 384; idem, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5633, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1994), p. 32; Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 1473.

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occupied within the boundless prior to the primal act of divine contraction.442 Time is thereby transformed, as it no longer has a limit, a philosophical idea communicated by the mythopoeic depiction of the seventh millennium as one elongated day, that is, the day beyond partition into the nocturnal/​diurnal binary. As Dovber describes the matter in another context, in the eschaton, both sun and moon will be limitless in their power, a balancing that neutralizes any priority or privilege accorded one over the other, but it is still possible, indeed necessary, to speak of an attribute of day [middat yom], albeit “a day that is entirely long, entirely good [yom she-​kullo arokh she-​kullo ṭov] … above male and female, which are called sun and moon.”443 In the state of redeemed time, the dyadic structure of night and day, marked by the dialectic of extension (hitpashsheṭut) and withdrawal (histallequt),444 gives way to the nondifferentiated unity in which opposites are no longer distinguishable as opposite. Consistent with earlier kabbalistic sources, however, the overcoming of the dimorphism does not imply difference of identity but rather identity of difference; the ultimate reality is described, therefore, as one elongated day that comprises both day and night rather than a span of time that is neither day nor night; identity of difference, as opposed to difference of identity, entails the absorption of one antinomy in the other such that we can speak of night contained in day, dark in light, left in right, female in male. As a representative illustration of this point, consider the remark of the Vilna Gaon: Thus, on the seventh day it does not say “And there was evening [and there was morning],” for male and female are not disclosed there, and there they are one and contained [one within the other], the female contained in the male, as is known, in the secret of waw within the supernal he. And even the day [ha-​yom] is there in concealment, and this is [the import of] what is written, “there shall be a continuous day [only known 442 Consider the formulation in Dovber Shneuri, Aṭeret Ro’sh, p. 12: The source of time is located in the aspect of Malkhut within Ein Sof, which prior to the withdrawal (ṣimṣum) is found in Keter, the “incomposite will that arose in thought” (raṣon ha-​pashuṭ she-​alah be-​maḥashavah) that comprises “all that will be after the withdrawal” (kol mah she-​attid lihyot aḥar ha-​ṣimṣum). 443 Dovber Shneuri, Derushei Ḥatunah, p. 638. 444 See, for instance, Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Bemidbar, vol. 3, p. 884: “This is the aspect of the year [shanah] for the root of the becoming of time [shoresh hithawwut ha-​zeman] is from the aspect of this efflux that comes forth in the aspect of running-​and-​returning [raṣo wa-​shov] (Ezekiel 1:14), which is the withdrawal and the expansion [histallequt we-​hitpashsheṭut], and by means of this time comes to be.” See also Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 339–​340.

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to the Lord] that is neither day nor night, and there shall be light at eventide” (Zechariah 14:7). This is the seventh day that is entirely Sabbath, as is known.445 In a touch of historical irony, on this key doctrinal point there is a basic agreement between the Lithuanian kabbalist and the view espoused by the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch masters. Focusing especially on the gender implications of this eschatological conception of time as the day in which the nocturnal is not discernible as distinct from the diurnal—​the reconstitution of the male androgyne—​it is relevant to mention the comment of Shneur Zalman on the verse “On that very day Abraham was circumcised,” be-​eṣem ha-​yom ha-​zeh nimmol avraham (Genesis 17:26): Abraham merited the disclosure of the aspect “the Lord will circumcise your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6), and thus it is written “Abraham was circumcised” (Genesis 17:26). And this is [the import of] “On that very day [be-​eṣem ha-​yom ha-​zeh] Abraham was circumcised” (ibid.), that is, in the essence of that day [be-​aṣmiyyut shel ha-​yom ha-​zeh], and that day is the day that is entirely long and entirely good [ha-​yom she-​kullo arokh kullo ṭov]. The essence of that day is the great disclosure that will occur in the future, the disclosure of the aspect of “the abundance of your goodness” (Psalms 31:20, 145:7), and this [is the aspect of the day] that is entirely good, and when the aspect the “essence of that very day” was revealed to him, Abraham was circumcised.446 To do justice to this passage, one would have to examine in greater detail the fuller exegetical context whence it has been severed, an eminently worthy task, but one that lies beyond the concerns of this chapter. Suffice it to note, however, that the circumcision of Abraham, which is emblematic of the eschatological moment, is identified as the “second circumcision” (milah sheniyyah), an “arousal from above” (it‘aruta di-​le‘eila), in contrast to the “first circumcision” (milah ri’shonah), an “arousal from below” (it‘aruta di-​letata). The latter is focused on the ritual act of circumcising the flesh, whereas the former is expressive of the circumcision of the heart, a spiritual state that is described as being higher than the Torah.

445 Elijah ben Solomon, The Commentary of the Gaon Rabbi Elijah of Vilna to Sifra di-​Zeni‘uta, p. 122. 446 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 13d.

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Thus, concerning this second circumcision, which will be after the ingathering of the exiles and after the fulfillment of the entire Torah, it is written, “Who among us can go up to the heavens” [mi ya‘aleh lanu ha-​ shamaymah] (Deuteronomy 30:12), the first letters [spell] milah, which is above the aspect of the Torah, for with respect to the Torah it says “it is not in heaven” (ibid.), as it is indeed lowered below. … However, circumcision … is above the Tetragrammaton, and thus [milah] is [alluded to] in the first letters, whereas the name yhwh is [alluded to] in the final letters,447 and it is from the aspect and gradation of the heavens, above the aspect of the Torah, which is lowered below the aspect of these heavens. Regarding this the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, “Great is circumcision for thirteen covenants were decreed on the basis of it.”448 The [words] “great is circumcision” [gedolah milah] portend the aspect of the “great circumcision” [ha-​milah ha-​gedolah] from above to below, [signified by the verse] “the Lord will circumcise your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6). … And thus it is in order for there to be the disclosure and overflow of the aspect of the great circumcision … by means of the thirteen attributes of mercy, which are above wisdom and intellect. Therefore, it is above the aspect of the name yhwh and above the aspect of Torah (just as the thirteen attributes of mercy are the aspect that is above the Torah and hence forgiveness of transgression is found there). … Through this one can understand the matter of Abraham having fulfilled the entire Torah before it was given, but he did not fulfill the commandment of circumcision, as he wanted to attain that great circumcision from above to below. Therefore, he fulfilled all of the Torah that is below that circumcision and afterwards he merited that great circumcision that is above.449 The circumcision of Abraham’s membrum virile resulted from his having merited the circumcision of the heart, a spontaneous gesture that issues from the highest manifestation in the sefirotic pleroma, Arikh Anpin, a term derived from the scriptural idiom erekh appayim in Exodus 34:6,450 the place that is pure mercy and consequently beyond the strictures of law and its implied system of

447 For discussion of this exegetical tradition, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 78 (1987): 77–​112. 448 Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 32b. 449 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or, 13c-​d. 450 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 270.

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reward and punishment.451 Needless to say, the position articulated by Shneur Zalman should not be confused with the Pauline argument so influential in the history of Christianity that circumcision of the spirit (identified with the rite of baptism) replaces circumcision of the flesh. For Shneur Zalman, there is no substitution or replacement; to locate the circumcision of the heart in a gradation that is superior to the law of dichotomy does not imply an abrogation of the dichotomy of the law, but rather a deepening of that law by adhering to its source in Keter, the realm of unmitigated mercy and unwarranted forgiveness—​hence the identification of the thirteen covenants mentioned in conjunction with circumcision and the thirteen attributes of mercy. The second circumcision, which foreshadows the eschatological moment, triggers the transmutation of the carnal body into the semiotic body, that is, the body composed of the twenty-​two Hebrew letters, which are comprised, in turn, in the Tetragrammaton, the mystical essence of the Torah, configured as an anthropos in the imagination of the visionary. To express the matter tersely, we can say that the esoteric gnosis of kabbalah, which is the basis for the Ḥasidic teaching championed by Shneur Zalman, advocates the transubstantiation of flesh into word in contrast to the Christological incarnational emphasis on the word becoming flesh.452 The implication of the transposition of body into letter for the mystical understanding of time may be inferred from the scriptural language that Abraham was circumcised “on that very day,” be-​ eṣem ha-​yom ha-​zeh, which, read hyperliterally, is decoded as “in the essence of that day,” be-​aṣmiyyut shel ha-​yom ha-​zeh. The import of circumcision illumines and is illumined by the essential nature of the day, which is conveyed by the eschatological images employed in rabbinic literature, “the day that is entirely long,” yom she-​kullo arokh, and “the day that is entirely good,” yom she-​kullo ṭov. Circumcision of the heart, which induces the spontaneous circumcision of the flesh rather than its abnegation as Paul and countless Christian thinkers who followed in his wake argued, draws our attention to the redemptive capacity of time, or, to be more specific, to the redemptive capacity of the moment in which time is redeemed by time, the moment wherein opposites coincide and difference is effaced in the identity of indifference, an ideal conveyed, as I noted above, by the image of day without night rather than by the image of 451 In Torah Or, 85c-​d, Shneur Zalman describes Moses drawing forth the efflux from the aspect of erekh appayim so that Israel would be forgiven even though or precisely on account of the fact that they did not merit this grace on the basis of their deeds. Nonetheless, Shneur Zalman insists that there still had to be a reason to explain why the people of Israel were worthy of this superfluity of mercy. 452 See the extended discussion in Wolfson, Language, pp. 190–​260.

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time that is neither day nor night, or, alternatively, by the image of good without evil rather than by the image of a state that is neither good nor evil. To experience the temporal overcoming of time, which originates in Malkhut, one must be conjoined to Keter, the “aspect that is intermediate between that which is bounded in actuality and that which is boundless … the root of the coming-​to-​be of the order of time [shoresh hithawwut seder zemannim] … which is intermediary between Ein Sof itself and the emanation,” the locus of the coincidentia oppositorum, which is called “Ancient of Days” (attiq yomin), “for it is the eternality of the days [niṣḥiyyut ha-​yomin].”453 That the temporal overcoming of time, an overcoming that proceeds from undergoing, is the esoteric intent of Shneur Zalman’s eschatological teaching may be corroborated from another passage where he sets out to explain why the Sinaitic epiphany took place in a “desolate desert” (midbar ḥareivah): The matter is that the essence of engagement with the Torah is to be in the aspect of complete annihilation in the light of the infinite, blessed be he [iqqar eseq ha-​torah hu lihyot bi-​veḥinat biṭṭul be-​or ein sof barukh hu legamrei]. … The meaning of the expression “desolate desert” is [related to] what the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said regarding the seventh millennium [that it is] the one that is desolate [ḥad ḥaruv],454 and this is on account of the strength of the disclosure of the light of the infinite [oṣem gilluy or ein sof], the day that is entirely Sabbath [yom she-​kullo shabbat], the day that is entirely long [yom she-​kullo arokh]. The corporeality of the world [gashmiyyut ha-​olam] could not receive the vitality [ḥiyyut] from there to be like it is now in the aspect of a being and a separate entity [yesh we-​davar nifrad].455 In a manner reminiscent of the view of Maharal discussed above, for the progenitor of Ḥabad philosophy, the Torah was revealed in the desert, for of all habitations in the physical universe the wilderness is the most appropriate to depict the insubstantiality of the infinite. Going beyond the monistic tendency evident in Maharal’s thought, Shneur Zalman and his successors emphasize that the cosmos appears to be composed of independent entities, but, in truth, when the veil of epistemic ignorance is removed, it becomes clear that these entities have no independent ontological status as they are naught but aspects of the light of Ein Sof. Torah provides the means by which one is conjoined to 4 53 Shmuel Schneersohn, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5627, p. 38. 454 See above, n. 300. 455 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Bemidbar, 4b-​c.

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this light and in so doing attains the state of annihilation, construed temporally as the day that is entirely Sabbath or as the day that is entirely long, that is, the temporal span wherein the mundane is subsumed in the holy and wherein the nocturnal is contained within the diurnal. From this kabbalistic wisdom, we may deduce that the most basic feature of time is related to the eternal recurrence of what is recurrently ephemeral, the self-​same repetition of what is repeatedly different, the chronic coming to be of what has perpetually never come to pass. Time weaves its web of luminal darkness, concealing truth disclosed in the disclosure of untruth concealed as truth, the play of antinomies that characterizes both the inscripted erasure and the decoding thereof on the part of the enlightened who comprehends that eternity is the elongation of time’s rotating wheel, the curvilinear withholding of what is extended forward, instigated by the illumination of Malkhut by Ein Sof and the consequent ascent of the former to the latter. Again, to cite from Dovber: The matter is as it is written “and eternity” [we-​ha-​neṣaḥ] (1 Chronicles 29:11)—​this is the construction of Jerusalem456 … for the construction of Jerusalem in the future to come will be eternal in time [niṣḥi bi-​zeman] without any cessation at all, that is, because the aspect of the kingship of David and the Messiah in the future to come will also be eternal, as it is written, “That it may be firmly established [in justice and in equity] now and evermore” (Isaiah 9:6), as it said, “David, king of Israel, shall live everlastingly,”457 and as it is known concerning what is written, “He asked you for life” (Psalms 21:5), verily in the aspect of the eternal life of the infinite [bi-​veḥinat ḥayyim niṣḥi de-​ein sof mammash], for it will illumine him from the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof itself, concerning which it is said “The Lord will reign forever” (Exodus 15:19), verily the aspect of the eternal world [beḥinat olam ha-​niṣḥi mammash]. Even though now the divine light in the aspect of malkhut de-​aṣilut enters [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing in the limited temporality of past, present, and future, “he reigned,” “he reigns,” and “he will reign,” and these are “the six thousand years in which the world exists,”458 for, as it is known, the essence of the boundary of time [de-​iqqar ha-​gevul di-​zeman] is in Malkhut, but it is known that he will be illumined from the essence of the light of Ein Sof that is above place and time, precisely in the aspect of the 4 56 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 58a. 457 Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 25a. 458 Babylonian Talmud, Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 31a.

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time of Malkhut. Therefore, the aspect of the division of time will also be eternal [gam beḥinat hitḥallequt ha-​zeman yihyeh niṣḥi] without any cessation at all, for it is called “eternal life” [ḥayyei olam].459 Cosmic time, represented by the cycle of six thousand years, is subject to the division of past, present, and future, but this time is transcended in the eschatological Sabbath, wherein time no longer reflects the triadic fragmentation. In the redeemed state, the gender binary of temporal existence (ḥayyei sha‘ah) gives way to the eternal life (ḥayyei olam), wherein the feminine is restored to the “inner aspect of Keter, prior to the division into the three lines [of time] … and also above the aspect of the source of time [lema‘lah gam miheyot beḥinat maqor la-​zeman], that is, the aspect of malkhut de-​adam qadmon, and the inner aspect of Keter, which is above time, for even when it enters into the investiture of time [be-​hitlabbeshut bi-​zeman], the time is not terminable [ha-​zeman einah kalah], as is known in the matter of ‘the Ancient of Days is seated’ (Daniel 7:9), ‘and his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom’ [malkhuteih malkhut alam] (ibid., 27), enduringly [le‘olam wa‘ed], which is the aspect of malkhut de-​ein sof, just as it was [before creation] when he and his name were alone.”460 In the end, as in the beginning, eternity and time are not diametrically opposed;461 on the contrary, eternal temporality best approximates the promise of a temporal eternity to be realized in the messianic future when Malkhut ascends to and is exterminated in the light of the essence of Ein Sof, the source of time that radiates incessantly beyond the margin of time,462 the nonphenomenalizable condition for the manifestation of all phenomenality that can be manifest only as nonmanifest, the inapparent that resides in and facilitates the appearing of all things apparent but which itself evades appearance. Appendix 1: Ethnocentrism and the Particular Indexicality of the Universal Moses Cordovero, following a time-​honored kabbalistic tradition, assumes a homologous relation between primal Adam and the Jewish male. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Ontology, Alterity, and Ethics in Kabbalistic Anthropology,” Exemplaria 12 (2000): 131–​155. A greatly 4 59 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 234a. 460 Dovber Shneuri, Perush ha-​Millot, 59c. 461 On the eternality of time in the will of the Creator, see also Schneersohn, Liqquṭei Torah: Torat Shmu’el 5627, pp. 38 and 85. 462 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 457a-​b; idem, Perush ha-​Millot, 67c.

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extended version of this study can be found in Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 17–​ 128. Some of the relevant Cordoverian texts are cited and analyzed on pp. 109–​111. On this theme, see as well Moshe Ḥallamish, “The Relation to the Nations of the World in the World of the Kabbalists,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 14 (1998): 289–​311 (Hebrew); and Zohar Raviv, Decoding the Dogma Within the Enigma: The Life, Works, Mystical Piety and Systematic Thought of Rabbi Moses Cordoeiro (aka Cordovero; Safed, Israel, 1522–​1570) (Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), p. 104: “the lingua franca in Safedian discourse was that of spiritual potencies exclusive to the Jewish nation. Parochial sanctity thus distinguished Jews not only from gentiles but even from the ministering angels on high—​rendering the Jewish nation the created beings most intimately associated with divinity” (emphasis in original). Not surprisingly, my argument in Venturing Beyond is criticized and simplified in the remark of Moshe Idel, “Solomon Schechter, Abraham J. Heschel, and Alexander Altmann: Scholars on Jewish Mysticism,” in Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2020), p. 178: “Though using similar critical tools, different visions of Jewish mysticism certainly appear from within the stark divergences between Scholem and his school on the one hand, and the ‘Americans’ on the other. This trend may very well continue. It suffices to compare the assessments in Altmann’s rather ‘inclusive’ essay on tolerance and Jewish tradition to Elliot Wolfson’s portrayal of Kabbalah in his Venturing Beyond as entirely ‘exclusive.’” For good measure, in n. 70, Idel adds that “Altmann’s essay is not mentioned at all” in my book. Let me start with the last claim. Although this stratagem—​perhaps subterfuge better conveys the devious intent—​to note what I have not cited in an effort to discredit my scholarly credentials is employed frequently by Idel, the reason that I did not refer to Altmann’s study “Tolerance and the Jewish Tradition,” The Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lecture 1957, first published by The Council of Christians and Jews in London, and then in translation in Alexander Altmann, Faces of Judaism: Selected Essays, edited by Abraham Shapira (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1983), pp. 217–​232 (Hebrew), is because there is no mention therein to kabbalistic sources and therefore it is irrelevant to my analysis. Moreover, I was not opining on the question of tolerance or intolerance in Judaism but on the more limited question of the status of the human according to kabbalistic anthropology. For the record, Altmann traces the motif of tolerance in biblical, rabbinic, and select modern thinkers including Moses Mendelssohn and Herman Cohen. The only figure remotely connected to kabbalah mentioned by him is Elie Benamozegh, whose Israël et l’Humanité is cited because of its embrace of the concept of Noachian humanity and the implicit sense of tolerance engendered thereby. (For a more current analysis of this topic, see the recently published revised version of the dissertation by my student Clémence Boulouque, Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020], pp. 83–​92.) However, even

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Altmann’s brief reference to Benamozegh does not engage the kabbalah at all. Idel’s vindictive comment, therefore, is unwarranted and his apparent attempt to insult me is easily debunked as nothing but smoke and mirrors. More importantly, his remark displays a lack of understanding of my argument in Venturing Beyond on two accounts. First, exclusivity is not identical to intolerance. What I do argue in the first chapter of that monograph—​“Ontology, Alterity, and the Anthropological Other”—​is that under certain social and historical conditions, such as the modern state of Israel, the kabbalistic rhetoric of viewing the holy seed of the Jews as the most authentic expression of being human can translate into intolerance toward the other (pp. 124–​128). Second, the full scope of my argument in the aforementioned book would require one to take into account the second chapter—​“Othering the Other: Eschatological Effacing of Ontic Boundaries”—​wherein I argue that despite the demonization of the non-​Jew, the kabbalistic symbolism—​epitomized in the Sabbatian material—​upholds conversion as the mechanism by which the boundaries are traversed such that there is a trespassing of the line separating Israel and the nations, the true God and false gods, and the inclusive exclusivity is transformed into an exclusive inclusivity (p. 192). If Idel wanted to deal seriously with my book, it would require something more thoughtful than this passing quip, which is meant to humiliate me by suggesting I ignored an important study that presumably presents a view different than my own. In the final analysis, Idel’s alleged criticism is vacuous and misleading, for, as I have indicated, Altmann’s lecture on tolerance has no reference to or engagement with kabbalistic material. For a more precise analysis of Altmann’s 1957 lecture, see Raphael Jospe, “Pluralism Out of the Sources of Judaism: Religious Pluralism Without Relativism,” Studies in Christian-​Jewish Relations 2 (2007): 99–​100: “In his 1957 lecture before the Council of Christians and Jews in London, my teacher Alexander Altmann discussed ‘Tolerance and the Jewish Tradition.’ In Altmann’s analysis, historically Jews in the biblical and rabbinic periods found ways to tolerate non-​Jews, while rejecting internal toleration of Jewish dissent. He then argued that Jews and Christians today meet on secular ground, while their theologies remain mutually exclusive. Therefore, he concludes, although theologically Jews and Christians cannot tolerate each other, they need each other for a common stand in the face of contemporary ‘virulent paganism.’ While theology thus divides, religion, which is broader than theology, can bring the two groups together by emulating God’s love.” The full text of Jospe’s essay is available at http://​escholarship.bc.edu/​scjr/​vol2/​iss2/​. Finally, it is worth recalling comments from several early essays of Altmann that articulate a viewpoint much more congenial to what I have argued with regard to the kabbalistic perspective. I will cite my analysis of Altmann’s position from Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 348, which includes quotes from him. I have placed the page references from Alexander Altmann, The Meaning of Jewish Existence: Theological

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Essays 1930–​1939, edited by Alfred Ivry, introduction by Paul Mendes-​Flohr, translated by Edith Ehrlich and Leonard H. Ehrlich (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991) in brackets: “The attitude to Hebrew and the land of Israel in Jewish sources, especially heightened in the kabbalistic material, fulfills a similar function, as German does for Heidegger in grounding the particular in the universal. The bond between linguistic and territorial provincialism lends credence to Altmann’s hypothesis in ‘Was ist jüdische Theologie?’ [1933] … since all thinking is oriented toward the universal, this must also be the case for Jewish theology, which is a manner of thinking; what is distinctive about that theology, however, fails repeatedly to advance into the articulation of what is generally understandable. Altmann draws the conclusion that ‘If one comprehends this tendency of the Jewish theological attitude, which manifests itself at every step in talmudic and midrashic literature as well as in the facticity of all great theological forms of Judaism, then one cannot uphold whatsoever the talk of an inner rupture of Jewish theology caused by the polarity of universalism and particularism. Rather, one should refer to the formal structure of Jewish theology as essentially particularistic’ [p. 52]. The particularism is indexical of the universal insofar as the untranslatability and singularity applies to the task of theology more broadly, and not just to Jewish theology: ‘It is the task of theology to preserve and refine this specific nuance. It is not universalization but differentiation that is the function specific to its nature; through it alone is it able to live and testify to its theological experience’ [p. 52]. … With a touch of irony, probably not discernible to Altmann himself, he goes on to say that the particularism he claims for Judaism can be applied universally to every genuine theological thought. In his words, ‘Theological ideas—​and this pertains to all religions—​are never concepts that can be schematized and thus universalized in some way without forfeiting the true essence of their being’ [p. 52]. For every religion, consequently, we must say unconditionally that its specific theology cannot be translated into universalistic terms. The very resistance to universalization is proffered as a universal characteristic of theology. Keeping the focus on Judaism, Altmann hit an important nerve: even the universalist element springs from and returns to the particularistic coloration that defies thematization and translation into a universal abstraction. Thus, in the lecture ‘Das jüdische Mystik’ (1935), Altmann argued, pushing against the grain of the historiographical sketching of the historical manifestations of Jewish mysticism, that it is of interest ‘to see the constant elements in this process of becoming, or better, the continuity in this becoming. Jewish mysticism has been able to preserve its specifically Jewish singularity to an incomparably greater extent than, e.g., Arab mysticism, the structure of which was substantially altered through its fusion with Indian thought. The basic trait of positive, creative assimilation peculiar to Judaism has proved successful also in this area of its intellectual history’ [p. 71].” In the continuation of this essay, Altmann depicts Jewish mysticism as an existential thinking rooted in and always returning to the biblical configuration of the revealed

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God. As I commented in Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 349, “the radical particularization of the mystical safeguards rather than erodes the boundary separating Jew and non-​ Jew. Even the idea of unio mystica, according to Altmann, ‘does not presuppose any diffusion of the I in the universe, nor any suspension of the will in the Nothing; rather, it reveals its Jewishness in the fusion of contemplation and responsible act, in leading all speculation back to the ground of Torah’ [p. 76]. The insistence on the Jewishness of Jewish mysticism, including the motif of mystical union, casts a light brightly on an intractable blind spot of the tradition. This shortcoming is especially conspicuous in kabbalistic and Ḥasidic literature, where we recurrently discover—​and here I respectfully disagree with these early ruminations of my teacher—​a nonegocentric piety that is ethnocentric in its theopolitics. Only the Jew, as it were, has the wherewithal to be absorbed into the infinite where all distinctions—​including the distinction between Jew and non-​Jew—​are transcended. The shortcoming here is palpable: the emphasis on the interconnectivity and unity of the manifold of beings should problematize the divisiveness that is enhanced by the ascription of uniqueness to one nationalistic-​ religious entity over and against all others, a uniqueness that is expressed in the ability of the Jew to experience the overcoming of the difference that is denied to others. The logic of this position is not entirely coherent, and yet, Jewish mystics have repeatedly affirmed that only the Jew can close the gap separating Jew and non-​Jew by steadfastly widening that gap” (emphasis in original). I have taken the liberty to cite my previous discussion at length to underscore how inadequate is Idel’s rendering of the views of Altmann and myself. Leaving aside his unsatisfactory treatment of my teacher, with respect to my own thinking, he shows once more that he is incapable of assimilating its complexity. For less apologetic approaches to the question of intolerance and exclusiveness in the biblical sources, which have served as a textual basis for later Jewish perspectives, see Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 120–​142; Jann Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. 28–​52, 106–​126; idem, The Price of Monotheism, translated by Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 8–​30; Tracy M. Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 225–​241; idem, “Dispossessing Nations: Population Growth, Scarcity, and Genocide in Ancient Israel and Twentieth-​ Century Rwanda,” in Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible: New Perspectives, edited by Saul M. Olyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 27–​65. For another striking example of the ethnocentrism defended by appeal to the mystical ideal of annihilation in the infinite presumed to be unique to the Jewish people, consider the following unambiguous but hardly eccentric statement of Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), p. 75: “Thus, the disclosure of light extends to the souls of Israel, for the root of

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the souls of Israel is from the aspect of Malkhut, for the Community of Israel is the source and root of the souls of Israel. Accordingly, when the light extends to Malkhut, it openly extends as well in the souls of Israel. Furthermore, the souls of Israel are the appropriate place for the disclosure of the light because there is in them the aspect of the essential nullification [ha-​biṭṭul be-​eṣem], and thus because of this they are worthy of the disclosure of the light, and if there is some sin or transgression, God forbid, this is something supplementary to the essence. As it is written in the books regarding the difference between Israel and the idolatrous nations, the idolatrous nations are essentially evil [be-​eṣem ra], and if there is in them something good, it is a supplementary matter, which is not the case with Israel who are essentially good [be-​eṣem ṭov], and if there is in them something evil, it is only a matter added to the essence. Therefore, from the perspective of their essence, Israel are worthy for the disclosure of the light.” See my comments in Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 237. The reference to the “books” is to the works of Maharal of Prague wherein it is emphasized that the essence of the Jewish people, who are connected pneumatically to the intellectual form, is to be good and thus any evil on their part must be considered a deviation from the truth of their holy seed, whereas the non-​Jews, who are linked somatically to the corruptible matter, are depicted as ontically deficient and therefore naturally evil. For instance, see Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2000), ch. 38, pp. 588–​589; idem, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1997), ch. 2, pp. 35–​ 36, ch. 5, pp. 139–​140, ch. 49, p. 806; idem, Gevurot ha-​Shem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2019), ch. 44, 276–​ 279; idem, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, edited and annotated by Ḥayyim Pardes (Tel Aviv: Makhon Yad Mordecai, 1996), pp. 278–​280. Maharal’s name is mentioned explicitly with reference to this distinction between Jew and non-​Jew in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5679 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2015), p. 658, and see other references cited in idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 75 n. 731. Unfortunately, the ethnocentrism continues in contemporary kabbalistic works. I submit one example that recently came to my attention, “Israel and the Nations of the World: The Secret of the History of the Human Species” (Hebrew), a chapter from a forthcoming treatise Tiqqun Olam by Mordecai Chriqui, included in Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Qin’at ha-​Shem Ṣeva’ot, edited by Mordecai Chriqui (Jerusalem: Makhon Ramḥal, 2020), pp. 125–​141. Utilizing the writings of Luzzatto, Chriqui proffers that the history of the human species is cast from the perspective of the perpetual conflict between Israel and the nations, or as the spiritual dialectic between the inner wisdom of the Jews and the ideologies of the non-​Jews. The source for this dialectic is in the presence of the two main names of God in the supernal will, Elohim and yhwh, the

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former denotes the Creator and all things created, whereas the latter denotes the Ein Sof, the limitless will and the infinity of the first being, the everlasting compresence of past, present, and future. The latter was revealed exclusively to the people of Israel when they departed from Egypt but it will be manifest more fully in the messianic era as the disclosure of the divine unity that effectuates the rectification of the world. The unity of this rectification entails the combination of the two names, which signify the polarities of male and female, light and darkness, Israel and the nations (pp. 127–​128). In spite of allocating a role to the gentiles in the messianic drama to achieve the unity of humanity by each one guarding its specific cultural role (p. 131), and emphasizing that they, too, will be rectified by the Jews in the future, and this in spite of the animosity they have borne in the past and continue to bear in the present toward the Jews, the privileged status of the latter is undeniable, as we see from this statement of Chriqui: “If we contemplate a little the general and universal history from the last three thousand years, it is seen that Israel occupies an honorable if not the main place, and I base this not only on the Tanakh but on different historians” (p. 128). Whereas the boundaries between nations have been effaced, the Jewish people alone resist this assimilation, and this is for the sake of the rectification of the world (p. 131). Indeed, the dichotomy of Israel and the nations “expresses the dynamic of the history of the rectification of the world” (p. 133). The unassailable difference is expressed more technically by reference to Luzzatto’s assumption (based on earlier Lurianic sources) that the root for the souls of all the human species is found in Adam Qadmon and they were all placed in the first Adam as two pneumatic gradations, the higher aspect designated as “souls” (neshamot) whence derive the souls of Israel, and the lower aspect designated as “garments” (levushim) whence derive the souls of the nations. In support of his explication, Chriqui, “Israel and the Nations,” p. 135, refers to a lengthy passage from Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, edited by Mordecai Chriqui (Jerusalem: Makhon Ramḥal, 2018), pp. 707–​711. Consider these words of Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, p. 709, cited by Chriqui, “Israel and the Nations,” p. 135: “The souls initially were created as souls and garments, and thus they were placed in the first Adam. When he sinned, the garments were separated from him, and they were submerged in the depths of the shells. The souls, too, fell into the shells, and yet, the souls were not submerged but only the garments. These are the souls of Israel and the souls of the nations of the world, for at first it was not appropriate for there to be nations of the world, but everything was Israel, and the souls of the nations were garments for them [compare Ḥayyim Viṭal, Sefer ha-​ Liqquṭim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2015), Psalms, 32, p. 476; idem, Sha‘ar ha-​Pesuqim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2017), pp. 19–​20]. This secret—​the brain and the shell. When Adam sinned, these garments were separated—​ they were not impure—​and they fell into the shells, and there they became impure, for the other side overpowered them. This was the part that truthfully needed rectification from the beginning.” The illumination of the light of the Messiah results in the

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unification of the souls of Israel and the souls of the nations, or to be more precise, the final rectification consists of the reinstallation of the souls of the nations to their role as garments for the souls of the body politic of Israel, a process that is also referred to as the elevation of Shekhinah in the secret of the diadem on the head of the king (aṭarah be-​ro’sh ha-​melekh) or the return of evil to good (haḥzarat ha-​rav le-​ṭov). See Luzzatto, Adair ba-​Marom, p. 711. Idel may be uncomfortable with my pointing out the ethnocentric dimension of the kabbalistic tradition—​epitomized in this notion that had Adam not sinned there would have only be Jews and non-​Jews would have been garments for the Jewish souls—​but that disquiet appears to be a consequence of his own particularism in not wanting negative aspects of Jewish culture to be exposed in scholarly works. Apparently, he fails to grasp that my calling attention to the exclusivity of kabbalistic anthropology is indicative of a universalist tendency that, at times, calls for a critical assessment of tradition. Let me conclude by underlining that I am not denying that the messianic vision endorsed by some kabbalists, following scriptural precedent, does envisage a moment when the other nations will join Israel to worship the one true God. However, a careful examination of such passages reveals that the eschatological universalism signifies the particularism of the election of the Jewish people. Consider, for instance, Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, edited by Yehudah Ohad Turjeman (Jerusalem: Makhon Ḥakhmei Yerushalayim we-​ha-​Ma‘arav, 2020), pp. 372–​373: “Know and believe that even in the days of the Messiah, the sentient good [ṭovat ha-​hergesh] for Israel will be temporary, and the intellectual good [we-​ṭovat ha-​sekhel] will be primary, to serve God with the proper worship. For even though the dominion of Israel will be over all the nations, the desire for sensible glory will be diminished and it will be augmented for intelligible glory. All of the nations will be a fitting aid to the children of Israel to worship God with the proper worship and to be occupied properly with the intelligibles. Concerning this great and wondrous matter, which is the purpose of the rank of the intelligible soul and its perfect delights, the sages, blessed be their memory, said ‘There is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except the bondage of foreign powers alone’ [Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 34b], for even the nations of the world will all call in the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord [Zephaniah 3:9] in the coming of our Messiah, speedily in our days.” It is interesting to note the following comment in the continuation of this passage, p. 373: “The [numerological] secret of peace [shalom] is Esau [i.e., both words equal 376], for the children of Ishmael are a nation that hates peace, but the children of Esau are lovers of peace. In an Ishmaelite land, if a Jew says to an Ishmaelite salaam alaykum, that is, peace be upon you, his life is endangered, for through them affliction and great danger will fall upon him, but if a Jew gives peace to the children of Esau, they will be joyous with him and honor him.” This is a somewhat unusual commendation of the Christian and denigration of the Muslim. For a more disparaging depiction of Christians, see ibid., p. 400: “Certainly when Israel fulfill the

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will of God they are the head and the children of Esau are the tail, but when they transgress the will of God the matter is inverted.” There were other kabbalists in the time of Isaac of Acre who expressed a preference for Christians over Muslims, as we find, for example, in Baḥya ben Asher’s citation of the dictum taḥat edom we-​lo taḥat yishma’el, that is, it is better to live under the rule of Christians than under the rule of Muslims. See Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 157–​158. Regarding this dictum, see Bernard Septimus, “‘Better Under Edom Than Under Ishmael’: The History of a Saying,” Zion 47 (1982): 103–​111 (Hebrew). The numerology of shalom and Esau is implied in Kallah Rabbati, edited by Israel ben Ḥayyim David Seligman (Vilna: Abraham Zvi ben Naḥum Elijah Katzenellenbogen, 1894), 3:4, p. 36, and it is made explicit in a number of medieval sources, for example, Jacob ben Asher, Ba‘al ha-​Ṭurim al ha-​Torah, edited and annotated by Yaakov K. Reinitz, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Rubinstein’s Press, 1985), 1:53 (ad Genesis 25:25); Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 22. The numerology is repeated in the course of the centuries by many kabbalists and ḥasidic masters.

Appendix 2: The Unprivileged of the Feminine: A Response to Moshe Idel I will not dignify Moshe Idel’s highly polemical book The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019) with a detailed response, but rest assure that it is based on a lack of understanding of my work in particular and of gender theory more generally. References to the female in kabbalistic sources do not constitute in and of themselves a break with the dominant androcentrism. The same mistake is made by others as well. I will cite here one example that deals with Cordovero. See Raviv, Decoding the Dogma, p. 102: “Greater attention should be indeed given to the lenses informing mystics’ view of women, for the feminine had a more noticeable voice within the cosmic dialogue as well. As we shall soon see, whereas phallic superiority had chiefly governed RaMaK’s cosmology, the kabbalistic structure as a whole put considerable weight on feminine and maternal terminologies regarding divinity.” Raviv offers the example of the use of the simile of breastfeeding in both Alqabeṣ and Cordovero. One could plausibly argue, however, that the appropriation of this image on the part of male kabbalists is indicative of their androcentrism rather than proof of their gynocentrism. Consider Raviv’s own words, op. cit., pp. 103–​104: “Although RaMaK employs the Aristotelian depictions of active masculinity vs. receptive femininity, he nonetheless does so within a mystical context which accentuates the male’s acute dependence on the female. In other words, comic governance mandated that in certain instances of theosophical trafficking the male property must rely on its lower female counterpart in order to arouse its own male potentiality and become worthy of

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benevolence from above. … One may therefore argue that notwithstanding the maintenance of traditional male supremacy in the Safedian discourse and its documental domains, both genders were nonetheless elevated a considerable notch in comparison to rabbinic Judaism and rational doctrines: men’s relation to divinity was given a momentous clout, whereas women were perceived as fundamental conduits to materialize such male potencies” (emphasis in original). That the masculine potency to overflow requires the feminine capacity to receive so that the former can receive the divine beneficence and thereby actualize its spiritual potentiality is hardly a serious challenge to the phallogocentric construction of gender identities. The phallocentrism is highlighted in Raviv’s discussion, op. cit., pp. 185–​187, of Cordovero’s utilization of the correlation of the covenant of the tongue and the covenant of the foreskin first enunciated in Sefer Yeṣirah. See Ithamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yeẓira,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 141, § 3; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation, and Text-​Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 67, § 3. Idel’s claim, The Privileged, p. 205, that I have constructed my edifice “by systematically blocking out instances of explicit discussions of the privileged divine Female” is an ad hominem attack on my scholarly integrity that is unworthy of an academic publication. Bracketing the negligence of the editors and presumably external readers to allow such a statement to stand, I will respond by noting that the assertion is conceptually unjustified. What Idel considers proof of a privileged divine female could be interpreted as yet another demonstration of the phallogocentric demarcation of gender. He assumes the correctness of his position and uses it to level an assault on my methodology. Apparently, it has not occurred to Idel that his own interpretations should be subject to the same critical assessment to which he subjects the views of others with which he disagrees. I offer here an example of the repulsive and hyperjudgmental tone used by Idel. On p. 138 n. 598, referring to my study “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” which is reproduced in this collection, Idel writes, “In this essay, he deals also with Luzzatto’s book ’Adir ba-​Marom, although he skips some of the sections concerning time that do not fit his theory and sometimes even invert the meaning of the texts he cites.” The first part of this allegation is completely inappropriate as Idel is not in the position to ascribe to me an intentional effort not to deal with material that purportedly contradicts my perspective. There is no merit to this baseless accusation, which is a technique that he deploys on more than one occasion in his essays and books, an attempt to devalue my explications by reminding the reader that there are other texts that I do not discuss, as if anyone, including Idel, can possibly cite all the relevant sources. The second part is also problematic as Idel is not the final arbiter to decide if these other texts actually go against my interpretation. Just because Idel asserts—​I am tempted to add ex cathedra—​that there are other texts that do not fit my theory or that invert the meaning of the texts that I cite, it is not necessarily the case that his assertion is correct. Posturing in this

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manner is scholarly overreach. Minimally, his pronouncements should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as he demands of my own. It is one thing to disagree with what I write but it is entirely another thing to frame that disagreement in language that questions my rectitude and worthiness as a scholar. I am loathe to speculate on what has motivated Idel’s need to criticize my views so obsessively and in such ruthlessly harsh terms. But, for the benefit of the historical record, I will state forthrightly that his criticisms are not only wanting in the theoretical sophistication required to engage my work properly, but they also too often slide into deplorable and unjustifiable judgments about my character. Note that Idel, The Privileged, p. 205 n. 913, delineates some of the critiques of my approach on the part of others and refers to them as “quite mild.” Ostensibly, this comment seems superfluous. But, upon further consideration, it provides a window through which we can see more clearly the animus that drives Idel’s compulsive effort to demean my life’s work. What is it that fuels this insatiable desire? Is it the fact that I have had the courage to articulate views that differ with Idel, including about Abraham Abulafia, long thought to be an area of research that was his exclusive territory? Specifically when it comes to gender, it is fair to say that I was the one who raised the level of discourse about this matter in the field of kabbalah studies by bringing into play contemporary gender theory. Presumably, this accomplishment has been unnerving for Idel, who cannot imagine that there is any aspect of the academic research into kabbalah about which he is not the authority. Hence, his protracted campaign to insert himself in this conversation even though he has displayed no grasp of how a contemporary scholar can reliably utilize gender theory in the analysis of texts from an earlier historical period. However time will eventually adjudicate between our perspectives, Idel’s relentless effort to disgrace me demonstrates pettiness, envy, and an inability to respect alternative viewpoints, and this despite his constant appeal to multivocality and his labeling me an essentialist. The irony is transparent: the dogged crusade against essentialism is essentialist to the core. Despite Idel’s admonishment to readers that kabbalah is not a unified system, his own idea of the interplay and interaction between three major models that have shaped the physiognomy of the history of kabbalistic speculation—​ the theosophical-​theurgical, the ecstatic, and the talismanic—​is its own form of essentialism, and scholars who choose not to follow his taxonomy are often criticized. I note, parenthetically, that Idel conveniently obscures the fact that Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 89, already rejected the idea that kabbalah is “a unified system of mystical and specifically theosophical thinking. There is no such thing as ‘the doctrine of the Kabbalists’” (emphasis in original). Leaving aside the lack of crediting Scholem for what he professes to be his signature denunciation of essentialism and the appeal to a panoramic or polychromatic hermeneutic—​indeed, Scholem is often castigated by Idel as essentialist and monochromatic—​the intellectual dishonesty in relation to

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me is not difficult to unmask: under the shield of defending heterogeneity Idel promulgates his own hegemony. Even more irksome is his inability to comprehend my approach to the complex interface between sameness and difference, novelty and repetition, which renders his reprimanding me as promoting an essentialism to be both disingenuous and sophomoric. Consider Idel’s remark, The Privileged, p. 117 n. 507, that my textual analysis of a passage from Menaḥem Azariah da Fano “is a matter to be proven not just stated as if self-​evident in order to defend a problematic essentialist gender theory.” Note as well Idel’s sarcastic correction of my using the rhetorical plural “we” to the singular “he,” since I alone “can speak in such a way, because of the bias of the rigid phallocentric theory, but it is questionable whether the Kabbalist did so.” Without entering all of the details of my previous study, the point I was making was that even though physiologically the act of vaginal coitus involves the man being contained in the woman—​and hence the female can be said to envelop the male—​it is still rendered symbolically as the woman being contained in the man because the theurgical import of the coitus is to unite mercy and judgment and thereby ameliorate the latter by the former. Idel’s acknowledging that he did not understand my argument quickly degenerates into his castigation of my interpretive skills. Such a condemnation is typical of the obfuscation that Idel employs to raise doubt about my hermeneutical credentials, a derision, I am sad to say, camouflaged as adherence to a retrograde modernist criterion of philological objectivity. Would we expect Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, who was active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to use the term “phallocentrism” in his exposition of kabbalistic doctrines? Idel’s disapproval of my utilization of this term is not only ludicrous but can easily be turned against his own essays and monographs on Jewish mysticism, which are replete with terminology and concepts that Jewish mystics did not use themselves. To offer one example, Idel vehemently opposes my use of the term phallocentrism, accusing me of imposing contemporary ideas on the texts, but it is perfectly fine for him to apply the term cosmoeroticism to a particular trend of Jewish mysticism. See Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 179–​201. Furthermore, can anyone take seriously the implication that everything that Idel himself writes is “proven” and does not fit into some agenda? Is The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah not itself indicative of an agenda, even if that agenda is as ignoble as the skewed effort to maintain his status as the leading scholar of kabbalah, a pretentious branding that has often been proclaimed on his behalf? Is the issue here really the displeasure with my pointing out the phallocentrism of the kabbalah and the fact that I have availed myself of a contemporary analytic term to explicate this dimension of the Jewish mystical tradition? Although it seems preposterous to have to defend myself on this elementary point, it is worth recalling the observation of Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Literary Analysis,” translated by Suzanne Taylor and Jonathan Schroeder, Critical Inquiry 45 (2019): 540, that the “first principle of structuralism in literary analysis”—​and we

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could extend this to the deconstructionist and the postmodernist perspectives—​“is to consider that, contrary to the old schema of the nineteenth century, the work isn’t essentially the product of time: a work doesn’t follow, in its birth and then in its existence a linear pathway that would be roughly chronological. The work is recognized as a fragment of space in which all the elements exist simultaneously. … In other words, it isn’t the diachronic thread of the work that must lead us, it’s the synchrony of the work with regard to itself. This isn’t to say that we dismiss the fact that the work has appeared at a given moment, in a given culture, or with a given individual. But to define how the work functions, it’s necessary to recognize that it’s always synchronic in relation to itself.” I accept this principle as the basis of my own hermeneutic. However, I would modify the claim that a work is not a product of time to arguing instead for a nonlinear conception of time to explain the genesis and afterlife of a particular work, a hybrid of the synchronic and the diachronic, as one can elicit from Merleau-​ Ponty. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. xxii: “Language is uncertain—​of this we can be certain; words are not blocks cemented in place but rather stones drifting this way, floating that way, synchronically, diachronically, two equal measures of time, returning forward, advancing backward.” And see the more extended discussion of dynamism and stasis in kabbalistic symbolism on pp. 88–​94, esp. 89: “Consequently, coexistence and modification are not mutually exclusive opposites; they reflect the concurrent dimensions of time, simultaneity and succession. Just as simultaneity cannot be experienced without succession nor succession without simultaneity, so permanence cannot be discerned without change nor change without permanence. It is precisely on account of structural similarity that we can speak of thematic variation.” Idel has demonstrated over and over again that he is incapable of grasping the subtlety of my thinking on the hermeneutical nature of time and the temporal nature of hermeneutics. A partial response to Idel can be found in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition,” in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and Mihaela Frunză (Cluj-​Napoca: Provo Press, 2008), pp. 159–​184. In a recent publication, Idel has the audacity to claim that my hermeneutical view is closer to his own, leaving the impression, as he is wont to do, that I have claimed for myself something I have appropriated from him. See Moshe Idel, Primeval Evil in Kabbalah: Totality, Perfection, Perfectibility (Brooklyn: Ktav Publishing House, 2020), pp. 36–​37 n. 99. The specific reason for this comment is that Idel is relating to my criticism of his very sharp distinction between what he identifies as the innovative and the conservative trends of the kabbalah. Obviously, Idel is entitled to uphold his view against my challenge, but he cannot reasonably commandeer my counterview that is based on disputing his rigid distinction between innovation and conservation and the correlative distinction between orality and writing as a way to

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explain the historical development of Jewish esotericism. To cite my own words from the study to which Idel refers, “the history of kabbalism as a religious phenomenon illustrates that it is the presumed immutability of system that occasions novel interpretation. In the wisdom of the tradition, if a teaching is old, it is because it is new, but it is new because it is old. The simultaneity of truth as novel and erstwhile is a fundamental axiom of interpretation—​linked to the conception of time in its most rudimentary form as an instant of diremptive reiteration, the repetition of the same as different in the renewal of the different as same—​legitimated not by reason but by prophetic experience that confirms in cultural memory the alleged chain of an unbroken oral tradition. The production of something new—​equally for the kabbalist and for the scholar of kabbalah—​comes about through the mechanism of repeating that proceeds from the formlessness of time’s form; indeed, the absolutely new is nothing but recurrence, albeit the recurrence of what is yet-​to-​come. Following the logic of this temporal comportment, we are led to the conclusion that the distinction between conservative and innovative orientations, at least if treated in a binary fashion, is not a reliable translation of the complex hermeneutical interplay that characterizes the creativity of the kabbalist. On the face of it, some kabbalists may have preferred the rhetoric of conservatism to the rhetoric of innovation, but in the final analysis, one as the other would have maintained that the expansion of the tradition is itself part of the perpetuation of the tradition, just as the perpetuation of the tradition is part of its expansion. Kabbalists singled out as most representative of the conservative slant are apt to conceal the innovativeness of their thinking in the guise of a received wisdom, whereas kabbalists singled out as most representative of the innovative slant repeatedly affirm the antiquity of the ideas they transmit. In the domain of esotericism, it is especially naïve to interpret pronouncements of authorial intent literally—​whether they mask originality as replication or replication as originality—​and not to see them as an integral part of the dissimilitude of secrecy. Scholars of medieval kabbalah, therefore, would be wise to replace the reigning dualistic conception with a notion of complentarity. According to this model, the conservative and innovative perspectives would not have to be set in diametric opposition; on the contrary, the two tendencies may be viewed as complementary pairs entangled in the sameness of their difference.” See Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Anonymous Chapters of the Elderly Master of Secrets: New Evidence for the Early Activity of the Zoharic Circle,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 19 (2009): 171–​172. See ch. 7 of this volume, n. 15. Naturally, I am aware of the fact that Idel has postulated that medieval kabbalists preserved older traditions, whether oral or written, but that is a far cry from his offering a hermeneutic that disrupts the polarity that he himself has reinforced time and again by insisting on the taxonomic distinction between the innovative and the conservative trends of the kabbalah. Any fair-​minded reader will realize how bizarre and insufferable it is for Idel to usurp my position and insinuate thereby that I have misleadingly claimed

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originality. There is nothing in Idel’s work that comes remotely close to the phenomenology of time that I have presented in support of my hermeneutical assumptions. It seems that this is yet one more example of Idel’s need to argue that what is right in my work he has already said and what is new therein is invariably wrong. Sadly, there appears to be no limit to Idel’s dishonoring himself in his efforts to dishonor me. I conclude by stating that Idel’s ridicule of my scholarship is not only intellectually bankrupt but it is morally pugnacious, a form of belligerence equivalent to someone vandalizing a painting by marking it up with graffiti. The latter can be a legitimate form of socio-​cultural expression and even criticism, but not when it is used destructively to vandalize a work of art. It pains me to have to denigrate my own book with this kind of language, but Idel’s unremitting pursuit of me for years has left me with no choice. I have had to labor with a cloud of anxiety hovering over my head knowing that whatever I publish—​including no doubt this appendix—​will be used as fodder to feed Idel’s unquenchable appetite to vilify my reputation. It is, of course, possible that many readers will see how disproportionate and unseemly are his criticisms, but it is also possible that many will not have the patience and time to scrutinize the details of the smokescreens he has erected, and still others will accept that Idel—​perhaps simply by the force of his reputation—​has offered a legitimate alternative to my perspective. Needless to say, I cannot control this outcome, but at least there will be a partial documentation of my response to what I consider to be a travesty. I know of no one else in kabbalah studies, indeed in Jewish studies more broadly, who has had to endure such a steady barrage of aggressiveness and violence.

Appendix 3: Reconsideration of Gender in the Kabbalah of Moses Cordovero Regarding more positive assessments of the construction of gender symbolism in the kabbalah of Moses Cordovero, see Daniel Abrams, The Female Body of God in Kabbalistic Literature: Embodied Forms of Love and Sexuality in the Divine Feminine (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004), pp. 48–​49, 54, 78–​80, 122–​123, 136–​137, 179–​180 (Hebrew); Jonathan Garb, “Gender and Power in Kabbalah: A Theoretical Investigation,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 13 (2005): 86–​93; idem, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism: From Rabbinic Literature to Safedian Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), pp. 212–​224 (Hebrew). I can accept Garb’s thesis that we find in Cordovero’s writings the portrayal of Shekhinah as a source of power. The question that must always be asked, however, is what is the ideational framework that explains that empowerment? Garb, “Gender and Power,” p. 88, cites a passage from Moses Cordovero, Tefillah le-​Moshe Moshe (Przemyśl: Zupnik, Knoller, and Hammerschmidt, 1892), 19a, where he states with respect to Malkhut, “The influx

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of vitality [shefa ha-​ḥiyyut] overflows from her to us, and also the force and the power [ha-​koaḥ we-​ha-​gevurah], and all of them” (I have retranslated the passage). In my work, elaborating a suggestion of Scholem, I have duly noted the androgynous nature of Malkhut as the attribute that passively receives from the gradations above her and actively bestows upon the entities below her. In the former capacity, Malkhut is engendered as female, and in the latter capacity as male. See Wolfson, Language, pp. 68–​75. The androgyny of Malkhut is explained similarly by Abrams, The Female Body, pp. 60–​ 61, although he attempts to correct my view by emphasizing a gynocentric paradigm whereby the male is perfected by the female. Cordovero does not make explicit the matter of gender transformation in the aforecited text from Tefillah le-​Moshe, but the description of Malkhut is predicated on viewing her role as the male donor in relation to the souls that live in the terrestrial world. Support for my surmise may be elicited from the continuation of the passage in Tefillah le-​Moshe, 19a, “He intended in these to overflow to her from the place of life [mi-​maqom ha-​ḥayyim], from Yesod, which is called ‘life of the worlds’ [ḥei ha-​olamim], El Ḥai, as is known, and the life overflows from Ḥokhmah and Binah, as is known, by means of Yesod.” It behooves me to note that Garb, “Gender and Power,” p. 88, does acknowledge that “one can argue that the power of Malkhut is in turn derived from the male potencies above her.” Indeed, Cordovero’s own language indicates that the empowerment of the feminine must be explained in terms of the phallocentric understanding of the emanative efflux. The principle is stated summarily by Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2000), 8:8, p. 100, elucidating the zoharic amplification (Zohar 1:165a) of the talmudic tradition (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 62b) that blessings are found only where there is male and female: “The reason is because every male bestows [mashpi‘a] and every female receives [mushpa‘at], and when there is a recipient [meqabbel] it is appropriate that blessings will come upon the one that bestows, but when there is no recipient, which is the [state of the] male without a female [zakhar be-​lo neqevah], it is not appropriate that they will be given to the one who bestows.” See ibid., 8:20, p. 129: “The light of emanation is not revealed without a case in which it can be hidden.” From the vantage point that the male potency to overflow requires a female vessel to receive, we can speak of a power ascribed to the feminine even to the point of avowing that the Jewish man cannot be conjoined to the divine but through the desire and love he has for his wife. See Bracha Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Beer-​Sheva: Ben-​Gurion University Press, 1995) p. 96 (Hebrew); Reuven Kimelman, The Mystical Meaning of Lekhah Dodi and Kabbalat Shabbat (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003), pp. 70–​74, 165 (Hebrew). However, this is a patently androcentric allocation, since the power attributed to the female still issues from the male. See the text from Cordovero’s Sefer Gerushin cited and analyzed by Abrams, The Female Body, pp. 118–​119. For affirmative evaluations of Cordovero’s position on

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gender, emphasizing the intertwining or mutual containment of male and female, which aligns with Garb’s view, see Charles Mopsik, Lettre sur la sainteté: le secret de la relation entre l’homme et la femme dans la cabale (Paris: Verdier, 1986), pp. 144–​153; idem, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part One, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 60–​61; idem, Sex of the Soul: The Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah, edited with a foreword by Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005), pp. 33–​ 34, 64–​65, 140–​144, 147. See also Abrams, The Female Body, p. 111; Kimelman, The Mystical Meaning, p. 142. I would add that it is not only that the power of the woman derives from the man, but in her role of overflowing, the female comports as a male. The same explanation can be applied to the other passages mentioned by Garb, including the one from the ninth chapter of Tomer Devorah cited in “Gender and Power,” pp. 88–​89. According to this text, which is based on passages in the zoharic compilation and related kabbalistic texts, the Jewish man must be married so that he stands between his wife below in the physical world and Shekhinah above in the divine world in a manner that emulates Tif’eret, which is positioned between two females, Binah, the supernal mother, and Shekhinah, the lower mother. Just as Binah bestows the lifeforce upon Tif’eret and Shekhinah receives it from Tif’eret, so the Jewish man receives blessings from Shekhinah and bestows them upon his wife. See Moses Cordovero, Tomer Devorah (Jerusalem: Qolmos, 2002), ch. 9, p. 60. In the continuation, pp. 61–​62, Cordovero elaborates on the ritual actions that the Jewish man must undertake to be united in matrimony with Shekhinah, actions that emulate the halakhic responsibilities that the man has in relation to his earthly wife. Concerning this passage and its background in zoharic texts, see Moshe Idel, “On the Performing Body in Theosophical-​Theurgical Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Remarks,” in The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, edited by Maria Diemling and Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 251–​271, esp. 259–​264. Scattered throughout that study are criticisms of my work on the phallocentrism of the traditional kabbalah. It lies beyond the scope of this appendix to respond to this particular essay of Idel, but it suffers from the same error that plagues all of his work on gender: the reference to the feminine is not a challenge to the androcentric construction of gender, nor does Cordovero’s emphasis on the male kabbalist coupling with the female undermine an implicit homoeroticism undergirding such heteroerotic rhetoric. To return to the main point: in my judgment, the bestowing female described by Cordovero assumes the character of the male and this applies both to Binah in relation to Tif’eret and to Shekhinah in relation to the Jewish man. The reference to femaleness in this context needs to be interpreted in accordance with the specific gender roles that allow for a male to function like a female and a female to function like a male.

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See Wolfson, Language, pp. 324–​325. Contrary to Garb’s assertion, “Gender and Power,” p. 90, I would argue that the fact that a text refers to a “concrete” woman does not mean that the gender transmutation is inoperative. In the kabbalistic symbolism, a somatically real female can be masculinized in the same way that a somatically real male can be feminized, and both of these processes reflect assumptions made about the nature of the divine potencies wherein femininity and masculinity are primarily performative rather than physiological markers. On the utilization of Cordovero to present an allegedly positive assessment of the feminine, see, more recently, Idel, The Privileged, pp. 77–​102. The chapter is replete with futile attempts to undermine my work, all based on the failure to understand that references to the female anatomy do not necessarily constitute a deviation from an androcentric understanding of femininity. Idel’s lack of understanding of my work extends to his criticism of my pointing out that a number of kabbalists remark that there is no independent feminine in the uppermost levels of the divine. As I have explained repeatedly in my studies, including in Wolfson, Language, pp. 179–​190, mentioned by Idel, The Privileged, p. 89 n. 375, what this characterization implies is that prior to the female emerging as an independent force opposite the male, the feminine potency is contained or incorporated in the world that is entirely masculine. In more recent work, I have explained that this means that the feminine existed as the potentiality for otherness in the domain in which there is no other, or as the quality of limit within the limitlessness, and hence the mystery of the contraction (ṣimṣum) of the boundless can only take place through the potency of the kingship of the infinite (malkhut de-​ein sof). See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 165, 188–​189 n. 228, 272–​273. This is the intent of the comment in Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1974), p. 262: “He concealed and constricted his presence [he‘lim we-​ṣimṣem shekhinato] in Keter to emanate by means of it the rest of the sefirot.” Compare the apparently corrupted version in Abraham Azulai, Or ha-​Ḥamah, vol. 1 (Przemyśl: Zupnik, 1896), 237a: “He completed [hishlim] and contracted his presence in Keter to emanate by means of it the rest of the sefirot.” This is one of the texts cited by Idel, The Privileged, p. 89 n. 375, as evidence against me, but, in fact, when the passage is properly decoded, it is proof of my thesis. For the creative process to unfold, it was necessary for the male androgyne to divide into male and female; redemption is the restoration of the female to the male, often described as the ascent of the lowest to the highest such that the capacity to receive is positioned above the potency to bestow. However, as I have argued, the elevation of the last to sit atop the first, and the reversal of the order that this occasions, must still be viewed as a facet of the phallocentric hierarchy. The clutch of the phallogocentrism is made tighter by the depiction of the female as the potential for alterity in the totality that is inclusive of even that which is excluded, indeed, the feminine is the very principle of exclusivity included in the all-​ inclusive inclusivity of Ein Sof.

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The conceptual and philological feebleness of Idel’s counterclaim to my view will be demonstrated by reference to another text from Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 22 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1987), pp. 65–​66, a source that Idel offers as evidence that my theory about the male androgyneity of Keter is incorrect. Cordovero is commenting on the following passage from Zohar 3:290a (Idra Zuṭa), “It has been taught, when Attiqa Qaddisha, the concealed of the concealed, desires to be adorned [le’atqena], everything was adorned in the manner of male and female [ke‘ein dekhar we-​nuqba]. In the place where male and female are integrated, they do not exist but in an alternate way of being male and female [ba-​atar de-​itkelilu dekhar we-​nuqba la itqeyyamu ella be-​qiyyuma aḥara di-​dekhar we-​nuqba]. And when that Ḥokhmah, the principle of everything [kelala de-​kholla], comes forth and is illumined from Attiqa Qaddisha, it does not shine but as male and female [la itnehir ella bi-​dekhar we-​nuqba], for that Ḥokhmah emanates and there issues from him Binah, and thus male and female are found [we-​ishtekhaḥ dekhar we-​nuqba]. Ḥokhmah is the father and Binah the mother. Ḥokhmah and Binah are balanced on one scale as male and female [be-​ḥad matqela itqalu dekhar we-​nuqba].” Cordovero interprets the text as demarcating the “moment of the rectification” (she‘at tiqqun) when Keter begins to disclose and to emanate its arrayments, that is, the sefirot. The technical locution Attiqa Qaddisha denotes, as the two words respectively suggest, two qualities applied to Keter, primordiality (qadmut) and holiness (qedushshah). Significantly, the latter term denotes the sense of difference, or what we might call transcendence, of Keter vis-​à-​vis the gradations that are below it, a divergence, I suggest, that relates to or at the very least also includes the attribution of the gender binary, the prism through which the tiqqun—​a term that connotes both arrayment and rectification—​is specularized. In Cordovero’s own words, “all of the emanation that is from Keter and below will be in the secret of male and female, Ḥokhmah is male and Binah is female.” Note that the gender dimorphism is attached to what is below Keter, namely, Ḥokhmah and Binah, and not to Keter as such. Cordovero points out that the gender imagery is not to be taken literally but should be interpreted metaphorically as a reference to the dual gesture of bestowing (mashpi‘a) and receiving (mushpa). The autonomous nature of masculinity and femininity ensues properly in the second and third of the sefirot, in Ḥokhmah and Binah, but inasmuch as both of them are rooted in Keter, Cordovero does write that “the matter of Keter itself, in the secret of its arrayments, is completed in male and female [mishtallem be-​zakhar wi-​ neqevah]; that is, the aspect of the male that is within him is Ḥokhmah and the aspect of the female that is within him is Binah … the membrane of the ether and the skull [qeruma de-​awira u-​moḥa].” Cordovero concludes, therefore, that “all the beings exist in the secret of male and female, and insofar as the lights are bound in the desire of overflowing and receiving, it is found below in Ḥokhmah and Binah. They concatenate below and are rooted in Keter, and on account of their being rooted in Keter, they exist

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so that all of the aspects that emanate will be in Keter itself. The reason that they had no existence [qiyyum] is because it was appropriate for Keter to be arrayed in the masculine and not in the feminine [mipnei she-​min ha-​ra’uy she-​yihyeh ha-​keter mittaqen be-​zakhar we-​lo bi-​neqevah], that is, the concatenations that are found from above to below. However, the feminine, which is the return of existence [haḥzarat ha-​meṣi’ut] from below to above, to be the receptacle [beit qibbul] for the straight light that emanates [le-​or ha-​yashar ha-​mitpasheṭ], is very foreign [zar me’od] and it is not found there except for the existence of the lower existents [we-​lo nimṣa sham ella le-​qiyyum ha-​nimṣa’ot ha-​taḥtonot].” Cordovero’s remark that Keter is arrayed in the masculine and not in the feminine not only does not conflict with my thesis but it supports my interpretation of the passage he explicates from the Idra Zuṭa in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 219–​220. We can speak of the potential of femaleness and maleness within Keter insofar as both Ḥokhmah and Binah, the first real markers of gender difference, are rooted there, but the nature of Keter is to be a male without an independent female complement, and the very existence of the female aspect in Keter or Attiqa Qaddisha is to be evaluated from the viewpoint of the existents that will emanate therefrom. Cordovero’s view is consistent with the depiction of Attiqa Qaddisha in the Idra Rabba section of zoharic literature as being right without any left (Zohar 3:129a) or as having only one eye (ibid., 130a)—​the root for leftness is undoubtedly to be found in this domain but it is fully integrated with the aspect of rightness. See Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 218–​220, which includes citation of a critical pssage from Cordovero’s Elimah Rabbati interpreting the aforementioned zoharic image of the one eye that signifies the state of affairs in Keter that is entirely right without any complement on the left. As I argued there, this kabbalistic notion is predicated on a paradoxical logic that defies the correlative principle that the left is meaningful only vis-​à-​vis the right or that maleness is meaningful only vis-​à-​vis femaleness. Confirmation of my presupposition is found in the gloss on the zoharic passage in David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, Sefer ha-​Gevul, ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Mic. 2193, fol. 3b (idem, Sefer Hagevul, edited with annotations and commentaries by Bentsion Ben Levi Hacohen [New York: Bentsion Cohen, 2016], p. 36): “There is no left in this Attiqa but rather everything is right, it is seen and not seen, hidden and not hidden.” It is of interest to recall the comment of Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 8:20, p. 130, that just as the first man (adam ha-​ri’shon) was made without a female, so the supernal man (adam ha-​ elyon) “was made from himself without a female.” Consider Moses Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati (Jerusalem: Nezer Shraga, 2013), p. 154: “Ein Sof has no partner, neighbor or friend, and it brings forth everything from the absolute naught, and it does not need male and female, but it generates and brings forth beings from nothing. However, from it and below there is no potency in beings to bring forth something from nothing, rather they are brought into being as something from something, and therefore Keter,

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which comes to be from it, did not come to be at all from male and female. To bring forth that which is other than itself [zulato], Keter needs male and female. All that which Ein Sof brings forth, the efflux and force it gives from itself and bestows on Keter, is without an intermediary of male and female. However, Keter does not bring forth, generate, emanate, or bestow but through the power of male and female, and thus Keter, in the manner of Ein Sof, is brought forth from itself to itself [me-​aṣmo el aṣmo]. … This is like the first Adam and Eve, Ḥokhmah and Binah in Keter come to be from the power of the Creator without male or female, but from here and forward male and female are conjoined.” I concede the point that Cordovero emphasized that, in contrast to Ein Sof, there is a secret of male and female within Keter, identified most frequently as the aspects of Ḥokhmah and Binah (Cordovero, Elimah Rabbati, pp. 222–​223, idem, Shi‘ur Qomah [Warsaw: Isaac Goldman, 1883], 69c, and other sources mentioned by Idel, The Privileged, pp. 82 n. 344 and 89 n. 379). In fact, I explicitly noted the androgynous nature of Keter in Cordovero in Wolfson, Language, pp. 447 n. 118 and 508 n. 244. However, this does not mean that this conception of androgyneity entails two distinct and equal ontologies of gender. The monistic nature of the ontological status of Keter is underscored by the depiction of it as coming forth parthenogenically from itself to itself, that is, without the conjunction of male and female. Compare the contrast of Keter in its relationship to its concealed source in Ein Sof, on the one hand, and the gender polarity of Ḥokhmah and Binah, on the other hand, in Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 11:5, p. 162, and the use of the phrase me-​aṣmo el aṣmo to describe the disclosure and emanation of the infinite light in ibid., 11:6, p. 163. A precedent for Cordovero can be found in Isaac of Acre. See the passage from Oṣar Ḥayyim cited in n. 322. That there is the potential for masculine mercy and feminine judgment in Keter is not necessarily a challenge to the androcentric or phallocentric demarcation of that androgyneity. A plausible case can be made—​ideationally and textually—​that the male androgyne comprises both male and female even though the latter is contained ontologically in the former. Relatedly, note that the infinite is characterized as unadulterated mercy, and insofar as mercifulness is correlated with masculinity, it follows that the infinite should be characterized as well as masculine. I conclude with an incontrovertible acknowledgment that Cordovero did expound the female persona of the divine in unprecedented detail, particularly in Ma‘yan Ein Ya‘aqov, a section of Elimah Rabbati. See Shifra Asulin, “The Twofold Understanding of the Image of the Shekhinah in the Ma‘yan Ein Ya‘aqov and Its Relationship to the Idrot Literature,” in Moses Cordovero, Ma‘yan ‘Ein Ya‘acov: The Fourth Fountain of the Book ’Elimah, edited with notes by Bracha Sack (Beer-​Sheva: Ben-​Gurion University Press, 2009), pp. 61–​111 (Hebrew); Melila Hellner-​Eshed, “Domestic Trouble: Family Myths in Moshe Cordovero’s Book Elima,” Te‘uda 21–​22 [New Developments in Zohar Studies, edited by Ronit Meroz] (2007): 419–​448 (Hebrew); idem, “On Love and Its

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Creativity: Slivers from the Sea of Cordovero’s Myths on the Shekhinah,” in Cordovero, Ma‘yan ‘Ein Ya‘acov, pp. 161–​188 (Hebrew). As impressive as Cordovero’s concern with the female anatomy is, and as edifying as the aforementioned studies are, I would still contend that his statements must be assessed from the perspective of a phallomorphic construction of gender that is encapsulated in the correlation of bestowing with masculinity and receiving with femininity. Regarding these gender identities, see the passage from Moses Cordovero, Zohar in Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1970), pp. 189–​190, cited and analyzed in Abrams, The Female Body, pp. 143–​147. Although Cordovero is critical of those who would extend the gender roles of bestowing and receiving to the point of viewing Keter as male in relation to the sefirot beneath it but feminine in relation to Ein Sof, or Malkhut as feminine in relation to the sefirot above it but masculine in relation to the worlds beneath it, I do not see any evidence that he breaks with the paradigm of understanding gender in precisely these terms, and indeed, as I argued above, on occasion he seems to embrace precisely what he is here denying. Bracketing the question of consistency on this point in his own compositions, what is most important for our purposes is that his repeated upholding of androgyny as a central feature of the nature of the divine, and indeed of all reality, is to be interpreted through the lens of the androcentric semiotic whereby the male is classified as the one who bestows, the attribute of lovingkindness (ḥesed), and the female as the one who receives, the attribute of power (gevurah) or judgment (din). See the explication of the partition into the upper, masculine waters and the lower, feminine waters (Genesis 1:6) in Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisra’el, 1963), p. 155. Once there is this separation in essence (havdalah be-​eṣem)—​the division of contrariness (havdalah shel maḥloqet)—​into upper and lower, right and left, male and female, we can speak of a dual ontology (shetei hawayot), but the state prior to the schism must be described monadically, even with respect to the first and supernal polarity of Ḥokhmah and Binah, where the division between the secret of light and dark is not really a division (she-​ha-​havdalah ha-​ri’shonah elyonah be-​sod or we-​ḥoshekh einah havdalah). The androcentrism underlying the correlation of male and female with bestowing and receiving, including in the system of Cordovero, has not always been noted by scholars. For instance, see Mopsik, Sex of the Soul, p. 25, and compare his discussion of Giqatilla’s idea of androgyny, op. cit., pp. 156–​157. For a similar approach to the androgyne motif in kabbalistic symbolism, see Daniel Abrams, Ten Psychoanalytic Aphorisms in the Kabbalah (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2011), pp. 28–​30. For my response to Mopsik’s criticism of my notion of the male androgyne (Sex of the Soul, p. 27), see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Bifurcating the Androgyne and Engendering Sin: A Zoharic Reading of Gen 1–​3,” in Hidden Truths from Eden: Esoteric Readings of Genesis 1–​3, edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Susanne Scholz (Atlanta: sbl Publications, 2014), pp. 87–​119, esp. 109–​114. As I pointed out, p. 102 n. 28, the degree of Mopsik’s tone

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deafness to the feminist theorizing of gender is exemplified in the fact that he does not take note of how the “theme of the fundamental unity of the human being, or more precisely the unity of man who regains his original bodily unity by uniting with his wife,” which serves as “a model for the destiny of the soul” (Sex of the Soul, p. 119), might be problematic from a woman’s standpoint. In light of the disagreement between Mopsik and myself, it is of interest to consider the Jungian analysis of the feminine principle offered by Erich Neumann, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, vol. 2: Hasidism, edited by Ann Conrad Lammers, translated by Mark Kyburz and Ann Conrad Lammers (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 96–​97: “Here, too, the opposition between feminine and masculine is not yet understood in entirely balanced terms. Although the feminine is no longer negative, it is not yet adequately developed either. In the ancient opposition between yhwh and earth, the earth confronted yhwh as the feminine dimension of nature, which only gradually came to have a negative constellation. For Jews, Christians, and Gnostics, the archetype of the negative Mother and the anima, representing the natural and earthly aspect of the unconscious, became the basis for a negative image of woman, whose instinctual, divinatory, and orgiastic aspect, destructive to consciousness, is seen in the image of Lilith. The left side of the Kabbalistic tree is feminine. Detached from the positive, masculine side, it is the origin of the ‘other side,’ meaning evil. Here, too, the masculine conception of the story of creation remains in effect, according to which the female is secondary, originating from the side of the male, Adam. For even though Adam is seen as a hermaphrodite, his maleness still predominates. In the Kabbalistic and Hasidic concept of human wholeness and of Adam Kadmon, a new countermovement begins to be apparent, leading to an emphasis on the feminine principle that is completely new in Judaism. This shift, which can realize its full development only in the modern Jew, is reflected in the growing importance of the symbols of Malkhut and the Shekhinah. This shift in moving in the direction of eliminating the polar opposition between the sexes, in which the individual is identical with one side of the sexual polarity. Previously, even in the Kabbalah, marriage was seen as the union of two sexual polarities to form a hermaphroditic, transindividual being, which still consists of two persons. In contrast when the parts of the soul are united, this process is introjected within one individual. Here, based on the model of Adam Kadmon, male and female combine within one individual to form a whole. This means, however, that a new image of the human being begins to constellate itself, one no longer centered on polarized sexuality, but instead on Adam Kadmon’s hermaphroditic character” (emphasis in original). I concur that, sociologically and culturally, the status of the woman in modern Judaism has changed dramatically, and in part this has been due to feminist interpretations of the kabbalistic symbol of Malkhut or the Shekhinah. However, from a textual standpoint, I do not agree with Neumann’s surmise that the androcentrism, rooted in the biblical account of the creation of man and woman whereby the latter is derived from and therefore

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subordinate to the former, gives way to the idea of the primal Adam that overcomes gender polarity. No new image of the human being can be elicited from the kabbalistic symbol; on the contrary, the one individual that is Adam Qadmon is still androgynous, albeit an androgyny that consists of the female being contained in the male. On the contrast between the hermaphroditic nature of the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother explicated by Neumann and the male androgyneity of the kabbalistic symbolism, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 67–​68.

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Kenotic Overflow, Temporal Transcendence, and Angelic Embodiment in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive “time” which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction. ludwig wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

∵ 1

Tempus Discretum and the Eternal Return of What Has Never Been*

In a number of previously published studies, I have explored the phenomenon of time in kabbalistic literature from various perspectives.1 Needless to say, the permutations on this theme that may be gleaned from this variegated corpus are complex and multifaceted. Without denying that any attempt to represent * The original version of this chapter appeared as “Kenotic Overflow, Temporal Transcendence, and Angelic Embodiment in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia,” in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 18 (2008): 133–​190. Permission to reprint the material has been granted by the publisher. 1 Elliot R. Wolfson, “From Sealed Book to Open Text: Time, Memory, and Narrativity in Kabbalistic Hermeneutics,” in Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age, edited by Steven Kepnes (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 145–​178; idem, “The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse,” in God’s Voice From the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 103–​154 [revised version included in this collection]; idem, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For a philosophical account of hermeneutics and the phenomenon of time reversibility, see idem, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. xv–​xxxi.

© Elliot R. Wolfson, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449343_004

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the kabbalah as monolithic is prone to criticism, it seems to me nonetheless legitimate from the perspective of both the kabbalists’ own hermeneutical practices and contemporary theoretical models to offer generalizations that are based on a plethora of specific textual sources. With regard to the notion of time, I am prepared to say in a general way that the intricate symbolic world of kabbalists defies the commonly held distinction between linear and circular time. I have, accordingly, dubbed the kabbalistic perspective by the paradoxical expressions “linear circularity” and “circular linearity,” expressions that are meant to convey the dual deportment of time as an extending line that rotates like a sphere or as a rotating sphere that extends like a line. Rendered in an even more appropriate geometric figure, we can speak of time as a swerve in which line and circle meet in the sameness of their difference. The convergence of line and circle can be thought from the vantage point of the confluence of the three modes of time in the moment: the present is determined by the past of the future that is yet to come as what has already been and by the future of the past that has already been what is yet to come. The pattern implied in these words suggests that past and future are not to be viewed as the starting-​point and finishing-​point of a closed circuit, but rather as termini of a path that is eternally bent, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s memorable locution, a path discerned anew from and in each and every moment, recurrently breaking through the cycle, beginning and end constantly refashioned by the intentional acts of retention and protention, tracks that crisscross eidetically in the midpoint of the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.2 Alternatively expressed, kabbalists delineate time as the eternal overflow of a tempus discretum, the duration of the interruptive present in which past may be anticipated as future that has already come to pass, and future remembered as past that has not yet taken place. The texture of temporality can be understood better if one bears in mind that the perspective I am attributing to kabbalists may be considered an explication 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For All and None, translated with a preface by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. 217–​218: “In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” See ibid., p. 158. After describing the meeting of two paths of eternity in the gateway of the moment, one that stretches backward and the other that extends forward, Nietzsche has the dwarf proclaim, “All that is straight lies. … All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.” Significantly, the image of the circle is juxtaposed to the notion of crookedness. A crooked circle is a curve, a break in a cyclical pattern of repetition. See below, n. 7. My interpretation of Nietzsche is indebted to the nuanced analysis in Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 155–​159.

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of a well-​attested tradition that the Tetragrammaton, the name beyond signification, signifies the compresence of past, present, and future, or, in the widespread Hebrew formulation, hayah howeh we-​yihyeh, “he was, he is, and he will be.”3 The intent of this interpretative gloss is that within the immutable divine nature the three modes of time are indistinguishable: he was before the time of creation, he is during the time of creation, and he will be after the time of creation, an apprehension that flies in the face of an experience of time predicated on a clear demarcation of past, present, and future.4 How does one account for all three tenses coexisting in the same temporal interval? Can we even speak meaningfully of an interval if a being is past, present, and future all at once? Contemplation of this imponderable idea helped foster the kabbalists’ notion of a time that is not time, a timeless time that ensues from the intersection of all three tenses in the moment, an equiprimordiality of past, present, and future that mimics the eternality of the divine ipseity,5 a time out of time that, at all times, is comported temporally in the here and now by the recollected projection of the beginning discerned from the projected recollection of the end. In this conception, the tension that may arise from the doubleness of time as stretched and punctiform, to borrow the articulation of Edith Wyschogrod,6 finds a resolution insofar as what is experienced phenomenologically as temporal continuity in reaching backward through memory and extending forward through anticipation is constructed hermeneutically in the moment that cuts the timeline by looping pastness, presentness, and futurity in the eternal continuity of a threefold bond of temporal discontinuity.7 3 See Wolfson, Alef, p. 174, and a select number of sources cited on p. 217 n. 118, to which many more could have been added. 4 See, for instance, Joseph Giqatilla, Ginnat Egoz (Jerusalem: Yeshivah ha-​ Ḥayyim we-​ ha-​Shalom, 1989), pp. 26–​27, pp. 60–​61, 163, 221–​222. On the unique role assigned to the Tetragrammaton as the only name that can instruct one about the existence and essence of the divine, see idem, Hassagot le-​Sefer Moreh Nevukhim, printed in Isaac ben Judah Abravanel, Ketavim al Maḥshevet Yisra’el, vol. 3 (Jerusalem, 1967), 23d. See also Midrash Simeon ha-​Ṣaddiq in Qabbalat ha-​Ge’onim (Jerusalem: ha-​Makhon le-​Iyyun be-​Ḥasidut, 2006), p. 19. Concerning the provenance of this text, see Mark Verman, The Books of Contemplation: Medieval Jewish Mystical Sources (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 79, 211–​212. 5 Wolfson, Alef, pp. 76–​78. The view I attribute to the kabbalists resonates with the temporalization of the eternal affirmed by some nineteenth-​century German Romantic philosophers. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 317–​326, and my own brief discussion of Schelling in Alef, pp. 34–​42. 6 Wyschogrod, An Ethics, p. 147. 7 Recall the language of Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 158: “Behold … this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? … And are not all things knotted

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Time’s passing, consequently, is not overcome by the dissolution of temporal transience in an ocean of eternity, but by abiding in the persistent demise of what has never been but what is ever to come, the eternal cycle of recurring difference wherein being becomes interminably in the terminable becoming of being. In the ephemerality of time’s ebb and flow lies its endurance; the one thing constant in the inconstancy of our transient existence is change. My understanding of the kabbalistic viewpoint can be profitably compared to the account of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence offered by Gilles Deleuze: We misconstrue the expression “eternal return” when we take it as the return of the same. It is not being that recurs, but, rather, that recurrence itself constitutes being insofar as it affirms becoming and passing. It is not some one thing that recurs, but that recurrence is itself affirmed by the passage of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the Eternal Return does not designate the nature of what recurs, but, to the contrary, the fact of recurring difference.8 In another context, Deleuze repeats his contention that the idea of the eternal return in Nietzsche is in no way the return of a same, a similar or an equal. Nietzsche says clearly that if there were identity, if there were an undifferentiated qualitative state of the world or a position of equilibrium for the stars, then this would be a reason never to leave it, not a reason for entering into a cycle. Nietzsche thereby links eternal return to what appeared to oppose it or limit it from without—​namely, complete metamorphosis, the irreducibly unequal. … The eternal return is neither qualitative nor extensive but intensive, purely intensive. In other words, it is said of difference.9 together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—​itself too? For whatever can walk—​in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more” (emphasis in original). 8 Gilles Deleuze, “Active and Reactive,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited and introduced by David B. Allison (New York: Random House Publishing, 1977), p. 86. It goes without saying that many scholars have explicated Nietzsche’s signature doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. See, for instance, Ned Lukacher, Time-​Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 115–​138. 9 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 242–​243.

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I will not assess the accuracy or legitimacy of the Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche, though I am of the opinion that his perspective is defensible. What is more important for the drift of these reflections is the remarkable assonance between this interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence and the kabbalistic stance on time and eternity that issues from the gnosis of the name yhwh. As I noted above, the Tetragrammaton denotes the compresence of past, present, and future. This idea, which destabilizes the triadic division of time that informs the commonsense outlook, rests on the assumption that the eternality of the divine being is instantiated incessantly in the becoming of the moment. The entwining of the three temporal modes logically suggests a sense of return, a recycling of the temporal flux, since if it is presumed that all is present in every moment, then what will come to be in any moment in some sense has already been. What is recycled, however, is not a selfsame, unchangeable identity; the return, the coming back, is about “complete metamorphosis,” the coming to be of a future past that is “irreducibly unequal” to the past future, and hence the only constancy of being that we can speak of is the becoming of change. The name yhwh, as its scriptural elaboration ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I will be as I will be” (Exodus 3:14), drives the point home as this unusual delineation indicates that the being of the God of Israel is marked by its becoming, and hence the name does not name anything that could be named except the unnameable. All that recurs in the interminable succession of time, therefore, is a manifestation of the divine essence, but that essence is essentially inessential, that is, its essence consists precisely of its having no essence: it is what it is to become. The kabbalistic teaching resonates with the description of the “play of the eternal return” in a third passage from Deleuze: This return is precisely the Being of becoming, the one of multiplicity, the necessity of chance. Thus we must not make of the eternal return a return of the same. To do this would be to misunderstand the form of the transmutation and the change in the fundamental relationship, for the same does not preexist the diverse (except in the category of nihilism). It is not the same that comes back, since the coming back is the original form of the same, which is said only of the diverse, the multiple, becoming. The same doesn’t come back; only coming back is the same in what becomes.10 10

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, with an introduction by John Rajchman, translated by Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 87 (emphasis in original). See the discussion of the Deleuzian sense of repetition and the synthesis of time in James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and

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Admittedly, the core of the kabbalistic teaching was shaped in the crucible of an elitist European culture in the high middle ages, and thus kabbalists were well-​informed of philosophical and scientific views that Nietzsche would have rejected as part of his critique of Western (or, more specifically, Platonic-​Christian) metaphysics. Nonetheless, the paradox of the Nietzschean perspective as presented by Deleuze—​“It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns—​or rather, everything does not return”11—​ is strikingly similar to what I have drawn independently from the texts penned by kabbalists, a kenotic understanding of time that parallels their embrace of an apophatic discourse.12 That is, just as kabbalists affirmed that language in what is, paradoxically, its most restricted and most expansive sense, leads one to speak the unspeakable, to say what is unsaid in the unsaying of what is said, so, in their effort to think the unthinkable, the giving of time comes forth from an infinite presencing of a presence that can be present only and always in the absence of its presence, an event of presence, one might say, rather than the presence of an event, the withdrawal of withdrawal in the recurrence of the same that becomes the same in virtue of being different, a becoming that comes to be in the return of what has always never been. 2

Intellectual Conjunction and the Mechanics of Divine Influence

In this chapter, I will turn my focus on some dimensions of the phenomenological depictions of time that may be elicited from the mystical thought enunciated by the thirteenth-​century Spanish kabbalist, Abraham Abulafia, with a specific interest in elucidating what I have called kenotic overflow and temporal

Guide, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 91–​117. See also the discussion of the eternal return and the production of difference in James Brusseau, Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 19–​43. 11 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 243. 12 For an earlier expression of this motif, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 115–​116. My application of Deleuze to the kabbalistic material resonates with the thesis proffered by Oliver Davies, “Thinking Difference: A Comparative Study of Gilles Deleuze, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart,” in Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 76–​86.

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transcendence.13 To date, the only aspect of Abulafia’s thinking about time that 13

Here I list a sampling of the studies on Abulafia and his school of mystical thought and practice, but let me note that I am citing only a portion of the published research of Moshe Idel on this topic, although in subsequent notes, interested readers will find reference to other studies; anyone of sound mind will see that the number of publications by Idel that I mention is considerable, but my primary concern nevertheless is to engage the corpus of Abulafia and not scholarly writings on him, a view that seems difficult for Israeli scholars to comprehend, especially Idel and Yehuda Liebes. A particularly egregious and revolting example is the remark of Moshe Idel, Vocal Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba‘al Tov’s Mysticism (New York: Herder & Herder, 2020) p. 362 n. 4: “Compare also the more recent reiteration of the nexus between the Besht, contemplation, graphical letters, and quietism in Wolfson, ‘Immanuel Frommann,’ p. 195, as if it’s a fact found in the analyzed material and not a consequence of scholars before him.” The reference is to Elliot R. Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah: Some Sabbatian and Ḥasidic Affinities,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, edited by G. Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), pp. 171–​222. Bracketing the completely inappropriate task that Idel assigns to himself to proclaim judgment on me in this gratuitously spiteful and petty manner, he is actually unacquainted with how I do my work and it is surely overreach on his part to presume that he does. I approach the material in the way that a philosopher does; hence, for example, someone writing on Plato engages the Platonic corpus and judiciously chooses to refer to secondary material. It is outrageous for Idel to assert that my analysis is a consequence of scholars that came before me rather than a consequence of my studying the primary material. Moreover, to add insult to injury, as a matter of fact I do make reference to secondary material (including Idel) in Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary,” pp. 215–​217 nn. 135–​138. Candidly, the need to cite every study of Idel on Abulafia is not mandatory since his work is marked by mechanical repetition of the same and not by the profound sense of repetition as the iteration of the similar that is always dissimilar. For previous scholarship on Abulafia, see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), pp. 119–​155; idem, The Kabbalah of Sefer ha-​ Temunah and Abraham Abulafia, edited by Joseph Ben-​Shlomo (Jerusalem: Akkademon, 1965) (Hebrew); idem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), pp. 53–​55, 180–​181; Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); idem, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); idem, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 61–​ 67, 97–​103; idem, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); idem, “The Contribution of Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah to the Understanding of Jewish Mysticism,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years After, edited by Joseph Dan and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), pp. 117–​143; idem, “Abulafia’s Secrets of the Guide: A Linguistic Turn,” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, edited by Alfred Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Alan Arkush (Australia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 289–​329; idem, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 314–​351; idem, “The Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Secret of ‘Arayot in Early Kabbalah,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 12 (2004): 89–​199 (Hebrew); idem, “Definitions of Prophecy—​Maimonides and Abulafia,” in Maimonides and Mysticism: Presented to Moshe Hallamish on the Occasion of His Retirement [Da‘at

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has been addressed in any detail is the role of history in his messianic vision.14 My attention will turn to other philosophical dimensions of temporality

14

64–​66], edited by Avraham Elqayam and Dov Schwartz (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2009), pp. 1–​36 (Hebrew); idem, “On the Secrets of the Torah in Abraham Abulafia,” in Religion and Politics in Jewish Thought: Essays in Honor of Aviezer Ravitzky, edited by Benjamin Brown, Menachem Lorberbaum, Avinoam Rosenak, and Yedida Z. Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2012), pp. 371–​458 (Hebrew); idem, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism: Secrets and Doubts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 2020); Elliot R. Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia—​Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2000); idem, “Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia and the Prophetic Kabbalah,” in Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah: New Insights, edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York: New York University Press, 2011), pp. 68–​90; Ron Kiener, “From Ba‘al ha-​Zohar to Prophet to Ecstatic: The Vicissitudes of Abulafia in Contemporary Scholarship,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years After, pp. 145–​159; Meirav Karmeli, “Men of the Ladder: The Explication of R. Abraham Abulafia to the Section ‘Wa-​yeṣe’ in Genesis in Comparison With Other Thinkers,” ma thesis, Hebrew University, 2002 (Hebrew); Harvey J. Hames, “The Resurgence of Mysticism in the Kingdom of Aragon in the 13th Century: Abraham Abulafia and his Place in Contemporary Society,” M. Phil. Thesis, Cambridge University, 1992; idem, “From Calabria Cometh the Law, and the Word of the Lord From Sicily: The Holy Land in the Thought of Joachim of Fiore and Abraham Abulafia,” Mediterranean Historical Review 20 (2005): 187–​199; idem, Like Angels on Jacob’s Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans, and Joachimism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Robert Sagerman, The Serpent Kills or the Serpent Gives Life: The Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia’s Response to Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Adam Afterman, “And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 151–​170; Federico Dal Bo, “‘A Sage Understands of His Knowledge’ (mHag 2:1): Degrees and Hierarchy of Knowledge in Abraham Abulafia,” Mediaevalia. Textos e estudos 36 (2017): 61–​73. For an attempt to interpret Abulafia’s linguistic-​nominal cosmology in light of Lacan and Levinas, see Michael T. Miller, The Name of God in Jewish Thought: A Philosophical Analysis of Mystical Traditions from Apocalyptic to Kabbalah (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 126–​149. An earlier attempt to juxtapose Abulafian kabbalah and Levinas can be found in Oona Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 139–​199. Moshe Idel, “Some Concepts of Time and History in Kabbalah,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers, (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), pp. 170–​ 176; idem, “‘The Time of the End’: Apocalypticism and Its Spiritualization in Abraham Abulafia’s Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic Time, edited by Albert I. Baumgarten (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 155–​185. More recently, and long after the original version of this chapter appeared in print, Idel has addressed the question of time in Abulafia in an appendix to his Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, pp. 358-​364. I will not respond here to Idel’s analysis, but it is fairly obvious that it is yet another disgraceful example of his utilizing scholarly publications as a means to polemicize against another person’s views that do not accord with his own. It is scandalous that the editors of so many academic journals and book series have given Idel carte blanche to spew his toxicity.

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as they emerge from Abulafia’s compositions, though the conclusions I will draw surely have a bearing on the eschatological elements of the prophetic kabbalah. Before proceeding to discuss the complex of themes related to this topic, it is incumbent on me to provide a sketch of the main contours of Abulafia’s kabbalistic landscape. Somewhat improbably, Abulafia was able to combine the basic tenets of Maimonidean religious philosophy with esoteric doctrines and mystical practices (mediated chiefly through the works of the Rhineland Jewish pietists, but also through select treatises of Catalonian and Castilian kabbalists that either preceded or were contemporary with him)15 to produce his distinctive understanding of kabbalah as a path, derekh,16 a way to attain 15

See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 152–​154, and the relevant studies of Scholem and Idel cited there pp. 153–​154 nn. 158–​161. 16 Idel, Studies, p. 144 n. 22, suggests that Abulafia’s use of the term derekh betrays the influence of the word tariqa as it is employed in the Ṣūfi lexicon. On the possible influence of Ṣūfism on prophetic kabbalah, see also Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 147, 384 n. 105; idem, Kabbalah, pp. 54, 180; ‘Obadyāh ben Abraham ben Moses Maimonides, The Treatise of the Pool: Al-​Maqāla al-​Ḥawḍiyya, edited with a translation and notes by Paul Fenton (London: Octagon Press, 1981), pp. 21–​22; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 14, 24, 46 n. 59, 104; idem, Studies, pp. 43 n. 30, 74–​76, 79, 91–​101, 105, 126, 144 n. 22; Idel’s introductory essay “‘Le Porte della Giustizia’: E La Qabbalah Estatica in Italia,” in Natan ben Sa‘adyah Har’ar, Le Porte Della Giustizia: Ša‘are Ṣedeq, a cura e con un saggio di Moshe Idel, edizione Italiana a cura di Maurizio Mottolese (Milano: Adelphi Edizioni, 2001), pp. 33, 166, 196, 247 n. 2, 289; Ḥaviva Pedaya, Vision and Speech: Models of Revelatory Experience in Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2002), pp. 176–​177, 186–​187, 194–​197 (Hebrew); Harvey J. Hames, “A Seal Within a Seal: The Imprint of Sufism in Abraham Abulafia’s Teaching,” Medieval Encounters 11 (2006): 153–​172; idem, Like Angels, pp. 34–​35; Afterman, “And They Shall Be One Flesh”, pp. 167–​170. I will forego here entering into a discussion of the larger question of the influence of Ṣūfism on medieval Jewish thought, including especially the Jewish-​Ṣūfi practice developed by the descendants of Maimonides. For general overviews, see Paul B. Fenton, “Abraham Maimonides (1186–​1237): Founding a Mystical Dynasty,” in Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the 13th Century, edited by Moshe Idel and Mortimer Ostow (Lanham: Jason Aronson, 1998), pp. 127–​154, and idem, “Judaism and Sufism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 201–​217 (on pp. 202 and 214, Fenton notes the similarity between Abulafia’s kabbalah and Ṣūfi practices, especially the connection between hazkarah of the former and dhikr of the latter); Elisha Russ-​Fishbane, Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See below, n. 210. Regarding the influence of Ṣūfism on medieval Jewish thought, the interested reader should also consult Diana Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-​Levi’s Kuzari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), and idem, A Sufi-​Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Baḥya Ibn Paqūda’s Duties of the Heart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

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knowledge of the explicit name (yedi‘at ha-​shem ha-​meforash) that facilitates the prophetic comprehension (ha-​hassagah ha-​nevu’it).17 To cite a succinct formulation by Abulafia himself from one of his major treatises, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, composed in Rome in 1280: “Hence, you must know in truth that the emergence of these permutations from the glorious name [yeṣi’at ha-​ṣerufim min ha-​shem ha-​nikhbad] is called for us the prophetic kabbalah [qabbalah ha-​nevu’it] whence the soul is conjoined to the name. And the receiving of the emergence [qabbalat ha-​yeṣi’ah] is so that one may be influenced by the other [lehiyotah nishpa‘at zo mi-​zo], and the one that is influenced [ha-​nishpa] by it is called the holy spirit [ruaḥ ha-​qodesh].”18 The matter of influence is crucial to Abulafia’s cosmology and psychology, and thus the choice to let it guide our explication of his mystical system is warranted. I commence with the observation that these two elements may be distinguished conceptually and marked as linguistically distinct, but as a matter of experience they are inseparable. With regard to the cosmological, in a manner consonant with Maimonides,19 the universe is described by Abulafia as issuing from and being sustained by an influx of divine intellection, the light that emanates from the first cause (sibbah ha-​ri’shonah), the “necessary of existence” (meḥuyav ha-​meṣi’ut),20 the “form of the intellect” (ṣurat ha-​ 17

Abraham Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 1999), pp. 112, 135. See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 136–​138; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 14–​24; idem, Language, pp. 101–​109. For a more elaborate account of the textual and historical background to this taxonomic understanding of kabbalah, see Moshe Idel, “Defining Kabbalah: The Kabbalah of the Divine Names,” in Mystics of the Book: Topics, Themes, and Typologies, edited with an introduction by Robert A. Herrera (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 97–​122. 18 Abraham Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, edited by Amnon Gross, third edition (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 20. 19 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:12, p. 279. 20 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 10; idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Sefirot, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 2. The terms “necessary of existence” and “first cause” are both derived from Maimonides; see The Guide, 1:57, p. 132, and 1:69, p. 166. On the application of the expression ein sof to the first cause, also described as the sofer ha-​ sefirot, the one that enumerates the enumerations, rather than being itself one of the enumerations, see Abulafia’s We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, in Adolph Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, Erstes Heft (Leipzig; A. M. Colditz, 1853), p. 20, and the more recent edition of Amnon Gross included as the first part of Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 24 (hereafter cited as We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah). In the continuation of the passage (Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, pp. 20–​21; We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, pp. 25–​26), Abulafia writes that when the “internal potencies” and the “hidden, human spirits” are untied from their knots to the body, “they run to their first source, which is one without any duality [eḥad bilti shum

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sekhel)21 that links all of reality in an unbroken chain of being. Abulafia identifies the intellectual overflow as the Tetragrammaton, but, in a manner closer to Judah Halevi than to Maimonides, he maintained that the knowledge of this name, which is the essence of the tradition, is grasped by a prophetic vision unique to the people of Israel rather than by speculation shared universally by all nations.22 Thus, in Imrei Shefer, after noting Naḥmanides’s celebrated

21

22

sheniyyut], and it comprises multiplicity until the infinite [kolel ribbuy ad ein sof]. And the untying reaches above, and when he mentions there the name [of God], he ascends and sits on the head of the supernal crown [mit‘alleh we-​yoshev be-​ro’sh ha-​keter ha-​ elyon], and thought draws from there the threefold blessing.” Concerning this text and Abulafia’s deliberate appropriation and reinterpretation of the symbolic language of theosophic kabbalah, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 132, and idem, “Universalization and Integration: Two Conceptions of Mystical Union in Jewish Mysticism,” in Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1989), p. 37. On Abulafia’s mentioning the theosophic symbol of maḥashavah, the first of the sefirot identified as keter elyon, see sources cited in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 112, 127, 138. On the expression sofer ha-​ sefirot, see also Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Sefirot, p. 5, cited by Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, p. 148 and see his comments on p. 349 n. 323. See also Abraham Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​ Tokhaḥot, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 33: “And yet, from the order of the number of the ten sefirot belimah we discern the unity because he is like one who counts [ke-​sofer] them and is not counted amongst them.” Regarding this expression, see also Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 160–​161, and references cited there in n. 181. Abraham Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), pp. 115–​116. Concerning this terminology in Abulafia, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 130–​131. Also pertinent to understanding the philosophical background of Abulafia’s representation of the sekhel ha-​po‘el is Richard C. Taylor, “The Agent Intellect as ‘Form for Us’ and Averroes’s Critique of al-​Fârâbî,” in Universal Representation and the Ontology of Individuation [Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 5], edited by Gyula Klima and Alexander W. Hall (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 25–​44. Judah Halevi, Sefer ha-​Kuzari, translated, annotated, and introduced by Yehuda Even Shmuel (Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1972), 4:15, p. 172, and see the brief but incisive characterization in Harry A. Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, edited by Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2:141. See also Warren Zev Harvey, “Judah Halevi’s Interpretation of the Tetragrammaton,” in A Word Fitly Spoken: Studies in Medieval Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Qurʾān, edited by Meir M. Bar-​Asher, Simon Hopkins, Sarah Stroumsa, and Bruno Chiesa (Jerusalem: Ben-​Zvi Institute, 2007), pp. 125–​132 (Hebrew); Adam Afterman, Devequt: Mystical Intimacy in Medieval Jewish Thought (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2011), pp. 73–​101, esp. 95–​99 (Hebrew). A general overview of the tension between the rational and the prophetic in Halevi’s thought is provided by Barry S. Kogan, “Judah Halevi and His Use of Philosophy in the Kuzari,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 111–​135. For an analysis of the topic of Israel’s uniqueness

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transmission of the true tradition (qabbalah shel emet) that the Torah in its entirety consists of the names of God,23 Abulafia writes, “And this kabbalah persists and is reinforced, and it is that which no sage from the philosophical sages [ḥakhmei ha-​meḥqar] can comprehend, and all the more so anyone else whose comprehension is below him. This is not comprehended by the human intellect, and therefore this received knowledge [ha-​yedi‘ah ha-​mequbbelet] is hidden from every sage who did not receive it from a prophet or from a sage who received it from a prophet, even after several generations.”24 Abulafia often reiterates this point, as we see in this remark in Oṣar Eden Ganuz: And from this perspective we, and all who follow after our tradition enlightened through prophecy [qabbalateinu ha-​muskelet bi-​nevu’ah], can say that the permutation of the letters [she-​ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot] instructs about the truth of existence [amittat ha-​meṣi’ut] as it is … even though the knowledge of the truth of existence is discerned through the abundance of thought [be-​rov maḥashavah], what leads to it, however, is the permutation. … And thus for this reason his nation must be absolutely distanced from every nation [leharḥiq ummato mi-​kol ummah be-​takhlit]. And one should be cautious and fearful of the punishments that have no atonement for the one who draws close to what is other than his nation [lezulat ummato].25 In the continuation, Abulafia goes so far as to say that the reward pledged to God’s people who keep their distance from other nations, and who will preserve their religion, their language, and their script, is a share in the world and election in Halevi’s religious thought in comparative perspective, see Shlomo Pines, “Shī‘īte Terms and Conceptions in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 165–​251, esp. 167–​172 where the term ṣafwa, which refers to the pure or chosen few among the descendants of Adam, is analyzed, and in greater detail in Ehud Krinis, “The Idea of the Chosen People in Judah Halevi’s al-​Kitab al-​Khazari and its Origins in the Shi‘i Imam Doctrine,” PhD dissertation, Ben-​Gurion University, 2007 (Hebrew), and revised version, God’s Chosen People: Judah Halevi’s Kuzari and the Shī‘ī Imam Doctrine, translated by Ann Brener and Tamar Liza Cohen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 23 Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah le-​Rabbenu Moshe ben Naḥman, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1984), 1:6. 24 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 61. Compare Natan ben Sa‘adyah Har’ar, Le Porte Della Giustizia, pp. 470 and 473. In the second passage, the received matter (inyan mequbbal) is said to be apprehended only by the “prophetic intellect” (sekhel nevi’i) together with divine assistance and not by the “human intellect” (sekhel enoshi). 25 Abraham Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2000), p. 182.

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to come, whereas every other nation will inherit Gehinnom.26 Yet, in the very same context, Abulafia boldly avows that with respect to the matter of the truth of the unity of God, there is no disagreement between the Jews, Christian, and Muslims. The religion of Moses, the religion of Jesus, and the religion of Muḥammad unanimously consent that the “name of God is unified necessarily” (shem ha-​shem meyuḥad behekhreaḥ); indeed, Abulafia go so far as to say that even the Christians, who affirm the trinity, in the end acknowledge the truth of the Torah by affirming God’s oneness. With respect to this matter, therefore, there is no difficulty between the three liturgical communities. Nevertheless, there are differences between the monotheistic faiths akin to the differences that exist in the multifarious oral languages and their written scripts.27 The variations may well be caused by custom (hergel) rather than by nature (ṭeva), as Abulafia insists, but they yield insurmountable disparities. Thus, at the conclusion of this discussion, Abulafia warns the reader, “one should contemplate that every way apart from his way and the way of his truth is in vain. Or one might think that the rest of the ways of humankind, who are not from his nation, are true, and the ways of his nation in which one grew up are false. I say now that it is compulsory that no way should be envisioned by one as true except for his way and the way of his nation [she-​lo yera’eh shum derekh emet eṣlo zulat darko we-​derekh ummato], to the point that one should contemplate all that one received in the level of truth, and everything apart from what one has received is for oneself the absolute deception.”28 Even in passages where Abulafia embraces the philosophical anthropology of Maimonides, careful scrutiny reveals that he reinterprets the latter in a manner that shows greater affinity with the particularism of the esoteric tradition than with the universalism of medieval rationalism. For example, he writes in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, “Thus, you should know that it was not possible for any of the prophets to prophesy without rational thought [maḥashavah sikhlit], and the way of prophecy is the most prominent of all the human gradations, and from this book you will learn all the ways of prophecy, their character, substance, and the truth of their existence. And thus I will have to bring to you in this worthy explanation the secret of the explicit name as it is unified, explained, and explicated until you will not be in doubt about anything of its truth.”29 Without the perfection of reason prophecy is not possible, but the latter is dependent on the secret of the Tetragrammaton, a mystery that exceeds 26 Ibid., pp. 182–​183. 27 Ibid., p. 183. 28 Ibid., p. 184. 29 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 22.

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the limits of the rational. At times, Abulafia’s language can be somewhat duplicitous, and thus one must not only be circumspect in interpreting him but also suspicious about his true intent. A case in point is the following passage in Or ha-​Sekhel: “And because the prophet cannot comprehend God except through knowledge of the name just as the complete philosopher cannot comprehend God except through his actions, we, and all who have preceded us, uniformly agree to attribute this human action, which alters the ways of the nature of the species, to the name of God. And we said that the prophet does what he does through the power of the name, and God is one and his name is one, and this matter is not apprehended through the senses [be-​hergesh], and not through the imagination [be-​dimyon], and not through the first intelligible [be-​muskal ri’shon], but it is comprehended after many intelligible wonders [moftim rabbim muskalim].”30 Abulafia goes on to say that he will not elaborate on these matters because his intention in composing this treatise was to write about the received matter [ha-​inyan ha-​mequbbal] and to transmit it through the tradition [ba-​qabbalah] even though it may have already been apprehended through the intellect. “Therefore, we will write about it from what is received, and if they are meritorious, the sages and the enlightened ones will understand it, and the all wicked ones will not understand, and he who wants to discern, he should seek and he shall find.”31 Of numerous other examples that could be cited to demonstrate this point, I will mention a passage from Mafteaḥ ha-​Ra‘yon. In the context of describing the unique status of the human being vis-​à-​vis other species, Abulafia notes, following standard philosophical taxonomy, that the distinguishing mark of homo sapiens is linked to the fact that a person can think and speak, qualities that enable the human species to discriminate between good and evil and between truth and deception.32 It is surely reasonable to presume that the identification of the intellect (sekhel) as the cause of the aptitude for speech (dibbur) should apply to all human beings without ethnic, cultural, or religious prejudice. In some passages in Abulafia’s treatises, however, it appears that the definition of the human as the animal rationale should be ascribed most accurately to the Jew. Thus, echoing the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, Abulafia writes that “there is no speech in man apart from the twenty-​two holy letters and apart from the five movements that move them in the five places of the

30 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, pp. 108–​109. 31 Ibid., p. 109. 32 Abraham Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Ra‘yon, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 17.

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mouth.”33 Speech—​the generic essence of what it is to be human—​is identi��fied more specifically as the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The inimitable role attributed to Hebrew implies that speech in its most perfect form—​whether mental, oral, or graphic—​is the singular possession of the Jews amongst all the nations. The correlate to this argument is the identification of the true Adam with Israel, an ethnocentric position that concurs with the esoteric and/​or mystical material that influenced Abulafia. The point is corroborated by copious passages in the Abulafian corpus including, for instance, the following remark in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, “And a man is called a person and a human [we-​adam niqra ish we-​adam] because he is sealed with the name ahwy.”34 The key to decipher this remark is to take stock of the fact that the letters ‫ אהו״י‬were considered in medieval sources not only as the vowel letters but also as representative of the Tetragrammaton. More importantly for our purposes, these letters numerically equal twenty-​two (1 + 5 + 6 + 10), which corresponds to the number of Hebrew consonants. As Abulafia puts it in another passage from the same treatise, “And the secret of the median is beit kaf, and their truth is the twenty-​two [kaf beit] letters whose secret is ahwy.”35 What Abulafia is communicating is that the terms “person” (ish) and “human” (adam) can be assigned only to one who is sealed with the letters of the name that signifies the totality of the Hebrew letters, which is to say, the Torah. Obviously, the one ethnos that can fit this description is the Jews. Thus, from the verse “For the Lord’s portion is his people” (Deuteronomy 32:9), Abulafia infers that 33 Ibid., p. 18. 34 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 361. 35 Ibid., p. 111. Abulafia may have been influenced on this point by his teacher. See Baruch Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, in Scholem, The Kabbalah of Sefer ha-​Temunah, p. 234. After establishing a connection based on the numerical equivalences of various denotations of “the all” (ha-​kol), which I assume refers to Metatron or the Active Intellect, to wit, zo’t (the feminine form of the pronoun “this”), kol ha-​merkavah elohim (“the entire divine chariot”), and ziw shekhinah (“splendor of the Presence”), which all equal 408, Togarmi writes: “And the secret with regard to him is known, and it is the unique name [shem meyuḥad], and with him are the powers, and it is yw”d h”a wa”w h”a, whose secret is the blood of male and female [dam zakhar u-​neqevah], that is, kaf beit, beit kaf, or ahwy, ywha.” Togarmi does not mention the Torah in this text, but he does make a point of noting that the name ahwy equals twenty-​two, the number of Hebrew letters, which are further related to the twofold dimension of the Tetragrammaton symbolized by masculine and feminine blood. See the text cited below, n. 132. On the phono-​morpho-​ orthographic nature of the letters ahwy, see Dorit Diskin Ravid, Spelling Morphology: The Psycholinguistics of Hebrew Spelling (Boston: Springer, 2012), pp. 129–​139. On the interpretation of the letters ‫ אהו״י‬in the writings of Abulafia, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 18, 22, 31. See also Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 113 n. 54, and the passage of Giqatilla mentioned, op. cit., p. 76 n. 240.

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“the most honorable of the human species is the Jewish person [ha-​nikhbad be-​ min ha-​adam hu ish ha-​yisra’eli].”36 The contention that Abulafia’s conception of salvation is universal because it is dependent on the experience of devequt, the intellectual conjunction that unites human and divine, obscures the point that, for Abulafia, the Jewish people are endowed with a special quality that facilitates their capability of achieving the unitive state of ecstasy associated with prophetic revelation and messianic illumination. The human intellect that achieves union with the divine intellect does so on account of a capacity that is supra-​rational and that is not shared equally by all people.37 Parenthetically, the claim I have made with respect to Abulafia can be illumined by a comparison of his idea of devequt and the ideal of mystical union proffered by Meister Eckhart. A number of scholars have drawn attention to affinities between the two figures, although this is a matter that still awaits proper analysis.38 For my purposes here I would like to focus on one, albeit not inconsequential, point. Like Abulafia, Eckhart utilized philosophical concepts and vocabulary to articulate his mystical teaching, and in particular the influence of Maimonides is notable in both thinkers. When the most exalted aspect of the soul—​the “intellect that does not seek, which is pure light in 36 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 18. Compare idem, Or ha-​Sekhel, pp. 33–​34; idem, Shomer Miṣwah, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 41. 37 For a more universalist interpretation of Abulafia’s ideal of salvation, see Hames, Like Angels, pp. 54–​70. With regard to this matter, Hames follows the view of Idel; see the references cited on p. 136 n. 31, to which we could add the brief discussion of Abulafia in the section on devequt and becoming universal in Idel, “Universalization and Integration,” pp. 30–​32; and the expanded discussion of this topic in idem, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, pp. 217-​243 (needless to say, my position is criticized in this publication as well, but I will not respond since there is nothing new in Idel’s criticism and his misconstrued defense of universalism on the part of Abulafia is unworthy of a serious philosophical rejoinder). See below, n. 75. See also Phillipe Gardette, Djalâl-​od-​Dîn Rûmî, Raymond Lulle, Rabbi Abraham Aboulafia ou l’amour du dialogue interconfessionnel (Istanbul: Les Éditions Isis, 2002), pp. 77–​86. 38 On comparisons between Abulafia and Eckhart, see Scholem, Major Trends, p. 126; idem, The Kabbalah of Sefer ha-​Temunah, p. 123; Idel, Studies, pp. 17 and 30 n. 112; idem, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” in Studies in Maimonides, edited by Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 78; Yossef Schwartz, “To Thee is Silence Praise”: Meister Eckhart’s Reading in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), pp. 163–​164, 180 n. 296, 323, 331, 333 (Hebrew); idem, “Meister Eckhart and Moses Maimonides: From Judaeo-​Arabic Rationalism to Christian Mysticism,” in A Companion to Meister Eckhart, edited by Jeremiah M. Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 406; Bernard McGinn, “Selective Affinities: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Mystical Exegesis,” in Creation and Re-​Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 98–​100.

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itself”39—​is “detached from all material things,” it “receives nothing but the naked Godhead [lûter gotheit],” but this transpires only when God, too, is “stripped of all additions,” that is, only when our notion of God is divested of all kataphatic attribution—​when we grasp the paradox of “God as mode without mode [wise âne wîse], and essence without essence [wesen âne wesen]”40—​do we apprehend the true meaning of divine oneness,41 the “nothingness” whose “shadow” is perceived in all created beings.42 The power of the soul that is the 39

40 41

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Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Die Deutschen Werke: Meister Eckhart’s Predigten, herausgegeben und übersetzt von Josef Quint, vol. 3 (Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 2000), p. 217 (Pr. 71); The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated by Maurice O’C. Walshe, revised with foreword by Bernard McGinn (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), p. 138. Meister Eckhart, Die Deutschen Werke, vol. 3, p. 231 (Pr. 71); The Complete Mystical Works, p. 142. Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Die Deutschen Werke: Meister Eckhart’s Predigten, herausgegeben und übersetzt von Josef Quint, vol. 1 (Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1958), p. 361 (Pr. 21); The Complete Mystical Works, p. 467. Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Die latenischen Werke: Expositio sancti evangelii secundum Iohannem, herausgegeben und übersetzt von Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, Albert Zimmermann, vol. 3 (Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1994), p. 17, n. 20: Res einim omnis create sapit umbram nihili, rendered into German as An allem Geschaffenen spürt man den Schatten des Nichts. English translation in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, translation and introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn, preface by Houston Smith (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 128: “Every created being smacks of the shadow of nothingness.” I would modify the translation to “In all created beings one can discern the shadow of nothingness.” The view expressed in this dictum should be contrasted with the more negative assessment of nothingness in Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrage der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Die latenischen Werke: Sermones, herausgegeben und übersetzt von Ernst Benz, Bruno Decker, und Josef Koch, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1956), p. 57 (Sermo 6.2, n. 57): Omne enim creatum ratione nihili foedum est et dividit a deo, sicut nox a die, tenebrae a luce, nihil an esse. English translation in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, edited by Bernard McGinn, with the collaboration of Frank Tobin and Elvira Borgstadt, preface by Kenneth Northcott (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 214: “Everything created is stained with nothingness and set apart from God, like night from day, darkness from light, nothingness from existence.” On the status of the nothing in Eckhart’s thought, see John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 134–​137; Beverly J. Lanzetta, “Three Categories of Nothingness in Eckhart,” The Journal of Religion 72 (1992): 248–​268; Annick Charles-​Saget, “Non-​être et néant chez Maître Eckhart,” in Voici Maître Eckhart: Textes et études réunis par Emilie Zum Brunn (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1998), pp. 301–​318; Udo Kern, “Gottes Sein ist Mein

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intellect can see God, the invisible likeness in all things visible, only when it is “entirely stripped and denuded of all means” (alzemâle entblœzet und entdecket von allem mittel) and thus becomes nothing as God, who is “like nothing” (als got nihte glîch enist, als enist ouch disiu kraft nihte glîch).43 But, as Eckhart makes clear, the “only way” that the soul can get closer to the “essential point” (wesenlîche punct) of God in the center, “equally far from and near to all creatures,” is through displacing the “natural intellect” (natiurlîchiu vernunft) by the light of the divine love that surpasses it.44 In this matter, Eckhart is beholden to the apophasis of the Neoplatonic tradition according to which the surpassing of reason is through reason. The intellect, accordingly, is not simply the faculty of discursive reason but rather the means by which the mind through contemplation can realize its oneness with the One beyond the mind. The same can be said with respect to Abulafia, but there is a critical difference between the Jewish mystic and the Dominican monk with respect to the status and function of language in relation to the unitive experience. Yossef Schwartz has argued that Eckhart displayed an interest in the magical or alchemical import of divine names,45 which is seemingly analogous to the prophetic kabbalah. However, even if we accept this hypothesis, there is still no evidence that Eckhart particularized the metacognitive element in the manner of Abulafia, for whom, as I have noted, the secret knowledge of the name belongs most properly to the people of Israel. In Imrei Shefer, Abulafia states that the kabbalah is transmitted to the enlightened one who is complete in his nature, and this perfection consists of his having acquired knowledge of the ways of Scripture and its grammar so that he can know the holy language as it is written, vocalized, and contemplated, the ways of the Mishnah, Talmud, sermons (derashot), legends Leben”: Philosophische Brocken bei Meister Eckhart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 137–​211. 43 Meister Eckhart, Die Deutschen Werke, vol. 3, pp. 165–​171 (Pr. 69); The Complete Mystical Works, pp. 234–​235. Compare idem, Die Deutschen Werke: Meister Eckhart’s Predigten, vol. 1, p. 152 (Pr. 9); The Complete Mystical Works, p. 344, where the intellect (vernünfticheit) is identified as the aspect of the soul through which God “is stripped of goodness and being and of all names.” With regard to this matter, Eckhart’s position has been compared to Zen Buddhism by Richard J. Woods, Eckhart’s Way (Dublin: Veritas, 2009), p. 50. On the detached intellectuality, see Carl F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 77–​93. 44 Meister Eckhart, Die Deutschen Werke, vol. 3, p. 298 (Pr. 75); The Complete Mystical Works, p. 428. 45 Yossef Schwartz, “Magic, Philosophy and Kabbalah: The Mystical and Magical Interpretation of Maimonides in the Later Middle Ages,” in Maimonides and Mysticism, pp. 120–​130 (Hebrew).

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(aggadot), and the philosophic wisdom (ḥokhmah filosofit). Hence, one cannot receive the tradition until one has mastered Scripture, Talmud, and philosophy.46 To the extent that the kabbalah is built on the different rabbinic forms of learning,47 it is obvious that it is the distinctive custody of the Jewish people. Moreover, insofar as the kabbalah about the name and the possibility of attaining prophecy implied thereby is unique to the Jews, the latter alone are capable of being transformed angelically by means of the experience of conjunction, the ultimate purpose of human existence.48 Thus, in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia notes that the expressions mal’akhei ha-​sharet, takkir shem ha-​el, hem kat yisra’el, and me’irat ha-​sekhel, all equal 1006, whence we can deduce that the comportment of the ministering angels, which are the faction of Israel, is to know the name of God, a knowledge that occasions and is occasioned by the illumination of the intellect.49 Tellingly, Abulafia approvingly cites the rabbinic dictum50 that the seminal filth with which the serpent inseminated Eve ceased for Israel who stood at Mount Sinai but not for the non-​Jews. After quoting this dictum in conjunction with his statement that the secrets of illicit sexual relations (sitrei arayot) refer to the serpent’s intercourse with Eve, Abulafia concludes “and this is a great and honorable matter that does not need an explanation for it is clear to the enlightened that the Torah is the cause of the life of the world to come … and the true Torah is verily the cause of the cessation of the filth of the serpent from him.”51 The faith of the Jews is thus called by Abulafia “the universal religion” (ha-​dat ha-​kelalit), for through the intervention of the Hebrew letters, the constituent elements of the Torah, they can stimulate “the divine overflow that moves the universal word [ha-​dibbur ha-​kelali].”52 A statement 46 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, pp. 135–​136. See ibid., pp. 195–​196. 47 Ibid., p. 135. 48 Abraham Abulafia, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, in Adolph Jellinek, Philosophie und Kabbala, Erstes Heft (Leipzig: Heinrich Hunger, 1854), p. 9. For a fuller discussion of the transmission of the name and the angelic status of the Jews, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond—​Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 58–​73; and idem, “Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia,” pp. 75–​78. 49 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 86. 50 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 146a, Yevamot 103b, Avodah Zarah 22b. 51 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 8–​9, slightly corrected according to ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1582, fol. 6b. 52 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 34. For a more nonsectarian interpretation of Abulafia’s notion of the universal religion, see Idel, Studies, pp. 49-​50. Initially, Idel acknowledges that Abulafia’s version of the tale of the pearl set aside for the father’s son as opposed to the servants, who are rivals to the son, has altered the “liberal” spirit of the original, implying that “Christianity and Islam are not even copies of Judaism” but they are rather “a vain pretense, having no theological basis at all.” Abulafia thus “denies the possibility of an

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such as this sets up a seemingly insurmountable inequity between Jew and non-​Jew as the Torah, which has been gifted uniquely to the Jewish people,53 is the only means to discharge the serpent’s pollution and to attain the spiritual felicity of the world to come. The Jews are designated “the universal nation” (ha-​ummah ha-​kelalit)54 because they are the one national identity whose particularity embodies the inherent potential to apprehend and to be absorbed in the universal, intelligible truths (ha-​muskalot ha-​kelaliyot) by means of the wisdom of the kabbalah with which they alone have been endowed.55 The Jews alone are privy to the gnosis of the name, which is the universal knowledge (yedi‘ah kelalit), the knowledge that comprises (kolelet) all previous knowledge and through which one attains the knowledge of the “first of all created beings” (re’shit kol ha-​beriyyot) upon whom is engraved the holy spirit, the “soul that comprises all of the souls” (neshamah kolelet kol ha-​ neshamot).56 The destiny of the Jewish people, who come from the seed of Judah, is discernible in their name. That is, they are called yehudim because they “admit the truth and say ‘More than all the goods of this world, it is sufficient for us to have knowledge of the name.’” The singular task of the Jews is to cultivate and propagate this knowledge—​the letters of the word yehudim are rearranged as yh”w dayam, that is, it is sufficient (dayam) for them to call upon the name (yh”w).57 Assuredly, this knowledge imparts to Jews a mission equal contest between the religions.” In the continuation of his analysis, Idel remarks that the most innovative part of Abulafia’s rendering of the tale is his view that “even Judaism does not possess religious truth in its entirety. However, the Jews are best endowed to attain this truth, because they are ‘the sons of God’—​and not servants. When religious belief is cleansed of illusory opinions, Judaism will be the universal religion. This process will reach its conclusion with the arrival of the Messianic Age, when knowledge of the true God will break down the barriers between the religions.” In my estimation, this presentation fails to discern that the index of the universal is the particular, that inclusivity of the other can itself be an expression of one’s exclusivity, and consequently, the barriers between religions are broken down only to the extent that they are reinforced. 53 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 9: “And thus it says about the Torah ‘She is a tree of life to those who grasp her, and whoever holds on to her is happy’ [eṣ ḥayyim hi la-​maḥaziqim bah we-​ tomkheha me’ushshar] (Proverbs 3:18) [the word me’ushshar] is numerically equal to yisra’el, for there is no nation that grasps the Torah like us.” See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 226. 54 Abraham Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 176. 55 Abulafia, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, p. 16. 56 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 46. 57 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 193. On the definition of the Jew (yehudi) in Abulafia related to the name yhw as well as to the confession (hoda’ah) connected to the names yh, Ehyeh, and yhwh, see Moshe Idel, “A Unique Manuscript of an Untitled Treatise of Abraham Abulafia in Biblioteca Laurentiana Medicea,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 17 (2008): 20–​23.

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of universal proportions, but they can fulfill that purpose only as members of a particular religion, one constrained by specific rites and beliefs that cannot be eradicated. It is for this reason that I deployed the term hypernomian to designate Abulafia’s approach to the rationale of the commandments.58 This

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On the mystical rationalization of the commandments in Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah, see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, 178–​228. The use of the term hypernomian is explained on pp. 209–​210. My position was framed explicitly as a response to Idel who uses the word anomian to characterize Abulafia in contrast to the nomian approach of theosophic kabbalah. See Wolfson, op. cit., pp. 179–​180, and references to Idel cited there in nn. 3–​4. There is no use of the terms hypernomian or hypernomianism on the part of Idel. See, however, Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 201, where we find the statement “Last but not least: while cosmoerotic theories work with innate propensities, with feelings or intellectual acts, which are natural processes, the theoerotic ones are oriented more to ritualistic activities, what I call nomian or hypernomian performances, which depend on human will.” In the corresponding note, p. 307 n. 112, Idel refers the reader to three of his studies: (1) Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 74-​55, (2) “‘Le Porte della Giustizia’,” pp. 113–​117, 144–​163, and (3) “Milḥemet ha-​Yetzarim: Psychomachia in Abraham Abulafia’s Ecstatic Kabbalah,” referred to as “forthcoming” but since published in Peace and War in Jewish Culture, edited by Avriel Bar Levav (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2006), pp. 99–​143 (Hebrew). Let me take each of these separately. In the discussion in Kabbalah: Perspectives, Idel distinguished between nomian and anomian; there is no reference to hypernomian. In the discussions in “‘Le Porte della Giustizia’,” we again find the distinction between nomian and anomian, and the few references to hypernomian (ipernomica, ipernomico) that I could find appear on pp. 151 and 159, in both cases criticizing my use of the term. In “Milḥemet Yetzarim,” p. 128, Idel characterizes Abulafia’s approach as hyponomian (‫ )היפונומית‬and states in n. 136 that this term is to be contrasted with my use of the term hypernomian. My view is rejected again on pp. 131 and 132 n. 151. In the earlier English version of this study, Moshe Idel, “Inner Peace through Inner Struggle in Abraham Abulafia’s Ecstatic Kabbalah,” The Journal for the Study of Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewry (March 2009): 62–​96, the term hypernomian appears twice, on p. 78, where I am given credit for the term, even though Idel expresses doubt about its applicability, and on p. 79 n. 42, where “the plausibility of a hypernomian understanding of Abulafia’s thought” is questioned. In light of the careful scrutiny of the sources mentioned by Idel, wherein the term hypernomian is either not used at all or used only in connection with criticizing my use of the term, it is quite remarkable that in Kabbalah and Eros, the author would appropriate the term as something he himself employed in his remark “what I call nomian or hypernomian performances.” Leaving aside the absurdity of Idel’s unwarranted appropriation of my terminology that he actually dismisses as erroneous, Idel misunderstands what I meant by it. The reference he cites (“Inner Peace,” p. 79 n. 42; “Milḥemet Yetzarim,” p. 132 n. 151) to Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 90, where Abulafia identifies the souls who are occupied with the commandments as “the intermediaries” (ha-​beinoniyyim) positioned between the completely righteous or “the enlightened” (ha-​sikhliyyim) and the completely wicked or “the corporeal” (ha-​ gufiyyim) who are occupied only with the work of the body, does not in the least “question the plausibility of a hypernomian understanding of Abulafia’s thought.” By applying the

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term conveys not only that the non-​halakhic rituals such as letter-​combination and permutation of the divine names are molded phenomenologically by the experiential structures sanctioned by the halakhah, but that these techniques represent the extension beyond the law that is the fulfillment of the law, an idea that is resonant with my view that mysticism within traditional communities more generally denotes a path that surpasses the path by insisting that one continuously walk the path.59 To adhere to the axiom that there is no overcoming except by undergoing does not mean I ever intended to deny that, for Abulafia, the account of the chariot (ma‘aseh merkavah), or the praxis of ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot, which is the means that leads to prophecy, is not a dimension added to the conventional modes of the nomian preoccupation with the Torah.60 We might even refer to this dimension as an example of the natural phenomenon of supersaturation; that is, when a solution contains more of the dissolved material than could be dissolved by the solvent under normal circumstances, the concentration is increased beyond the point of saturation. Exceeding the limit is gauged by the delimitation of the limit. To be sure, intermittently in his writings, Abulafia gestures toward a more universalistic orientation by entertaining the possibility, articulated in the Talmud and codified by Maimonides,61 that the pious of the nations of the notion of the hypernomian to Abulafia, I did not mean to suggest that he placed ritual observance at the highest rung of human achievement. What I intended rather is that the meditational practice is a venturing beyond the law that constitutes the fulfillment of the law. The law itself is grounded in that which exceeds the law in the manner, for instance, that repentance is the hypernomian ideal that short circuits the system of reward and punishment undergirding the law but in so doing provides the foundation for that system. The center is upheld by the surplus at the margin. Consider the brief discussion on ṭa‘amei miṣwot in Abraham Abulafia, Sefer Ge’ullah, edited by Rafael Cohen (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 14-​15. Abulafia explicity rejects those who deny the literal sense (peshaṭ) of the commandments and interpret them entirely in terms of spirituality (ruḥaniyyut), which he further describes as the “way of philosophy as was done by those who worshipped Jesus.” Although the passage is truncated, we can presume that explicating the commandments by “way of the prophetic kabbalah,” the “way of the names,” or “according to the permutation of the letters,” must offer an approach that does not deny their concrete implementation. 59 Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 232, 241–​242, 262–​263, 268, 285, and more recently, idem, “Heeding the Law beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 215–​263, esp. 228. 60 Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Tokhaḥot, pp. 122–​123. This passage is also mentioned by Idel, “Inner Peace,” p. 79 n. 42 (“Milḥemet Yetzarim,” p. 132 n. 151) as counterevidence to my utilization of the term hypernomian to describe Abulafia’s orientation. 61 Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13:2; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 105a; Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, edited by Yoḥai Makbili (Ḥaifa: Or wi-​Yeshu‘ah, 2009), Hilkhot Teshuvah, 3:5, p. 80; Hilkhot Melakhim, 8:11, p. 1241.

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world (ḥasidei ummot ha-​olam) have a portion in the world to come, which he understands as a disembodied state of intellectual conjunction. For instance, in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia writes, “Spirituality is also attributed to the supernal angels of the Lord, which are the intellects separate from all matter, and the souls of the pious of the nations and the souls of the righteous of Israel as well are not bodies or faculties in bodies, but they all are only separate intellects.”62 Similarly, in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia acknowledges that there are some non-​Jews who may be considered perfect (shalem) because they have “already recognized the truth” and are considered to be in the class of those who are drawn after the Jewish people, and thus “they are called the pious of the nations of the world, who have a share in the world to come.”63 The more universalistic orientation also seems to be at play in Abulafia’s observation in Mafteaḥ ha-​Shemot that in the future all three Abrahamic religions will know the supreme name of God, that is, the seventy-​two letter name of God derived from the three verses in Exodus 14: 19–​21, which are correlated with Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic, the scriptural languages of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.64 The eschatological promise is anchored exegetically to the verse “For then I will make the nations pure of speech, so that they invoke the Lord by name and serve him with one accord” (Zephaniah 3:9).65 The ecumenical implications of the messianic vision of Christians and Muslims gaining knowledge of the name already known by Jews is anticipated to some extent by Abulafia’s claim that the seventy languages are all contained within Hebrew.66 Prima facie, this view attenuates the apparently insurmountable distinction that arises from Abulafia’s identifying Hebrew as the natural language and all the other languages as conventional,67 a position 62 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 6. 63 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 192–​193. 64 The grouping of these three languages is to be distinguished from an alternative threefold classification found more prevalently in Abulafia’s writings, to wit, Hebrew, Greek, and la‘az, which can designate either Latin or Italian. See Idel, “A Unique Manuscript,” pp. 9–​11. 65 Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Shemot, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 81. See Idel, Studies, p. 50; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with Christianity,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan, edited by David Engel, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Elliot R. Wolfson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 205–​206. 66 Abulafia, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, p. 8. 67 Idel, Language, pp. 12–​14, 16–​27, 143–​145 n. 55, 146 n. 71; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 58–​59, 62–​64, and see my discussion of Scholem’s attempt to resolve the incongruity between Abulafia’s mysticism of language and Maimonides’s attitude toward language on pp. 64–​65 n. 189.

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that he himself acknowledges is dependent on prophetic authority that is not subject to rational interrogation.68 Ostensibly, the disparity between the two types of language is somewhat mitigated by the numerical equivalence of the expressions shiv‘im leshonot (seventy languages) and ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot (permutation of the letters).69 Furthermore, the linguistic point of comprising all languages in Hebrew sheds light on Abulafia’s view of the messianic moment as the time in which the nations will be awakened spiritually to the mystical truth of Judaism. Consider Abulafia remark in Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh: “There is no doubt that in every language secrets from this matter can be found, for the final intention of human existence is to reach perfection, and the ultimate of all perfections is knowledge of God, blessed be he, and on this is dependent the life of the world to come.”70 Perhaps Abulafia is alluding to something similar when at the very end of the epistle We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah he briefly refers to the kabbalah of the other nations.71 Even though the content of that kabbalah is not entirely clear, it is 68 Abulafia, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, pp. 16–​17. In that context, he attributes the view that language is conventional to Averroës and Maimonides. A portion of this passage is translated and analyzed in Idel, Language, pp. 12–​13, and see Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 206–​207. 69 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 77, 95, 313, 381; idem, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 85; idem, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, p. 17; idem, Sitrei Torah, pp. 37, 89, 144; idem, Imrei Shefer, p. 183; idem, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 122; idem, Sefer ha-​Ḥayyim, in Maṣref ha-​Sekhel, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 81; idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Tokhaḥot, p. 106; idem, Shomer Miṣwah, p. 16; Scholem, Major Trends, p. 381 n. 53; idem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Diogenes 80 (1972): 190–​193; Idel, Language, pp. 9 and 142 n. 47; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 62; Hames, Like Angels, pp. 134–​135 n. 24. 70 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 10. Compare the passage from Ner Elohim cited by Idel, Language, p. 19. 71 Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, p. 28; Abulafia, We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, p. 34. For my previous brief discussion of this passage, see Wolfson, “Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia,” p. 75. It is possible that the reference to the kabbalah of the other nations should be interpreted in terms of another passage in We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah where Abulafia’s posits four epistemological types of proof, the sensible (murgash), the intelligible (muskal), the conventional (mefursam), and the traditional (mequbbal). See Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, p. 15; Abulafia, We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, p. 18. In other places in his writings, Abulafia delineates only three categories, the sensible, the intelligible, and the traditional. See Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 138; idem, Sitrei Torah, p. 9. Elsewhere, only two types of proof are contrasted, the sensible and the intelligible. See Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Tokhaḥot, p. 66. Concerning the receiving of a kabbalah from an uncircumcised Gentile, identified further as a Christian, see Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, edited by Yehudah Ohad Turjeman (Jerusalem: Makhon Ḥakhmei Yerushalayim we-​ha-​Ma‘arav, 2020), p. 205. Somewhat surprisingly, Isaac of Acre writes that the matter revealed by the non-​Jew about the appearance of Solomon to one of the pious of the nations of the world (ḥasid eḥad me-​ḥasidei

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surely noteworthy that Abulafia utilizes this terminology. However we are to interpret this tantalizing reference, the comment stands in marked contrast to Abulafia’s repeated insistence that the prophetic kabbalah, which centers around transmission of the knowledge of the name, is limited to the Jews. The kabbalah of non-​Jews cannot encompass this critical gnosis and the ensuing possibility of prophetic attainment, for if one were to suggest otherwise, then this text would conflict with a major tenet that Abulafia repeats frequently in his writings. Indeed, even in the aforecited comment, Abulafia states that if the beliefs of kabbalists within the community of Israel are not grounded in the comprehension of matters through wisdom (ḥokhmah), understanding (tevunah), and knowledge (da‘at), then “there is little difference between their kabbalah and the kabbalah of the kabbalists of the other nations.”72 Presumably, the passages I have mentioned level the difference between Jew and non-​Jew, but careful attunement reveals that Abulafia’s position is more complex and inconsistent. Just as it is not perfectly coherent to say that the conventional languages are comprised within the essential language, so it is not perfectly coherent to say that the pious Gentiles can attain the state of the world to come that is dependent on the signs of the covenant that were given uniquely to the Jews. Note, for example, that in the aforementioned passage from Oṣar Eden Ganuz, where Abulafia writes about the class of non-​Jews who follow the Jews, he insists nonetheless that “the argument has already been removed regarding the knowledge that our nation is the privileged [mivḥar] of every nation just as the human species is privileged amongst all the creatures in this world, and regarding the knowledge that our religion, its language, and its script are the privileged of every religion, every language, and every script.”73 In the very same context wherein the barrier between Jew and non-​Jew, or at least the pious elite of the latter, is broken down, the barrier is fortified. Indeed, we could say, paradoxically, the bridge that draws non-​Jew and Jew closer together is precisely what keeps them apart. Abulafia’s position may be regarded as a reverse supersessionism; that is, instead of recognizing the rectitude and veracity of each tradition in its singularity, Christianity and Islam are valorized from the standpoint of their respective acquiescence to the monotheistic truth of Judaism. The truth that has been castigated is finally discerned in its glory like a lost pearl that has been retrieved.74 Consequently, the universalism ummot ha-​olam), who was an ascetic that practiced isolation (perush mitboded), is not true in its literal sense, but by way of the hidden secret, it is correct and true. 72 Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, p. 28; Abulafia, We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, p. 34. 73 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 193. 74 According to Abulafia’s version in Or ha-​Sekhel, pp. 34–​35, of the widely circulated parable of the three rings, a father has a pearl that he wishes to bequeath to his son, but when

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that is affirmed upholds the parochial delineation of Israel as the holy nation, and hence, the knowledge of the name to be revealed messianically does not undercut the provincialism of Judaism but rather bolsters its spiritual insularity. The challenge to my perspective by distinguishing between two narratives in Abulafia, the national, exoteric and the individual, esoteric, which is compared to the Averroean double doctrine of truth,75 is not convincing insofar as

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the latter angers him, he hurls the pearl into a pit, waiting for the son to repent. Before the son complies to his father’s will, he is tormented by two of the father’s servants, who covet the pearl. The son obviously refers to the Jews, the two servants to Christians and Muslims. The pearl is the truth that belongs, most properly, only to the Jews. See Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” p. 204. On the parable of the three rings, see Idel, Studies, pp. 48–​50; idem, “The Pearl, the Son and the Servants, in Abraham Abulafia’s Parable,” Quaderni di Studi Indo-​Mediterranei 6 (2013): 103–​155; idem, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, pp. 159-​256; Iris Shagrir, “The Parable of the Three Rings: A Revision of Its History,” Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997): 171–​172; Hames, Like Angels, pp. 66–​69; Sagerman, The Serpent Kills, p. 58 n. 98. Idel “The Pearl,” p. 105 n. 7, questions why in my earlier discussions of Abulafia’s rendering of the parable I speak of a king and a prince, adding that “Nothing in the Hebrew text points in this direction.” I concede that the Hebrew does not have the explicit language of king and prince, but my assumption that this is the implication of the text is not unreasonable, especially when the meaning of the parable is decoded as the relationship between God and the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Only the narrowest kind of philology would lead one to challenge my interpretation, which is not in the least upended by this trivial criticism. Idel’s further reproof of me, op. cit., p. 110, that Abulafia is not talking about Christianity and Islam is ludicrous, especially since he admits (n. 18) that in the parallel discussion in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 183, the three monotheistic religions and their founders are mentioned explicitly. Idel repeats his criticisms of me more recently in ch. 4 of Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, a lengthy discussion on the symbol of the pearl. I will refrain from citing the precise pagination in this additional publication as it provides no benefit to the reader since there is nothing new or different in Idel’s niggling disapproval and condemnation of my work. Even if all I have said in my defense is not accepted, one has to wonder why Idel, the self-​proclaimed champion of hermeneutic multivocality, invests so much time attacking my scholarship on Abulafia that presents a different picture than the one that emerges from his abundant essays and books. It appears that the appeal to manifold readings—​often used as the basis for characterizing me as espousing a monochromatic essentialism—​is abandoned when it comes to dealing with someone who has offered an alternative to the views promulgated by Idel. Idel, “The Pearl,” p. 118 n. 44. I regret to say that despite the criticism leveled against me by Idel, op. cit., pp. 118 nn. 44–​45 and pp. 123–​124 n. 58, he demonstrates repeatedly that he cannot understand my point insofar as he continues to operate with a fallacious sense of universalism that is historically inapplicable to Abulafia. The amassing of sources on the part of Idel surely has the pretense of solid scholarship, but it does not amount to a persuasive argument against my claim that Abulafia’s universalism is rooted in his commitment to the particularity of the Jewish people, and that even the inclusivity of his eschatology remains exclusive. Ironically, Idel’s emphasis on Abulafia’s universalism is a reflection of his own particularism and the inability to accept the ethnocentrism of an individual living in the thirteenth century. By contrast, my painstaking effort to

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these two dimensions in Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah cannot be bifurcated in a binary fashion that does not recognize the interrelatedness of universal ontology and ontic individuation. The inclusivity of Abulafia’s eschatology—​ whether specularized through the prism of the national-​exoteric or through the prism of the individual-​esoteric—​remains exclusive to the extent that the universalism is rooted in his commitment to the particularity of the Jewish people, an ethnocentrism captured, for instance, in Abulafia’s referring to “our true and Torah tradition,”76 that is, the kabbalah is exclusive to the ethnos who have received the Torah. Insofar as the truth of the Torah is incontrovertible, the claim that it is unique to the Jews is not subject to modification. Hence, to repeat my argument, I do not deny Abulafia’s universalism but I do contend that it is reflective of an unwavering particularism. In the final analysis, Abulafia was not able to escape the quandary that has marked the Jewish sensibility through the centuries: on the one hand, a particularism that has deep roots in the biblical metaphor of chosenness; on the other hand, a universalism grounded in the prophetic-​messianic mission of being a light unto the nations. The paradox that has shaped the Jewish mentalité presumes that Israel’s election is predicated on an exclusiveness that is inclusive of its own others, but the inclusiveness of this exclusiveness is still dependent on the exclusiveness of its inclusiveness. Hence, the inclusion of the excluded in the claim to exclusivity only renders the inclusivity more exclusive. Abulafia’s kabbalistic anthropology—​palpably abounding with utopian aspiration—​is no different: rather than embodying an exemplarity that is inclusively exceptional, it remains exceptionally inclusive. As he remarks in Sitrei Torah, the disclosure of the secret (gilluy ha-​sod) to the nations in the time of the redemption (zeman ha-​golah) is enabled by the fact that the Jews will rule over their enemies, a reversal of fate alluded to proleptically in the story of Purim.77 Support for my contention can be elicited from another passage in Sitrei Torah, where Abulafia remarks that the mysteries of Torah will be revealed in call out the ethnocentrism—​and we could add here the issues of androcentrism and phallocentrism—​is indicative of my own belief in the need for a more universalist position. It is part and parcel of my view that historical scholarship performs an ethical corrective not by hiding the past but by allowing it to be seen unencumbered by ideological or political prejudices. In my academic guise, I cannot invoke the talmudic dictum that the seal of God is truth, but I can declare the tautologous proposition that the seal of truth is truth, and the truth is that Idel’s relentless criticisms are conceptually fallible and consequently disposable. 76 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 4. 77 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 133.

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the future by prophets and by the Messiah himself. Through those secrets “all of Israel and those who are drawn after them” (kol yisra’el we-​khol ha-​nimshakhim aḥareihem) will become wise [yitḥakkemu],78 an assertion buttressed by two prooftexts, “For all of them, from the least of them to the greatest, shall know me” (Jeremiah 33:34) and “For the land shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord as water covers the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).79 It is surely commendable that Abulafia extends the messianic enlightenment to non-​Jews—​those who are drawn after Israel—​but this does not diminish, let alone obliterate, the privileged role Jews play in the soteriological drama. The asymmetry is obvious: the worth of the non-​Jew is ascertained from the fact that he or she follows the faith of the Jew, but the worth of the Jew is independent of the status of the non-​Jew except to the extent that the latter acknowledges the superiority of the former. The messianic vision accentuates the fact that monotheism is inclusive by excluding the claim of the other to an autonomous dogma that contradicts the Jewish creed. In the introduction to Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, Abulafia writes that all of the nations (goyim) were created for the sake of the eternal life of the soul (ḥayyei ha-​nefesh ha-​niṣḥiyyim), which is the true life (ha-​ḥayyim ha-​amittiyyim), and he even insists that this matter is dependent on the will of each person. In the same context, however, he notes that the expression “life of the world to come” (ḥayyei olam ha-​ba) was received by the prophets from God, a claim that implies that, in some respect, the ultimate beatitude is predicable in the most pristine manner to the Jews. The point is corroborated by Abulafia’s assertion that the secrets of the Torah, which can be revealed in a plethora of languages, are imparted by “the glorious and awesome name” (ha-​shem ha-​nikhbad we-​ ha-​nora) that is disclosed distinctively to Israel.80 Along similar lines, in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia notes that while multilingualism often characterizes the Jewish experience in the world, Jews still preserve Hebrew as the holy language. He deploys the aforementioned numerical equivalence of shiv‘im leshonot and ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot as a way to mediate the particular and the universal. The task of the meditational exercise is to restore each and every name to its “first matter” whence it was hewn, and it is the permutation of the letters that comprises the seventy languages.81 Just as the first matter is depicted as having no form of its own and therefore can assume the form of everything, so 78

This is the reading in the printed text (see following note for reference), but the variant yitaṣṣemu, “will be strengthened,” is preserved in ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 774, 119a. 79 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 15. 80 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 3. 81 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 313.

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Hebrew is identified as the matrix language that comprehends all other languages. The inclusion of the seventy languages in Hebrew is indicative of their subsidiary status. The vision of the endtime, therefore, does not neutralize Abulafia’s unambiguous assumption that the intellectual perfection, which leads to the prophetic-​ messianic consciousness, is dependent on transmission of and meditational practices connected to the divine name bestowed exceptionally on the Jewish people. In the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, often employed by Abulafia, the covenant of the tongue (the Hebrew letters or the Torah) is granted only to one who bears the covenant of the foreskin (circumcision of the flesh).82 Precisely because Abulafia does not reject the literal circumcision of the flesh, he insists that the connection between the covenant of the foreskin and the covenant of the tongue cannot severed, and hence, even though the spiritual covenant of the tongue is superior to the physical covenant of the foreskin, only he who is imprinted with the mark of the latter can be a recipient of the gnosis of the name,83 and only one who receives this gnosis can reach the level of prophecy.84 The proper historical contextualization of Abulafia’s kabbalah justifies the conclusion that the intellect is a necessary but not a sufficient cause to explain the means required to bring about the ecstasy that is the goal of the mystical praxis. It is well to remember that in his delineation of the seven paths of exegesis in Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, Abulafia states that all the nations participate in the first four paths (literal, halakhic, homiletical, and allegorical), whereas the last three (letter-​permutation, restitution of the letters to their primary matter, and prophecy or the way of the divine names) are apprehended only by the “Jewish sages of the kabbalah” (ḥakhmei ha-​qabbalah ha-​yisra’elim).85 Non-​Jews have the potential to explicate Scripture according to the first four paths because the cognitive faculty necessary to undertake these forms of interpretation is reason, which is allegedly common to all humanity without exception; only the Jews, however, have the capacity to attain the last three paths because they embrace the supra-​rational dimension that perfects rather than rescinds the rational. The universal, accordingly, is not only achieved through the agency of the particular, but its very instantiation preserves the

82 Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 87–​89; idem, Venturing Beyond, pp. 65–​69, 188–​189. 83 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 285–​286; idem, Imrei Shefer, p. 48; idem, Mafetaḥ ha-​ Ra‘yon, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 14. 84 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 29. 85 Jellinek, Philosophie und Kabbala, p. 3. The seven paths are utilized by Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 379–​381, to interpreted Exodus 15:3. For an extensive discussion of these exegetical paths, see Idel, Language, pp. 82–​109.

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particularity. To circumvent misunderstanding, let me repeat that I naturally acknowledge that the mystical experience was framed by Abulafia in terms of the philosophical ideal of intellectual conjunction that is presumably not ethno-​linguistically or culturally constricted. However, in Abulafia’s idiosyncratic appropriation of the Maimonidean perspective, the primary means to bring about the conjunction is knowledge of the name, a spiritual gnosis that endows Jews with the ability to attain prophetic vision and mystical enlightenment that is not shared by non-​Jews.86 Insofar as the name is equated with the Torah,87 and the Torah is composed of the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, we may surmise that the vital life force of all existence consists of the “holy tongue” (leshon ha-​qodesh), the “mother of all languages” (em kol ha-​leshonot),88 which Abulafia deemed “natural” in contrast to the other seventy languages that are derived from Hebrew and are considered “conventional.”89 I will cite here one of countless texts in which Abulafia affirms this rudimentary principle of Jewish esotericism.90 Commenting on the statement in Sefer Yeṣirah that by means of the letters the Creator “forms the soul of every creature and the soul of everything that will be formed,”91 Abulafia writes: “Indeed, each and every body is a letter 86

Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 207–​208. The particularity of the universal in Abulafia’s mystical thought is apparently not understood by Idel who has criticized my position by reminding the reader that the locus of enlightenment in Abulafian kabbalah is the intellect. This criticism fails to take into account Abulafia’s insistence that the prophetic-​ messianic experience is dependent on knowledge of the name, which can be apprehended most accurately and perfectly only by the people of Israel. 87 Regarding this axiom, which is shared by various esoteric circles, including the so-​called ecstatic and theosophic kabbalists, see Wolfson, Language, p. 26, and references to other scholars cited on p. 422 n. 251. 88 Abraham Abulafia, Mafteaḥ ha-​Ḥokhmot, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 60. 89 See above, n. 67. 90 Wolfson, Language, pp. 197–​202. 91 Ithamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yeẓira,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 148, § 19. According to the surmise of A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation and Text-​Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), pp. 53, 102–​ 103, these words do not belong to earliest layer of the text. In my judgment, to speak of Sefer Yeṣirah in these terms has little heuristic value since it is not possible to reconstruct the earliest layers of the text given the material that is extant. Indeed, I would go further and say that there is no such thing as the earliest layer; the text took shape over a course of many years and up to a certain point (around the time that commentaries begin to be written and the text is stabilized to some degree in its different recensions) there is no credible way to distinguish “original” layers and supplemental accretions. See the observation of A. Peter Hayman, “The ‘Original Text’: A Scholarly Illusion?,” in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F. A. Sawyer, edited by Jon Davies,

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[ot] … and every letter is a sign [ot], signal [siman], and verification [mofet] to instruct about the divine overflow [shefa ha-​shem] that causes the word [ha-​ dibbur] to emanate through its mediation. Thus, all of the world, all the years, and all the souls are replete with letters.”92 The influx that confers vitality upon all beings of the world—​classified by Abulafia in terms of the tripartite division in Sefer Yeṣirah, olam, shanah, and nefesh, rendered narrowly as “world,” “year,” and “soul,” but denoting more broadly the temporal, spatial, and human planes of existence, each of which is constituted by the Hebrew letters—​is here identified as the word (dibbur). For Abulafia, therefore, the ancient cosmological speculation is reinscribed within the medieval worldview, yielding the belief that the intellectual efflux, which endows the corporal cosmos with form, is made up of the twenty-​two Hebrew letters, and these collectively are the word of God, which is also identified as the Tetragrammaton, and this, in turn, with the Torah in its mystical valence. Hence, to receive the divine overflow, which moves the intellect from potentiality to actuality, one must rotate and permutate the letters to the point that one’s body shakes, the hair on one’s head stands out, and there is a feeling of being anointed from head to foot.93 The archaic esoteric doctrine attenuates the split between soul and body that is suggested by Abulafia’s own insistence that the meditational practice of letter-​ permutation has the goal of untying the knots of the body so that the soul/​ intellect may be separated from its somatic encasement.94 I am not overlooking the fact that the corporeal body is viewed by Abulafia as an obstacle to the attainment of spiritual perfection, a point that has been appreciably emphasized by scholars. My contention is, however, that Abulafia envisioned another sense of corporeality, one that does not position soul and body in diametric opposition.95 Viewing the body as letter, and the letter as the sign that points Graham Harvey and Wilfred G. E. Watson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 434–​449. 92 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 66. Compare ibid., p. 365. 93 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 365–​366. 94 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 131; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 134–​137. 95 In Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 344, Abulafia applies the dictum transmitted in the name of R. Ishmael, to which he refers as a qabbalah, concerning knowledge of the measurement of the Creator (shi‘uro shel yoṣer bere’shit) to gnosis of the Tetragrammaton. Already in the ancient Shi‘ur Qomah fragments, two strands of tradition are woven together such that inconceivable physical dimensions and incomprehensible magical names are attributed to the limbs of the divine. However, Abulafia has reinterpreted the tradition by denying the former entirely and collapsing the very idea of corporeal proportions in his notion of the magnitude of the name. Underlying this strategy is the alternative conception of linguistic embodiment. See Wolfson, Language, pp. 190–​260, and esp. 243-​242 where other Abulafian material is engaged.

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to the intellectual overflow permeating reality, provides a theoretical ground to undergird an alternate conception of embodiment, a transposed materiality rooted in the belief that the body, at its most elemental, is constituted by semiotic inscription, the flesh that is word garbed in the word that is flesh.96 As he puts it in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, “The letters are the force of the root of all wisdom and knowledge without doubt, and they themselves are the matter of prophecy [ḥomer ha-​nevu’ah], and they appear in the mirror of prophecy as if they were dense bodies [gufim avim] that speak to a man mouth to mouth in accord with the abundance of the rational form [ha-​ṣiyyur ha-​sikhli] that is contemplated in the heart that converses with them, and they appear as if they are pure, living angels that move them.”97 In Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, a relatively short treatise that proffers a kabbalistic exposition of the Maimonidean ideal of ‘ishq, we are told that the mind (maḥashavah) of the adept at the peak of the ecstatic conjunction to the object of his yearning “imagines an image of the letters [ha-​meṣayyeret ṣiyyur ha-​otiyyot] that are imagined [ha-​meṣuyyarot], contemplated [ha-​muskalot], and thought [ha-​neḥshavot], rational thoughts replete with letters [maḥashavot sikhliyyot mele’ot otiyyot], which are the true forms [ha-​ṣurot ha-​amittiyyot], imagined in the image and likeness of the ministering angels [meṣuyyarot be-​ṣelem u-​demut ke-​mal’akhei ha-​sharet], for each letter is a vision from the prophetic visions [mar’ah mi-​mar’ot ha-​nevu’ah], and each of them is pure splendor [zaharurit zakhah].”98 96

For instance, see Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 190: “Know that alef is one, and it is the matter of all the sefirot in thought, but yod, which is ten, is their end. Therefore, they called it shekhinah, which is the end of thought. But yod, which is the matter of the twenty-​two letters, and also alef, is their end, for it is the great body [ha-​guf ha-​gadol] that is in all of their forms.” 97 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 77–​78. See Pedaya, Vision and Speech, p. 102 n. 34. 98 Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 10. On the Maimonidean idea of ‘ishq, see Warren Zev Harvey, “‘Ishq, Ḥesheq, and Amor Dei Intellectualis,” in Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 96–​107. In the postscript, pp. 106–​107, Harvey reminds the reader that the expression ahavah elohit sikhlit used by Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 109, and later appropriated by Abraham Shalom in his Neveh Shalom, linguistically parallels Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis. As Harvey duly notes, this observation was made by Idel, a topic that he had already discussed in Warren Zev Harvey, “Idel on Spinoza,” in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and Mihaela Frunză (Cluj-​Napoca: Provo Press, 2008),pp. 102–​104. See Moshe Idel, “On the Influence of Or-​ha-​Sekhel on R. Moses Narboni and R. Abraham Shalom,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 4 (1979): 5–​6 (Hebrew section); idem, Studies, pp. 20, 66–​67, 70–​71 n. 18; idem, “Abraham Abulafia and Unio Mystica,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, edited by Isadore Twersky and Jay M. Harris, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 167; idem, Kabbalah and Eros, p. 80. See also Yitzhak Melamed, “The Enigma of Spinoza’s Amor Dei Intellectualis,” in Freedom, Action, and Motivation in

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With regard to the anthropological, Abulafia maintained that by means of the proper discipline, receiving the name through the art of letter combination,99 one can be conjoined to the effluence of intellectual light, a unitive experience that, both ideationally and experientially, relates to the contemplative ideal of conjunction whose epistemological and ontological contours he configured on the basis of philosophical assumptions elicited from Jewish and Muslim sources wherein the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic currents are intertwined, for example, Avicenna, Averroës, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and, above all others, Maimonides.100 Inscribed in one of the circles transmitted in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, which was to serve as a mandala or an instrument of meditation, the experience is conveyed in the following way: “And the secret of the splendor [sod ha-​ziw] that emanates upon us from the supernal, divine Intellect [ha-​sekhel ha-​elyon ha-​elohi] through which we comprehend the Active Intellect that is in us, and it is called the splendor of the Presence [ziw ha-​shekhinah].”101 The Shekhinah, also designated the “holy spirit” (ruaḥ ha-​ Spinoza’s Ethics, edited by Noa Naaman-​Zauderer (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 222–​238. On the influence of Maimonides’s exegesis of Isaiah 58:8 in his discussion of the intellectual love of God in The Guide, 3:51, on Spinoza’s interpretation of the Tetragrammaton in the Theological-​Political Treatise, see Warren Zev Harvey, “Spinoza’s Metaphysical Hebraism,” in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 111. For a more recent analysis of the Maimonidean ideal of ‘ishq, see Tanja Werthmann, “‘You Know the Difference Between a Lover (Oheb) and a Passionate Lover (Ḥosheq)’: Degrees of Love in Maimonides and His Source in Al-​Ghazālī,” Tarbiṣ 87 (2019): 37–​66 (Hebrew). 99 For a discussion of the phenomenon of receiving God’s name according to the prophetic kabbalah, set against the background of the philosophical notion of the continuous chain of being, see Moshe Idel, Enchanted Chains: Techniques and Rituals in Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005), pp. 76–​109. 100 Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 131–​135; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 22–​24, 124–​134; idem, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 40–​42, 47–​48, 61–​62; idem, Studies, pp. 1–​31; idem, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” pp. 54–​76; idem, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, pp. 46-​106; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 54–​55. See the suggestion of Harvey, “Idel on Spinoza,” p. 105, that Scholem’s diminishing interest in Abulafia can be attributed to the Maimonidean elements of the prophetic kabbalah, which became problematic for the binary that Scholem posited between a “spiritually meaningful Kabbalah” and a ‘sterile Maimonideanism.” See ibid., p. 105 n. 30, where Harvey argues that despite Scholem’s mentioning Maimonides in his chapter on Abulafia in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, “the role of Maimonides’ philosophy in Abulafia’s Kabbalah is minimized” (italics in original). Many have opined on Maimonides’s doctrine of conjunction, but for an especially valuable discussions for students of Jewish mysticism, see Afterman, Devequt, pp. 134–​168, and idem, “And They Shall Be One Flesh”, pp. 109–​120. 101 Abraham Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, edited Amnon Gross, second edition (Jerusalem: Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 1999), p. 97 (in the original publication of this chapter, I mistakenly gave the reference as p. 79). The diagram is left out in the

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qodesh)102 or the “spirit of the living God” (ruaḥ elohim ḥayyim),103 is a splendor that emanates from the supernal Intellect, and serves as the means by which the soul comes to comprehend the Active Intellect that is within itself. The final words are crucial as they underscore that in the moment of ecstatic union the distinction between outside and inside is no longer epistemically tenable. The double mirroring to which I refer is alluded to in the following comment in Imrei Shefer: “This is the prophet who sits upon the throne of the Lord … and concerning this man it says ‘and on top, upon the image of the throne, there was the image in the appearance of a human’ (Ezekiel 1:26), he appears to him in his image [we-​hu bi-​demuto mitdammeh lo], and his appearance [u-​ mar’ehu]—​he makes visible the image of the glory of the Lord [hu mar’eh demut kevod yhwh], and he sees himself in the speculum [aspaqlari’ah] that illumines the eyes and the heart.”104 By means of the meditational training, the adept is transformed into the angelic guide, the Active Intellect (sekhel ha-​po‘el), personified in the figure of Metatron,105 the demiurgic angel about whom there is intentional confusion regarding its ontic relationship to the glory,106 the angel of the Lord (mal’akh yhwh), that is, the “angel whose name is yhwh,”107 the

third edition but it is attested in some of the manuscripts. See, for instance, ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1582, fol. 94b. In some manuscript witnesses, there is preserved the instruction to copy the text into a circle but the image of the latter is not drawn. See ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 775, fol. 6b. 102 On the identification of the Active Intellect and the holy spirit, see Halevi, Sefer ha-​Kuzari, 1:87, p. 28. 103 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 114. 104 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, pp. 104–​105. See ibid., pp. 106–​107, where the rabbinic idiom “speculum that shines” (aspaqlari’ah ha-​me’irah) is applied to the ten sefirot, that is, the ten separate intellects, which are like a mirror (mar’ah) in which one sees the forms of all reality. 105 Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 139–​140, Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 116–​119; idem, “Definitions,” pp. 7–​8. 106 The ambivalence regarding the ontic boundary separating angel and God is a much older motif that I have long considered one of the most archaic elements of Jewish esotericism, an idea that has much relevance in assessing the points of convergence and divergence in the mystical currents of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a point I share with Henry Corbin. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University of Press, 1994), pp. 184 n. 247, 216, 224–​228, 255–​263, 310 n. 147, 312–​313; idem, Language, pp. 430–​431 n. 354, 543 n. 421. See also Daniel Abrams, “The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead,” Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994): 291–​321. 107 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 139.

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intermediary108 between human and divine109 that assumes corporeal shape in the imagination at the moment of prophetic vision.110 Referring to this process in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia writes: “And it is known that we, the community of Israel, the congregation of the Lord, know in truth that God, blessed be he and blessed be his name, is not a body or a faculty in a body, and he never materializes [hitgashem]. But his overflow creates a corporeal intermediary [emṣa‘i eḥad gufani], and it is an angel in the moment of the prophecy of the prophet [we-​hu mal’akh be-​et nevu’at ha-​navi].”111 Or, again, as he puts it in Sefer ha-​Malmad: “Every speech written about in the Torah that God spoke to Moses or to one of the prophets is not like our speech, which comprises voice [qol], breath [ruaḥ], and speech [dibbur]. Rather, this speech is in accordance with what the ears of the prophet hear, just as the body, the form that is seen in the prophetic vision, is not like our actual body, but it is like the body seen by man in his dream.”112 The ambiguity that one may discern in Abulafia’s demarcation of the object of the unitive experience as either God or the Active Intellect113 may be explained by the fact that he viewed the latter as 108 The role of the Active Intellect as the medium underlies Abulafia’s insistence that the Torah is the intermediary, an identification anchored in the numerical equivalence of the words torah (400 + 6 + 200 + 5 = 611) and emṣa’it (1 + 40 + 90 + 70 + 10 + 400 = 611). See Idel, Language, pp. 37–​38. 109 In this connection, it is of interest to note Abulafia’s remark in Imrei Shefer, p. 85, that the description of wisdom as God’s “confidant” (amon) in Proverbs 8:30 refers to one “who is human [ben adam] from one side and an angel [mal’akh] from the other.” 110 For discussion of this aspect of Abulafia’s understanding of prophecy, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 89–​90, 95–​104; Wolfson, Language, pp. 238–​242; idem, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 219–​220. With respect to the matter of the angelic body specularized in the prophetic vision, there is an interesting affinity between Abulafia’s kabbalah and Islamic mysticism, especially Shī‘ite esotericism as presented by Corbin. See Wolfson, Language, p. 239. 111 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 6. 112 Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Malmad, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 18. The Hebrew title can also be vocalized as Sefer ha-​Melammed. 113 Idel, Studies, pp. 9–​10. It is worth recalling here the statement of Maimonides, The Guide, 1:62, p. 152, that divine science (ḥokhmat ha-​elohut), i.e., metaphysics, which he also identifies as the rabbinic “account of the chariot” (ma‘aseh merkavah), consists of “the apprehension of the Active Intellect.” See Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge according to Al-​Farabi, ibn Bajja, and Maimonides,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, edited by Isadore Twersky, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 90–​91; Alexander Altmann, Von der mittelalterlichen zur modernen Aufklärung: Studien zur jüdischen Geistesgeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987), pp. 118–​119; Herbert A. Davidson, “Maimonides on Metaphysical Knowledge,” Maimonidean Studies 3 (1992–​93): 49–​103, esp. 92–​98, reprinted in idem, Maimonides the Rationalist (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), pp. 173–​211.

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the visible vehicle by which the invisibility of the former is manifest in space and time. In the moment of theophanic incarnation, the line separating the two is blurred. As Abulafia himself put it in Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, “All these matters emanate from the Active Intellect, which informs the person about the truth of the substance of his essence by means of the permutation of the letters [ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot] and the mentioning of the names [hazkarat ha-​shemot] without doubt, until the person is restored to the level of intellect [ad she-​yashuv ha-​ adam be-​madregat ha-​sekhel] so that he may be conjoined to him in the life of this world in accord with his capacity and in the life of the world to come in accord with his comprehension.”114 3

In the Blink of an Eye: Time as the Mysterium Coniunctionis

Following Maimonides,115 Abulafia portrays the imagination in negative, indeed at times in explicitly satanic terms, but he also accepts that this faculty plays a crucial role in the mechanics of prophecy (with the exception of Moses) as the angelic intermediary that connects spirit and matter, intellect and body.116 Thus, in one passage wherein the prophetic vision is discussed in 1 14 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 8. 115 Maimonides, The Guide, 3:22, pp. 489–​490. 116 See especially Maimonides, The Guide, 2:6, pp. 264–​265: “Thereby we have stated plainly to him who understands and cognizes intellectually that the imaginative faculty is likewise called an angel and that the intellect is called a cherub. … We have already spoken of the fact that every form, in which an angel is seen, exists in the vision of prophecy” (emphasis in original). See ibid., 2:41–​42, pp. 385–​390, 2.44, pp. 394–​395. On the identification in Maimonides of the angelic form seen and/​or heard in prophecy as either the Active Intellect or the imaginative faculty, an imprecision that doubtlessly influenced Abulafia, see Howard Kriesel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 236–​237. The positive valorization of imagination can be seen, for instance, in Abulafia’s explanation in Sitrei Torah, p. 21, of the “image” and “likeness” with which Adam was created according to the biblical account (Genesis 1:26): “Thus it has been explained that the matter of the image [ṣelem] is the form of intellect [ṣurat sekhel], and the matter of the likeness [demut] is the image of knowledge [dimyon da‘at], for it is known that intellect and imagination are the image and likeness.” To grasp the import of the last sentence, one must bear in mind that the expressions ha-​sekhel we-​ha-​dimyon yedu‘im and ṣelem u-​demut both numerically equal 616. On the imagination in Maimonides and Abulafia, see Idel, “Definitions,” pp. 26–​29. See also Pedaya, Vision and Speech, pp. 9, 11. A notable exception is found in Sha‘arei Ṣedeq. See Natan ben Sa‘adyah Har’ar, Le Porte Della Giustizia, p. 476: “And thus the blessed One, and blessed be his name, said to Moses ‘See, there is a place near me, and I positioned you in a cleft of the rock’ (Exodus 33:21–​22), that is, in the root of the formal principle. And the blessed One pitied him and told him the secret to complete his comprehension ‘I will

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terms of a mirror or a body of water, through wordplay Abulafia links together imagination (dmywn), demon (dymwn), and medium (mdwyn).117 According to another passage, Abulafia notes that the expressions demut (“image”), shem dimyon (“name of the imagination”), and shefa (“overflow”) all equal 450,118 a numerical equivalence that drives home the point that the imaginal form envisioned by the prophet-​mystic is the concretization—​indeed, “incarnation” would not be an inapt term as long as we understand the latter in terms of an imaginal rather than a material body, that is, a theophanic apparition that is confabulated as real in the specter of the imagination119—​of the divine effluence. Also relevant here is the grouping of the terms mal’akh, adam, and saṭan.120 The justification to juxtapose these three is that the human is situated between the angel and Satan, since we have the capacity to be one or the other, an elaboration of a basic postulate of rabbinic anthropology concerning the good and evil inclinations lodged within each person’s heart. For Abulafia, the two inclinations, yeṣer ha-​ṭov and yeṣer ha-​ra, also identified as the good angel (mal’akh ṭov) and the bad angel (mal’akh ra),121 or as the scale

shield you with my hand’ (ibid., 22), that is, all that you will comprehend in seeing the face, you will comprehend from under the cover of the hand. Thus, it says ‘with my hand’ [kappi = 110], which numerically equals ‘imagination’ [dimyon = 110].” According to this text, Moses beheld something of the forms called the “face” from beneath the cover of the hand, which is to say, through the power of the imagination. 117 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 121, cited in Idel, Language, pp. 21, 56–​57, and see idem, Studies, 35–​39. 118 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 83. 119 I have elaborated on this topic in Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 189–​226, in great measure as a response to Idel’s condemnation of my use of the term incarnation to elucidate kabbalistic doctrine. With regard to this matter, as elsewhere in my work, I am thinking in the footsteps of Corbin. For a more extensive discussion of the incarnational element of Corbin’s thinking, with reference to other places in my own work where this influence is detectable, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Imago Templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-​Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007): 121–​125. 120 On the tripartite classification of mal’akh, adam, and saṭan in Abulafia, see the passages from Mafteaḥ ha-​Shemot and Sefer ha-​Meliṣ cited and analyzed in Idel, Studies, pp. 38–​39. See also Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Malmad, p. 18, where Abulafia speaks of the “matter of prophecy” in the threefold manner of the “creation of the human body,” the “creation of Satan,” and the “creation of the angel.” 121 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 119b; Maimonides, The Guide, 3.22, p. 490. On the identification of the good inclination (the “good angel” or the “angel of God”) as the intellect and the evil inclination (Satan or the “angel of death”) as the imagination, see Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 146.

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of merit (kaf zekhut) and the scale of debt (kaf ḥovah),122 correspond to matter and form, the imagination and intellect, both of which are sealed within the Tetragrammaton.123 Abulafia elaborates on this twofold aspect of the explicit name (shem ha-​meforash) in Sefer ha-​Malmad: “In the secret of this name that is permutated front and back as hwhy or as hyhw, and this is the reality of the essence of the soul in the secret of the good inclination and the evil inclination. And the secret of [the word] ‘explicit’ [meforash] is a witness as its numerical value is [equal to the expression] ‘there is and there is’ [yesh we-​ yesh], which is the Active Intellect.”124 The two dimensions of the Tetragrammaton, which are linked to the two permutations hwhy and hyhw, troped respectively as the front and the back, are attested in the numerical equivalence of the word meforash (40 + 80 + 6 + 200 + 300 = 626) and the expression yesh we-​yesh (10 + 300 + 6 + 10 + 300 = 626), an allusion to the duplicitous character of the Active Intellect as being both good and evil. In another passage in Sefer ha-​Malmad,125 Abulafia expresses this idea in terms of the attributes of mercy and judgment, which, following the ancient rabbinic tradition, are correlated respectively with the names yhwh and Elohim. The mystical knowledge that the two attributes are one attribute (ein shetei ha-​middot ela middah aḥat) is transmitted by the following numerological equivalences: the value of yhwh is 26 (10 + 5 + 6 + 5) and that of Elohim is 86 (1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 40), and the sum of the two is 112 (26 + 86), which is the value of the letters that signify the number 26 (k”w) when they are written out in full as k”f w”w (20 + 80 + 6 + 6). The name Elohim also alludes to this secret, insofar as it can be divided into y”h ml”a, and y”h can be spelled as yw”d h”a, which numerically equals 26, the value of yhwh. Interestingly, at the conclusion of this discussion, which is the end of the book, Abulafia mentions briefly the matter of the front and the back of the divine (citing Exodus 33:23), but he considers it a “great secret” that he cannot elaborate in writing. From the context, however, as well as from other passages in his compositions, we can deduce that the terms “front” and “back” denote the polarity that characterizes the Active Intellect, a polarity that Abulafia delineates in his writings in a litany of binaries—​mercy (raḥamim) and judgment (din), form (ṣurah) and 122 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 26. Compare idem, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, p. 9: “The judge sits on two thrones of judgment and he judges by two attributes … and they are called the attribute of judgment and the attribute of mercy … the scale of merit and the scale of debt.” 123 Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 96–​97; idem, “The Kabbalistic Interpretation,” p. 161 n. 507. 124 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Malmad, p. 3. 125 Ibid., p. 44. This passage is cited and analyzed by Idel, “Some Concepts,” p. 174.

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matter (ḥomer), intellect (sekhel) and imagination (dimyon), male (zakhar) and female (neqevah), good (ṭov) and evil (ra), sacred (qodesh) and profane (ḥol), truth (emet) and deceit (sheqer), life (ḥayyim) and death (mawet). Just as the Active Intellect ontically displays the warp and woof (sheti wa-​erev) of this twofold comportment,126 so each human being psychically possesses a dual potential to act in accordance with either the angel from the right or the angel from the left.127 The goal is to actualize the angelic potential on the right over and against the satanic potential on the left, to subjugate the imaginative faculty to reason,128 thereby facilitating the ocular apprehension of the letters yhwh.129 Note that the prophetic-​ecstatic vision is predicated on a harnessing of intellect and imagination, not the eradication of the latter by the former. The harnessing is possible because at root the opposites are identical in their opposition. The point is epitomized in Abulafia’s observation that the adept who visualizes Metatron in the “countenance of the living man” (parṣuf adam ḥai) comes to know that “death is life, and that life, too, is death, and that if the living die, the dead shall live.”130 This insight lies at the core of Abulafia’s understanding of androgyny. As he writes in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, “Just as [the word] ‘far’ [raḥoq] [and the expression] ‘and near’ [we-​qarov] in our language are numerically equal [314], so [the word] ‘androgyne’ [androginos] [1 +50 + 4 + 200 + 6 + 3 + 10 + 50 + 6 + 60 = 390] and [the expression] ‘male and female’ [zakhar u-​neqevah] [7 + 20 + 200 + 6

126 Abulafia repeatedly uses the image of the warp and woof (sheti wa-​erev) to characterize form and matter. For instance, see Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 94. In a number of contexts, the expression sheti wa-​erev is transposed into berit esaw, that is, the “covenant of Esau.” See Perush Sefer Yeṣirah Almoni mi-​Yesodo shel Rabbi Avraham Abula’fiyah, edited by Israel Weinstock (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1984), p. 29; Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 9 and 286. On Abulafia’s notion of the warp and woof (sheti wa-​erev), see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 194 and 217 n. 97; Sagerman, The Serpent Kills, pp. 189–​190, 256–​ 266, 269–​276, 279–​283, 286–​294, 296–​298, 301–​302, 305–​306, 309–​310, 333–​334. Sagerman is particularly attentive to Abulafia’s polemical use of the image of the warp and woof to demarcate the corporeal manifestation of Jesus or the cruciform configuration of the cross. See Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 223–​225. On the use of the image of the sheti wa-​ erev to depict Moses and Jesus, see the text of Judah Canpanton’s Arba’ah Qinyanim cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Judah ben Solomon Canpanton’s Leqaḥ Ṭov: Annotated Edition and Introduction,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 43 (2019): 26. 127 Abulafia, Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, p. 29. 128 On the collaboration between intellect and imagination, the angel and Satan, see the text from Oṣar Eden Ganuz cited by Idel, Language, p. 19. 129 Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 167–​168 n. 197. 130 Abulafia, Ish Adam, in Maṣref ha-​Sekhel, p. 44, and see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 220 n. 125.

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+ 50 + 100 + 2 + 5 = 390] are equal.”131 By juxtaposing these two numerical equivalences, Abulafia drives home the point that just as the spatial difference between distant and proximate collapses in the identity of their opposition, so the gender difference between male and female, which may legitimately be translated as paradigmatic signposts for the various binaries mentioned above, is overcome in the sameness of the difference of their sameness. As Abulafia emphasizes in a second passage from this composition, the name adam is attributed to both male and female “because their secret is the ‘source of blood’ [meqor dam = 40 + 100 + 6 + 200 + 4 + 40 = 390] [and the] ‘channel of blood’ [ṣinnor dam = 90 + 50 + 6 + 200 + 4 + 40 = 390], and the explanation is ‘man is in the heart of woman’ [adam be-​lev ishshah = 1 + 4 + 40 + 2 + 30 + 2 + 5 + 1 = 300 + 5 = 390], ‘woman is in the heart of man’ [ishshah be-​lev adam = 1 + 300 + 5 + 2 + 20 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 4 + 40 = 390], male and female [zakhar u-​neqevah = 390], androgyne [androginos = 390].”132 The androgynous nature of the human is symbolized by the image of the seal within the seal (ḥotam be-​tokh ḥotam),133 the male is the protruding seal and the female the recessed seal.134 We can speak of “the seed of the male as female, according to the way of ‘When a woman conceives and gives birth to a male’ (Leviticus 12:2), for just as the male that is born from the seed of a female, so all his offspring will be female, and just as the female that is born from the seed of the male, so all of her offspring will be males. … And thus the female alludes to the male and the male alludes as well to the female.”135 Textual support for this understanding of androgyny as the apposition—​as opposed to conflation—​of opposites in the distinctiveness of their opposition may be gathered from the admonition that Abulafia offers in the introduction to the third part of Sitrei Torah, one of his commentaries on the secrets in the Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides.136 He begins by noting the basic axiom,

131 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 344. See Idel, Language, p. 21. See below, n. 238. On the numerical equivalence of the words qarov and raḥoq, see Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 236. 132 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 376. Compare ibid., pp. 35, 41. The motif of the androgyne is repeated in many of Abulafia’s treatises: Abraham Abulafia, Gan Na‘ul, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 1999), p. 35; idem, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 50; idem, Ner Elohim, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2002), p. 47; idem, Ḥotam ha-​Hafṭarah, in Maṣref ha-​Sekhel, p. 119. 133 Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 29b, 31a. 134 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 377. 135 Ibid., pp. 377–​378. 136 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, pp. 149–​151. For an alternative translation and analysis of this passage, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 96–​97.

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which, in his view, is known to both the “kabbalistic sages of Torah” (ḥakhmei ha-​torah ha-​mequbbalim) and the “true philosophical sages” (ḥakhmei ha-​ meḥqar ha-​amittiyyim), that each human being is endowed with the freedom to act one way or another. Psychologically, there is an efficient force (koaḥ ha-​ mit‘orer)137 that arouses (me‘orer) the heart of the person “to act or not to act.” This force, moreover, helps one decide between the two opposites (hafakhim) that purportedly compete and struggle with one another, the good and the evil inclinations (yeṣarim), which Abulafia also refers to as “forces” (koḥot), “angels” (mal’akhim), “thoughts” (maḥashavot), and “images” (ṣiyyurim). Abulafia here touches on the philosophical/​theological dilemma that has plagued, and continues to plague, thinkers through time, the problem of evil and its relation to the good. Abulafia emphasizes that one must strive to comprehend the existence of these forms (ṣurot), to discern their essence, to determine if they are two expressions of one reality that ought to be conjoined or two independent realities that must be separated. Abulafia’s response begins from the empirical perspective that the two forces wage an ongoing battle in the heart, interacting with and affecting one another, and thus it is reasonable to presume that “there is a time for this one and a time for that one [yesh et la-​zeh we-​yesh et la-​zeh].”138 That a discrete time is allocated for each of the impulses suggests that they are to be kept distinct. In the continuation, however, Abulafia describes the nature of that time, and, in so doing, provides a way to construe the contraries as identical in their contrariety: “and it is like a small second [ke-​rega qaṭan], as an indivisible point [ki-​nequddah bilti neḥleqet], less than a blink of the eye [paḥot me-​heref ayin].”139 That the time apportioned for each impulse is no more substantial than a split second, a point that has no parts, even briefer than the blink of the eye, implies that the difference between the good and the evil inclinations is minimal, even if it might seem from the psychological battle raging within the heart that the disparity is vast, if not unbridgeable. It is noteworthy that Abulafia chose to describe this matter in temporal terms elicited from the expression yeshu‘at yhwh ke-​heref ayin, “the salvation of the Lord comes as a blink of the eye.”140 Since the word yeshu‘at is written defectively without a waw, the phrase can be read as yesh et yhwh ke-​heref ayin, “There is a moment of the Lord that is like a blink of the eye.” The sensitivity 1 37 Compare Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 138; idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Ḥokhmot, p. 56. 138 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 150. 139 Ibid. 140 Tobias bar Eliezer, Midrash Leqaḥ Ṭov al Esther, in Sammlung Agadischer Commentare zum Buche Esther, edited and with notes by Salomon Buber (Vilna: Romm, 1886), 52a (ad Esther 4:17).

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to what is at stake is underscored by Abulafia’s additional words of counsel “know this.”141 The transposition of the expression yeshu‘at yhwh into yesh et yhwh impels the reader to attend to the gnosis of redemption, a wisdom that is linked to the “moment of the Lord” (et yhwh), the interlude of time that concurrently marks and effaces the difference between the spiritual and the material, the intellectual and the imaginative, the divine and the daemonic.142 What separates good and evil is nothing but a fracture of time, a split second, a point so infinitesimal that it cannot be divided, a duration that measures less than the blink of an eye. In Abulafia’s own words: “And this may be compared to the sparks of light that strike the eye as one sees it in a blink of the eye, the spark strikes him, then it returns, and it appears to him as if another [spark] has struck him, and afterwards it returns immediately in the form of the matter ‘and the beasts ran to and fro in the appearance of lightning’ (Ezekiel 1:14).”143 The analogy of the spark provides a metaphor to articulate the dialetheic logic of the differentiation of opposites in their nondifferentiation: there is one light but its varied manifestations leave the impression that the light is manifold. Expressed more suitably, the many are not superadded to the one but the oneness is itself constituted by the manifoldness. Abulafia explains this phenomenon by referring to the process through which the soul, which is a “heavenly, resplendent light [or bahir shemeimi] that materializes [hitgashem] and becomes a force in the body, and it is form [in relation] to matter,” and it “produces sparks of thought [niṣoṣei maḥashavah] in the heart, and the heart receives from it two ways of configuration [darkhei ṣiyyur],” that is, the good and evil inclinations, which take shape “in accordance with the capacity of the eye of the heart [kefi yekholet ein ha-​lev]—​if it is strong, it is true and it will endure, but if it is weak, it is a lie and it will be abolished.” From the heart these sparks of soul (niṣoṣei ha-​nefesh), which arise from the “sparks of intellect” (niṣoṣei ha-​sekhel), spread forth to the remaining forces in the body, terminating with the physical sense (hergesh), the last of the cognitive faculties determinative of human nature.144 We may conclude, therefore, that, according to Abulafia’s esoteric teaching, the roots for which can be discerned in Baruch Togarmi’s Mafteḥot

1 41 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 150. 142 For a similar phenomenological reading of the concept of et in zoharic kabbalah as the interval that demarcates concomitantly the unification and separation of opposites, see Wolfson, Alef, pp. 98–​107 (in this volume, pp. 177–202). 143 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 150. 144 Ibid.

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ha-​Qabbalah,145 from one perspective the two impulses ought to be treated as conflictual, and hence it is pertinent to speak of one as truth and the other as deceit, but from another perspective the two impulses are manifestations of one light, and hence the contrast between truth and deceit collapses. In Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia links this insight to the depiction of the sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning, and their beginning in their end, like the flame bound to the coal”146: “The secret of the ‘coal’ [gaḥelet] is ‘truth’ 145 See the important passage from Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 234: “Thus, I have said to you above in explicating the scale of merit and the scale of guilt that the two of them are the word of the tongue [millat lashon] and the letters of the foreskin [otiyyot ma‘or], that is, between the two of them there are four matters. With respect to the mouth, which is the tongue, the wise one said concerning it, ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ (Proverbs 18:21). And with respect to the phallus [milah], which is the covenant [berit], there is the obligatory intercourse [be‘ilat miṣwah], [connected to] procreation [periyyah u-​reviyyah], and there is the illicit intercourse [be‘ilat zenut], and the two of them are the secret of Paradise [gan eden], that is ‘the mouth or mouth’ [peh o peh] … ‘the phallus or the phallus’ [milah o milah] … Adam and Eve [adam we-​ḥawwah] … the Jew and Gentile [ha-​yehudi we-​ha-​goy] … and the two of them are hot and cold [ḥam we-​qar], cold and hot [qar we-​ḥam]. And with this the secret of the marking [qa‘aqa] (Leviticus 19:28) will be known to you, for they are the mouth of the phallus [peh milah], the phallus of the mouth [milah peh], and the two of them are Shaddai yhwh.” Explicating the parallelism between the covenant of the tongue and the covenant of the foreskin affirmed in Sefer Yeṣirah, Togarmi emphasizes that each one exemplifies a polarity, the former embraces death and life, and the latter the permissible and forbidden forms of cohabitation. The critical claim is Togarmi’s further observation regarding the ultimate unity of these oppositional pairs, a point that is confirmed in the statement that the “two of them are the secret of Paradise.” The identity of opposites is corroborated by the numerical equivalences of the expressions gan eden (3 + 50 + 70 + 4 + 50 = 177), peh o peh (80 + 5 + 1 + 6 + 80 + 5 = 177), milah o milah (40 + 10 + 30 + 5 + 1 + 6 + 40 + 10 + 30 + 5 = 177), as well as the numerical equivalences of adam we-​ḥawwah (1 + 4 + 40 + 6 + 8 + 6 + 5 = 70) and ha-​yehudi we-​ha-​goy (5 + 10 + 5 + 6 + 4 + 10 + 6 + 5 + 3 + 6 + 10 = 70). The duplicity is also expressed as the pairing of hot and cold, ḥam we-​qar, or cold and hot, qar we-​ḥam, each of which equals 354, which is the sum of the combination of peh o peh (177) and milah o milah (177). Finally, this insight is related to the shared numerological value of the expression qa‘aqa (100 + 70 + 100 + 70 = 340), a word especially suitable to denote duality inasmuch as it is composed of the doubling of the two letters qof and ayin, and the sum of peh milah (80 + 5 + 40 + 10 + 30 + 5 = 170) and milah peh (40 + 50 + 30 + 5 + 80 + 50 = 170), which is also the value of the amalgamation of the two names, Shaddai (300 + 4 + 10 = 314) and yhwh (10 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 26). Togarmi alludes to the same principle in another passage (Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 235) by noting that the “profane language” (leshon ha-​ḥol) and “sacred language” (leshon ha-​qodesh) as well as the “language of blood” (leshon ha-​dam) and the “language of faith” (leshon ha-​dat) are all in the “power of the supernal world” (bi-​reshut ha-​olam ha-​elyon). For a reverberation of Togarmi’s chain of associations, see Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 110. 146 Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 142, § 6; Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, p. 74, § 6.

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(emet), and the secret of the bond [qesher] is deceit [sheqer], as in the matter of our existence, that is, in deceit there is truth.”147 Abulafia discerns the secret of the paradoxical identification of opposites in the uroboric description of the sefirot,148 an idea that he substantiates exegetically by the numerical equivalence of gaḥelet (3 + 8 + 30 + 400 = 441) and emet (1 + 40 + 400 = 441), on the one hand, and by the transposition of qesher into sheqer (they are composed of the same consonants and thus they both numerically equal 600), on the other. The unity of the sefirot bespeaks the metaphysical truism that is reflected empirically in the fact that in every falsehood there is truthfulness. In another passage from Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia adduces this paradox from the description of the three matrix letters in Sefer Yeṣirah, alef, mem, and shin, as the “great and wondrous secret, concealed and sealed in six rings”149: “From them you will find the deceptive truth [ha-​emet shiqri = 5 + 1 + 40 + 400 + 300 + 100 + 200 + 10 = 1056], as you will find the truthful deception [ha-​sheqer ha-​amitti = 5 + 300 + 100 + 200 + 1 + 40 + 400 + 10 = 1056]. And thus the enlightened one [ha-​maskil] through the power of his intellect can make the deception truthful [ye’ammet ha-​sheqer] [10 + 1 + 40 + 400 + 5 + 300 + 100 + 200 = 1056] and also make the truth deceptive [yeshaqqer ha-​emet] [10 + 300 + 100 + 200 + 5 + 1 + 40 + 400 = 1056], that is, the truth is divisible into three parts in the secret of alef, mem, shin, emet makhri‘a sheqer [truth mediates deception].”150 For the sage, truth and deception are not in binary opposition, as he knows that truth is the mediation between what is true and what is false (the three matrix letters alef, mem, and shin decoded as the acrostic emet makhri‘a sheqer), and hence he has the capacity to ascertain the deceptive truth (ha-​emet shiqri) that is the truthful deception (ha-​sheqer ha-​amitti). The pietistic ideal that emerges from this gnosis is one of transformation as opposed to obliteration, the intellect guiding rather than annihilating the imagination.151 As Abulafia puts it in the concluding sentence in his advisory note in the introduction to the third part of Sitrei Torah, “On account of this

1 47 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 20. 148 See Ithamar Gruenwald, “Some Critical Notes on the First Part of Sēfer Yeẓirā,” Revue des Études juives 132 (1973): 492; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 143–​144. 149 Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 151, § 24; Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, pp. 110–​ 112, § 24. 150 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 111. 151 Idel, Language, pp. 61–​63, discusses the notion of “trial” in Abulafia’s thought, and specifically as it is related exegetically to the narrative of the binding of Isaac, in terms of the intellect overpowering the imagination, the overpowering of the good inclination over the evil inclination.

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it is necessary for every person to have a revealed and a concealed matter.”152 From the vantage point of the soul that is not yet enlightened, the revealed and the concealed must be kept apart, and thus the model of redemption entails liberating the intellect from the imagination,153 but from the vantage point of the soul that is enlightened, the revealed and the concealed are to be united, and thus the model of redemption entails transmuting good into evil. In a manner that resonates with the dyophysite portrayal of Mercurius in alchemical treatises—​expressed in a number of antinomies including the male/​female binary, the spiritual/​material polarity, and the divine/​demonic dichotomy154—​in the kabbalistic teaching enunciated by Abulafia, Metatron exemplifies a duplex nature,155 a fact typified by the characterization of this angel as both the first and the last of the ten intellects, marked respectively as alef and yod,156 and designated by the two names Israel and Jacob, the former

1 52 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 151. 153 This is the figurative understanding of the exodus of Egypt offered by Abulafia. See Idel, Language, p. 69. 154 Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, translated by Richard F. C. Hull, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 16–​17, 79, 93, 97, 101, 184–​185, 187, 295, 304, 340, 490–​491, 506–​507, 510; idem, Alchemical Studies, translated by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 217–​220. Affinities between Mercury (the Roman analogue to Hermes) and Metatron, including the roles of mediator and scribe, have been noted by Nathaniel Deutsch, Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 164–​167. On the ascription of the images of scribe and mediator to the figures of Enoch and Metatron, including references to Mesopotamian sources whence the later traditions may have evolved, see Andrei A. Orlov, The Enoch-​ Metatron Tradition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 34–​37, 50–​70, 97–​101, 104–​112, 184–​188, 203–​207. 155 See, for example, Abulafia, Ḥotam ha-​Hafṭarah, p. 112: “On account of this he is the angel of the moon, and the name that is unique to him in truth is ‘Metatron, the archon of the face,” and [the designation] ‘Mordecai the Jew’ is attributed to him. Therefore, we say [Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 7b] arur haman [‘cursed be Haman’] and barukh mordekhai [‘blessed be Mordecai’].” To articulate the twofaced nature of Metatron, Abulafia utilizes the rabbinic directive that on Purim one should drink to the point of no longer discerning the difference between the wicked Haman and the righteous Mordecai (the collapse of opposites is based on the numerical equivalence of the expressions arur haman [1 + 200 + 6 + 200 +5 +40 + 50 = 502] and barukh mordekhai [2 +200+ 6 + 20 + 40 + 200 + 4 + 20 + 10 = 502]). On the dual nature of Metatron, see also Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 62, and the citation and analysis of some other relevant sources in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 172–​173 n. 213. 156 See, for instance, Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 190: “Know that alef is one, and it is the matter of all the sefirot in thought, but yod, which is ten, is their end. Therefore, they called it shekhinah, which is the end of thought. But yod, which is the matter of the twenty-​two

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signifying the head (yisra’el = ro’sh li) and the latter the heel (ya‘aqov = iqvi).157 The adept who attains mystical insight discerns that the two aspects, which might appear from the dyadic standpoint of a logic of the excluded middle to be antinomical, are in reality unified within Metatron. As Abulafia expressed the esoteric wisdom in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, “And the eminent secret that one must know is that his head is in the tail and his tail is in the head.”158 In Ḥayyei ha-​ Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia relates the unity of opposites to the scriptural instruction to craft the two cherubim from one piece of gold (Exodus 25:18–​19): “However, the matter of the two cherubim alludes to the Presence [ha-​shekhinah], they are cause and effect, male and female, and therefore they were hammered in one body with two forms, and they saw one another, and God was between them.”159 The soul transformed into this angel realizes the integration of opposites in its own being and thereby imitates the divine. Abulafia refers to this gnosis as the “secret of inversion” (sod ha-​hippukh) or as the “inversion of attributes” (hithappekhut ha-​middot)160 predicated on the realization that opposites are the same in virtue of being different, that the attribute of the right is the attribute of the left and the attribute of the left is the attribute of the right, since above we cannot properly speak of an autonomous left that is not comprised within the right.161 The secret of time is intricately linked in Abulafia’s thinking with the paradoxical identity of opposites. Thus, in a discussion in Imrei Shefer concerning the three critical moments that determine the fate (goral) that befalls a person in this world—​the moment of intercourse (rega ha-​shimmush), the moment of conception (rega ha-​yeṣirah), and the moment of birth (rega ha-​leidah)—​ Abulafia notes that the “secret of the lot [sod pur] … comprises the conjunction of the impure [ha-​ṭamei] and the pure [ha-​ṭahor] together.”162 Abulafia avails himself of numerology to anchor the dual characterization of time, represented letters, and also alef, is their end, for it is the great body [ha-​guf ha-​gadol] that is in all of their forms.” 157 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 94. See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 143–​145. On the Active Intellect and Israel, see Idel, “Definitions,” pp. 9–​11. 158 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 243, and see other sources (including a passage from Togarmi’s Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah) cited and discussed in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 143–​144 n. 135. 159 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 72. 160 Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 59 n. 167, and in more detail in idem, “Deceitful Truth and Truthful Deceit: Sod ha-​Hippukh and Abulafia’s Divergence from Maimonides,” in A Tribute to Hannah: Jubilee Book in Honor of Hannah Kasher, edited by Avraham Elqayam and Ariel Malachi (Tel Aviv: Idra Publishing, 2018), pp. 91–​125 (English section). 161 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 132. For full citation, see first reference to my work in previous note. 162 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 44.

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typologically by the categories of purity and impurity, for the word “lot” (pur), which denotes the wheel of time, numerically equals 286, which is the sum of the words ha-​ṭamei and ha-​ṭahor, “the impure” and “the pure.” Predictably, Abulafia relates the identity of opposites to the Tetragrammaton: “And the secret of the name is entirely [in the word] ‘explicit’ [meforash], for it combines being [hawayah], the body [guf], the impure [ṭamei], and that which contaminates [meṭammei], and to it is joined the soul [nefesh], which is pure [ṭehorah] and which purifies [meṭaheret]. And when you comprehend this secret you will apprehend the secret of the calf, the secret of the ashes of the cow, why it purifies the impure and contaminates the pure.”163 The choice of the ritual ordinance of the red heifer (Numbers 19:1–​10) to exemplify the paradox is sensible enough inasmuch as it possessed the curious capacity to render the pure impure and the impure pure. For Abulafia, then, the depiction of time as the mysterium coniunctionis is connected to the idea of the lot, pur, which he articulates as the inner meaning of the holiday of Purim, a title derived from the plural of this very word. For example, in Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, he writes, “The explicit name [shem ha-​meforash] falls upon the name of the lot [shem ha-​pur] for every revealed being. And [the word] purim refers to two without doubt, for there are two lots, ‘one lot to the Lord and one lot to Azazel’ (Leviticus 16:8).”164 The juxtaposition of the mystery of the Tetragrammaton and the secret of the lot is based on the fact that shem ha-​meforash, the “explicit name,” and shem ha-​pur, the “name of the lot,” are made up of the same consonants and, consequently, they have the same numerical value.165 Having established that correspondence, Abulafia goes on to link the dual nature of time to the word purim,166 which he connects, in turn, with the priestly ceremony on Yom 1 63 Ibid., pp. 44–​45. 164 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 73. 165 In Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 256, Abulafia similarly explains that the name purim is derived from the “name of the lot [shem ha-​pur] that is explicit [ha-​meforash] in the secret of the explicit name [be-​sod shem ha-​meforash] that is known, face [panim] and back [aḥor], the intermediary [emṣa‘i] in the world.” Compare Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 237: “The tongue and the phallus [ha-​lashon we-​ha-​milah = 5 + 30 + 300 + 6 + 50 + 6 + 5 + 40 + 10 + 30 + 5 = 487], right and left [yamin u-​semo’l = 10 + 40 + 10 + 50 + 6 + 300 + 40 + 1 + 30 = 487], and the secret of ‘the nature, front and back’ [ha-​ṭeva panim wa-​aḥor = 5 + 9 + 2 + 70 + 80 + 50 + 10 + 40 + 6 + 1 + 8 + 6 + 200 = 487], and thus it says concerning him ‘Open my eyes (Ps 119:18), Shaddai’ [gal einai shaddai = 3 + 30 + 70 + 10 + 50 + 10 + 300 + 4 + 10 = 487].” On the mystery of time associated with Purim, see also Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Meliṣ, in Maṣref ha-​Sekhel, p. 30; idem, Sitrei Torah, p. 133; idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Sefirot, p. 87. 166 See Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 44: “In the secret of the name purim, which are days of celebration and joy that were engendered by male and female, Mordecai and Esther.” The twin character of Purim is accentuated further in Ḥotam ha-​Hafṭarah, p. 112, where

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Kippur to place lots (goralot) on two goats, one marked for the God of Israel and the other marked for Azazel (Leviticus 16:7–​10). From Abulafia’s perspective, therefore, Purim instructs us about the hermaphroditic measure of time weighed in the balance of life and death, guilt and innocence, the two faces of Metatron. In Sitrei Torah, Abulafia explicates the matter as follows: “And thus the ‘turn of Esther’ [tor esther] (Esther 2:15), ‘the turn, the scale of merit or the scale of guilt’ [tor kaf zekhut o kaf ḥovah], for the scale of merit and the scale of guilt comprise the moment of the end [et qeṣ], and the moment [et] is an appointed time [mo‘ed], as there is a moment for the appointed time [et la-​mo‘ed].” 167 Based on the numerological equivalence of the expressions tor esther (400 + 200 + 1 + 60 + 400 + 200 = 1261) and tor kaf zekhut o kaf ḥovah (400 + 200 + 20 + 80 + 7 + 20 + 6 + 400 + 6 + 1 + 20 + 80 + 8 + 6 + 2 + 5 = 1261), Abulafia derives the characterization of time as a balance on the scales of guilt and innocence from the figure of Esther in the Purim narrative. Insofar as Abulafia employs the image of the scales as a figurative representation of the evil and the good inclinations,168 it is reasonable to propose that the aforementioned depiction of Esther is an alternative way of speaking about time as the mediation of opposites. The surmise is substantiated by two other passages. The first is a description of the “elements of man” (yesodot ha-​adam) in Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq as “twins [te’omim] in the image of the left and the right upon which the intellect and the imagination are engraved. Therefore, I have commanded you that the intellect should prevail over the imagination and the scale of merit should offset the scale of debt.”169 The underlying temporal implication of the image of the twins is brought to the surface in an excerpt from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba: “Even though heaven and earth were completed from one side, their seal, which is the seal of evening and morning [ḥotam erev wa-​voqer], was not sealed on account of the secret of the sabbatical of the earth [sod ha-​shemiṭṭah shel ha-​areṣ], but the seventh day was sealed in the completion of the work, the respite, the blessing, and the holiness. … And the essence is that the right and the left [ha-​yamin we-​ha-​semo’l = 5 + 10 + 40 + 10 + 50 + 6 + 5 + 300 + 40 + 1 + 30 = 497] are twins [te’omim = 400 + 1 + 6 + 40 + 10 + 40 = 497], a ‘veritable day’ [yom emet = 10 + 6 + 40 + 1 + 40 + 400 = 497], and that is ‘entirely true’ [kullo emet = 20 + 30 + 6 Abulafia draws a link between this holiday and the revelation of Sinai, which occurs in the third month of the year whose astrological sign is that of Gemini. 167 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 132. On the image of the scales of merit and guilt, see also idem, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 66. 168 See above at n. 122. 169 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 18.

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+ 1 + 40 + 400 = 497], and this is ‘his work’ [mela’khto = 40 + 30 + 1 + 20 + 400 + 6 = 497], ‘his work’ [mela’khto], ‘his work’ [mela’khto],170 they were garbed [lavshu] in ‘angelhood’ [mal’akhut = 40 + 30 + 1 + 20 + 6 + 400 = 497].”171 Abulafia strings together various images to elucidate the notion that the essence of the material creation is tied to the binary of night and day, the “seal of evening and morning,” also identified as the right and the left twins. Through a series of letter transpositions and numerical equivalences, Abulafia links the expressions te’omim, yom emet, kullo emet, mela’khto, and mal’akhut. The full idiom connected to the latter is lavshu mal’akhut,172 which Abulafia appropriates from a dictum transmitted in Bere’shit Rabbah (though it is likely that his use reflects the reference to it on the part of Maimonides as a “great prophetic secret”173) that seeks to explain the textual discrepancy between the appearance of the figures to Abraham (Genesis 18:2) in the form of men (anashim) and their appearance to Lot (ibid., 19:1) in the form of angels (mal’akhim): “When the Presence [shekhinah] departed from them, they were garbed as angels [lavshu mal’akhut].”174 Refracted through the prism of Abulafia’s interpretative gaze, the term mal’akhut signifies angelic embodiment, that is, the concretization of the divine effluence in the figure of Metatron whose body is composed of the letters of the name yhwh, which itself comprises all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, constituted as an anthropos in the imagination. This incarnation, moreover, is referred to as God’s work (mela’khto) in creating the universe, the temporal nature of which is manifest in the twofoldness (te’omim)

170 The third occurrence of mela’khto was deleted from Gross’s third edition of Ḥayyei ha-​ Olam ha-​Ba, although it is attested in his second edition (1999) and in a number of manuscripts. See ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1582, fol. 74a; ms London, British Library Or. 10867, fol. 42b; ms London, Montefiore Library 322, fol. 43b; ms Moscow, Guenzberg 133, fol. 80b; ms Zurich, Braginsky 251, fol. 72a. I have, therefore, restored it in my translation. In other manuscript recensions, the word appears only twice. See ms Moscow, Guenzberg 378, fol. 39b. In several sentences prior to the one I have cited, it is stated that the expressions yom ha-​shivi‘i and mela’khto are each repeated three times in Genesis 2:2–​3. See Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 100. 171 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 99–​100. 172 I have accepted the reading in the printed text (see previous note for reference), which is preserved as well in many of the manuscript witnesses, for example, ms Moscow, Guenzberg 133, fol. 80b; ms Moscow, Guenzberg 378, fol. 39b; ms London, British Library Or. 10867, fol. 42b; ms London, Montefiore Library 322, fol. 43b; ms Zurich, Braginsky 251, fol. 72a. The reading in other manuscripts, such as ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 1582, fol. 74a, is levusho mel’akhto, “his garment is his work,” which seems to me to be a scribal error. 173 Maimonides, The Guide, 2:6, p. 265. 174 Midrash Bere’shit Rabbah, critical edition with notes and commentary by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965), 50:2, p. 517.

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of night and day, the two aspects that jointly constitute a single “day of truth” (yom emet) that is “entirely true” (kullo emet). One of the most striking accounts of the coincidentia oppositorum is offered by Abulafia through the imaginary persona of Zekhariah in Sefer ha-​Ot,175 a prophetic treatise composed in poetic form. The visionary relates that the “figure of his name” (temunat shemo), i.e., the Tetragrammaton, is engraved in his heart176 in the “image” (ṣelem) and “likeness” (demut), which correspond to the 175 Concerning this treatise, see Harvey J. Hames, “Three That is One or One That is Three: On the Dating of Abraham Abulafia’s ‘Sefer ha-​Ot’,” Revue des études juives 165 (2006): 179–​ 189; Aryeh Yosef Krawczyk, “Sefer ha-Ot—Preliminary Insights on a Critical Edition,” Jewish History Quarterly 2 (2015): 283-​316; idem, Blood, Orchid, Ink—​Endophasion and Heautoscopy in Sefer ha-​Ot, “Book of the Sign,” R. Abraham Abulafia (1240-​1292): Critical Edition, Text Translation and Interpretation (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2018). I express my gratitude to Anna Sierka for providing me with a digital copy of Krawczyk’s study and edition of Sefer ha-​Ot. 176 See Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 44: “Know from this secret of the explicit name [sod ha-​shem ha-​meforash], and know that it is engraved and sealed on the heart of each man from the human species [ḥaquq we-​ḥatum be-​lev kol ish me-​ishei ha-​min ha-​enoshi] according to the fate that falls upon him in three moments.” Concerning the three moments, see the rest of this passage cited above at n. 162. The question is what does the word ish connote in this context? Is it to be rendered in universal terms as a reference to all humankind or is it a code for the Jew? See the passage cited above, n. 34, and compare Abulafia, Sefer ha-​ Meliṣ, p. 19: “And the Messiah is called ‘the man’ [ha-​ish] and in the future he will take us out from the exile under the hands of the nations through the power that emanate upon him from the Active Intellect.” There are passages in the Abulafian corpus where the term ish applies to both Jew and non-​Jew. Indeed, in the continuation of the passage from Sefer ha-​Meliṣ, pp. 19–​20, Abulafia uses the term ish equivocally to refer both to all people inclusively and to the Jew exclusively: “It is germane for every enlightened one, who seeks to prophesy, that he will see with his eyes and his heart each and every person from the foolish people of the earth [kol ish we-​ish me-​anshei ha-​areṣ ha-​sekhalim], as if they were apes. … and all their actions are images, and the man [we-​ha-​ish], who is with them, is like one who finds himself alone in the forest, for he knows that the name ish is not [applicable] except to anyone but him, and his body is endangered amongst the evil beasts found in the forest. But they have no power over his soul, and it is the intellectual soul that remains after the life of this world. And yet, because he was amongst them and of their species, he was one of them, and today through his intellect he is elevated from their species and he is distinguished [we-​nityaḥed] from them and returns to the other species, which is divine [elohi], after having been human [enoshi].” Despite the inconsistency in the connotation of the word ish, we do see from this passage that the Jew is signaled out again as the man among the beasts, since he is the one who is capable of being transformed from human to divine. See Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 109–​110. On the distinction between Israel and all the other nations compared to the distinction between the nations and beasts, see Abulafia, Shomer Miṣwah, p. 43. On the disparaging portrayal of the sages from the nations of the world (ḥakhmei ummot ha-​olam) as occupying a rung on the ladder between humans and apes, see Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, p. 14; Abulafia, We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, pp. 17–​18. In the same context, Abulafia compares the minds of these

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intellect and the imagination.177 At first, he considered separating them, but he then realized that the “two are bound to one another,” and just as it is impossible to separate two letters that are identical, so it is not possible to separate the two forces.178 Abulafia readily acknowledges that there is an intense battle in the heart between form and matter, spirit and body, intellect and imagination, depicted metaphorically as blood and ink,179 but he also relates that he had the capacity to transform the lethal drug (sam ha-​mawet) into an elixir of life (sam ha-​ḥayyim),180 a transmutation that is possible because life and death share a common source. The alchemical ideal is laid out in more detail in the following passage from Imrei Shefer: “The one who transmits the transmission of the name in the secret of the two inclinations informs his disciple initially that in the beginning of his creation he was himself one essence composed of two aspects, and they are called matter [ḥomer] and form [ṣurah], or mass [golem] and image [temunah], for everything was indifferently the same [ha-​ kol shawweh]. They are also called the two inclinations sealed in the explicit name, which conceals his mysteries, and this is their sign: the good inclination and the evil inclination.”181 The esoteric wisdom consists of apprehending that sages to the mind of women (based on the rabbinic teaching in Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33b, that women are of weak minds or lightheaded (nashim da‘atan qallah); compare Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 80b) and to the Turks and the Ethiopians. 177 Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 97. 178 Adolph Jellinek, “Sefer ha-​Ôt: Apokalypse des Pseudo-​Propheten und Pseudo-​Messias Abraham Abulafia,” in Jubelschrift zum Siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz (Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1887), p. 81. For a more recent edition, see Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ot, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 30; and see Krawczyk, Blood, Orchid, Ink, p. 150. Idel, Language, p. 97, already cited and analyzed the passages from Sefer ha-​Ot in conjunction with the text from Sitrei Torah. See op. cit., p. 113. 179 Jellinek, “Sefer ha-​Ôt,” p. 81; Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ot, p. 32; Krawczyk, Blood, Orchid, Ink, p. 152. The images of blood and ink are used repeatedly by Abulafia. Some of the relevant references are cited by Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 157–​158 n. 138. 180 Jellinek, “Sefer ha-​Ôt,” p. 82; Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ot, p. 33; Krawczyk, Blood, Orchid, Ink, p. 154. Compare Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Meliṣ, p. 29: “What was for others a drug of death [sam ha-​mawet], which is the Tree of Knowledge, was for Raziel an elixir of life [sam ha-​ ḥayyim], and he did not stumble with respect to it like the others.” 181 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 80. See ibid., p. 27. Compare Abulafia, Sefer Ge’ullah, pp. 2-​3: “It says ‘The Lord God [adonai elohim] gave me a skilled tongue, to know how to speak timely words to the weary’ (Isaiah 50:4). He began this with the times [ha-​ittot], the two mercies [raḥamim], for these two names [adonai and elohim] are the attribute of mercy. And even though we designate the second name by the attribute and we call it elohim, its vocalization [yhwh is written with the vowels for Elohim] attests to this. Its intention is only to illustrate, as it is written, that the rest of humankind are judged as guilty [be-​ḥovah], the prophets and righteous sages are judged through it itself as innocent [li-​zekhut]. …And according to my opinion, this is the truth because the good inclination itself is the evil

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there is one essence that is composed of two facets. The time of the realization of this gnosis is the split second, the indivisible point, an eternity more fleeting than the blink of the eye. In Sefer ha-​Malmad, Abulafia provides more insight into the nature of this time by echoing the talmudic association of the blink of the eye and twilight182: “We have also received that twilight [bein ha-​ shemashot] indicates that it is without time [heyot zeh belo zeman], for the meaning of twilight is that its moment is like a blink of the eye [she-​itto ke-​ heref ayin].”183 It is precisely in and from that site, whence one gains access to the secret of the world to come, that one may discern the line that divides and thereby conjoins light and dark, day and night,184 the angelic and the satanic capacities of the human being. In the time of twilight, a time that is without time, the interim between life and death, opposites are identified in the difference of their identity to the extent that they are differentiated in the identity of their difference. In a passage from Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia addresses this point in slightly different language: “Every enlightened person [maskil] knows that the human being possesses these three types of existence, as we have remarked. Hence, at times he is a human, and his actions attest that they are human actions [ma‘aseh adam], and at times he is Satan, for his actions are satanic actions [ma‘aseh saṭan] that are injurious to himself and to others, and at times he is an angel, for his actions are angelic actions [ma‘aseh mal’akh] that are beneficial to himself and to others, and this is well understood.”185 In other contexts, inclination [ki yeṣer ha-​ṭov be-​aṣmo hu yeṣer ha-​ra], as man was created in the secret of ‘[the Lord God] formed [wayyiṣer] (Genesis 2:7), with two yodin to instruct about the two inclinations [Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a]. And in the secret of adonai elohim, for they are the attribute of judgment [the reading preserved in ms jnul heb. 801303, fol. 72b, is ‫מד"ה‬, that is, middat ha-​din, and not ‫מר"ק‬, as has been suggested by Cohen; the reading is emended in the more recent edition, Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ge’ullah, edited by Yehudah Ohad Turjeman (Jerusalem: Makhon Ḥakhmei Yerushalayim we-​ha-​Ma‘arav, 2020), p. 56] and the attribute of mercy. There is no doubt that there are two actions in two paths that are good and evil. Therefore, we have a time for good and a time for evil insofar as the capacity of man is dependent on the times. ‘A time to be born and a time to die’ (Ecclesiastes 3:2), ‘a time for war and a time for peace’ (ibid., 8). And thus the prophet said ‘to know how to speak timely words to the weary,’ to give to the inclination the power of speech in its time. And when is its time? ‘Morning by morning, he rouses’ (Isaiah 50:4), and they are the two awakenings in the two paths of light.” 182 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 2b; Shabbat 34b. 183 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Malmad, p. 21. 184 On the representation of the time cycle in terms of diurnal and nocturnal rotation, see the extended discussion in Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, pp. 7–​8. 185 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 90. See ibid., p. 56, and compare Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, p. 32: “And when you attach the serpent to Adam and Eve, you find that man is Satan

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the satanic and the angelic186 are identified by Abulafia as two faces of Metatron, sometimes portrayed as the attributes of mercy and judgment, and thus we may assume that in grouping together human, angel, and Satan, what he intends is that an individual can emulate either dimension of Metatron. This symbolism may relate as well to Abulafia’s portrayal of Christianity as demonic,187 which he associates (in line with any number of medieval rabbinic figures) with its idolatrous nature, that is, the worship of the image (the term that Abulafia often uses is demut) of the divine body, a characterization that is based, in turn, on the assumption that the tenets of this Abrahamic faith are rooted in the imagination rather than reason.188 In an ironic twist, the religion that dogmatically professes the incarnation of God in human form is placed on the level of Satan as opposed to Adam, whereas the religion upon whom the prophetic tradition has been bequeathed expresses its adamic nature by actualizing the capacity to conjure the angelic body, the anthropomorphic configuration of the incorporeal, in the imagination.189 It is feasible, then, to surmise that the three terms, adam, mal’akh, and saṭan, signify the struggle on the psychological plane between the evil and the good inclinations, which corresponds to the battle on the theological plane between Christianity and Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth and the Messiah of Israel, the seals of the sixth and the seventh days of the week, the material Tree of Knowledge and the spiritual Tree of Life.190 The threefold distinction can also be cast in temporal terms that were a commonplace in the cosmological order that Abulafia arrogated from Maimonides: the satanic corresponds to the corruptible matter and it is thus subject to time, the angelic corresponds to the incorruptible intellect and just as Satan is a man [ha-​adam saṭan eḥad ka’asher ha-​saṭan adam eḥad].” The passage is cited by Idel, Studies, p. 37, from ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale héb. 768, fol. 11a. See also Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 63: “every man is Satan, every Satan a man [kol adam saṭan kol saṭan adam].” 186 It should be noted that in his writings Abulafia repeats the identification of Satan as the evil inclination and the angel of death reported in the name of Simeon ben Laqish in Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 16a, and repeated by Maimonides (see above, n. 121). For example, compare Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 56, 291; idem, Sitrei Torah, p. 139; idem, Imrei Shefer, p. 27; Idel, Studies, p. 38. 187 Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 62–​63, and particularly the passage from Mafteaḥ ha-​ Shemot cited on p. 62 n. 195. 188 Idel, Studies, pp. 45–​61; idem, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 62, 97–​99. 189 Wolfson, “Textual Flesh,” pp. 208–​212. On the vision of the human form and prophecy in Abulafian kabbalah, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 95–​100. 190 Idel, Studies, pp. 51–​52. On the correlation of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life with Cain and Abel, see Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 65.

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it is thus not subject to time, and the human being is a composite of matter and intellect and it is thus both subject to and not subject to time,191 or, to put it differently, the human being has the capacity to eternalize the temporal by temporalizing the eternal. 4

Angelomorphic Transformation and Monopsychic Integration

As a consequence of the angelomorphic conversion, the distinction between the soul of the one cleaving and the intellect to which one cleaves cannot be easily upheld. Thus, in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia muses, “If a person comprehends God and mentions his name so that he will be conjoined to him, and in the moment the efflux of God comes to conjoin himself to himself [lehadbiq aṣmo el aṣmo], that is, his intellect in his soul, so that he will not feel the death of the body.”192 The individual conjoined to the Active Intellect becomes cognizant, or perhaps “incognizant” would be the more felicitous term, of being part of the oneness of all things that are contained in this Intellect,193 an experience of ecstasy portrayed in a panoply of intensely heteroerotic images,194 the 1 91 Abulafia, Ner Elohim, pp. 85–​86. 192 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 109. See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 138–​142; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 88–​91, 124–​134; idem, Studies, pp. 7–​11; Wolfson, Language, pp. 236–​242. I should note that the fuller context of the passage from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba is one in which Abulafia describes the person who turns away from the unitive experience, rejecting the eternal life of divinity and returning to the vain life of the beast, a spiritual fleeing that is linked to the verse “Man does not abide in honor; he is like the beasts that perish” (Psalms 49:13). 193 The matter of mystical union in Abulafia has been well discussed in the scholarly literature. The most detailed exposition can be found in the essay by Moshe Idel, “Abraham Abulafia and Unio Mystica,” published in idem, Studies, pp. 1–​31, and reprinted in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 3, pp. 147–​178. 194 Many of the central images in Abulafia’s writings are anticipated in a passage from Togarmi’s Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 232. The conjunction of the intellect and the soul is portrayed by the image of the kiss, which is related to the description of God conversing with Moses mouth-​to-​mouth, peh el peh (Numbers 12:8) and to the coupling of the king and the queen, ziwwug ha-​melekh we-​ha-​malkah (the expressions peh el peh and ha-​ melekh we-​ha-​malkah both equal 201). The sensitive implications of this matter are underscored by Togarmi’s comment that “it is not possible to write about this secret explicitly or to transmit it orally [peh el peh] until one first comprehends its principle, and afterwards it can be transmitted in a tradition to those who contemplate his name through the fear of him [based on Malachi 3:16].” On the image of the kiss in Abulafia’s ecstatic kabbalah, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 180–​184; Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), pp. 39–​44. The philosophical background for the metaphorical use of the kiss to depict the conjunction

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male character assumed by the Active Intellect and the female by the human soul.195 One of the more beautiful and impassioned articulations of the mystical appropriation of the philosophical ideal appears in Or ha-​Sekhel: And thus the one who is desired [he-​ḥashuq] places the desire [ha-​ ḥesheq] in the heart of the one who desires [ha-​ḥosheq] … And because there are two parts of love between the two lovers … the name [of God] is composed of two parts, and they are the amalgamation [shittuf] of the divine intellectual love [ahavah elohit sikhlit] with the human intellectual love [ahavah enoshit sikhlit], and it is one just as his name comprises [the words] eḥad eḥad [that is, the numerology of eḥad is thirteen, which multiplied by two is twenty-​six, the numerical value of yhwh], on account of the joining [ḥibbur] of human existence with divine existence in the time of the comprehension, which is equated with the intellect in existence until she and he are one thing [hi we-​hu davar eḥad]. And this is the power of the human being that he can bind the lower part and be conjoined to the supernal, and the supernal descends and kisses the matter that ascends to greet it, in the image of the bridegroom who kisses his bride in actuality from the abundance of the true desire that is distinctive to the delight of both of them from the power of the name.196 of human and divine intellects is provided by Tanja Werthmann, “‘Spirit to Spirit’: The Imagery of the Kiss in the Zohar and its Possible Sources,” Harvard Theological Review 111 (2018): 586–​609, esp. 589–​599. 195 Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 179–​227; idem, “Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, edited by David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 200–​201; idem, “Eros in der Kabbala: Zwischen gegenwärtiger physischer Realität und idealen metaphysischen Konstrukten,” in Kulturen des Eros, edited by Detlev Clemens and Tilo Schabert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), pp. 85–​90; idem, Kabbalah and Eros, pp. 77–​81, 94–​95. While I accept the merit of distinguishing between the symbolic approach to the sexual in the theosophic kabbalah and the allegorical approach of the prophetic kabbalah, I am of the opinion that the distinction cannot be made in an absolute manner, as the symbolic orientation is itself indebted to an allegorical understanding that kabbalists likely derived from philosophical sources in order to formulate their notion of spiritual or intellectual eros, a noetic state of conjunction facilitated by ascetic renunciation. See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 90–​ 91; idem, Language, pp. 345–​346, 348–​351. 196 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 109. For references to Idel’s discussion of this passage, and specifically his surmise regarding the affinity between Abulafia’s ahavah elohit sikhlit and Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis, see above, n. 98. On the comparison of the threefold unity of desirer (ḥosheq), desired (ḥashuq), and desire (ḥesheq), to the triad of lover (ohev), beloved (ahuv), and love (ahavah), and by implication knower (yode‘a), known (yadu‘a), and knowledge (de‘ah), see Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 62. On the use of the erotic imagery of ḥesheq, see also Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 155; idem, Oṣar Eden

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To receive the efflux of the holy spirit is to be conjoined to the Intellect in this erotic bond, to be transmuted into Metatron, to be incorporated into the name, which is the Torah, and to be restored to the light. Let us consider another passage from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, which summarizes the essential aspects of Abulafia’s mystical worldview: Both the heart and the mouth have to be circumcised, “in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14), the mouth to enunciate [lehazkir] through it what needs to be enunciated [ha-​nizkar] in the enunciation of the glorious name [be-​hazkarat ha-​shem ha-​nikhbad], and the heart to contemplate [laḥashov] the name in the time of the enunciation [hazkarah], that is, the letters of the name themselves, for they are the limit of comprehension [takhlit ha-​hassagah]. … Therefore, the first intention is to enunciate the name of God [lehazkir be-​shem ha-​shem] in order to receive from him the overflow of wisdom and knowledge [shefa ḥokhmah wa-​da‘at]. The second is to augment what he has received, and to rectify the doubts that are thought with respect to many issues, and to fortify the overflow until it returns more perfectly to the one who receives from what was, and he will ascend from matter to matter, and the holy spirit will return.197 Availing himself of the language of Deuteronomy, read through the prism of Sefer Yeṣirah, Abulafia depicts the two stages of the meditational process respectively as circumcision of the mouth and circumcision of the heart. The former involves verbal articulation of the name, and the latter, mental contemplation.198 It is important to recall here that the practice promoted by Abulafia entailed three phases, combination of the letters of the name in writing, verbally, and mentally.199 The text I have cited obviously relates to only the latter two stages, something of a departure, since it is more common to find references in the compositions of Abulafia and other ecstatic kabbalists to the first two stages of the process.200 It is reasonable to propose, however, that the two

Ganuz, p. 288; idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Ḥokhmot, p. 6; idem, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, pp. 10, 48; idem, Sitrei Torah, pp. 197–​198. 197 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 142. 198 In Imrei Shefer, p. 68, Abulafia writes that the letters that are contemplated (otiyyot ha-​ neḥshavot) are neither a body nor a faculty in the body. 199 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 135; Idel, Mystical Experience, p. 20; idem, Language, pp. 3–​11; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 56 n. 159, 160 n. 180. 200 Idel, Enchanted Chains, pp. 97–​98.

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circumcisions singled out by Abulafia reflect a distinction affirmed by the intellectual elite of his time, largely due to the impact of the ideal of intellectual worship set forth by Maimonides, that is, a distinction between liturgical prayer, which is dependent on the enunciation of words, and contemplative prayer, a form of speculative meditation that is without words, the silent worship of the heart, which is accomplished most effectively in solitude.201 From the standpoint of the philosophically enlightened sage, traditional prayer is problematic as the words used to describe, to approach, and to elicit a response from God are literally false, and, hence, “silence and limiting oneself to the apprehensions of the intellects are more appropriate.”202 Demarcating the limit of language was not merely a logical deduction for Maimonides, but, rather, a consequence of contemplating the divine luminosity, the flood of intellect that carries one beyond intellection: “We are dazzled by His beauty, and He is hidden from us because of the intensity with which He becomes manifest, just as the sun is hidden to eyes that are too weak to apprehend it.”203 The paradoxical gist of this statement should be evident: the hiddenness of God is consequent to his becoming manifest; that is, to be revealed God must be concealed, for 201 Maimonides, The Guide, 3:51. The scholarly treatment of this topic is extensive, and hence I will mention here only a select number of relevant studies: Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 297–​321; Ehud Benor, Worship of the Heart: A Study in Maimonides’ Philosophy of Religion (Albany: State University of New York, 1995); Steven Harvey, “Maimonides in the Sultan’s Palace,” in Perspectives on Maimonides: Philosophical and Historical Studies, edited by Joel L. Kraemer (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), pp. 47–​75, esp. 66–​68; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth-​Century Kabbalah,” Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 415–​ 442; Alfred L. Ivry, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Philosophical Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 209–​224. See also the studies of Harvey and Werthmann cited above, n. 98. In the case of both Maimonides and the kabbalists, who evolved spiritually and intellectually in his shadow, the phenomenon of prayer has to be understood from the standpoint of a juxtaposition of the kataphatic and the apophatic approaches to the possibility of God-​language. There are, of course, significant differences, but they do share a common challenge. 202 Maimonides, The Guide, 1:59, p. 140. For an explication of the apophatic orientation of Maimonides framed in light of the critical verse from Psalms, see Diana Lobel, “‘Silence is Praise to You’: Maimonides on Negative Theology, Looseness of Expression, and Religious Experience,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002): 25–​49. See also Kenneth Seeskin, “Sanctity and Silence: The Religious Significance of Maimonides’ Negative Theology,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002): 7–​24; idem, “Metaphysics and Its Transcendence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, edited by Kenneth Seeskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 88–​91; Wolfson, “Via Negativa.” 203 Maimonides, The Guide, 1:59, p. 139.

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the concealment of God cannot be revealed without being concealed, just as the light of the sun is too powerful to be seen, and thus it is phenomenally visible only when it is veiled. This may be taken as an alternative expression of the paradox of the apophatic perspective that Maimonides explicitly embraces in his observation that “all men, those of the past and those of the future, affirm clearly that God, may He be exalted, cannot be apprehended by the intellects, and that none but He Himself can apprehend what He is, and that apprehension of Him consists in the inability to attain the ultimate term in apprehending him.”204 Herein lies the fundamental paradox of the via negativa, knowing God consists precisely of knowing that God cannot be known, a knowledge that cannot be communicated except by paradoxical dicta that extol the ideal of learned ignorance.205 The only philosophically-​credible liturgical response to God, therefore, is silence, a view supported exegetically by the citation of the words of the ancient poet, “Silence is praise to thee,” lekha dumiyyah tehillah (Psalms 65:2). The verse, according to Maimonides, is “a most perfectly put phrase” regarding the matter of the efficacy of our kataphatic praise of the divine. “For of whatever we say intending to magnify and exalt, on the one hand we find that it can have some application to Him, may He be exalted, and on the other we perceive in it some deficiency. Accordingly, silence and limiting oneself to the apprehensions of the intellects are more appropriate—​just 2 04 Ibid. 205 José Faur, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 68–​69. For a representative selection of other studies that deal with negative theology in Maimonides, see David Kaufmann, Geschichte der Attributenlehre in der Jüdischen Religionsphilosophie des Mittelalters von Saadja bis Maimuni (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1877), pp. 428–​470; Harry A. Wolfson, “Maimonides on Negative Attributes,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 411–​446, reprinted in idem, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, 2:195–​230; Joseph A. Buijs, “Comments on Maimonides’ Negative Theology,” New Scholasticism 49 (1975): 87–​93; idem, “The Negative Theology of Maimonides and Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics 41 (1987/​ 88): 723–​ 738; David Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1986); Maurice-​Reuben Hayoun, Maïmonide et la pensée juive (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 197–​212; Charles Manekin, “Belief, Certainty, and Divine Attributes in the Guide of the Perplexed,” Maimonidean Studies 1 (1990): 117–​141, esp. 130; Ehud Benor, “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides’ Negative Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995): 339–​360; Hilary Putnam, “On Negative Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 407–​422; Faur, Homo Mysticus, pp. 5–​9, 20–​52; Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 70–​84; Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 360–​365; and the references to Lobel and Seeskin cited above, n. 202.

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as the perfect ones have enjoined when they said: Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah (Psalms 4:5).”206 This pronouncement of Maimonides accords with the directive he offers to achieve the true worship of the heart in chapter fifty-​one of the third part of the Guide of the Perplexed, which strikes me as the fitting conclusion of the treatise: “When, however, you are alone with yourself and no one else is there and while you lie awake upon your bed, you should take great care during these precious times not to set your thought to work on anything other than that intellectual worship consisting in nearness to God and being in His presence in that true reality … and not by way of affections of the imagination.”207 Scholars have duly noted that a number of Spanish kabbalists in the thirteenth century opposed the extreme spiritualization of prayer that could potentially, and in some instances actually did, lead to an abrogation of ritual worship.208 I bracket the question of Abulafia’s own commitment to statutory prayer. What is most important for our purposes is his application of this philosophical issue to the meditational practice more generally. He is unequivocal on this point, one needs to vocalize the names orally and to contemplate them mentally, a position that, in my mind, parallels his insistence elsewhere that circumcision of the flesh is a necessary prerequisite for circumcision of the tongue; that is, just as only one who bears the somatic mark of circumcision is capable of undertaking the regimen of letter-​combination, the goal of which is to separate the soul from the body, so, too, only one who pronounces the divine names verbally is capable of contemplating them internally.209 It is worth noting, moreover, that the application of the term hazkarah to the vocalization of the name by the mouth and to the meditation on the name in the heart is reminiscent of two types of dhikr that one finds in Ṣūfi devotional practice, the verbal recitation of the names and the introspective recollection

206 Maimonides, The Guide, 1:59, pp. 139–​140. On the use of Psalms 4:5 to anchor the idea of apprehending truth without uttering it verbally, see ibid., 1:50, p. 112. 207 Ibid., 3:51, p. 623. 208 See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Beneath the Wings of the Great Eagle: Maimonides and Thirteenth-​Century Kabbalah,” in Moses Maimonides (1138–​1204): His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts, edited by Görge K. Hasselhoff and Otfired Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004), p. 228, and reference to other scholars cited there in n. 79. 209 Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 87–​90, 194–​195, 216–​220; idem, Venturing Beyond, pp. 63–​ 69. It is worth mentioning in this context Abulafia’s assertion in Imrei Shefer, p. 44, that the Tetragrammaton is “engraved and sealed in the heart of every man from the individuals of the human species in accord with the lot that falls upon him.”

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of them.210 There are, of course, important differences, one of them, as noted by Idel, is that in Ṣūfism the objective of dhikr is to achieve a state of undivided mental focus—​concentrating on a point—​by the repetition of onomastic formulæ, whereas Abulafia’s technique is based on purifying the mind by rapid permutation of consonants and vowels in constantly changing patterns.211 To clarify the point, according to the tenets of the kabbalah enunciated by Abulafia and his disciples, there are fixed patterns to the permutations, patterns that are determined by a received number of possible pairings; the practice of letter-​combination, however, does not involve the iteration of the same name or even a sequence of names, but the vocalization of different combinations that follow in a rapid pace and effectuate the trance-​like state into which the adept temporarily succumbs. Discrepancies notwithstanding, the affinity between the Abulafian hazkarah and the Ṣūfi dhikr cannot be ignored, and one ought not rule out the possibility that the crucial meditational exercise promulgated by prophetic kabbalah, the path of the names (derekh ha-​shemot), evolved as a modification or adaptation of the practice cultivated by Muslim mystics, and this despite the effort of Abulafia’s disciple in Sha‘arei Ṣedeq to denigrate somewhat the Ṣūfi practice of dhikr, which he flags with the expression zokhrim otiyyot, by stating that since they did not receive the kabbalah, they did not know the source of their illumination.212 What is essential to emphasize is Abulafia’s explanation of the purpose of the two circumcisions or the two stages in the meditational method. The “first intention” is to enunciate the name of God so that one may receive the overflow of wisdom and knowledge. The “second intention” is to contemplate the name so that one may augment what one has received initially, to fortify the overflow until it returns more perfectly. As a consequence of the amplification of light, the adept ascends spiritually from the world of multiplicity to the divine

210 The terminological and conceptual affinity between Abulafia’s meditative technique of hazkarah and the Ṣūfi ritual of dhikr was noted by Fenton, “Judaism and Sufism,” pp. 202, 214. The connection between the Abulafian ideal of hitbodedut and the Ṣūfi practice of dhikr was already noted by Idel, Studies, pp. 106–​107. On Ṣūfism and the prophetic kabbalah, see above, n. 16. 211 Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 40. 212 Natan ben Sa‘adyah Har’ar, Le Porte Della Giustizia, pp. 476–​477. In the same context, the author alludes to the Ṣūfi goal of meḥiqah, the Hebrew rendering of fanā’, described as the discarding of all natural forms from the heart. On Nathan’s critical remarks about Ṣūfism, see Idel, “‘Le Porte della Giustizia’,” pp. 65, 99, 104. For the possible positive influence of Ṣūfi ideas on Nathan, see ibid., pp. 204, 277, 292–​293, 344, and idem, Studies, pp. 155–​ 156 n. 81.

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unity213—​an ascent upward that is, at the same time, a journey inward—​and thereby restores the holy spirit to its source.214 The psychological experience of union cannot be separated from the ontological assumption regarding the unity of all things in the light of the intellect (or ha-​sekhel), which Abulafia identifies as the first cause215 whence the whole of reality emanates and to which it returns. Consider, for instance, Abulafia’s formulation in We-​Zo’t li-​ Yehudah: “And when you loosen all the bonds of the sefirot, you will unify them of necessity, and when you unify them in the ultimate unification [takhlit ha-​ yiḥud], you will not find in them anything but the unity, and when you will unify from the unified one [meyyaḥed min ha-​meyuḥad],216 you will not find there any sefirah but the first cause exclusively. … Everything will be restored to its beginning, which is the one [yashuv ha-​kol el re’shito she-​hu eḥad].”217 Or compare the language in Imrei Shefer, which seems to be based, in part, on the description of the sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning, and their beginning in their end”218: “And the secret is that the first ones are the last ones, and the last ones are the first ones, and everything is his, blessed be he, and therefore he constantly says ‘to me it belongs’ (li hu). ‘For the entire earth is mine’ (Exodus 19:5), everything is my portion, and I am divided in all of the parts, from beginning to end.”219

213 On Abulafia’s use of the image of ascent to describe the spiritual journey that results in the attainment of prophecy, see Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 83, 156–​157 n. 128, and idem, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 38–​40. 214 Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 132. 215 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 3: “I composed this treatise … and I called its name as the name of the first cause, which is the light of the intellect.” 216 This is an admittedly difficult expression to translate. In a number of manuscripts (ms Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, hebr. 285, fol. 140a; ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale héb. 774, fol. 68a; ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale héb. 828, fol. 230a; ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale héb. 1092, 165b; ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Mic. 1990, fol. 136b), the reading that has been preserved is meyyaḥed min ha-​ meyyaḥed, “to unify from the unifier.” Compare Abulafia, Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah, p. 10. 217 Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, p. 25; Abulafia, We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah, pp. 31–​32. 218 See above, n. 146. 219 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 42. Compare the interpretation of the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, eser sefirot belimah, in Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 231: “Ten names without substance [beli mahut], for God, blessed be he, is not himself enumerated together with the sefirot and he is not in the same gradation as they are but rather he is above them with respect to everything. He brings them forth and it is impossible for him to be brought forth from them … and he is in everything and everything is in him [we-​hu ba-​kol we-​ha-​ kol bo].”

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I concur with Idel’s assessment that Abulafia’s mysticism betrays the mix of a “transformational unitive component” and a “limited pantheistic facet.”220 220 Idel, Studies, pp. 12–​14. Alas, it is incumbent upon me to cite the following comment offered by Idel, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, p. 231 n. 303 (reacting to this passage in its original published version): “Wolfson does not refer to these theological issues, but decides that pantheism is a better description of Abulafia’s position than limited pantheism. However, without first presenting the entire range of pertinent materials, it is quite easy to claim new insights, or qualifications of older ones, which eventually turn out to be dramatically problematic when additional material is taken into consideration, and I refer here only to Abulafia’s printed material. One may ask how this panentheistic approach operates together with the theosophical vision of the sefirot that Wolfson champions on other occasions. It is one more quandary that deserves elaboration. I am, therefore, more concerned with understanding the fluidity of Abulafia’s thought, or of any other thinker, than to establish clear-​cut theological positions deemed to represent what I assume is a complex discussion.” The first thing to note in response to this diatribe is that I do not use either the term pantheism or panentheism in my study of Abulafia criticized by Idel except for this one context where I am, in part, following his own suggestion. He is apparently disturbed that I write, in what I consider to be very respectful terms, that my own preference would be to view the pantheistic facet as more than limited, as Idel had suggested, even though I quickly qualify my own recommendation and leave open the question of the most appropriate choice of terminology. This example renders transparent that it is not sufficient for me to cite Idel—​any reasonable person would have to acknowledge the excessive number of times I have cited his work in this chapter—​ but I am expected to never take issue with him, and if I do, he will unfailingly use the occasion to debase my scholarship. The motive here is patently clear and indisputably reprehensible. Perhaps Idel would well take to heart the words of Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 78: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.” Secondly, it is regrettable but not surprising that Idel once again simplifies my work in the effort to proclaim that his method better accommodates the complexity of kabbalistic thought, justifying such a judgment by purporting that my analysis is flawed because I allegedly cite sources selectively and tendentiously to accommodate my hypothesis, which will be undermined by the amassing of additional texts. As I have responded elsewhere in this book to the feebleness and disingenuousness of Idel’s criticism, I will not belabor the point here, but the suggestion that my scholarship can be faulted for lack of textual citation is laughable, as is the implication that Idel’s method is more suitable to elucidate complexity. In fact, his modernist hermeneutic, predicated on proffering binarian models of opposing and irreconcilable antinomies, is too simplistic to render effectively the complex structures of thought that may be elicited from the primary kabbalistic sources and surely inadequate to understand my own hermeneutic applied to those sources, which he continually distorts. His derisive barbs demonstrate an inability to grasp the dialetheic logic of my argument that binaries are overcome in the identity of the nonidentity of their identity. See the farcical portrayal of my position in Idel, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, p. 358 n. 219. Now, in addition to continuing to charge me of the crime of essentialism, Idel mocks my response to him by applying his false claims to texts I cite in an effort to counter his erroneous representation of my position. He is both incapable of understanding my views and blinded by the desire to prove that he has the final word on determining how kabbalistic sources are to be interpreted. At the very

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My own preference, however, would be to view the pantheistic facet as more than limited, although, I hasten to add, perhaps terms such as “panentheistic,” “monistic,” or “monopsychic,” are better suited to translate Abulafia’s thinking.221 The very possibility of unio mystica rests on an ontological affirmation of the underlying oneness of all being, a unifying force that Abulafia relates to the intellectual overflow, the providential light, which actualizes the potential of all that is intrinsically contingent but necessary from the point of view of its efficient cause. As an illustration of the point, I will cite from Ḥayyei ha-​ Nefesh, another one of Abulafia’s commentaries on the secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed. Following Maimonides, Abulafia insists that “all of existence is necessitated from his existence, blessed be he, from his will, which is himself, as the wisdom of his existence decreed in the essence of his truth as it is in itself.”222 With regard to this matter, there is a convergence of philosophy and tradition, and thus Abulafia speaks of “the rational and received unity” (ha-​yiḥud ha-​sikhli we-​ha-​mequbbal).223 The oneness of God experienced mystically is a matter that is both demonstrated rationally and acquired traditionally. To add anything to God’s essence is to be guilty of ascribing complexity (harkavah) to the incomposite nature of divine simplicity.224 It follows, least, in light of Idel’s recurrent need to pigeonhole me as an essentialist, it is curious that the man who professes to uphold multivocality exhibits no tolerance for an explanation that deviates from his own. 221 Concerning this terminology, see Philip Merlan, Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness: Problems of the Soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), and see my brief comments in Language, pp. 283–​284. 222 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 60. 223 Ibid. 224 Abulafia follows Maimonides on this point, but even with regard to this basic matter there is not perfect agreement between the two. The burden of the Jewish esoteric tradition concerning the names of God simply weighed too heavily on Abulafia’s mind to accept without qualification the view of Maimonides that all names (with the exclusion of the Tetragrammaton) signify attributes of action as opposed to essential attributes, that is, attributes that are indicative of our way of speaking about God’s providence in the world rather than asserting anything positive about the divine nature. For a typical statement of Abulafia that marks his deviation from Maimonides, see Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 52. After delineating the ten paths connected to the seventy-​two letter name, which are specified in the tradition (qabbalah), he writes: “Know that with all the sacred wisdoms, this wisdom is the holy of holies, for it is the limit of all the paths that one can comprehend in the knowledge of God, and in the comprehension of his actions, and in the discernments of his ways and his attributes, for his names, may he be elevated, are matters very close to him, and they are the truth of his Torah.” The concluding remark about the names and the Torah is precisely the spot where the paths of Maimonides and Abulafia differ as the latter remained faithful to a tradition that the former could not justify philosophically. For a more extensive discussion, see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 152–​177.

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therefore, that all the attributes of God, such as “the form of the world” (ṣurat ha-​olam), “the form of all the forms” (ṣurat ha-​ṣurot kullam), and the “end of all ends” (takhlit ha-​takhliyyot kullam), relate to actions vis-​à-​vis the world that proceed continually from his necessary existence, “for he is the cause and reason [sibbah we-​illah], the origin and the first principle of everything [we-​re’shit we-​hatḥalah ri’shonah la-​kol], and in him is everything [u-​vo ha-​kol], and from him is everything [u-​me-​itto ha-​kol], and he is the all of everything [we-​hu kol la-​kol], and all for every part that is contained in everything [we-​khol la-​kol ḥeleq ha-​nikhlal ba-​kol], and, he, blessed be his name, is the all [we-​hu ha-​kol yitbarakh shemo].”225 In the continuation of this passage, Abulafia turns to the status of the one who is conjoined to the divine. He notes that it is incumbent upon every enlightened person (maskil) to imitate God by becoming the incomposite whole, something that is possible for the soul but not for the body, since corporeality presupposes division. “In the moment of being conjoined to the Intellect, and being separated from the body, she and he are everything [hi we-​hu kol], and hence they are one thing [hem davar eḥad].”226 When the soul (portrayed as feminine) is separated from its somatic encasement, and it unites with the Intellect (portrayed as masculine), it transcends its partiality by becoming one with the all, kol, a technical term that Abulafia assigns to the Active Intellect, insofar as the latter encompasses in itself everything that is contained in the first cause (ha-​sibbah ha-​ri’shonah) or the First Existent (ha-​nimṣa ha-​ri’shon),227 and, consequently, the execution of the governance (hanhagah) over everything is attributed to it.228 In the following passage in Oṣar Eden Ganuz, Abulafia combined ancient Jewish angelological traditions, the Maimonidean account of the Active Intellect, especially its designation saro shel olam, “archon of the world,”229 a title based on the 2 25 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 60. 226 Ibid. 227 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, pp. 28–​29, 41. 228 It is worth noting here the expression “one who governs” (ha-​manhig) seems to be associated with Metatron, the archon of the face (sar ha-​panim), near the conclusion of the short recension of Sefer-​ha-​Iyyun, a thirteenth-​century kabbalistic text of a highly speculative nature, transcribed in Verman, Books of Contemplation, p. 36, and translated somewhat differently on p. 48. In the same context, Metatron is also depicted as the “end of the act of the supernal ones and the beginning of the foundation of the lower ones.” Although not stated explicitly, the Maimonidean-​Abulafian identification of Metatron as the Active Intellect and archon of the world well suits the view that may be extrapolated from this mystical composition. On the Active Intellect, Metatron, and the role of the manhig, see Idel, “Definitions,” pp. 13–​15. 229 Maimonides, The Guide, 2:6, p. 264. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Hebrew translation from the Arabic, annotations, appendices, and indices by Michael

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expression sar ha-​olam found in older rabbinic and mystical sources,230 and sefirotic nomenclature derived from contemporary kabbalistic sources: And know that all the attributes are dependent on the holy spirit to guide them, as it is the guide of everything [manhig ha-​kol]. Therefore, one sefirah, which is the Active Intellect, is called “the all” [ha-​kol], for it is the archon of the world [saro shel olam]. And it is the king of the world [melekh ha-​olam], and it is called the “life of the worlds” [ḥei ha-​olamim] … and from one perspective it is possible to call it an “angel” in actuality [mal’akh mammash], and its name is “angel of the Lord” [mal’akh yhwh], and it is the angel whose name is yhwh. And it is the one in whose hand are all the attributes, and the attribute of Malkhut is assigned the name of the tenth attribute [meyuḥeset be-​shem middat ha-​eser].231 5

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In the following passage from Imrei Shefer, the mystical ideal of union with the Active Intellect is cast in language that further reflects the sefirotic terminology of kabbalistic theosophy, a framing that affords one an opportunity

Schwartz (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2002), p. 280 n. 23 (Hebrew), where the demiurgical characterization of the Active Intellect is traced to Abū Naṣr al-​Fārābī, On the Perfect State (Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al-​madīnat al-​fāḍilah), revised text with introduction, translation, and commentary by Richard Walzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 363 n. 171. 230 Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 16b; Sanhedrin 94a; Ḥullin 60a; Shemot Rabbah, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), 17:4, p. 199; Orlov, Enoch-​ Metatron Tradition, pp. 127–​130, 159–​162. In Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 27, 62a, Michael is identified as the “archon of the world” (saro shel olam). 231 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 139. For a slightly different rendering of this passage, see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 145. Compare the depiction of the tenth intellect in Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 142, as the one that “governs everything” (manhig et ha-​kol). The precise terminology is applied to Shekhinah in Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah, 1:133 (ad Genesis 24:1). On the background of this technical terminology and discussion of some of the sources that may have influenced Abulafia, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “God, the Intellect, and the Demiurge: On the Usage of the Word Kol in Abraham Ibn Ezra,” Revue des études juives 149 (1990): 77–​111, and see the response to my essay by Howard Kriesel, “On the Term Kol in Abraham Ibn Ezra: A Reappraisal,” Revue des études juives 153 (1994): 29–​66.

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to attend more closely to the kenotic dimension of the ecstatic experience, a critical component in Abulafia’s phenomenology of time: In discovering, however, that the beginning of the name [yhwh] is yod, we know immediately that the purpose of the intention in the existence of man is that he comprehend himself and his substance, which is in the form of yod according to its form … that is, the gathering of the thing that gathers everything. And this is the secret of the Assembly of Israel, for its secret is the gathering of yod, the archon of God. For the perfect man [ha-​adam ha-​shalem] gathers everything, and he is called the “congregation of Jacob” [qehillat ya‘aqov]. And the essence is from the all, ten souls [eser nefashot], according to the aggregation [qibbuṣ] of the ten sefirot in the sefirah of the Shekhinah, which is the female that is impregnated, and she receives everything from the all [u-​meqabbelet ha-​kol midei ha-​kol], and her name is ṣedeq in the masculine and ṣedaqah in the feminine, “and righteousness saves from death” [u-​ṣedaqah taṣṣil mi-​mawet] (Proverbs 10:2).232 In Abulafia’s writings, the sefirot are identified as the separate intellects that cause the motion of the heavenly spheres.233 Accordingly, Shekhinah, which is the last of the sefirotic emanations, is a cognomen for the Active Intellect, which is linked causally to all that transpires in the sublunar realm and is the source for human knowledge including prophecy. Just as kabbalists, who embraced a theosophic interpretation of the sefirot, spoke of Shekhinah as the quintessential vessel, the gradation that has nothing substantial of its own but only what it receives from the gradations above, so Abulafia described the Active Intellect in relation to the Intellects from which it receives the divine overflow. Accordingly, Abulafia commandeered the theosophic designation of Shekhinah as the “Assembly of Israel,” kenesset yisra’el, which he transposes into kenesset yod sar el, “the gathering of yod, the archon of God.”234 The yod, 2 32 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 121. 233 For a more extensive discussion of this matter, see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 94–​ 177. I will not repeat here the reference to the work of Scholem and Idel found in my previous study. 234 Idel, Kabbalah and Eros, pp. 77–​78, notes that the term kenesset yisra’el is a designation for the human intellect, and thus the allegorical explanation of the Song of Songs as the love dialogue between God and the community of Israel is transformed in the prophetic kabbalah of Abulafia into a description of the conjunction between the divine intellect and the individual soul, personified respectively as male and female. I do not disagree with this assertion, which in part is a corrective to the generalization of Scholem, Major Trends, p. 226, but it must be pointed out that Abulafia appropriates the expression

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which is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet but the first letter of the Tetragrammaton, alludes symbolically to the ten souls or sefirot that converge in the tenth one. Not surprisingly, Abulafia also avails himself of the kabbalistic depiction of Shekhinah receiving the overflow more directly from Yesod, the ninth sefirah, which is designated kol because it comprises the totality of the divine light within itself in the same manner that the phallus was thought to contain within itself the energy of the whole male body. Abulafia’s language reflects the detailed exposition in Naḥmanides’s commentary on Genesis 24:1 of the esoteric meaning of the aggadic tradition that God blessed Abraham with a daughter whose name was ba-​kol,235 “this alludes to a great matter that he blessed him with that attribute that is within the attribute of the all [middat ha-​kol], and thus she was also called “all” [kol], in the language of ‘for my name is within him’ (Exodus 23:21).”236 Through the theosophic rendering of the rabbinic interpretation, inspired by a passage from the Bahir that Naḥmanides mentions explicitly under the title Midrasho shel R. Neḥuniah ben ha-​Qanah,237 the scriptural ba-​kol alludes symbolically to Shekhinah, the attribute called by this name because the phallic potency of Yesod, also called kol since it is the foundation of everything (yesod ha-​kol), is within her. Abulafia, accordingly, refers to Shekhinah as the “impregnated female” (ha-​neqevah ha-​mit‘aberet), but, in his case, the symbolism must be interpreted allegorically as a reference to the widely held belief that the tenth of the separate intellects takes in the efflux of intellectual light from all the intellects above it and hence it is said to “receive everything from the all” (meqabbelet ha-​kol midei ha-​kol). Inasmuch as Shekhinah exhibits an androgynous character of receiving and overflowing, both masculine and feminine names, ṣedeq and ṣedaqah, are bestowed on her.238 In the kabbalistic sources whence Abulafia derived this terminology,

2 35 236 237 238

kenesset yisra’el as a proper designation for the Active Intellect from the attribution of this name to Malkhut or Shekhinah in works that expound a theosophic symbolism. More noteworthy is the fact that other kabbalists in the thirteenth century accepted an allegorical interpretation of the language of the Song of Songs as a dialogue between the soul and God that corresponds to Abulafia’s approach. See Pedaya, Vision and Speech, p. 166 n. 87; Wolfson, Language, pp. 348–​351. On Abulafia’s notion of love as the union of human and divine intellects, see also Dal Bo, “‘A Sage’,” pp. 69–​71. Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 16b. Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah, 1:133. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Naḥmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutics,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 14 (1989): 166–​167. The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts, edited by Daniel Abrams with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), § 14, p. 125. On the symbol of the androgyne in Abulafian kabbalah as the conjunction of the human and divine intellects, see Idel, “Eros in der Kabbala,” pp. 85–​90; idem, Kabbalah and Eros,

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ṣedeq refers to Yesod and ṣedaqah to Shekhinah, but both terms can be applied to the latter.239 What Abulafia shares in common with the other kabbalists, therefore, is the view that the last of the ten sefirot displays both the power to overflow, the formal principle engendered as masculine, and the capacity to receive, the material principle engendered as feminine. The gender dynamics of the divine-​human encounter are such that the soul is feminized in relation to God.240 Abulafia has this in mind when he states that the perfection of human existence is realized when one is conjoined to the yod, that is, the Active Intellect, which is the tenth sefirah, Shekhinah or Malkhut, and one thereby becomes oneself a yod, the vessel of the perfect man that “gathers everything” (maqhil ha-​kol).241 Orthography is necessary to get the point fully: the yod is shaped like a half-​circle, a shape that brings to mind the image of a vessel and hence it conveys the notion of gathering. As a consequence of the conjunction, the soul morphs into this yod and thus assumes the name “congregation of Jacob,” qehillat ya‘aqov, a scriptural designation of the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 33:4), but here it functions as a technical name applied to Shekhinah as it is the intellect that comprises the overflow of all the intellects. To receive the effluence of the all, one must become a vessel that is all in virtue of being nothing, a process that rests on the paradox of concomitant constriction and expansion—​by being diminished like the yod, the smallest of Hebrew consonants, one is incorporated into the yod, which is the fullness of everything. The biblical model here is Moses, who, out of his extreme humility, feared looking at God in the epiphany of the burning

pp. 77–​81. On the numerical equation of the word androginos and the expression zakhar u-​neqevah, see the texts cited above, nn. 131–​132. 239 Wolfson, Language, pp. 63–​77. 240 See references to Idel cited above, n. 195. While I accept the merit of distinguishing between the symbolic approach to the sexual in the theosophic kabbalah and the allegorical approach of the prophetic kabbalah, I am of the opinion that the distinction cannot be made in an absolute manner, as the symbolic orientation is itself indebted to an allegorical understanding that kabbalists likely derived from philosophical sources in order to formulate their notion of spiritual or intellectual eros, a noetic state of conjunction facilitated by ascetic renunciation. See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 90–​91; idem, Language, pp. 345–​346, 348–​351. 241 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 121. See Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 119 n. 66, where I cite a passage from Abulafia’s Shomer Miṣwah in which the perfect soul is described as the “bride in which all is found” (kallah asher ha-​kol bah), a locution that I proposed is based on the theosophic depiction of Shekhinah as the “bride that is comprised of all” (kallah ha-​kelulah min ha-​kol), as we find, for example, in the commentary of Naḥmanides to Genesis 24:1. See Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah, 1:133. On the Active Intellect and Malkhut, see Idel, “Definitions,” pp. 11–​13.

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bush (Exodus 3:6), and, as a consequence, merited to behold the image of the Lord (Numbers 12:9).242 As Abulafia put it in his commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah, “From this perspective it was necessary for us to vocalize the name of God in its beginning with the smallest of all the letters and the greatest of them in number—​just as we are the little ones of the world, and each of us is called a ‘microcosm’ [olam qaṭan], and this is the secret of the world to come, which is suspended on the point [taluy al nequddah], and we are the ‘macrocosm’ [olam gadol] when we comprehend the truth of the point that is renewed in truth, and its name is yod, and its numerical value is ten, and its form is that of a half-​ circle, and their secret [the sum of the name of the letter yod when written in full, ywd (10 + 6 + 4 = 20) + the word for ten, asarah (70 + 300 + 200+ 5 = 575) + the letter yod itself (10) = 605] is the tenth majesty [hod asiri = 5 + 6 + 4 + 70 + 300 + 10 + 200 + 10 = 605].”243 There is no need, in my judgment, to distinguish sharply between affirmations of the unity of all being and statements concerning the union with God.244 To be united with God is possible because in its actualization the mind discerns that all things are expressive of the divine unity, a unity that is formulated, more specifically, as the intellectual overflow that sustains the world through the agens intellectus. In becoming conjoined to this intellect, the holy spirit that is the soul that comprises all souls,245 the distinction between the one who is conjoined and that to whom one is conjoined is effaced, since in the moment of conjunction, the intellect (sekhel), the intellectually cognizing subject (maskil), and the intellectually cognized object (muskal) are no longer distinguishable; in fact, as Abulafia repeatedly reminds his reader, the Active Intellect and the human intellect are ontically homologous.246 Insofar as this tripartite unity is applied to God’s self-​intellection, following the view of Maimonides concerning the intellect in actu that betrays absolutely no potentiality,247 it can be said that the breakdown of boundaries portends the 242 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 65, and see also the passage from Shomer Miṣwah cited in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 119 n. 66. On the need for the mystic to veil his face in emulation of Moses, see the text from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba discussed in Wolfson, op. cit., p. 220 n. 125. 243 Abulafia, Perush Sefer Yeṣirah, p. 24. 244 Idel, Studies, p. 10. 245 Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 46. 246 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 141; Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 131–​ 132; Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 87–​88, 216–​217 n. 115. Abulafia’s indebtedness to the Maimonidean understanding of prophecy as intellectual conjunction is summarized succinctly by Hava Tirosh-​Samuelson, “Philosophy and Kabbalah: 1200–​1600,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, pp. 232–​236. 247 Maimonides, The Guide, 1:68, pp. 165–​166.

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divinization of the human, which presumes in tandem a humanization of the divine. I suggest that Abulafia alludes to this insight when he remarks in Sefer ha-​ Ḥesheq concerning the archon of the face (sar ha-​panim)—​identified in this context as Uriel, but in other contexts associated with Metatron—​“his power speaks in the heart [koḥo medabber ba-​lev], and he also shows his power in the heart [mar’eh koḥo ba-​lev], for we said that the Presence of God [shekhinat el] is in the middle; our intention is to say about him that his name is the first matter [ḥomer ri’shon], and all of the world is the first matter in the middle … You should only be careful lest it rise in your thought that the form hinted at refers to the issue of the first cause [inyan ha-​sibbah ha-​ri’shonah]. Rather, you should know that the matter is imagined [medummeh] on account of the secret of the existence of the world and of man, for the intellect is in everything [ha-​sekhel hu ba-​kol], and a place is not attributed to it except by way of analogy [derekh mashal].”248 That the Active Intellect both speaks in the heart of the visionary and shows its power—​the two expressions koḥo medabber ba-​lev and mar’eh koḥo ba-​lev numerically equal 314—​illustrates that Abulafia acknowledged the synesthetic element of the experience: the word that is spoken assumes the form that is visually apprehended, but since the intellect is omnipresent, it cannot be circumscribed to any particular place. What is seen in the prophetic vision, therefore, is an imaginal body, that is, a bodily form of the immaterial that is configured as real in the imagination. As I have already indicated, the mystical gnosis of the name, which is achieved as a result of the meditational technique of letter-​combination (ḥokhmat ha-​ṣeruf), entails a state of intellectual conjunction that Abulafia, in the wake of Maimonides, categorized in terms of both the scriptural idea of prophecy (nevu’ah) and the rabbinic notion of eschatological felicity, the life of the world to come (ḥayyei ha-​olam ha-​ba). Although the latter retains something of its original connotation in Abulafia’s scheme, he was far more interested in utilizing the phrase to denote an interior state of spiritual transformation prompted by the triumph of intellect over imagination, spirit over body, an orientation that is attested as well in other medieval Jewish philosophical exegetes, poets, and kabbalists.249 Abulafia does not go so far as to negate 2 48 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 30. 249 See Shalom Rosenberg, “The Return to the Garden of Eden: Remarks on the History of the Idea of Restorative Redemption in Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” in The Messianic Idea in Jewish Thought: A Study Conference in Honour of the Eightieth Birthday of Gershom Scholem (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1982), pp. 78–​86 (Hebrew); Moshe Idel, “Types of Redemptive Activities in the Middle Ages,” in Messianism and Eschatology: A Collection of Essays, edited by Zvi Baras (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center

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entirely the nationalistic and geopolitical aspects of the messianic ideal, but it is clear from his writings that his messianism is primarily psychic in nature.250 Tactilely, the ecstatic experiences the illumination as an anointing with oil, and thus the one who is illumined is not only capable of being redeemed proleptically prior to the historical advent of the Messiah, but such an individual noetically attains the rank of the messianic figure according to the literal meaning of the term mashiaḥ, the one who is anointed.251 The anointment also denotes the priestly status of the illuminate;252 indeed, in the unitive state, the ecstatic assumes the role of high priest,253 the position accorded Metatron in the celestial Temple, the angelic viceregent summoned by Abulafia as the object of conjunction.254 We may conclude, therefore, that the phenomenon of anointment comprises three distinct, though inseparable, aspects of the pneumatic metamorphosis—​messianic, priestly, and angelic. For Abulafia, moreover, the matter of reception is critical to his understanding of the prophetic-​messianic

for Jewish History, 1983), pp. 254–​259 (Hebrew); Dov Schwartz, “The Neutralization of the Messianic Idea in Medieval Jewish Rationalism,” Hebrew Union College Annual 64 (1993): 37–​58 (Hebrew); idem, Messianism in Medieval Jewish Thought, translated by Batya Stein (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017), pp. 34–​77; Kenneth Seeskin, “Maimonides and the Idea of a Deflationary Messiah,” in Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism, edited by Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 93–​107. See also Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 39 n. 95, with specific reference to Abraham Ibn Ezra’s understanding of the secret of conjunction, and p. 91, where I argue that the more spiritualized interpretation of the traditional eschatological expression world to come is an approach shared by Abulafia and other masters of esoteric lore of his time, who are classified by modern scholars (following the typological scheme proffered by Scholem and Idel) as theosophic kabbalists. For a more detailed discussion of the doctrine of conjunction and the divine glory in Ibn Ezra, see Afterman, Devequt, pp. 102–​133. 250 Abraham Berger, “The Messianic Self-​Consciousness of Abraham Abulafia: A Tentative Evaluation,” in Essays on Jewish Life and Thought Presented in Honor of Salo Wittmayer Baron, edited by Joseph Blau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 55–​61; Idel, “Types,” pp. 259–​263; idem, Messianic Mystics, pp. 58–​100, 295–​307; idem, “‘The Time of the End’,” pp. 157–​158; idem, “Multiple Forms of Redemption in Kabbalah and Hasidism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101 (2011): 39–​44. 251 Scholem, Major Trends, p. 142, rightly points out that the “state of ecstasy as described by Abulafia … carries with it something like an anticipatory redemption.” For elaboration of this facet of Abulafian kabbalah, see references in previous note. 252 On the priestly status of the Messiah in Abulafia’s writings, see Idel, Messianic Mystics, pp. 94–​97. 253 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 18. 254 Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 116–​119; idem, Messianic Mystics, pp. 65–​77, and see especially the passages from Isaac of Acre cited and analyzed by Idel, op. cit., pp. 303–​306; Wolfson, Language, p. 241.

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experience, as the enlightened mind, the soul unfettered from the chains of corporeality, receives the overflow of the holy spirit, which is identified as the Active Intellect, the angelic Metatron, and as the wheel of letters that is the Torah scroll in its idealized form.255 The experience of unio mystica may be viewed phenomenologically from four vantage points: to cleave to the name, to be conjoined with the intellect, to be transformed into the demiurgical angel, and to be incorporated within the textual embodiment of the word of God.256 6

Life of the World to Come: yhwh and the Compresence of Time

In another passage from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, the experience of conjunction with the Active Intellect is characterized in terms that contribute significantly to our understanding of the role of time in Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah. The comprehension of the Active Intellect is the purpose of the life of the rational soul, and it is the cause of the life of the world to come, and this soul is conjoined to God, blessed be the name, eternally and forever. … Concerning this it says “For he is your life and the length of your days” (Deuteronomy 30:20), and it says “You, who cleave to the Lord your God, are all alive this day” (ibid., 4:4). The one who is not conjoined to God does not live an eternal life that is like “this day” [ha-​yom], which is perpetual [tamid], and thus the expression “this day” was added.257 As a consequence of the ecstatic union, one participates in the eternal life that is God’s being. Significantly, the overcoming of time in the transformative experience is linked exegetically to the locution “this day” (ha-​yom) in the verse “You, who cleave to the Lord your God, are all alive this day.” Just as the sense of permanence communicated by this rhetoric is not to be understood as the mere repetition of the same, but rather as the abiding of the flux that is continuously changing, so conjunction with God results in the attainment of a pneumatic perpetuity realized in the moment that persistently alters the past and the future. Abulafia expresses the matter in terms of the relationship 2 55 Idel, Language, pp. 34–​41, 79–​80, 163 n. 33; idem, Absorbing Perfections, pp. 348–​350. 256 On the use of the expression “word of God” by Abulafia to designate the Active Intellect, see Idel, Language, p. 33. See also Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 141, and on the identification of the visionary and the Torah in the supreme state of ecstasy, see Scholem, Major Trends, p. 141. 257 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 52–​53.

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between the two names Ehyeh and yhwh, to which he refers respectively as the “first secret” and the “last secret.” The “intermediate secret” is Yah, that is, the letters yod and he, which are found in both names. The two occurrences of Yah “instruct about the secret of beginning [ro’sh] and end [sof], for the first instructs about the secret of the Yah that is primordial [qadmoni] and the second, the Yah that is eternal [niṣḥoni], and the secret that is in both of them is perpetual [tamid].”258 The character of time that is everlasting is the present that mediates continually between the primordiality of the past and the eternality of the future. The nature of temporality is explored further in another passage from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba: Know, my son … that the name is his essence, and his essence is his name [ki ha-​shem hu aṣmo we-​aṣmo hu shemo], and the name of the unique name is composed of four letters, and they are, in truth, yw”d h”a, and they are the concealed letters [otiyyot ha-​ne‘lamot]. Since they are beginning, middle, and end [ro’sh tokh sof], they instruct about the name whose secret is beginning, middle, and end, and this is the universal secret [sod kelali]259 that is called “place” [maqom], and it is called “time” [zeman], which is the “confidant” [amon], and this is the squared number that emerges from yhwh [that is, the sum of each of the letters of the name squared: 10 x 10 + 5 x 5 + 6 x 6 + 5 x 5 = 100 + 25 + 36 + 25 = 186] … And the secret is [the word maqom spelled out in full as] m”m qw”f w”w m”m [80 + 186 + 12 + 80 = 358], and the all [we-​ha-​kol] that is the “name of the living” [shem ḥai] [340 + 18 = 358], and know it, for it comes forth from yhwh, “male and female” [zakhar u-​neqevah = 227 + 163 = 390], and this is the secret of the Presence [ha-​shekhinah = 390], the “Almighty, and Adam, and Eve” [shaddai we-​adam we-​ḥawwah = 314 + 51 + 25 = 390], “male and female” [zakhar u-​neqevah = 227 + 163 = 390]. Therefore, it is the secret of “the image of Adam and the image of Eve” [ṣelem adam we-​ṣelem ḥawwah = 160 + 45 + 166 + 19 = 390], “male and

2 58 Ibid., p. 63. 259 See ibid., p. 4, where Abulafia writes that with respect to the letters of the seventy-​two letter name there is the sod ha-​kelali, which I would translate as a “general secret,” and the particular (peraṭi) that comes forth from it. On the idea of mystery, see sources cited below, n. 272. On the expression sod ha-​kelal, connected to sod ha-​kefel, see Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 6. See idem, Mafteaḥ ha-​Tokhaḥot, p. 51: “And the encompassing general secret comprises the teaching together with the commandment [we-​sod ha-​kelal ha-​ nikhlal kolel torah im miṣwah].”

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female” [zakhar u-​neqevah = 227 + 163 = 390]. And this is 15 [y”h] times 15 [y”h], which is 225, and additionally 15 [y”h] times 11 [w”h], which is 165, and together [225 + 165 = 390] they are “male and female” [zakhar u-​neqevah = 227 + 163 = 390], for they were created from the combination of the name y”h with the name y”h, and the name y”h with the name w”h. … And the secret of time [zeman] is zy”n m”m nw”n [67 + 80 + 106 = 253], and together they are the matter [ha-​ḥomer = 5 + 8 + 40 + 200 = 253], and it is created [nivra = 50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 253].260 The passage is a typical specimen of Abulafia’s literary style and associative mode of thinking, linking together disparate ideas by linguistic transpositions and numerical equivalences. The starting point is the identification that Abulafia makes between the name and the essence, but the name that he has in mind, which he denotes as the unique name (shem ha-​meyuḥad), is not the Tetragrammaton in its entirety but the first two letters, which when spelled out in full yw”d h”a (10 + 6 + 4 + 5 + 1) equal 26, the numerical value of yhwh (10 + 5 + 6 + 5). It is possible that the reference to the “concealed letters” (otiyyot ne‘lamot) alludes to ahwy—​elsewhere designated as otiyyot ha-​ha‘alamah261—​ whose numerical sum is twenty-​two (1 + 5 + 6 + 10), the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet or the Torah in its mystical essence, which is identified as yhwh.262 I briefly discussed the letters ahwy above, but let me add here that they are designated in other medieval Jewish sources as otiyyot ha-​hamshakhah or otiyyot ha-​dibbur,263 for they are the consonants that guide one in the vocalization of words,264 and thus they were compared by Judah Halevi to souls 260 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 61–​62. See also Abulafia, Gan Na‘ul, p. 27: “And the secret of time [zeman] is zy”n m”m nw”n, and this is the supernal first matter [ha-​ḥomer ha-​ri’shon ha-​elyon], and it is numerically [equal to the word] nivra, and this is its secret according to the form of the sefirot.” The Abulafian influence is discernible in Sefer ha-​ Peli’ah (Przemysl, 1883), 75b: “And the secret of time [we-​sod ha-​zeman] you can elucidate and comprehend [by spelling it out as] zy”n m”m nw”n [67 + 80 + 106 = 253], which is numerically ha-​ḥomer [5 + 8 + 40 + 200 = 253] … and this is the first matter [ha-​ḥomer ha-​ ri’shon], and it is the supernal one in relation to the first, Keter Elyon … and thus ha-​ḥomer is numerically equal to nivra [50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 253].” 261 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, pp. 47 and 70. See Wolfson, Language, pp. 236–​239. 262 See the fuller exposition in Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 63–​64, and idem, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, 69–​70. Compare idem, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 353. The identification of the name and the Torah is affirmed by Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 238. See above, n. 35. 263 Dunash Ibn Tamim, Sefer Yeṣirah with Commentary by Dunash Ben Tamim, edited by Menasche Grossberg (London: R. W. Rabbinowicz, 1902), p. 48. 264 Abraham Ibn Ezra, Sefer Ṣaḥot (Fürth: David Isaac Zürndorff, 1827), 13a; idem, Sefer ha-​ Shem (Fürth: David Isaac Zürndorff, 1834), 7a.

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in relation to all the other letters that are like bodies.265 Three of the letters, yod, he, and waw, constitute the core letters of the Tetragrammaton, and, consequently, various masters of esoteric lore in the thirteenth century began to refer to them as the hidden name of God.266 For his part, Abulafia follows this tradition. Thus, in another passage in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia identifies ywha—​the same letters as ahwy but in a different order—​as “the name of the unique name,” exchanging the alef in place of the he.267 Or, as he put it elsewhere in this composition, “And you already know that there is no essential name [shem ha-​eṣem] but for the four letters, and they are ywha. Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom forever.”268 In Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, Abulafia refers to ahwy as the concealed letters that make up the name of God, the hidden soul of the revealed world, the “holy of holies … that instruct about the secret of the ten sefirot.”269 I would suggest that Abulafia has this identification 265 Halevi, Sefer ha-​Kuzari, 4:3, p. 157. On the widely attested comparison of vowels to the souls and letters to the bodies in medieval philosophical and kabbalistic sources, see the references cited in Gerhard Scholem, Das Buch Bahir: Ein Schriftdenkmal aus der Frühzeit der Kabbala auf Grund der kritischen Neuausgabe (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), pp. 87–​89 n. 5; Yehuda Liebes, Sections of the Zohar Lexicon (Jerusalem: Akkademon, 1976), pp. 174–​176 (Hebrew). The prominence of this tradition is demonstrated by the fact that Spinoza paraphrases it in the beginning of his Hebrew Grammar (Compendium grammatices linquæ hebrææ). See Spinoza, Complete Works, transaltions by Samuel Shirley, edited, with introduction and notes, by Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002), p. 588: “A vowel is a sign indicating a certain and determined sound. From which we learn that vowels among the Hebrews are not letters; and therefore among the Hebrew vowels are called souls of letters, and letters without vowels are bodies without souls” (emphasis in original). Spinoza’s langauge parallels the formulation in Zohar Ḥadash, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), 73c: “All of the letters are like a body without a soul [ke-​gufa be-​la nafsha]. When the vowels come forth, this body is established in its existence [itqayyam be-​qiyyumeih], and then it is written ‘and man became a living soul’ [wa-​yehi ha-​adam le-​ nefesh ḥayyah] (Genesis 2:7), and all of them emerged from one point [Ḥokhmah]. When the letters came forth from the world to come [Binah], they all took shape in the mystery of the human [aglimu be-​raza de-​adam], and they were a body without a soul, until that supernal point was aroused, and it entered clandestinely [bi-​ṭemiru] in the world to come, and all the vowels emerged from that point to establish the letters in their existence.” Regarding this passage, see Elliot R Wolfson, “Anthropomorphic Imagery and Letter Symbolism in the Zohar,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 175–​176 (Hebrew). 266 See Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, translated by Allan Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 337, and other references, including several works of Abraham Ibn Ezra, cited in Wolfson, Through the Speculum, p. 252 n. 264. On the use of ahwy in Abulafia, see references above, n. 35. 267 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 63. 268 Ibid., 98. 269 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, pp. 67–​68. See ibid., p. 103.

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in mind when he describes the name as comprising beginning (ro’sh), middle (tokh), and end (sof). This expression, which appears frequently in Abulafia’s writings,270 and in some contexts is related specifically to the practice of letter-​ combination associated with the seventy-​two letter name,271 in the aforecited passage denotes past, present, and future, the three temporal modes comprised in yhwh. On occasion Abulafia notes that the first letters of the three words when arranged in reverse order (sof, tokh, ro’sh) spell seter, implying thereby that these three aspects of time constitute a “mystery.”272 The secret related to the triadic structure of beginning, middle, and end is underscored further by the numerical equivalence of the terms zeman (7 + 40 + 50 = 97) and amon (1 + 40 + 6 + 50 = 97), the latter term (drawn from Proverbs 8:30) signifying the demiurgical capacity that is attributed to the Active Intellect. Abulafia alludes to this gnosis in the following remark in Sitrei Torah: “And the secret of time [we-​sod zeman] is the confidant [amon], which comprises four letters, and in full it is zy”n m”m nw”n, and its secret is the fifty times [nwn zemannim], and this is the secret of the jubilee [ha-​yovel], the fifty years … and the totality of [the word] zeman in full is ha-​ḥomer, and its secret is nivra, for the matter is created [ki ha-​ḥomer nivra] without doubt.”273 Further support for this interpretation may be found in the following comment in Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq: “And it is known that Uriel is the archon of the face [sar ha-​panim], and he is in the image of matter [bi-​demut ḥomer] before the Torah … and [the letters] zy”n m”m nw”n are also in one image [bi-​demut aḥat], and the confidant [amon], and the angel [u-​mal’akh], and the tree [we-​illan] are clear witnesses in relation to him, and he is the wise one that speaks [ḥakham medabber].”274 It is noteworthy that the Active Intellect, the archon of the face, identified here with Uriel, the “wise one that speaks,” is aligned with the image of time, zeman (7 + 40 + 50 = 97), which is further linked to the demiurgical expressions “confidant” (amon = 1 + 40 + 6 + 50 = 97), “and the angel” (u-​mal’akh = 6 + 40 + 30 + 1 + 20 = 97), “and the tree” (we-​illan = 6 + 1 + 10 + 30 + 50 = 97). The depiction of the Active Intellect as the locus of time cannot be separated from its characterization as the chiasm of space. If we were to put this in contemporary jargon,

2 70 Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 86. 271 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 16–​17, 19, 80–​87; idem, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, pp. 106, 242, 347, 381; idem, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, pp. 8, 10, 14, 17, 18; idem, Imrei Shefer, pp. 181–​182. 272 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 17, 19; idem, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 242; idem, Sefer ha-​ Ḥesheq, p. 8; idem, Imrei Shefer, pp. 181–​182. 273 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 117. 274 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, pp. 29–​30. On the attribution of the title ḥakham medabber to Metatron, see also idem, Maṣref ha-​Sekhel, p. 112, and idem, Ner Elohim, p. 91.

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we would be justified in referring to the Active Intellect as either timespace or spacetime. This is the implication of Abulafia’s reference to the numerological equivalence of the square of each of the letters of the Tetragrammaton, the sum of which is 186, and the word maqom, “place.” By spelling out this word is full, m”m qw”f w”w m”m, which equals 358, Abulafia is able to reinforce the connection between time, space, and the Active Intellect (referred to as the “name of the living,” shem ḥai = 358). Once he establishes this connection, he goes on to make several numerical calculations (all based on the sum 390) aimed at elucidating different features of the androgynous nature of Metatron (zakhar u-​neqevah = ha-​shekhinah = shaddai we-​adam we-​ḥawwah = ṣelem adam we-​ ṣelem ḥawwah). Space and time, we may presume, are themselves expressions of this androgyneity, which is derived from the Tetragrammaton,275 if we multiply by fifteen the two parts of the name that correspond to the masculine form and to the feminine matter, that is, yod he (10 + 5) x 15 = 225, and waw he (6 + 5) x 15 = 165, and the sum of the two (225 + 165) equals 390. Abulafia establishes an inextricable link between time and matter, or, more specifically, the “first matter,” which is applied to Metatron. Thus, at the end of the extract from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, we find the observation that “the secret of time [zeman] is zy”n m”m nw”n [67 + 80 + 106 = 253], and together they are the matter [ha-​ḥomer = 5 + 8 + 40 + 200 = 253], and it is created [nivra = 50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 253],” and in Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, the Active Intellect is described as being “in the image of matter [bi-​demut ḥomer] before the Torah.” Given the theoretical explanations of time that circulated in his day, it should come as no surprise that Abulafia would himself affirm a nexus between corporeality 275 The derivation of time from the Tetragrammaton is affirmed as well by Giqatilla, Ginnat Egoz, pp. 289–​290. On the linkage of the Tetragrammaton and the spatial dimension of the world, see ibid., pp. 372–​375, and compare idem, Hassagot, 28d, where the kabbalistic meaning of the attribution of maqom to God is said to be based on the numerical equivalence of that word (182) and the sum derived from squaring each of the letters of the Tetragrammaton (10 x 10 + 5 x 5 + 6 x 6 + 5 x 5 = 182). The numerology of ḥeshbon and shem yhwh is found in Togarmi, Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 234, and see the translation of the text in Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, p. 142 n. 132. For Togarmi, and for Giqatilla as well, the term ḥeshbon has both numerological and linguistic implications, as it relates to the mathematical value of letters as well as to their permutation; both connotations are aspects of the mystical import of the divine name. See the beginning of Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 229. The play on words between ḥeshbon and maḥashavah appears in the writings of Abulafia as well. See Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 46; idem, Imrei Shefer, p. 46; idem, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 38. See also idem, Ner Elohim, p. 59. On Giqatilla’s relationship to Togarmi and Abulafia, see Shlomo Blickstein, “Between Philosophy and Mysticism: A Study of the Philosophical-​Qabbalistic Writings of Joseph Giqatila (1248-​C. 1322),” PhD dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1983, pp. 109–​115.

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and temporality. In that regard, time is uniquely associated with the concept of a world (olam) that is extrinsic to the divine.276 What is surprising, however, is that space and time are not treated by Abulafia, to use the Aristotelian system of classification, as independent qualities attributed to one substance, but rather as two conduits through which the intellectual overflow of the divine is instantiated in the chain of being. This, it seems, is the import of the reference in Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba to the “universal secret” (sod kelali)—​elsewhere identified explicitly with the Active Intellect, referred to as adam, meṭaṭron, and sar ha-​panim277—​that is called “place” (maqom) and “time” (zeman). This identification of the Active Intellect as either space or time strikes me as one of the more innovative ideas proffered by Abulafia. As he formulates it in another passage from the same work: Therefore, it is written “But where can wisdom be found; where is the source of understanding?” (Job 28:12). The secret of “where” [me-​ayin] is m”n a”y, from [min] alef until yod … And the secret of “source of understanding” [meqom binah] through permutation is he “understands the stature” [mevin qomah], that is, he “comprehends the world” [mevin ha-​olam], “in the midst of the place” [bein ha-​maqom],278 and they are numerically [equal to] zy”n m”m nw”n, which instructs about the created time [ha-​zeman nivra] that is the matter for everything created [ha-​ ḥomer le-​khol nivra], and this matter is called “something from nothing” [yesh me-​ayin]. And when you comprehend these two aspects in truth, which are the time [ha-​zeman] and the place [ha-​maqom], you will comprehend with them the existence of the lower first matter [ha-​ḥomer ha-​ ri’shon ha-​shafel].279

276 See, for instance, Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 71: “The world is attributed to time, and time is attributed to the world.” 277 Abulafia, Sitrei Torah, p. 165. 278 The text could also be vocalized as bin ha-​maqom, which would be translated as “comprehend the place.” Although I do not think it likely, perhaps Abulafia used ha-​maqom in the rabbinic sense as a circumlocution for God. If that surmise is correct, then there is a parallelism drawn between the words qomah, olam, and maqom, which might suggest the idea that the physical world is the corporeal stature of the divine. Such an allegorical interpretation of the ancient Jewish esoteric speculation is attested in medieval philosophical sources epitomized perhaps in the Iggeret al Shi‘ur Qomah composed by the fourteenth-​ century Moses Narboni. See Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 180–​209, esp. 202–​205. 279 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, pp. 27–​28.

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The two facets of the Active Intellect are portrayed in the above passage as Ḥokhmah and Binah, the former comprising the ten separate intellects, the first designated as alef and the tenth as yod (both derived from the word ayin, which appears in Job 28:12), and the latter the embodiment of the intellectual effluence in the material universe, an idea that is substantiated by the scriptural idiom from the same verse, meqom binah (40 + 100 + 6 + 40 + 2 + 10 +50 + 5 = 253), which is transmuted linguistically into mevin qomah (40 + 2 + 10 + 50 + 100 + 6 + 40 + 5 = 253) and bein ha-​maqom (2 + 10 + 50 + 5 + 40 + 100 + 6 + 40 = 253), and numerically transposed into mevin ha-​olam (40 + 2 + 10 + 50 + 5 + 70 + 6 + 30 + 40 = 253). All of these, which can be seen as specifications of the spatial dimension, are linked further to the aspect of time as the word zeman when written out in full has the same numerical equivalence (zy”n m”m nw”n = 7 + 10 + 50 + 40 + 40 + 50 = 6 + 50 = 253), which is also the value of the word nivra (50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 253), “created,” in the expression zeman nivra, the “created time,” a turn of phrase that underscores the fact that the temporal is assigned to matter (if the word ha-​ḥomer were written in the defective form, i.e., without the waw, its numerical computation would be 5 + 8 + 40 + 200, which equals 253, the same sum as zeman when it is spelled out as zy”n m”m nw”n), the “something” (yesh) that issues from the “nothing” (ayin). For Abulafia, therefore, the traditional formula creatio ex nihilo does not denote the volitional and temporal creation of being from nonbeing, but the necessary and continuous emanation of the cosmos from the intellectual overflow from the ens necessarium, a view that, in my judgment, resonates with the opinion of Maimonides.280 The key point is that, in Abulafia’s thinking, time and space are not conceived as attributes of matter; they are matter itself, which can be viewed as spatial from one perspective and as temporal from another perspective. Alternatively expressed, for Abulafia, time and space are correlated with the dual aspects of Metatron, and since the latter is the imaginal configuration of the Active Intellect, it is plausible to speak of the temporal and the spatial as modalities of the divine mind. On this score, the gap between God and nature 280 Many scholars have attempted to articulate the “true” view of Maimonides on creation. Providing an exhaustive list is well-​nigh impossible. See Tamar M. Rudavsky, Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 30–​38, and reference to other scholarly assessments listed on pp. 201–​202 n. 32. For a more recent summary of the various perspectives, see Davidson, Moses Maimonides, pp. 365–​370. Also relevant here is the study by Lenn E. Goodman, “Maimonidean Naturalism,” in Maimonides and the Sciences, edited by Robert S. Cohen and Hillel Levine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 57–​85, and the analysis in Ivry, Maimonides’ Guide, pp. 86–​122.

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is significantly narrowed. As Abulafia observes in Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, “For nature [ha-​ṭeva] is the act of God [ma‘aseh elohim].”281 One might be inclined to interpret this comment in a figurative way, but I am of the opinion that it should be taken in a more literal and precise manner as an affirmation of the divine status of nature and the natural status of divinity, a stance that is supported by the numerological equivalence of ha-​ṭeva (5 + 9 + 2 + 70 = 86) and elohim (1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 40 = 86), which Abulafia proclaims explicitly in another passage from the same work, “the secret of God is nature [elohim sodo hu ha-​ṭeva]”282 I would surmise, however, that just as the other binaries collapse into a twofold unity—​for instance, the left is absorbed in the right—​so space in its originary inception is to be viewed as a manifestation of time. That this is the tenor of the ecstatic experience is implied in the following comment in Sefer ha-​ Malmad: “For his explicit name [shemo ha-​meforash] and the soul [ha-​nefesh] were conjoined and bound in the steadfast bond at the time of creation [be-​et ha-​yeṣirah], and this is the ‘soul of Israel’ [nefesh yisra’el], and this is the ‘beginning of time’ [ro’sh et].”283 The inceptual moment of creation is marked by the conjunction of the Jewish soul and the divine name, a correlation substantiated by the numerical equivalence of the expressions nefesh yisra’el (50 +80 + 300 + 10 + 300 + 200 + 1 + 30 = 971) and ro’sh et (200 + 1 + 300 + 70 + 400 = 971). In the mystical state of conjunction, the Jewish soul assumes the character of the name to which it is attached, and, insofar as the name embodies the compresence of past (hayah), present (howeh), and future (yihyeh), we can speak of the ecstatic experience as the convergence of the three modes of time in the mystery (seter) of the moment that comprises beginning (ro’sh), middle (tokh), and end (sof). To cite once more from Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, Abulafia writes with regard to the name yhwh, “And in its triad [u-​ve-​shillusho] ‘he was, he is, and he will be’ [hayah we-​howeh we-​yihyeh], which are ro’sh tokh sof, and time is entirely without distinction in relation to him [we-​ha-​zeman kullo eṣlo shawweh], which is not so in our case.”284 The secret of the name, therefore, is encoded in the beginning, middle, and end, a mystery further elucidated by the compresence of past, present, and future. Within God the three tenses merge so that there is no way to distinguish between them, which marks a crucial

2 81 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 37. 282 Ibid., p. 70. Regarding the origin of the numerology in Abulafia’s writings and its reverberations in later philosophical sources, see Moshe Idel, “Deus Sive Natura—​The Metamorphosis of a Dictum From Maimonides to Spinoza,” in Maimonides and the Sciences, pp. 87–​110, esp. 90–​93, and compare Harvey, “Idel on Spinoza,” pp. 100–​102. 283 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Malmad, p. 3. 284 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, p. 63.

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difference between the nature of time when viewed from the human and the divine perspectives. Abulafia understands the affirmation of God’s timelessness and immutability not as the absence of temporality but rather in terms of the secret of the intersection of all modes of time in the divine essence. As he writes in Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh: And since he does fall under time, the three times are attributed to him indifferently [be-​shiwwuy], as it is said about him, blessed be he, that he was, he is, and he will be. He was before man, he is together with man, and he will be after man. And so the tradition is that he was before the world, he is together with the world, and he will be after the world. And so the secret is that he was in the past as he is now, and as he shall be in the future without change, for nothing of his actions changes in relation to him and in accordance with his knowledge. All the more so he himself does not change, and inasmuch as his attributes are naught but his essence, his attributes do not change.285 When the mystery of time is viewed linearly, then we may be prone to think of the present as the midpoint that connects the past that is no more and the future that has not yet been, but when it is viewed circularly, the present would be conceived better as a spot in which past and future remain open, where beginning and end can both occupy the position of the middle. In attaining the life of the world to come, one emulates the motion of the Active Intellect “whose action is in the image of a sphere that turns in a circular rotation [bi-​ demut ha-​galgal mitgalgel be-​sibbuv iggul], for it acts as it is, it was, and it will be.”286 In this triune unity of the name,287 the eternal is temporalized and the temporal eternalized. By way of conclusion, we may say that Abulafia’s mystical theosophy is predicated on an ontological presumption regarding time as the primal impulse of God in nature as mediated through the light of the Active Intellect, the demiurgical angel, the soul of the universe, who maintains the balance of existence by holding together opposites in the space of their divergence. In Oṣar Eden

2 85 Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh, p. 72. 286 Abulafia, Or ha-​Sekhel, p. 29. See ibid., p. 106, for the diagram of the tenfold circle as an object of meditation, and discussion in Idel, The Mystical Experience, pp. 109–​116. 287 On the threefold status of the name, which is connected with the triadic division of time, see Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 53. For a more extended discussion of the “threefold unity” (shillush ha-​yiḥud) or the “unity of the threefold” (yiḥud ha-​shillush), see Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 131–​133 n. 101.

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Ganuz, Abulafia expounds the matter specifically as it relates to the time of the eschaton: Thus, I will inform you of something greater than this, for the secret of the scale of merit and the scale of guilt instruct about the time of the end [et qeṣ], and they are composed of the account of creation in the account of creation [ma‘aseh bere’shit be-​ma‘aseh bere’shit]. And in the account of the chariot [ma‘aseh merkavah], there are an additional twenty-​two corresponding to the letters, which instruct about the two accounts together [yaḥad = 10 + 8 + 4 = 22]. And, indeed, “merit and guilt” [zekhut we-​ḥovah = 7 + 20 + 6 + 400 + 6 + 8 + 6 +2 + 5 = 460], “the one who sees within it” [ḥozeh be-​tokho = 8 + 6 + 7 + 5 + 2 + 400 + 6 + 20 + 6 = 460], “the script that holds on” [ha-​katuv ha-​oḥez = 5 + 20 + 400 + 6 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 6 + 8 + 7 = 460], which is the “stone” [even = 1 + 2 + 50 = 53] joined together with the “letter” [ot = 1 + 6 + 400 = 407], in the junction of “intellect” [sekhel = 300 + 20 + 30 = 350] and “imagination” [dimyon = 4 + 40 + 10 + 6 + 50 = 110], as the junction of “the angel” [ha-​mal’akh = 5 + 40 + 30 + 1 + 20 = 96] and “the Satan” [ha-​saṭan = 5 + 300 + 9 + 50 = 364]. Thus “holy to the Lord” [qodesh la-​yhwh = 100 + 4 + 300 + 30 + 10 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 460] is in the image of “son and daughter” [ben u-​vat = 2 + 50 + 6 + 2 + 400 = 460], and this is the “created light” [or nivra = 1 + 6 + 200 + 50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 460], which is the “light of the limbs” [or evarim = 1 + 6 + 200 + 1 + 2 + 200 + 10 + 40 =460] from which “the worlds were created” [nivre’u ha-​olamim = 50 + 2 + 200 + 1 + 6 + 5 + 70 + 6 + 30 + 40 + 10 + 40 = 460].288 I end with one final citation from Abulafia’s Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq that weaves together the diverse themes explored in detail in this chapter. The immediate context is an exegetical meditation on the critical verse, “I was with him as the confidant, a source of bemusement every day, toying before him in every moment,” wa-​ehyeh eṣlo amon wa-​ehyeh sha‘ashu‘im yom yom mesaḥeqet lefanaw be-​khol et (Proverbs 8:30): And the secret of “in every moment” [be-​khol et] is “five thousand years” [he alafim shanah] “written” [nikhtavin] “on the script” [al ketav] in the two opposites, “in death and life” [ba-​mawet we-​ḥayyim]. Therefore, it says “I was with him as the confidant” [wa-​ehyeh eṣlo amon] [who is] doubled [kaful]. [The words] “with him as the confidant” [eṣlo amon] [can be 288 Abulafia, Oṣar Eden Ganuz, p. 110.

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transposed into] “it emanated from El and Yah” [aṣulah me-​el we-​yah], and the two of them are the bemusement [sha‘ashu‘im]. The name of the attribute of judgment [middat ha-​din] is El and the name of the attribute of mercy [middat raḥamim] is Yah. Elijah is proof, as is Enoch who is Metatron, and he is the secret of “in every moment” [be-​khol et]. And the secret of the “moment” [et] is “the created light” [ha-​or ha-​nivra], which is “from the soul” [mi-​nefesh], the “scale of reality” [mishqal ha-​meṣi’ut].289 In this extraordinary text, Abulafia offers a succinct summation of his exceedingly complex conception of time. The exegetical springboard for his reflections is the verse in Proverbs that describes wisdom’s intimate relation to God in images of temporality, which Abulafia applies to Metatron.290 The passage begins with the expression that appears at the end of the verse, “in every moment” (be-​khol et), for by attending to the nature of the moment, one can discern the character of time more generally. Numerically, be-​khol et (2 + 20 + 30 + 70 + 400 = 522) is equal to he alafim shanah (5 + 1 + 1 + 30 + 80 + 10 + 40 + 300 + 50 + 5 = 522), “five thousand years,” an expression likely based on the rabbinic tradition that history can be divided into six millennia, the first two correspond to the period of chaos (tohu), the next two to the period of Torah,

2 89 Abulafia, Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq, p. 67. 290 An allusion to the view articulated by Abulafia may be found in the following passage from Togarmi’s Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 233: “Three lovers [ohavim], ‘he is, he was, and he will be,’ and this is one matter [zeh davar eḥad], and it is the universal wisdom [ha-​ ḥokhmah ha-​kelalit], the all [ha-​kol], and this is the three mothers, that is, one in the entourage above, the vessel [keli] that is in the alef, mem, shin [i.e., the letters designated as ‘mothers’ according to the classification in Sefer Yeṣirah; see Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 147, § 17; Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, p. 92, § 17].” Implicit in Togarmi’s comment is the belief that the numerical equivalence of the expressions howeh we-​hayah we-​ yihyeh (5 + 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 10 + 5 + 6 + 10 + 5 + 10 + 5 = 78) and ha-​ḥokhmah (5 + 8 + 20 + 40 + 5 = 78) signifies that the three temporal states are manifestations of the divine wisdom, which constitute the one reality that is the all (ha-​kol), a vessel (keli) for the three matrix letters, alef, mem, and shin, an alternate semiotic demarcation of the three aspects of time contained in the Tetragrammaton. Idel’s reference to this text of Togarmi (which includes mentioning my citation of it in the original publication of this chapter in 2008) to substantiate his understanding of universal wisdom in Abulafia is misleading. See Idel, “The Pearl,” p. 118 n. 44, and idem, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, p. 220 n. 257. Togarmi is simply articulating the point that divine wisdom is the all or the wisdom that is comprehensive of the three temporal modes, which are symbolized by the three matrice letters. In another passage from Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah, p. 234, Togarmi cites and interprets the description in Sefer Yeṣirah of the three mothers in the image of the scale (Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition,” p. 151, § 23; Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, p. 110, § 23), the alef is the balance between the mem and shin, the scale of guilt and the scale of merit.

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and the last two to the days of Messiah.291 I would suggest, accordingly, that the expression “five thousand years” denotes the totality of the historical cycle prior to the messianic advent in the sixth millennium. Abulafia expands on the quality of time by proffering three other expressions that have the numerical value of 522, nikhtavim (50 + 20 + 400 + 2 + 10 + 40), al ketav (70 + 30 + 400 + 20 + 2), and ba-​mawet292 we-​ḥayyim (2 + 40 + 6 + 400 + 6 +8 + 10 + 10 + 40). The first two, nikhtavim, “written,” and al ketav, “on the script,” are alternative ways of communicating that time is a matter of inscription,293 an idea that is a reverberation of two elemental tenets of Jewish esotericism, the semiotic nature of corporeality and the scribal role assigned to Metatron. The third expression, ba-​mawet we-​ḥayyim, “in death and life,” conveys that time is a coincidence of opposites, a motif, as we have seen above, that is also linked to the twofold nature of Metatron, an idea here referred to in Abulafia’s aside that the confidant is doubled (kaful). This idea is reiterated in the numerical morphing of eṣlo amon (1 + 90 + 30 + 6 + 1 + 40 + 6 + 50 = 224) into aṣulah me-​el we-​yah (1 + 90 + 6 + 30 + 5 + 40 + 1 + 30 + 6 + 10 + 5 = 224), the names El and Yah designating the attributes of judgment and mercy, the two faces of Metatron, encoded as well in the word sha‘ashu‘im. The twofoldness is linked to the figure of Elijah, probably on account of his status as being both human and angelic, which is made more explicit in the figure of Enoch who, according to a much older tradition, was translated to heaven and transformed into Metatron.294 In the end of the passage, Abulafia circles back to the beginning by noting that Metatron, the being who mediates between human and

2 91 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a. 292 I have accepted the emendation of the printed text from ka-​mawet (the reading preserved in ms New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Mic. 1801, fol. 33b) to ba-​mawet, since this change is necessary to attain the correct sum of 522. I assume, therefore, that in this instance the manuscript witness is a scribal error. 293 Compare Abulafia, Imrei Shefer, p. 34: “Time is entirely enumerated [ha-​zeman kullo nispar], and it is called ‘the scribe’ [ha-​sofer], for it is the one who writes [ha-​kotev], and it is the scribe [ha-​lavlar], the scripter [sofer], for it writes the letters one by one.” Abulafia here is obviously drawing on the tradition that Metatron is the celestial scribe. See Wolfson, Through a Speculum, p. 259 and reference cited in n. 300. See above, n. 154. Given Abulafia’s portrayal of Metatron as the personification of time, it makes sense that he would describe the latter as well in scribal terms. 294 For discussion of this motif and references to other scholarly treatments, see Moshe Idel, “Enoch is Metatron,” Immanuel: A Bulletin of Religious Thought and Research in Israel 24/​ 25 (1990): 220–​239, and the extensive analysis in Orlov, The Enoch-​Metatron Tradition. For an assessment of Idel’s methodology as it pertains to this theme, see Lawrence Kaplan, “Adam, Enoch, and Meṭaṭron Revisited: A Critical Analysis of Moshe Idel’s Method of Reconstruction,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 6 (2001): 73–​119.

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angel, is the secret of “in every moment” (be-​khol et), substantiating the point by observing that the word et (70 + 400 = 470) has the same numerical value as ha-​or ha-​nivra (5 + 1 + 6 + 200 + 5 + 50 + 2 + 200 + 1 = 470), mi-​nefesh (40 + 50 + 80 + 300 = 470), and mishqal (40 + 300 + 100 + 30 = 470). In this chain of numerological equivalences, Abulafia imparts his understanding of time as the moment, the instantiation of the created light, the soul of the cosmos, and the scale of existence.

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Retroactive Not Yet

Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality

A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing. walt whitman, Song of Myself

∵ Gershom Scholem famously described kabbalah as a “time-​bound thought.”*,1 In support of his contention, Scholem referred to a passage in the treatise Rav Pe‘alim composed in the thirteenth century by Isaac Ibn Laṭif, “Whatever is found in the heart of the sage without duration [shehut] and without time [zeman] is called wisdom, and every image of a true matter that does not exist in itself without time [we-​khol ṣiyyur davar amitti she-​eino maṣuy be-​aṣmo be-​lo

* “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” was originally published in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 15–​50. 1 Gershom Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Paul Mendes-​Flohr (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 35. See Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “The Relations between Mysticism and Philosophy in the Teachings of Rabbi Isaac Ibn Latif,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, 3–​4 (1987): 368–​369 (Hebrew); Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-​Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 288 n. 24.

© Elliot R. Wolfson, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449343_005

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zeman] is not wisdom at all. The one who relies upon it is not a sage but a kabbalist.”2 Let me preface the ensuing analysis with a brief methodological clarification. As I am wont to do in my scholarship, in this chapter, too, I will use the text of Ibn Laṭif as a springboard to reflect on the larger philosophical issue concerning the relationship of time and image. This is not to say that I think kabbalistic texts present the reader with a coherent epistemology or a systematic ontology. I am, nevertheless, committed to the supposition that one may engage these sources philosophically and thereby elicit from them insights that will contribute to the ongoing interrogation of 2 Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Rav Pe‘alim, edited by Samuel Schoenblum (Lemberg: Anna Wajdowicz, 1885), sec. 39, 14a; Hannah Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” ma thesis, Bar-​ Ilan University, 1974, p. 27 (Hebrew). Heller-​Wilensky, “The Relations between Mysticism and Philosophy,” p. 370, suggests that the temporal nature of kabbalistic thought relates to the fact that this wisdom is transmitted orally from the master to the disciple, a dialogical process that unfurls in time. Ibn Laṭif’s theory of temporality has been discussed by several other scholars: Deborah Schechterman, “Studies in the Short Version of Sha‘ar ha-​ Shamayim of Isaac Ibn Laṭif,” ma thesis, University of Haifa, 1980, pp. 107–​113 (Hebrew); Yossi Esudri, “Studies on the Philosophy of R. Isaac Ibn Latif: Profile, Knowledge and Prophecy, and a Critical Edition of Zurat ‘Olam,” PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2008, pp. 208–​214 (Hebrew); and compare my own reflections in Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 360–​362 n. 37. See the more recent exploration of this theme by my student Guadalupe González Diéguez, “Isaac ibn Laṭif (1210–​1280) Between Philosophy and Kabbalah: Timeless and Timebound Wisdom,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 2014, pp. 239–​325. The chapter begins with the aforementioned passage from Rav Pe‘alim. Additionally, she cites this text on p. 221, in support of her claim that Ibn Laṭif integrates the messianic age “in a temporal scheme of cosmic cycles which he derives from esoteric exegesis of the Bible” (p. 220). This theme is discussed in greater detail, op. cit., pp. 262–​318. I have offered a different explanation of this passage. The temporal implications of Ibn Laṭif’s theory of cosmic cycles have also been explored by Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “Messianism, Eschatology, and Utopia in the Philosophic-​Mystical Current of Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century,” in Messianism and Eschatology: A Collection of Essays, edited by Zvi Baras (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1983), pp. 221–​237 (Hebrew); Ḥaviva Pedaya, Naḥmanides: Cyclical Times and Holy Text (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003), pp. 22–​23, 216–​217 (Hebrew). Both Wilensky and Pedaya suggest that, with regard to this matter, Ibn Laṭif may have been influenced by Ismā‘īlī theology. For fuller treatment of this topic, see Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “The ‘First Created Being’ in Early Kabbalah and Its Philosophical Sources,” in Studies in Jewish Thought, edited by Sara O. Heller Wilensky and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989), pp. 272–​276 (Hebrew); English ­translation in Jewish Intellectual History in the Middle Ages [Binah: Studies in Jewish History, Thought, and Culture, vol. 3], edited by Joseph Dan (Westport: Praeger, 1994), pp. 72–​74.

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speculative questions that have perplexed thinkers through the centuries. This method is to be differentiated from the more historiographical orientation that puts its focus on the relationship of medieval kabbalists to the philosophical literature of their day.3 As important as this line of research is, my concern here is not with the chronological alignment of the ducks, as it were, but with the more constructive use we can make of kabbalistic sources. 1

Alef and the Immeasurability of Eternal Time

What, then, may we glean from the pairing of the role of the image (ṣiyyur) and temporality (zeman) in the aforecited remark from Rav Pe‘alim? Ibn Laṭif’s deliberately laconic aphorism is far from clear. Minimally, we can deduce that, corresponding to a distinction he makes in Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim between the “masters of rational analysis” (ba‘alei shiqqul ha-​da‘at)4 and the prophets (nevi’im), who are described as “those who receive from the true sages” (mequbbalim me-​ḥakhmei ha-​emet),5 he distinguished sharply between philosopher

3

4

5

The attempt to clarify this question has roused the interest of various scholars through the generations. It has been a pivotal part of my own work. See, for example, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hebraic and Hellenistic Conceptions of Wisdom in Sefer ha-​Bahir,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 147–​176, esp. 148–​156; and compare the insightful discussion of the “philosophical ethos” cultivated by the early Provençal and Spanish kabbalists in Jonathan Dauber, Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah (Leiden: Brill, 2012). The expression shiqqul ha-​da‘at, which literally means the “weighing of knowledge,” is a rabbinic idiom (see, for example, Palestinian Talmud, Ketuvot 9:2, 33a; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 6a, 33a), which was appropriated in medieval Hebrew parlance to refer to the art of ratiocination, the dexterity that is characteristic of the philosophers. It is used frequently by Abraham Ibn Ezra. See Irene Lancaster, Deconstructing the Bible: Abraham ibn Ezra’s Introduction to the Torah (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 83; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2014/​entries/​ibn-​ezra/​. It is reasonable to assume that Ibn Ezra was the source for Ibn Laṭif’s own utilization of the expression ba‘alei shiqqul ha-​da‘at as a synonym for the philosophers (see, for example, Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 22b). Regarding the link between Ibn Ezra and Ibn Laṭif, see Sara O. Heller-​Wilensky, “On the Question of the Authorship of Sefer Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim Attributed to Abraham Ibn Ezra,” Tarbiz 32 (1963): 277–​295 (Hebrew). Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 12a. See ibid., fol. 21b, where a distinction is made between the “level of speculation” (ma‘alat ha-​iyyun) and the “level of the true tradition” (ma‘alat ha-​qabbalah ha-​amittit). Compare

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(ḥakham) and kabbalist (mequbbal).6 However, in contrast to the earlier work, wherein the spiritual vision (mar’eh ruḥanit) is characterized as seeing the “secret of the supernal beings [sod ha-​elyonim] in one timeless moment [be-​ rega eḥad be-​lo zeman],”7 in the latter work, it is the wisdom (ḥokhmah) of the philosopher that is represented as a form of atemporal cognition,8 whereas the object of the kabbalist—​presumably a secret (sod) that can be neither comprehended by discursive reason nor explicated fully in writing9—​is the image of the true matter (ṣiyyur davar amitti) that is dependent on time.

6 7 8

9

Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, edited by Zalman Stern (Wien: Adalbert della Torre, 1860), ch. 27, p. 41 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 72), where the “masters of rational analysis” (ba‘alei shiqqul ha-​da‘at) are contrasted with “the prophets, who speak through the holy spirit” (ha-​nevi’im ha-​medabberim be-​ruaḥ ha-​qodesh). I have accepted the emendation of the printed text ha-​nivra’im, “the created beings,” to ha-​nevi’im, “the prophets,” first suggested by Hannah Kasher, “On the Meaning of the Terms ‘Kabbalah’ and ‘Kabbalist’ in the Writings of Laṭif,” Da‘at 42 (1999): 8 (Hebrew). For a different explanation of the term “kabbalist” in this context, see Kasher, “On the Meaning,” pp. 8–​9. On the contrast between prophet and philosopher in Ibn Laṭif, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 118–​119. Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 12a. Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” p. 27 n. 1, cites a parallel to this passage in Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Perush Megillat Qohelet (Jerusalem: Maqor, 1969), p. 48. She also traces this idea of atemporal wisdom to Ibn Sina and notes that it is mentioned by Judah Halevi (Sefer ha-​Kuzari, translated, annotated, and introduced by Yehuda Even Shmuel [Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1972], 5:12, p. 203) and accepted by Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963], 2:38, p. 377). See, for instance, Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 5b; idem, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, edited by Adolf Jellinek, in Kokhvei Yiṣḥaq 33 (1866): ch. 27, 10. Ibn Laṭif’s hermeneutic of esotericism, influenced by the rhetoric of Maimonides, is stated succinctly in Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 6b: “The essence of my intention is a hidden explication [be’ur mekhusseh], to conceal that which is alluded to in the allusion [ha-​nismhal ba-​mashal], the object in the subject [ha-​ nasuy ba-​nose].” The exact language is repeated in Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, edited by Adolf Jellinek, in Kokhvei Yiṣḥaq 28 (1862): 7. On the use of the parable (mashal) to elucidate hidden matters, see Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 26, p. 39 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 69). See also Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 11a: “My intention in the matter of the secrets and the mysteries will be to transmit of them chapter headings through profound allusions like one who reveals a handbreadth and conceals two handbreadths. What is disclosed will be for one who understands from his own mind, but if one does not understand, one will not succeed because it is sealed.” In the continuation, Ibn Laṭif states that the comprehension (havanah) of the “wondrous and hidden matters” requires a “pure and impeccable contemplation” (iyyun zakh we-​ naqi). This locution is used on a number of occasions by Ibn Laṭif; see, for instance, op. cit., fol. 20a. The secrets, which are related to the “words of the prophets and those who speak through the holy spirit,” exceed demonstrative reason, but they cannot be apprehended except by one who has mastered the various philosophical disciplines. As he puts it, op. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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It lies beyond the scope of this study to examine the complex blend of philosophical and kabbalistic elements in Ibn Laṭif’s thought,10 a subject that has

10

cit., fol. 33a, “Every prophet is a philosophical sage but no philosopher is a prophet until all these honorable gradations are united with him.” The prophetic soul (nefesh ha-​nevu’it) is superior to the philosophical soul (nefesh ha-​filosophit), which is a form for the rational faculty (ṣurah la-​medabberet). On five “supernal mysteries of the Torah”—​the unity of the divine comprehended through the name of ten letters (the Tetragrammaton written out in full), the connection of the eternal and the creation of the world, the form of prophecy and revelatory visions, the form of the earth and the seas, and the ostensible conflict between the literal meaning of Scripture and truths ascertained on the basis of demonstrative reason—​that cannot be ascertained by the philosophers or the masters of speculation, see Ibn Laṭif, Rav Pe‘alim, secs. 80–​86, 25b-​27a (Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” sec. 81–​87, pp. 55–​61); Esudri, “Studies,” pp. 227–​232; Wolfson, A Dream, p. 361 n. 37. On the superiority of the prophet over the philosopher in Ibn Laṭif’s teaching, see Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “The Dialectical Influence of Maimonides on Isaac Ibn Latif and Early Spanish Kabbalah,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 7 (1988): 298–​299 (Hebrew); English version: “The Guide and the Gate: The Dialectical Influence of Maimonides on Isaac Ibn Latif and Early Spanish Kabbalah,” in A Straight Path—​Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture: Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman, edited by Ruth Link Salinger (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 273–​274. On the use of the rabbinic criterion for the disclosure of secrets, understanding on one’s own, mevin mi-​da‘ato (Mishnah, Ḥagigah 2:1), see Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fol. 42b. In that context—​and many more examples could have been adduced—​it does not appear that the expression “hidden secret” (sod nistar) refers to anything but an accepted philosophical conception; that is, to be more specific, the phrase “a still, subtle voice,” qol demamah daqqah (1 Kings 19:12) denotes the divine word that is without any vocal articulation (davar beli qol). On fol. 44b, Ibn Laṭif uses the expression “simple spiritual word” (dibbur ha-​ruḥani ha-​pashuṭ), and on fol. 55a, he writes that “the first will [ḥefeṣ ha-​ri’shon] precedes the simple word [dibbur ha-​pashuṭ], which is described as a ‘subtle voice’ [demamah daqqah], a primordiality of a unique existence that is boundless [qadimat meṣi’ut meyuḥedet beli nigbelet]. … And to this Elijah, blessed be he, intimates in his saying ‘a still, subtle voice’ [qol demamah daqqah], that is, the voice that issues from the subtlety [demamah], which is described as the spiritual word [dibbur ha-​ruḥani].” Ibn Laṭif hints at the secret of the word (dibbur) and the voice (qol) from between the two cherubim in Ṣurat Olam, ch. 7, p. 13 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 21). For a more comprehensive discussion of the hermeneutical strategies of Ibn Laṭif, see González Diéguez, “Isaac ibn Laṭif,” pp. 97–​148. Finally, let me note that Ibn Laṭif also accepted the negative theology endorsed by Maimonides and thus he emphasized that there is no way to comprehend the “ultimate truth” of the “substance of God” (mahut ha-​el), also identified as the “first cause” (ha-​sibbah ha-​ri’shonah), the “cause of all causes” (sibbat kol ha-​sibbot), the “incomprehensible primordial existence” (meṣi’ut qadmon beli mussag), and the “one true unity” (eḥad aḥdut amittit). By the logic of the via negativa, to say that God is eternal means that he is not created; to say that God is one means that he is not composite; and so on. See Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 335, fols. 17b-​18a, 45b; idem, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, ch. 3, p. 10. Interestingly, in the introduction to his Minḥat Yehudah, a commentary on Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut (Mantua, 1558), 3b, Judah Ḥayyat instructed the reader to study the works of the Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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been addressed by a number of scholars,11 but there is one point that is worth pondering as it has important ramifications for understanding the nature of time. I have in mind the discussion in Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim of the doctrine of the temporal creation of the world (ḥiddush ha-​olam) from absolute nothing (afisah muḥleṭet)12 versus belief in the eternity of the world (qadmut ha-​ olam), whether understood in the Platonic version (the world was shaped from pre-​existent matter) or in the Aristotelian version (the world as it is always existed).13 His explicit declarations notwithstanding, the view on creation that he espoused does not accord perfectly with what became in medieval rabbinic culture the traditional reading of the scriptural narrative. Precisely the point of disparity provides a window through which we can better fathom his perspective on time and the imagination.

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12

13

“divine sage” (ha-​ḥakham ha-​elohi) Ibn Laṭif with caution, since with respect to the wisdom of kabbalah, “one of his feet was inside and one of his feet was outside.” See Moshe Idel, “On Kabbalah in R. Judah Moscato’s Qol Yehudah,” in Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16th-​17th Centuries, edited by Giuseppe Veltri and Gianfranco Miletto (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 62–​63. Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “Isaac Ibn Latif’s ‘The Gate of Heaven’: A Mystical Guide of the Perplexed,” in Perspectives in Jewish Learning, vol. 2, edited by Moses A. Shulvass (Chicago: Spertus College of Judaica, 1966), pp. 17–​25; idem, “Isaac Ibn Latif—​ Philosopher or Kabbalist?” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, edited by Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 185–​223; idem, “The Relations between Mysticism and Philosophy;” idem, “The Dialectical Influence,” pp. 289–​306 (“The Guide and the Gate,” pp. 266–​278); idem, “The ‘First Created Being’ in Early Kabbalah,” pp. 261–​276 (English translation, pp. 65–​77); Shoey Raz, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif and the Guide of the Perplexed,” ma thesis, Bar-​Ilan University, 2004 (Hebrew); idem, “Metaphysics and the Account of the Chariot: Maimonides and Iṣḥaq Ibn Laṭif,” in Maimonides and Mysticism: Presented to Moshe Hallamish On the Occasion of his Retirement [Da‘at 64–​66], edited by Avraham Elqayam and Dov Schwartz (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2009), pp. 133–​164 (Hebrew); idem, “Latif, Isaac b. Abraham Ibn,” Encyclopedia Judaica, second edition (2008), 12:506–​507, available at http://​www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/​jsource/​judaica/​ejud_​0002_​0012_​0_​ 11920.html. Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 6b. See ibid., fol. 19a, where the author uses the expression afisah gemurah muḥleṭet. As González Diéguez, “Isaac ibn Laṭif,” p. 246 n. 18, points out, Ibn Laṭif’s presentation of the traditional dogma of ex nihilo (yesh me-​ayin) corresponds to the idea of creation from absolute nonexistence (lā min shay) as opposed to creation from no-​thing (min lā shay), since the latter could be interpreted as creation out of something that is no-​thing, for existence, primordial matter, is inchoate and indeterminate. Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fols. 18a-​20a. See Wilensky, “Isaac Ibn Latif,” pp. 191–​192. For an extended discussion on the topic of time and creation, see González Diéguez, “Isaac ibn Laṭif,” pp. 242–​252.

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Ostensibly following Maimonides,14 Ibn Laṭif maintains that everything celestial and terrestrial was created concurrently by means of one word (dibbur), which he identified further as the “simple will” (ḥefeṣ pashuṭ),15 a cosmological notion that he casts mythopoeically in the rabbinic idiom, “everything was created in one moment immediately when it arose in thought,”16 or in the mystically-​oriented formulation, all entities were created by means of the Tetragrammaton.17 In support of the latter idea, Ibn Laṭif invokes the dictum from Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, “Before the world was created the blessed holy One and his name alone existed,”18 to convey the coevality of the first cause and the will.19 This secret seems to be implied in the aphorism in Rav

14 15

16 17

18 19

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:17, p. 296; 2:30, p. 350. Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 21b. see ibid., fol. 45b. The role of the will in Ibn Laṭif’s thought can be traced to what is most likely an Ismā‘īlī interpolation of the word (kalima) in the Plotinian scheme of emanated hypostases between the One and the Nous. See Shlomo Pines, “La longue recension de la Théologie d’Aristote dans ses rapports avec la doctrine ismaélienne,” Revue des Études Islamiques 22 (1954): 7-​20; idem, “The Book Arugat ha-​Bosem: Fragments from the Book Fons Vitae,” Tarbiz 27 (1958): 218–​233 (Hebrew); Samuel M. Stern, “Ibn Ḥasday’s Neoplatonist: A Neoplatonic Treatise and Its Influence on Isaac Israeli and the Longer Version of the Theology of Aristotle,” Oriens 13–​14 (1960–​1961): 58–​120; F. W. Zimmerman, “The Origins of the So-​Called Theology of Aristotle,” in Pseudo-​Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, edited by Jill Kraye, W. F. Ryan, and C. B. Schmitt (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), pp. 110–​240, esp. 196–​208; Heller-​Wilensky, “The ‘First Created Being’ in Early Kabbalah,” pp. 262–​266 (English translation, pp. 66–​69). Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 20b. Ibid., fol. 55b. In that context, Ibn Laṭif paraphrases the dictum in Sefer Yeṣirah 2:6 that God “makes all creation and all the things one name, and a sign for the matter is the twenty-​two objects in one body.” For textual variants of this passage and analysis, see Ithamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yeẓira.” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 150, § 22; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation and Text-​Critical Commentary (Tūbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 109, § 22. The passage is paraphrased in the same language by Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 21, p. 31 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 55). The name through which all things are created is identified both as the will (ḥefeṣ) and as the first word (dibbur ha-​ri’shon), which comprises the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 3, 5b. Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 20b. See also Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 6, pp. 10–​11 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, pp. 14–​16). In that context, the name alludes to the “primordial supernal intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​elyon ha-​qadmoni), which is depicted as well as the form (ṣurah) in relation to the “resplendent light” (or bahir), the “simple splendor” (zohar pashuṭ), or the “spiritual light” (ha-​ or ha-​ruḥani), which is the “simple matter” (ḥomer pashuṭ). Ibn Laṭif suggests that the

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Pe‘alim wherein Ibn Laṭif writes about the mystery of the connection between the creation of the world and its primordiality (qadmuto), a secret predicated on the seemingly impossible confluence of two opposites in one subject and in one moment (qibbuṣ shenei hafakhim be-​nose eḥad u-​ve-​rega eḥad).20 Defying the law of noncontradiction, we are compelled to say that the world is both created and eternal, insofar as all that was generated temporally was contained timelessly in the infinite will. The paradox can be explained as well in light of the doctrine of the cosmic cycles (shemiṭṭot) according to which the present world is a renewal of the world that preceded it and was then destroyed, and so ad infinitum.21 From that vantage point, there cannot be an absolutely novel act of creation as is implied by the doctrine of ex nihilo—​even the presumed first act of creation, technically speaking, is not out of nothing, since what is brought forth existed already in the divine volition. Extrapolating more generally about the nature of time, we can say that every moment is radically new only to the extent that it is utterly ancient. Time, on this score, extends as a line that revolves as a circle. In any given point of the temporal rotation within the cycle, creation mimics this linear circularity. Hence, what comes to be is what has always been, the same difference that perpetually recurs as differently the same. In the twelfth chapter of Ṣurat Olam, Ibn Laṭif elicits this mystery from the two sacred names, Ehyeh and yhwh, which are compared, inter alia, to form and matter, to the point (nequddah) and the encircling line (ḥuṭ ha-​sovev), to the letters alef and waw. Moreover, the pairing of these names is alluded to in the verses “What was is what will be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) and “Remote and inscrutable is what has happened; who can discover it?” (ibid., 7:24). The cadence of time is discerned as the encircling line of the future that continuously unpacks all that was contained in the impenetrable point of the past.22 This, I submit, is the deeper significance of Ibn Laṭif’s acceptance of the Maimonidean claim that all things were created in one act by the divine will. When read through this lens, the first verse of the Torah—​“In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” bere’shit bara elohim et ha-​shamayim we-​et ha-​areṣ (Genesis 1:1)—​alludes to

20

21 22

name may also allude to the divine will (ḥefeṣ el), which is positioned as an intermediary between the first being (yeshut ha-​ri’shonah) and the dyad of matter and form. Ibn Laṭif, Rav Pe‘alim, sec. 82, 26a (Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” sec. 83, p. 57). On the convergence of the necessary, impossible, and possible in one subject and in one time, see Ibn Laṭif, Rav Pe‘alim, sec. 29, 10b (Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” sec. 29, p. 21). Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” p. 58. Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 7, p. 12 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, pp. 18–​19).

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the tripartite structure of the universe: the intelligible or angelic world (elohim), the celestial world (shamayim), and the terrestrial world (areṣ).23 The subsequent events, delineated in the account of the six days, do not bespeak distinct acts of production, but rather the differentiation of all what was contained in an undifferentiated way in the root of all being, the secret of alef that is before beit, the infinite will that is the origin that prefigures—​conceptually and not temporally—​the beginning and thus bears the form of the world in its entirety.24 This is the import of the claim that all things were created in the immediacy of one moment [rega eḥad], the blink of the eye, the omnitemporal interval that can occupy no space, the nonlocal locality of the instant that bridges the chasm separating time and eternity. The logical principle at work here seems to be that the timelessness of God’s essence precludes attributing any succession to divine action, and hence, with respect to creation, there can only be a single and instantaneous act—​an act without duration—​that issues from the first cause.25 Just as divine omniscience implies that God knows every particular being in an eternal moment, so God creates the totality of the cosmic order in a momentary but never-​ ending flash. Seemingly deviating from Maimonides, Ibn Laṭif infers from this notion of simultaneity that divine creativity is expressive of perpetual volition26—​a stance that approximates the theory of occasionalism—​insofar 23 24 25

26

Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fols. 45a-​b. Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 6, p. 11 and ch. 25, p. 38 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, pp. 17 and 67). In the second of these passages, Ibn Laṭif distinguishes between the alef and the first created being (nivra ha-​ri’shon), which is the archon (sar) of the alef. Zimmerman, “The Origins,” p. 204. In kabbalistic literature, the principle is articulated clearly by Yiṣḥaq Isaac Ḥaver Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1964), Netiv Olam ha-​Tiqqun, ch. 10, 69a: “If all the lights were illumined in one moment, then time would be abrogated and there would be the aspect of eternality [niṣḥiyyut] in relation to which past, future, and present are not appropriate.” Based on this principle, and the corollary assumption that each moment of time must be distinctive, Wildmann concludes that the process of tiqqun in this world occurs successively (be-​hadragah) rather than simultaneously (be-​vat aḥat), although he entertains the possibility that in the world to come time will be nullified and hence all the lights will shine in tandem. The question of the attribution of timelessness, eternity, sempiternity, or omnitemporality to God is a complex matter that has been discussed by various philosophers. See, for instance, William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001); the essays by Paul Helm, Alan G. Padgett, William Lane Craig, and Nicholas Wolterstorff included in God & Time: Four Views, edited by Gregory E. Ganssle (Downers Grove: InterVasity Press, 2001); and the collection of studies in God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature, edited by Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). I am not certain that the emphasis on the will as the agent of creation in Ibn Laṭif signifies a renunciation of emanationism for the sake of affirming a voluntarism that is in more

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as the “first mover produces constantly without cessation [oseh tamid beli hefseq], for if the mover stops moving even for one small second, the reality of the natural world—​in its generalities and in its particularities—​would be obliterated.”27 The time of creation, accordingly, is an eternal now, the nunc stans, which is both the fullness of time and outside the flow of time. Read as philosophical allegory, the story of creation instructs us that time in its most rudimentary comportment is to be calibrated from the vantage point of the Tetragrammaton,28 which comprises the compresence of the three temporal modes in the ever-​changing but immutable flux of the present that is always the same because always different. In the thirty-​third chapter of Ginzei ha-​Melekh, Ibn Laṭif links this secret to the “inner and hidden intent” of Ehyeh, the name that denotes (1) the primordiality (qadmut) and unity (aḥdut) of the first existent (maṣuy ri’shon); (2) the existence (meṣi’ut) of the first created being (nivra ha-​ri’shon), which contains all created beings in its existence for a thousand generations, a cipher that stands for a cosmic cycle or aeon; and (3) the thirty-​two paths of wisdom that illumine the heart from the thirty-​two divine intelligible forms (ṣurot sikhliyyot elohiyyot), encoded both in the thirty-​two occurrences of the word elohim in the first chapter of Genesis and in the word kavod, “glory,” whose numerical value is thirty-​two (kaf = 20 + bet = 2 + waw = 6 + dalet = 4).29 That all things originate from and are contained within these thirty-​two forms is a mystery that no one can comprehend, u-​me-​hem u-​va-​hem nimṣa ha-​kol we-​ein mevin. The secret of Ehyeh, moreover, alerts us to the inaccessibility of the substance (mahut) of God, on the one hand, and to the attachment of the influx of the

27

28 29

accord with the traditional creationism. I think the argument offered about Solomon Ibn Gabirol by Sarah Pessin, Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 53–​65, can also be applied to Ibn Laṭif; that is, the latter’s conception of the will as the principle agent of the divine efflux enhances the emanationist scheme, since all things that come to be through the will are expressive of the divine essence. Creation is a narrative recounting of the originary act of genesis. The question that still needs to be investigated is if the philological distinction made by Pessin between will and desire—​the latter is the word she uses to render the Arabic al-​irāda, which corresponds to the Hebrew raṣon and the Latin voluntas—​can also be transferred to Ibn Laṭif’s ḥefeṣ. Ibn Laṭif, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, ch. 3, pp. 10–​11. For a similar articulation, see Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 55b. In the passage from Ginzei ha-​Melekh, Ibn Laṭif draws an analogy between the traditional view that the Creator is the first mover through the agency of the simple will and the Aristotelian view that the means for the divine causality are the separate intellects. Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 16, p. 25 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 44). Compare Ibn Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 21, p. 30 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, pp. 52-​53).

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divine potency and providence in the world, on the other hand—​in more conventional terms, this name signifies both transcendence and immanence. Ehyeh is ascribed, most properly, to the first existent or to the first cause, since it denotes the “eternal and everlasting existence that has no end, limit, or termination” (qiyyum la‘ad u-​le-​neṣaḥ neṣaḥim ad le-​ein qeṣ we-​takhlit we-​sof),30 and hence it embodies the essential feature of time realized in the futurity of the past taking shape in the eternality of the present. The enlightened (maskilim) contemplate this name and, as a consequence, conjure a mental image of time that mirrors the convergence of past, present, and future that is symptomatic of the demiurgic potency.31 I note, in passing, that in several of his treatises, spanning the trajectory of his literary career, Ibn Laṭif affirmed the view that time exists only within the intellect.32 This conception is referred to by Hannah Kasher as “subjectivist”33 and she suggested as a possible source the statement of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya in Hegyon ha-​Nefesh ha-​Aṣuvah that “time is not a substantial entity” (ein 30 31

32 33

Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, edited by Adolf Jellinek, in Kokhvei Yiṣḥaq 34 (1867): ch. 33, p. 37. On the name ehyeh and its relationship to the Tetragrammaton, see Laṭif, Ṣurat Olam, ch. 7, p. 12 (Zurat ‘Olam, edited by Esudri, p. 18). On the possible repercussions of the kabbalistic insight about time associated with the name Ehyeh, see Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Emergence of Ethical Man, edited by Michael S. Berger (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2005), pp. 171–​172: “The name Ehyeh (‘I will be’) which God reveals to Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:14) conveys an identical idea: I am and remain present; not merely sometime and somewhere but in every now and in every here (Buber, Moses, p. 52). Why? Because I am entangled in the historical occurrence; I co-​participate in the historical drama on account of my covenant with their fathers, whom Israel embodies now. The Ehyeh of God is eo ipso the assurance for the Ehyeh of the charismatic personality. … Covenant existence is historical existence in its full uniqueness; existence in a present in which future and past converge. … The uniqueness of such a historical existence consists in projecting a present onto a mystical future, and vice-​versa in tying it in with a dim past.” For discussion of the passage from Buber to which Soloveitchik alludes, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 27–​28, 296 n. 102. On the kabbalistic influence—​especially as mediated through Ḥabad—​on Soloveitchik’s approach to the simultaneity of time as the coalescence of past, present, and future, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Eternal Duration and Temporal Compresence: The Influence of Ḥabad on Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience: Essays in Honor of Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ingrid Anderson and Michael Zank (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 195–​238. Ibn Laṭif, Sha‘ar ha-​Shamayim, ms Vatican 335, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. fol. 21a; idem, Perush Megillat Qohelet, p. 19; idem, Rav Pe‘alim, sec. 18, 8a (Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” sec. 18, p. 14). Kasher, “Isaac Ibn Laṭif’s Book ‘Rav Pe‘alim’,” p. 15.

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ha-​zeman davar she-​yesh bo mammash).34 I would take issue with this characterization, for the locating of time within the mind, an idea that is well attested in the Neoplatonic tradition, is not meant to suggest that time is merely subjective, but rather that temporal facticity is inherently noetic in nature and hence there is no objectivity outside the mind. Time, on this measure, is the distension or duration of the movement of the soul from one state to another.35 The reference to Bar Ḥiyya as a likely source for Ibn Laṭif enhances the labeling of this idea as Neoplatonic rather than subjectivist.36 Here it is germane to recall another comment in the forty-​first chapter of the same treatise. Ibn Laṭif distinguishes three forms of comprehension (hassagah): speculative (iyyunit), prophetic (nevu’it), and esoteric (ne‘lemet). The first category entails demonstrative proofs of the existence of the first cause derived from knowledge of created existents. The second category involves apprehension of the first cause acting through the simple will (ḥefeṣ pashuṭ) or the spiritual word (dibbur ruḥani). This path is inaccessible to the philosophers (ba‘alei ha-​meḥqar ha-​iyyuni), since it is enabled exclusively by the luminal overflow that emanates upon the prophets through gnosis of God’s names. The third category is limited to the knowledge of Ehyeh, the most concealed name (shem ha-​ne‘lam be-​takhlit ha-​ha‘alamah), which is depicted figuratively as the face that will be revealed in the future in accord with the prophetic pledge, “In that day the Lord will be one and his name will be one” (Zechariah 14:9). Significantly, a hint to the eschatological promise is discernible in the concluding words of the creation narrative, “which God created to be done,” asher bara elohim la‘asot (Genesis 2:3). The “inner intent” (kawwanah penimit) of these words “alludes to the emergence of the comprehension of the hidden secret from potentiality to actuality.” 37 The termination of the creation myth is not simply a comment about the past; it portends the event that will transpire at the end of time. The sealing of creation is thus indicative of the hermeneutical bending of the temporal arc, the crisscrossing of past and future in the present that perpetually renews itself as the reiteration of what has always been what is yet to be.

34 35 36 37

Abraham Bar Ḥiyya, Hegyon ha-​Nephesch ha-​Atzuvah, edited with introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1971), p. 41. Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 8–​9, 13–​16. González Diéguez, “Isaac ibn Laṭif,” pp. 241–​242. Ibn Laṭif, Ginzei ha-​Melekh, ch. 41, p. 16.

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Imagining Time and the Givenness of the Nongiven

It goes without saying that it is not an easy matter to generalize about a phenomenon as multifaceted as the imagination. However, one of its salient characteristics, attested in a variety of disciplinary approaches, including philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology, is the ability to traverse spatial and temporal distances. This is an ability that is facilitated by the transporting quality of reminiscence, which has been long associated with the imaginative faculty. As Eva Brann expressed it, “To the imagination diverse regions of present space represent different slices of time, insofar as they are invested by different memories. … The imagination overcomes the physical necessities of space and time equally.”38 Probing the matter further, we surmise that the ability of imagination to surmount spatial and temporal boundaries is related to the fact that when we imagine something of the present, we not only summon an image of what is indirectly given through sense perception, but an image that is lodged between retention and expectation, the no-​more of the past and the not-​yet of the future. As it happens, in another treatise, Ṣeror ha-​Mor, Ibn Latif offers a description of time related to this very conception: “The temporal present of necessity exists but it is impossible to understand it. Rather it is in the image of the intermediary between past and future; the intermediate image, which is between two nothingnesses, is very difficult for the intellect … to imagine … for there is no intermediary outside the intellect, even for something that exists in actuality, and how much more so for the absolute privation.”39 Ibn Latif is here drawing on an idea that is traceable to Plato: the image is a combination of being and nonbeing; the object we imagine is mentally present but somatically absent, and thus it is, at once, real and unreal.40 Rendered in the technical language of Husserlian phenomenology, the presentification of 38

Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 1991), pp. 615–​616. 39 Isaac Ibn Laṭif, Ṣeror ha-​Mor, edited by Adolph Jellinek, Kerem Ḥemed 9 (1856): 155. I have also consulted ms Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale héb. 982, fol. 80b. For a parallel description of time, see Ibn Laṭif, Perush Megillat Qohelet, pp. 19–​20. In that context, Ibn Laṭif cites the comment of Maimonides, The Guide, 1:73, pp. 196–​197, that “the cleverest philosophers were confused by the question of time and that some of them did not understand its notion—​so that Galen could say that it is a divine thing, the true reality of which cannot be perceived—​this applies all the more to those who pay no attention to the nature of anything.” 40 Plato, Sophist 240b-​c, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, with introduction and prefatory notes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 983. See analysis in Brann, The World of the Imagination, pp. 389–​396.

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the image, whether in the act of recollecting the past or in anticipating the future, is to be contrasted with the appresentationally given object that is characteristic of the appearance of the present in the impressional consciousness of perception. The intentionality of the imagination is to be distinguished from that of perception insofar as the givenness of the perceived object has the character of actuality, whereas the reproductive givenness of the imagined object is characterized as fictive, and in this sense, it can only be given as nongiven and is thus more proximate to the retentional consciousness of memory, in which the absent is continuously made present by the present being perpetually absent.41 The insight concerning the formal affinity between time and imagination is expressed poetically and lucidly by Brann: “An image, as a likeness, is composed of Nonbeing and Being at once, meaning that it is not the original, which in a way it also is; an image is the presence of an absence. In time, as the pure structure of Becoming, that ‘at once’ comes apart as absence turns into presence and presence into absence, as the future that is not yet ceaselessly propels the present that is now into a past that is not anymore; time is thus a present winged by two absences.”42 Alternatively, we can speak of the image as a coincidentia oppositorum of the hidden and the manifest; it both is and is not what it represents.43 The flux of time, similarly, exhibits the heterogeneity of the homogeneous. To paraphrase Hegel, the constituent element of becoming is the movement that consists of the reciprocal passing of being into nothing and nothing into being.44 What is available at any moment is the presence of the actual present, the now that appears to us, but this present lacks any presence apart from the presence 41 Dorion Cairns, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, edited by Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 72–​74. 42 Eva Brann, What, Then, is Time? (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. xii (emphasis in original). 43 In a related, albeit somewhat different terminological index, Henry Corbin educed from the Ṣūfi understanding of the Active Imagination (ḥaḍrat al-​khayāl), especially in the mystical theosophy of Ibn ‘Arabī, the depiction of the image as the intermediate plane, which is marked by the coincidence of opposites of the infinite and the finite, the intelligible and the sensible. See Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, translated by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 218–​219, 272–​273, and the discussion in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Imago Templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-​Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007): 123–​124. 44 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences (1830), translated by William Wallace, with foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), § 88, pp. 130–​131, and see analysis in Brann, What, Then, is Time? p. 23.

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of the recollected past and/​or the presence of the anticipated future, that is, a presence that cannot be accorded the reality of being present outside the absence conjured by the affirmation of negation that is central to the imaginative faculty. It follows that the duration of time is not primarily the property of thinghood or the measure of actual bodies in motion, as Aristotle famously argued, but rather the measure of alteration determined by the extension or stretching (distentio) of the mind backward and forward. This is a crucial aspect of Plotinus’s reflections on time that had a major impact on Augustine’s Confessions and later on Husserl’s lectures on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness.45 To the extent that becoming marks the being of time, we can conjecture that the facticity of the latter is such that nonbeing and being coalesce, not as the dialectical resolution of antinomies but as the paradoxical juxtaposition of contraries that belong together in virtue of their intractable disjuncture. As Merleau-​Ponty put it, “Past and future exist all too well in the world, they exist in the present, and what being itself lacks in order to be temporal is the non-​ being of the elsewhere, of the bygone, and of tomorrow. … Past and future voluntarily withdraw from being and pass over to the side of subjectivity, to seek there not some real support, but rather a possibility of non-​being that harmonizes with their nature.”46 The common sense conception of time as a string of now-​points is meaningful only insofar as it presupposes the synchronization of being and nonbeing in a field of presence that is circumscribed by the absence of the double horizon of past and future. Time and imagination both assume that being is implicated with nonbeing in becoming. Again, to quote Brann: “Imagination and time are related to the brink of identity through memory, which is the presence of what has gone absent through passage. … Therefore, if we want to understand something of imagination, memory, and time, we must mount an inquiry into what it means to say that something is not what it claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by Nonbeing.”47 In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to think about time kabbalistically from the vantage point of an apophasis that emerges from pondering the existence of nonexistence, the event of presence that is always in excess of being present.

45 Wolfson, Alef, pp. 8–​30. 46 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 434–​435. 47 Eva Brann, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. xii.

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Return of the Altogether Otherwise

The imaginary fusion of presence and absence, visible and invisible, imparts to us the key to understanding the paradox of linear circularity, the locution that I have deployed to name a conception of temporality that calls into question the linear model of aligning events chronometrically in a noetic sequence of now-​points stretched invariably between the retention of the before that is no more and the protention of the after that is not yet. The notion of the timeswerve that I have championed calls for the reversal of the standard order, and hence, instead of speaking of every actual present becoming a repetition of a past that induces the expectation of a future, we should readily speak of every actual present becoming an expectation of a past that induces the repetition of a future.48 In the contours of imagination, we affirm the coming to be of what is always yet to come. This inversion is at the heart of the hermeneutical process that has informed the variegated nature of textual reasoning at play in rabbinic and kabbalistic sources, and, I would add, in scholarly analyses of these sources as well. Indeed, with respect to the intricate relationship between temporality, imagination, and hermeneutics, I contend that there is no substantial difference between scholar and adept. To avoid potential misunderstanding, let me elaborate on this last point. I am ever mindful of Nietzsche’s observation, “He who wants to mediate between two resolute thinkers shows that he is mediocre: he has no eye for what is unique; seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes.”49 In this spirit, I have sought to extract and to assess—​at times quite critically—​kabbalistic doctrines from immersion in textual details rather than by providing systematic and/​or totalizing generalizations based on the purported existence of metaphysical absolutes or ontological essences. Neither in theory nor in practice do I advocate for a simplistic flattening of difference implied by the charge of essentialism that has been leveled against me. Appeal to the Derridean différance has been mobilized in the effort to criticize the alleged essentialist nature of my work, but a proper understanding of the paradox of iteration and innovation implied in this concept—​and particularly as it relates to the notion of singularity—​would expose the inadequacy of these 48 49

For the fullest discussion, see the prologue “Timeswerve/​Hermeneutic Reversibility” in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. xv-​xxxi. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, poems translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), sec. 228, p. 145.

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attacks.50 Consider as exemplary the following comment of Derrida about his own writing praxis: “Every time I write something, I have the impression of making a beginning—​but in fact that which is the same in texture is ceaselessly exposed to a singularity which is that of the other … Everything appears anew: which means newness and repetition together. … In the actual writing, of course, I’m well aware of the fact that at bottom it all unfolds according to the same law that commands these always different things.”51 The comment leaves little room for ambiguity: everything must appear as new but newness is unintelligible without the presumption of repetition. The perspective of Derrida, to which I subscribe, is in basic accord with the observation of Deleuze that the principle of repetition “is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other—​involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted.”52 Deleuze distinguishes the repetition of the same, which presumes the identity of the concept or representation, and the repetition of difference, which presumes the alterity of the idea or the heterogeneity of the a-​presentation. The former involves equality, commensurability, and symmetry; the latter, inequality, incommensurability, and dissymmetry.53 Even in the latter case, however, heterogeneity entails that we find the singularity within

50

Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 100–​101, and my rejoinder in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition,” in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and Mihaela Frunză (Cluj-​Napoca: Provo Press, 2008), pp. 159–​184, esp. 168–​177. See also Moshe Idel, “Ascensions, Gender and Pillars in Safedian Kabbalah,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 25 (2011): 55–​108, esp. 104–​105 and 107–​108. Idel’s comment that my stance is “still an open question” is surely true but ultimately trivial to the extent that it applies to every scholar, including Idel, and even his assertion that what I have written is an open question is itself an open question. If Idel were genuinely committed to différance, one wonders what would motivate him to invest so much time and energy to pass judgment repeatedly on the views that I have adopted. The fanatical need to criticize my scholarship coupled with the fervent tone of condemnation hardly suggests a portrait of someone genuinely devoted to the aporetic indeterminacy fostered by deconstruction or postmodernism. In the absence of an interpreter, texts are mute; a text speaks only through the voice of a reader, and, on this principle, the texts cited by Idel could be interpreted differently, just as he claims about my own interpretation of texts. 51 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb, translated by Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 47. 52 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 23. I have taken the liberty to repeat my analysis in Wolfson, Giving, p. 12. 53 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 23–​24.

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that which repeats, the return of the same in which the same is nothing but the recurrence of difference,54 the ungiven that is the prerequisite of all that is given, the principle of nonphenomenality that accounts for the phenomenality of every phenomenon.55 The masking of the dissimilar in the pretense of the similar constitutes the elemental paradox of temporal becoming: “Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself.”56 Hence, the “repetition of dissymmetry is hidden within symmetrical ensembles or effects; a repetition of distinctive points underneath that of ordinary points; and everywhere the Other in the repetition of the Same. This is the secret, the most profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts.”57 The following Deleuzian depiction of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence could well serve as a succinct summary of what I will here present as the kabbalistic conception of time: Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world … in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back “the same,” but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity … the identity of difference … Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different.58 There is no self-​same and stable being that persists in the becoming; the being of that which becomes is nothing other than the process of return. The only thing that does not change is the inevitability of change necessitated by the continuous passage of time. It follows, moreover, that in each moment there is a merging of the three temporalities: The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. … We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same.” It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that 54 Ibid., pp. 90–​91, 242–​243. 55 Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 52–​53. 56 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 17. 57 Ibid., p. 24. 58 Ibid., p. 41.

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constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. … Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. … Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different.59 A similar approach to time can be elicited from the “future thinking” (künftige Denken) and the grounding of the place of the moment (Augenblicksstätte) that Heidegger enunciated after the so-​called Kehre in the 1930s. For example, in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), composed between 1936–​38 but not published until 1989, Heidegger writes explicitly that with respect to the question of being (Seinsfrage) and the wish to traverse its course in the hope of retrieving the lineage of antiquity, the matter of repetition (Wiederholung) means “to let the same, the uniqueness of being, become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. ‘Again’ means here precisely ‘altogether otherwise’ [‘Wieder’ besagt hier gerade: ganz anders].”60 Prima facie, one would not expect the concept of “the same” (das Selbe) to be glossed as the “uniqueness of being” (Einzigkeit des Seyns), since sameness, by definition, is diametrically opposed to uniqueness. However, in Heideggerian terms, there is no opposition, for to be attuned to the same, which is contrasted with the identical (das Gleiche),61 one must retrieve the opening that is repeatedly different,62 the event (Ereignis) of the other beginning (der andere Anfang) that 59 60

61

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Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 48. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 33, p. 58 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [ga 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 73. I am here expanding on the discussion of this aphorism in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 243–​244. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated and with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 45; German text: p. 111. On the distinction between selfsameness (Selbigkeit) and identicalness (Gleichheit), see Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, translated by Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 25; idem, Feldweg-​Gespräche [ga 77] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p. 39. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 41; idem, Einführung in die Metaphysik [ga 40] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983) p. 42. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/​veiling Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Secret,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 33–​34, and the sources

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is disclosive of the originary truth (ursprünglicheren Wahrheit), anterior to and concealed within the first beginning (der erste Anfang), the dawning of Greek thought that initiated the history of Western metaphysics.63 Insofar as “every beginning is unsurpassable, it must constantly be repeated and must be placed through confrontation into the uniqueness of its incipience [die Einzigkeit seiner Anfänglichkeit] and thus of its ineluctable reaching ahead.”64 Bracketing the implicit political and ideological importance of Heidegger’s emphasis on the confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) between the two beginnings, what is vital to this analysis is his avowal of the paradox that only what occurs once is repeatable, Nur das Einmalige ist wieder-​holbar, whence it follows that repetition “does not mean the stupid superficiality and impossibility of the mere occurrence of the same for a second and third time. Indeed the beginning can never be apprehended as the same, since it reaches ahead and thus encroaches differently each time on that which it itself initiates.”65 The temporal line is here inverted, for the beginning, which is typically located in the past, is comported as that which reaches ahead, the futural initiation of what returns always as something different, the inaugural event that is neither timeless nor timebound. This event is characterized, more specifically, as the “self-​eliciting and self-​ mediating center in which all essential occurrence of the truth of beyng must be thought back in advance [voraus zurückgedacht]. This thinking back in advance [voraus dahin Zurück-​denken] to that center is the inventive thinking of beyng [Er-​denken des Seyns].”66 The path of thought, also labeled as the “inceptual thinking” (anfängliche Denken) that engenders the “fathoming of the ground” (Ergründung des Grundes),67 is a thinking back that is, at the same time, a thinking ahead to the giving (es gibt) that tacitly offers itself—​Heidegger explicitly draws a connection between the Greek words for substance (ousia) and presence (parousia), an interpretive move that has obvious theological overtones,68 which are expressed most poignantly by the that treat the paradox of the repetition of the origin in Heidegger cited op. cit., p. 34 n. 35. See also Wolfson, Giving, pp. 442–​443 n. 116. 63 Heidegger, Contributions, § 92, pp. 146–​147; idem, Beiträge, pp. 186–​187. See Joseph P. Fell, “Heidegger’s Notion of Two Beginnings,” Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971): 213–​237; Joan Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 112–​114. 64 Heidegger, Contributions, § 20, p. 44; idem, Beiträge, p. 55. 65 Heidegger, Contributions, § 20, p. 45 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 55. 66 Heidegger, Contributions, § 34, pp. 58–​59; idem, Beiträge, p. 73. 67 Heidegger, Contributions, § 22, p. 46; idem, Beiträge, p. 56. 68 Wolfson, Giving, pp. 101–​ 102, 232–​ 233, and consider the other pertinent studies cited on p. 364 n. 89 and pp. 437–​438 nn. 34–​35, to which I would add the following:

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figurative use of the image of the advent of the last god (der letzte Gott)69 that belongs to the “future ones” (die Zukünftigen)70—​in “historical recollection” (geschichtlicher Erinnerung) as the “primordial temporality” (Temporalität). The nature of that temporality is portrayed paradoxically as “the occurrence of the having-​been/​preserving [Gewesend-​bewahrenden] and futural/​anticipating transporting [Künftigend-​vorausnehmenden Entrückung], i.e., the occurrence of the opening and grounding of the ‘there’ and thus of the essence of truth.”71 Heidegger insists that this temporality should not be understood as a form of “lived time” (à la Dilthey or Bergson) that is thought to be superior to the concept of “calculable time.” The time implied in the transporting of the inventive thinking is a continuation of the view of time proffered in Sein und Zeit as a “directive toward, and a resonating with, that which takes place in the uniqueness of the ap-​propriation [Einzigkeit der Er-​eignung] as the truth of the essential occurrence of beyng.”72 The principle of inceptual thinking is such that “all essence is essential occurrence” (alles Wesen ist Wesung), but every essential occurrence “is determined out of what is essential in the sense of the original-​unique [Ursprünglich-​Einzigen].”73 The uniqueness of the event, in turn, is ascertained only through a “more original repetition [ursprünglichere Wiederholung] of the first beginning,” for the beginning (Anfang) “is the concealed, the origin [Ursprung] that has not yet been misused and driven on, Joachim L. Oberst, Heidegger on Language and Death: The Intrinsic Connection in Human Existence (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 17–​47, esp. 28–​36; Aubrey L. Glazer, A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking: Critical Theory After Adorno as Applied to Jewish Thought (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 34–​35; Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 61–​65. 69 Heidegger, Contributions, § 23, p. 46 (idem, Beiträge, p. 57): “The greatest event, however, is always the beginning, even if it is the beginning of the last god.” See also Contributions, § 32, p. 56 (idem, Beiträge, p. 70): “The approach and absconding, the advent or retreat, or the simple remaining absent of the gods; for us in the sovereignty, i.e., the beginning and dominion over this occurrence, the initial and final sovereignty which will show itself as the last god. In the intimations of the last god, being itself, the event as such, first becomes visible, and this shining requires both the grounding of the essence of truth as clearing-​ concealing and its final sheltering in the changed forms of beings” (emphasis in original). And compare Contributions, §§ 253–​256, pp. 321–​330; idem, Beiträge, pp. 405–​417. The adjective “last” does not signify cessation but the beginning that is always on the way to begin, “the beginning which reaches out the furthest and catches up to itself with the greatest difficulty” (Contributions, § 253, p. 321; idem, Beiträge, p. 405). 70 Heidegger, Contributions, § 252, pp. 316–​318; idem, Beiträge, pp. 399–​401. 71 Heidegger, Contributions, § 34, p. 59; idem, Beiträge, p. 74. 72 Heidegger, Contributions, § 34, p. 59; idem, Beiträge, p. 74. 73 Heidegger, Contributions, § 29, p. 53; idem, Beiträge, p. 66.

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the one which reaches furthest ahead in constantly withdrawing and thus preserves within itself the highest sovereignty.”74 The mystery of time is thus suggestive of the truth of the original repetition—​apperceived at all times through the semblance of untruth75—​ the axial truth that is grounded in the discernment that the impermanence of becoming alone is the permanence of being, that what is given in the beginning from the origin is steadfastly the same because interminably different. From this perspective, the “original seeking”—​the seeking for origin—​is a “grasping of what has already been found, namely, the grasping of what is self-​ concealing [Sichverbergenden] as such.”76 The temporalization apposite to this appropriative event of an origin that remains concealed in the veil of the beginning77—​marked by the anomaly of the “again” that is “altogether otherwise”—​is a “remembering expectation” (erinnernde Erharren), the abandonment (Verlassenheit) to the moment wherein “remembering a hidden belonging to beyng” is “expecting a call of beyng,” the “dispensation of the (hesitant) self-​withholding,” which “a-​byssally grounds the domain of decision” and “also makes possible a bestowal as an essential possibility, grants bestowal a space.”78 The mandate of the inceptual thinking is “to think the essence of time so originarily (in the temporal ‘ecstases’) that time becomes graspable as possible truth for beyng as such. Yet this thinking of time already brings it, through relatedness to the ‘there’ of Da-​sein, into essential relation with the spatiality of Da-​sein and thereby with space. … Compared to their usual representations, however, time and space are in this case more originary and are entirely time-​ space [Zeit-​Raum], which is not an interconnection but something more originary in the belonging together [Zusammengehörigkeit] of time and space. This something points to the essence of truth as the clearing-​concealing [lichtende Verbergung].”79 The clearing-​concealing of the abyssal ground (Ab-​grund)—​“the originary essential occurrence of the ground” (die ursprüngliche Wesung des Grundes)—​is 74 Heidegger, Contributions, § 23, p. 46; idem, Beiträge, p. 57. 75 On this Heideggerian theme, see Wolfson, Giving, pp. 48–​52, and reference to other scholars cited on pp. 314–​315 n. 106, to which many more studies could have been added. 76 Heidegger, Contributions, § 38, p. 64 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 80. 77 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? Translation by Fred D/​Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, with an introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 152; idem, Was heisst Denken? [ga 8] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p. 156. 78 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 303; idem, Beiträge, p. 384. On “the remembering expectation of the event” (die erinnernde Erwartung des Ereignisses), see also Heidegger, Contributions, § 31, p. 55; idem, Beiträge, p. 69. 79 Heidegger, Contributions, § 95, p. 148; idem, Beiträge, p. 189.

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identified as “the essence of truth” (das Wesen der Wahrheit) that is grasped as the time-​space, “the originary unity of space and time” (die ursprüngliche Einheit von Raum und Zeit), the “unifying unity [einigende Einheit] which first allows them to diverge into their separateness.”80 The abyss thus gives in such a way that the intensiveness of time is exteriorized as the extensionality of space. Although adamant that space and time are not of the same essence, Heidegger avers that there is an essential juxtaposition such that the presence (Anwesenheit) of the present (Gegenwart) provides the space wherein beings are put into presence. “Time as transporting and opening up [entrückende-​ eröffnende] is in itself equally a granting of place [einräumend]; it creates ‘space.’ Space and time are not of the same essence, but each belongs intrinsically to the other. … The unity of temporalizing [Zeitigung] and the granting of place [Einräumung], and indeed in the mode of presencing [Anwesung], constitutes the essence of beingness: the overcrossing [Überkreuzung].”81 The inimitable destiny of humanity as the custodian of the appropriating event—​ the spatialization of time in the temporalization of space—​is attested in the fact that Dasein alone is assigned the role of serving as the “site of the moment [Augenblicksstätte] for the grounding of the truth of beyng. The site of the moment arises out of the solitude of the great stillness in which the appropriation becomes truth.”82 4

Ṣimṣum and the Replication of Difference

Heidegger’s terminology bears a remarkable affinity to the kabbalistic conception of ṣimṣum, the primordial act of withdrawal of the light of infinity.83 80 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 299 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 379. 81 Heidegger, Contributions, § 98, pp. 150–​151; idem, Beiträge, p. 192. 82 Heidegger, Contributions, § 200, p. 255; idem, Beiträge, p. 323. Heidegger’s views of time have commanded an enormous amount of scholarly interest. For one representative study that treats his notion of Augenblick as the moment of vision and the redemption of being, see Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th-​and 20th-​ Century Western Philosophy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 97–​124. 83 On the comparison of Heidegger’s conception of nothingness and the domain of being’s withdrawal to the kabbalistic speculation on the infinite and the idea of ṣimṣum, see Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 130–​138; Donatella di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, translated by Murtha Baca (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), pp. 172–​73, 285 n. 483. See also Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nihilating Nonground and the Temporal Sway of Becoming,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17 (2012): 31–​45, esp. 40–​41; idem, Giving, p. 346 n. 333; idem, Heidegger and

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I will forego the discussion of possible sources that might explain this affinity other than to mention that the most probable channel is Schelling.84 As far as the resemblance to kabbalistic theosophy, what is exceptionally noteworthy is Heidegger’s depiction of the ground as “that which veils itself [Sichverhüllende] and also takes up [Aufnehmen], because it bears and does so as the protruding of what is to be grounded. Ground: self-​concealing in a protruding that bears [das Sichverbergen im tragenden Durchragen].”85 Astonishingly, the path of Heidegger’s thinking leads to the very paradox that may be elicited from kabbalistic sources in their effort to explain the inexplicable mystery of ṣimṣum, the withdrawal of Ein Sof from itself in order to create a vacuum within the plenum, to make space for the other in the all-​encompassing oneness of the infinite. In an astounding similarity, Heidegger writes about the abyssal ground as “a self-​concealing in the mode of the withholding of the ground” (ein Sichverbergen in der Weise der Versagung des Grundes), that is, through the act of withdrawal the concealment is concealed and the ground is emptied of the fullness of its emptiness. To cite Heidegger’s own kabbalistically-​ inflected language: “The lack of the ground is the lack of the ground [Der Ab-​ grund ist Ab-​grund]. In withholding itself, the ground preeminently brings into the open, namely into the first opening of that emptiness which is thereby a determinate one. … The abyssal ground is the hesitant self-​withholding of the ground [Ab-​grund ist die zögernde Versagung des Grundes]. In this withholding, the originary emptiness [ursprüngliche Leere] opens up and the originary clearing [ursprüngliche Lichtung] occurs, but this clearing is such that, at the same time, hesitation is manifest in it.”86 Utilizing the Heideggerian trope of ontological difference, we can describe Ein Sof—​the infinite essence whose essence, paradoxically, is to lack any essence—​as the withdrawal of being that Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 137–​196. For an early comment on the use of Heidegger to illumine kabbalistic sources philosophically, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 420–​421 n. 241. 84 See Christoph Schulte, “Ẓimẓum in the Works of Schelling,” Iyyun 41 (1992): 21–​40, German version “Ẓimẓum bei Schelling,” in Kabbala und Romantik, edited by Eveline Goodman-​ Thau, Gert Mattenklott, and Christoph Schulte (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), pp. 97–​ 118; idem, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), pp. 296–​323; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 170–​171, 190 n. 249, 193–​194 n. 279, 209–​210, 251–​252 n. 188. On Schelling and the kabbalah more generally, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 100–​104, and reference to other scholars cited on pp. 392–​393 n. 2, 475 n. 49; idem, Alef, pp. 34–​42, 119, 121–​122, 193–​194 n. 225, 194–​195 n. 233; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 8–​9, 18–​19 n. 40, 23 n. 93, 26–​27 n. 118, 104–​105, 119–​120, 167–​168, 172, 205–​207, 209–​210, 214, 221, 282, 300, 363–​364, 367. 85 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 300; idem, Beiträge, p. 379. 86 Heidegger, Contributions, § 242, p. 300 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, pp. 379–​380.

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occasions the manifestation of the myriad of beings that come to light in the concatenation of the multiple worlds. Needless to say, many scholars have written about the theme of ṣimṣum, but little attention has been paid to its temporal implications. If translated into this register, we can say that ṣimṣum instantiates the secret of time as the retroactive not yet, the coming to be of what has already been, not as duplication of sameness but as replication of difference, the original repetition, one might say, the reappearance of nonappearance. I will illumine this point by citing a passage from Sod ha-​Yiḥud, which is part of the treatise Sod ha-​Merkavah, also referred to as Perush ha-​Merkavah, composed, in all probability, by the eighteenth-​century kabbalist and man of letters, Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, known honorifically by the acronym Ramḥal.87 Ein Sof was already perfect as he88 is now and as he will be forever without any modification, but initially the perfection was not revealed in actuality and afterwards it was revealed in actuality. Because he wished to realize this disclosure, three matters came to be: beginning [ro’sh], end [sof], and middle [emṣa]. That is, “the beginning”—​the perfection initially was in potentiality; “the end”—​the perfection afterwards was revealed in actuality; and “the middle”—​before it was revealed. Thus, whether in the beginning or in the end, there is no reality of evil, for everything is good, but in the middle, there is that which appears to be evil, even though in truth it is good, and this is what is called the “name” and the “epithet.”89 87

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Here I am following the conclusion reached by Jonathan Garb, “The Authentic Kabbalistic Writings of R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 25 (2011): 183 (Hebrew). In his painstaking analysis, Garb divides the corpus of material attributed to or associated with Luzzatto into four groups: texts that were authentically written by Ramḥal; texts that were probably written by Ramḥal; texts attributed spuriously to Ramḥal; texts written by members of Ramḥal’s circle. Sod ha-​Merkavah is placed in the second category. The third person masculine pronoun can be rendered in English by the third person impersonal pronoun “it.” While there is justification for translating the references to Ein Sof in this neutral manner, the volitional characteristics attributed by Ramḥal to Ein Sof seem to me to justify using a more personal pronoun. In this respect, Ramḥal’s thinking is consistent with other kabbalists for whom Ein Sof, contrary to what one might expect, is depicted in personal and gendered terms, more often than not, as masculine without a full-​blown feminine counterpart. The feminine quality of infinity is commonly referred to as the aspect of Malkhut that is within Ein Sof. Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Ginzei Ramḥal, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander, second edition (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1984), p. 264. For a more recent edition with extensive annotation, see Sod ha-​Yiḥud, edited by Mordecai Chriqui (Jerusalem: Makhon Ramḥal, 2013). Chriqui, p. 47, surmises that Ramḥal’s Sod ha-​Yiḥud is based on his exegesis of a passage

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All that is contained atemporally in the infinite will of Ein Sof, the “root of all roots” (shoresh kol ha-​shorashim),90 is brought forth in the temporal division of beginning, middle, and end. The eternality (niṣḥiyyut) of this will, also identified as the incomprehensible capacity for perfect goodness (koaḥ ha-​haṭavah ha-​sheleimah), is revealed through an unremitting sequence of novel creations in time until the “secret of the supernal unity” (sod ha-​yiḥud ha-​elyon) is achieved at the end when evil is transformed into good and everything is restored to Ein Sof as it was in the beginning.91 The semblance of duality—​ signified by the distinction between the name (shem) and the epithet (kinnuy), yhwh and Elohim, which respectively symbolize masculine mercy and feminine judgment92—​pertains only to the middle. The rectification (tiqqun) constitutes the perfection of creation (sheleimut ha-​beri’ah) and the true manifestation of the supernal oneness, themes that are well known from Luzzatto’s teaching.93 To cite again from Sod ha-​Yiḥud: Accordingly, there are two types of conjunctions [ziwwugim]: the conjunctions of the middle and the conjunctions of the beginning and the end. That is, the unity needs to be disclosed, and it is disclosed incrementally by means of the conjunctions, for the left is subjugated by the right and the good dominates, and the evil is restored to the good. When it is completely revealed in the middle itself, the beginning and the end are perforce united, for then everything is one—​beginning, end, and middle, from Zohar 1:65a, which appears in the second part of Adir ba-​Marom, his commentary on Idra Rabba. See Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, edited by Joseph Spinner (Jerusalem: Sifrayyati, 1988), pp. 61–​92, and compare the introductory note on the history of the publication of this passage. 90 Luzzatto, Ginzei Ramḥal, p. 265. 91 Ibid., pp. 265, 267. 92 Usually the epithet (kinnuy) refers to Adonai, the appellation by which yhwh, the ineffable name (shem), is pronounced, but for Luzzatto the epithet is Elohim. See Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, p. 39: “Let me now explain the matter of the name [shem] and the epithet [kinnuy] that I mentioned. The [word] kinnuy is equal to Elohim, and this is [the import of the expression] ywhh Elohim.” Based on a passage from Tiqqunei Zohar, which is printed in Zohar 1:22b, Luzzatto observes that the numerical value of the term kinnuy is the same as the name Elohim, i.e., both equal 86. The juxtaposition of the name and the epithet, yhwh and Elohim, marks the conjunction of the masculine and the feminine. 93 See, for instance, Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Da‘at Tevunot, edited by Joseph Spinner (Jerusalem: Hamesorah, 2012), sec. 158, pp. 246–​247; idem, Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1992), ch. 49, p. 179. I accept the deduction of Garb, “Authentic Kabbalistic Writings,” pp. 188–​199, that Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah was probably not written by Luzzatto, but many of the ideas expressed in it are consistent with his views.

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everything is good without any evil at all. As long as there is a middle … there is a distinction between beginning and end, for the beginning is in potentiality and not [in actuality] and in the end it is in actuality. When the middle reverts to being good, the beginning and the end are inexorably joined together, and this is the secret [of the verse] “I am first and I am last” (Isaiah 44:6). … The principle of the rectification [kelal ha-​ tiqqun] is that the lower beings are conjoined to the supernal beings to the point that everything is conjoined to Ein Sof, blessed be he, and then everything is called one. This is the completion of the middle and the union of the beginning and the end, and this is the essence of the true worship. … Initially, the supernal union of perfection is united with the beginning, the perfection is aroused below, and everything is perfected in perfect unity. The beginning joins the end in accord with the aspect that is rectified in the middle through this conjunction. For you have already heard that the unity is revealed intermittently in the rectification of the middle, and through this aspect the beginning and the end are joined, and everything is perfected in one secret in perfection.94 Prima facie, it might seem that there is an inescapable circularity to Luzzatto’s thinking, since the end is envisioned as a return to the beginning in which there is no duality, no distinction between the name and its epithet, between love and judgment, between masculine and feminine. From that vantage point, the tiqqun betokens an actualization of what existed already in potentiality, and hence the commencement can be delineated as that which will be seen in the conclusion.95 A more attentive reading, however, reveals that the differentiated unity at the end is not merely a replica of the nondifferentiated unity at the beginning. To be sure, at the end there is a retrieval of the unity of the beginning, but, paraphrasing the words of Heidegger, what is achieved again is altogether otherwise; that is, the return of all things to the one is not the reverberation of the same but the reclamation of divergence. In Adir ba-​Marom, Luzzatto refers to this process tellingly as the orientation of the infinite will that is disposed toward the power of particularity (koaḥ ha-​ peraṭi), that is, the perfection of the goodness that is the “root of all that exists in the present” (shoresh el kol ha-​nimṣa attah), the eternality through which novel knowledge is constantly revealed (ha-​niṣḥiyyut yitgalleh mimmennu tamid yedi‘ah ḥadashah).96 Just as the novelty of the progressive evolving of 94 Luzzatto, Ginzei Ramḥal, pp. 264, 268. 95 Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, p. 36. 96 Ibid., p. 76.

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human knowledge is anchored in the perpetuity of the infinite beneficence that is beyond knowledge, so the oneness of the universal is calibrated from the perspective of the absolute inimitability of the particular. Time is the measure of this incommensurability, the beckoning of the eternal will that materializes in the temporal enfolding of the middle. In another passage from Adir ba-​Marom, Luzzatto elaborates on the identification of the “secret of time” (sod ha-​zeman) as the “rectification of the middle” (tiqqun ha-​emṣa): This is the secret of time concerning which [it is written] “For every time [zeman] and moment [et], and for every desire [ḥefeṣ] under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). And this secret is the forty-​five [letter name] and the fifty-​two [letter name], and they are verily the rectification of the middle. … And this secret is: forty-​five [‫ ]מ״ה‬and fifty-​two [‫ ]ב״ן‬equal zeman [‫]זמ״ן‬, for all of time is only in them, and the divisions of time are the divisions of the forty-​five [letter name] and the fifty-​two [letter name] joined together as one with the other. Therefore, the unity ascends until the secret of the beginning and the end.97 It lies beyond my immediate concerns to explicate all of the minutiae of this passage, but let me underline the principal point. Time is understood as the unification of the masculine and the feminine,98 signified respectively by the two permutations of the Tetragrammaton, the one that numerically equals forty-​five and the other that equals fifty-​two.99 The theoretical assumption is buttressed by the fact that the Hebrew word for time, zeman, has the numerical value of ninety-​seven, which is the sum of forty-​five plus fifty-​two, a numerology that is well attested in post-​Lurianic kabbalistic literature.100 97 98

Ibid., p. 91. On time and the conjunction of male and female potencies, see Wolfson, Alef, pp. 79, 91, 98 (in this volume, pp. 146-​147, 167, 178). 99 Ibid., pp. 89–​90 (in this volume, pp. 164-​165). 100 Natan Shapira, Maḥberet ha-​Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2005), Sha‘ar ha-​ Sukkot, p. 318. See also Moses Zacuto, Em la-​Binah, included in Remez ha-​Romez (Jerusalem: Qol Biṭḥah, 2008), s.v. zeman, p. 33: “It is already known that time is consequent to the movement of the sun and the moon, that is, the [name of] forty-​five and [the name of] fifty-​two, and this is the numerical value of zeman [7 + 40 + 50 = 97].” See ibid., p. 41, and Immanuel Ḥai Ricchi, Mishnat Ḥasidim im Perush Maggid Sheni, pt. 3 (Szilágysomlyó, 1909), Massekhet Leil Yom Ṭov, ch. 2, 122b, where the word zeman is said to symbolize the unity of the name of forty-​five and the name of fifty-​two, associated respectively with Ze‘eir Anpin and Nuqba. Compare Yiṣḥaq Isaac Ḥaver Wildmann, Beit Olamim (Warsaw: Meir Yeḥiel Halter, 1889), 55a. Commenting on the verse “For every time [zeman] and moment [et], and for every desire [ḥefeṣ] under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1),

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The fuller implications of the gender properties of time may be culled from a third passage in Adir ba-​Marom. Luzzatto remarks that, in the “secret of the beginning” and in the “secret of the end,” the masculine and the feminine are both designated as adam, which signifies that they are in a state of unification (be-​ḥibbur), but in the “secret of the middle,” they are called ish and ishshah, “man” and “woman,” because they appear as two separate beings (kol eḥad le-​ aṣmo). Even so, in the intermediary domain, which is the period of history, the goal is for the lost part (ha-​avedah), that is, the female, to be restored to the male (al ken ṣerikhah laḥazor le-​ba‘aleha), a hyperliteral reading of the end of the account of the creation of man and woman in the second chapter of Genesis: “Then the man said, ‘This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman, for from man was she taken.’ Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:23–​24). When the female is constructed from the male, she is transformed from the aspect of the back (aḥor)—​consciousness (moḥin) is said to be aroused in her in the secret of the face (sod panim)—​and Ḥaver writes: “For the difference between time [zeman] and the moment [et] is that the [word] et is applied to the present time, in the moment that he acts in the world, and [the word] zeman is applied to what will come afterward, and it is from the language ‘to be summoned’ [mezuman] and the future that is coming. … And this can be expressed by way of the secret, for it is known that et is the aspect of the feminine, the name of fifty-​two, and zeman is the numerology of forty-​five and fifty-​two together.” In the same passage, Wildmann links the aspect of et with the governance of Ze‘eir Anpin and that of zeman with Attiqa Qaddisha; the former is the present, which is marked by the polarity of good and evil, whereas the latter is the messianic future, which is beyond all duality. See also Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, Netiv Olam ha-​Tiqqun, ch. 10, 69a; Netiv Parṣuf Arikh Anpin, ch. 11, 92a. In Ṣevi Hirsch Eichenstein of Zidichov, Aṭeret Ṣevi, vol. 1 (Benei Beraq: Benei Shillesim, 2009), p. 246, time is linked to the secret of Neṣaḥ and Hod, the seventh and eighth of the ten sefirot, to which are attached respectively the forty-​five and the fifty-​two letter name. The passage is referenced in Ya‘aqov Ṣevi Yalles, Qehillat Ya‘aqov (Jerusalem, 1971), s.v. zeman, 20b. The numerology appears frequently in the writings of Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov. One particularly interesting text is found in his Derushim al Seder ha-​ Hishtalshelut included in Kitvei ha-​Gaon Rav Menaḥem Mendel, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 2001), 1: 306: “Every rectification [tiqqun] without the fiftieth gate [the letter nun], which is Keter, is teiqu [the word that talmudically signifies the irresolution of a question], and it remains in concealment [bi-​setimu], the secret of doubt [sod ha-​sefequt], and the essence of doubt depends on the purification [berur] of the crowns that are within it, the inner light [or penimi] and the encompassing light [or maqif], the interiority [penimiyyut] and the exteriority [ḥiṣoniyyut], in the secret of forty-​five and fifty-​two. The purification is in the secret of [the names of] forty-​five and fifty-​two, which is the numerology of zeman, ‘for every time [zeman] and moment [et] and for every desire’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1).” I hope to dedicate an independent study surveying the esoteric intent of the notion of sefequt in Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov.

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as a consequence, she is conjoined to the male and the unity is revealed in the mystery of the complete human (adam shalem). The body is then rectified and evil restored to the good. 101 The reconstituted unity of the feminine end (sof) returning to the masculine beginning (ro’sh) is symbolized by the letter zayin, which is composed of the yod that sits atop the waw, the female diadem (aṭarah) that is positioned on the head of the male consort.102 As Luzzatto elaborates elsewhere in the same treatise: I will explain to you the matter of the beginning and the end [sheiruta we-​ siyyuma]. In truth, this is a great and deep secret, for it is verily the principle of governance [kelalut ha-​hanhagah] in general and in particular as it pertains to each one … Thus, the secret of the principle [sod ha-​kelal] appears in the creation of the world, for the world was created in six days, and afterward came the Sabbath, which is repose. Similarly, in the matter of the world, it exists for six thousand years, and afterward there is the seventh millennium, which is the secret of the Sabbath. And, analogously, in the life of a person who toils in them, and in the end reaches the rest, in the secret “they shall have rest on their couches” (Isaiah 57:2). … And the secret of everything is the secret of male and female, for the male is the secret of the head and the female is the secret of the end … And this is the secret of the governance that goes from the beginning, which is the male, to the end, which is the female … The matter is that the beginning of thought [teḥillat ha-​maḥashavah] is the end of action [sof ha-​ma‘aseh], and the beginning of thought is the male and his focus is toward the female, which is the end of action. Thus, the whole time that the male rules is the time of action [zeman ha-​pe‘ulah], and when things reach the female, then everything is in the secret of repose [sod menuḥah] … In accord with this way, the world is governed, for the six 101 Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, pp. 48–​49. Compare ibid., p. 65: “Indeed, I have already explained to you the matter of the beginning, the end, and the middle, for the beginning and the end are both perfect in one way, but rather the beginning—​its beginning is revealed inceptually, and the end is revealed after the deed of restoring the evil to the good has been realized in actuality. But the matter of restoring the evil to the good is done in the middle, for in the beginning and in the end, everything is good. This is in the secret of ‘I foretell the end from the beginning’ (Isaiah 46:10), this is from the perspective that it has already been accomplished—​that evil changed to good. But the middle itself is the restoration of evil to good.” 102 See the text from Qin’at ha-​Shem Ṣeva’ot cited and analyzed in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Tiqqun ha-​Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto,” History of Religions 36 (1997): 331.

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thousand years are in the secret of the male, and they are the time of action and preparation, and afterward in the end is the restful Sabbath, which is the purpose of the world. And similarly in the life and death of the person, for all the days of this world are in the secret of the preparation from the side of the male, and the end of the days are in the secret of the female, Sabbath, repose, when they ascend to rest in their source.103 In the same way that the six millennia, which correspond to the six weekdays, culminate in the Sabbath, the eschaton is marked by a gender transvaluation, the governance of the world by the male will give way to the cessation of activity linked to the female—​a dynamic that is attested microcosmically in the fact that the corporal life of each individual terminates in death. However, the empowerment of the expiration of power is still an aspect of the androcentric construction of gender reflected in the delineation of the potency to overflow as masculine and the capacity to receive as feminine; the privation of activity is accorded a positive valence precisely from the standpoint of the activity that is no longer operative.104 The quality of time can be elucidated further by delving more deeply into the motif of ṣimṣum and the trace of infinity. I will not investigate Luzzatto’s sources nor will I refer to those whom he influenced; I will keep the focus only

103 Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, first part, edited by Joseph Spinner (Jerusalem: Sifrayyati, 1990), p. 94. 104 The persistence of the androcentric construction of gender in the eschaton is expressed in a different symbolic register in the depiction of Malkhut, the speculum that does not shine, in Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, first part, p. 5: “For, in truth, the female is not made except to receive from the male and to overflow to the lower beings. And thus the perfection of her existence is the receiving from the male and the overflowing, and this is lacking from her when she is not yet complete, but when she is complete, the influx is fixed in her. For even though it appears that this matter is outside her, since her light is from the male, it is not so but rather there is perfection of the female, just as a part of her is the overflow of the male that extends in her and he joins her to overflow to her, and in this aspect she is affluent and she has a great light. However, when this is removed, what remains is impoverishment and deprivation. And in the future to come, the light of the sun, which is now occasionally absent from her and occasionally abundant in her, will be fixed in her with permanency. And thus on all accounts her light will not be created anew, but the light of sun will remain in her.” It is hard not to deduce from this text that the depiction of the feminine even in the future is determined from the androcentric vantage point insofar as her change in status is occasioned by the light she receives from the masculine. See the additional evidence marshalled in Wolfson, “Tiqqun ha-​Shekhinah,” pp. 324–​329, and compare Jonathan Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm: R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2014), pp. 208–​209 (Hebrew).

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on his writings, and even this will be highly selective. Let me initiate the analysis by citing a passage from Adir ba-​Marom: Know that the essence of everything is the secret of the soul and the body, for their roots in the [divine] lights are the interiority [ha-​penimiyyut] and the exteriority [ha-​ḥiṣoniyyut]. … Know that in this order the reality of the sefirot was ordered from the beginning of their existence, which is at the time of the contraction [zeman ha-​ṣimṣum]. Greatly understand this matter, for there remained a trace [reshimu] within the space [ha-​ ḥalal], and from it the vessels [ha-​kelim] were made. Afterward the line [ha-​qaw] came into it and from it was made the essence [ha-​aṣmut]. This is the difference between the essence and the vessels, for the vessels are from the aspect of the contraction [mi-​beḥinat ha-​ṣimṣum], and the essence is the secret of Ein Sof, blessed be he, which enters into the vacated space [ḥalal ha-​meṣumṣam].105 The time of the contraction does not refer to an actual time, since prior to the ṣimṣum there is no time of which to speak; it denotes rather the demarcating point whence we can commence to ruminate about temporality, a point that is marked by the triadic structure of beginning, middle, and end. In the pure light of infinity, there is no time, for the oscillation of the latter is dependent on the distinction between the one that bestows and the one that receives, a distinction that does not pertain to the innate nature of light but only to its functional character when the agent of illumination is set in relation to the other that is illumined. In and of itself, light is beyond the contrast between light and dark, beyond the binary of masculine donor and feminine recipient. The wheel of history, which is impelled forward by the tension between these two poles, turns in such a way that the present proceeds according to a sequential order of one rectification after another, a process that leads to the gradual evisceration of evil and its reintegration into the good. In the future, by contrast, everything will be eternal (ha-​kol niṣḥi) and thus all the lights will flow in an infinitesimal moment (rega qaṭan) that surpasses the customary partition of time, the time before time began as a result of the contraction of the light.106 In the fifth principle of Da‘at Tevunot, which is an explication of the notion of the reshimu, Luzzatto writes: “The first time [ha-​zeman ha-​ri’shon] that we now have to explain is the time that his unity, blessed be he, was concealed as

1 05 Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, first part, pp. 88–​89. 106 Ibid., p. 107.

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this day [zeman hit‘allem yiḥudo yitbarakh ka-​yom ha-​zeh]; this is the principle of the time of the worship of man [kelal zeman avodat ha-​adam].”107 Luzzatto is alluding to the new order (seder ḥadash) of governance (hanhagah)108 that comes about as a consequence of the primordial act of withdrawal, the concealment of divine unity (he‘lem ha-​yiḥud).109 The algorithm of historical time is based on the binary of the jurisdiction of good and evil (hanhagat ha-​ṭov we-​ra) and hence it demands a system of reward and punishment that is apposite to human worship. The ultimate purpose of that worship is to convert evil into good and thereby facilitate the disclosure of unity (gilluy ha-​yiḥud) and the comprehensive rectification (tiqqun ha-​kelali).110 Time is commensurate to the trace of light that the supernal will innovates in proportion to the concealment of God’s dominion and unity (zeh kelal ha-​derekh asher ḥiddesh ha-​ raṣon ha-​elyon lefi inyan hit‘allem sheliṭato we-​yiḥudo), a hiding of the face of divine goodness (hester penei ṭuvo), for had the truth been revealed without obstruction, all evil would have been transformed into good, and the durée of time would be dispelled in the limitlessness of eternity.111 The temporal efflux that issues from Ein Sof after the ṣimṣum is like the shadow (ke-​dimyon ha-​ṣel) in relation to the person or the small trace (roshem qaṭan) that remains from the writing on paper after the letters have been removed.112 Following previous Lurianic sources, Luzzatto contrasts the essence (aṣmut) and the vessel (keli), connected respectively to the images of the line (qaw) and the trace (reshimu). The extension of the line, which is an expression of ḥesed, is set in motion by the act of ṣimṣum, which is an expression of din, but the main goal of the withdrawal is to produce the vessels that will reveal the light by concealing it, since the nonmanifest cannot be manifest without being occluded. In accord with the main drift of the Lurianic teaching, for Luzzatto, the process of ṣimṣum provokes the emergence of the dyadic structure of light and vessel that marks the transition from indifferent oneness to differentiated unity. The source of the vessel is the trace that remains in the vacated space within the infinite after the light has been withdrawn. The residual trace, therefore, prefigures the vessel that will receive the light, and thus, in relation to the amplification and expansion of the light, it signifies delimitation and condensation. 1 07 Luzzatto, Da‘at Tevunot, p. 63. 108 Ibid., p. 63. 109 Ibid., p. 80. 110 Ibid., p. 67. 111 Ibid., p. 65. 112 Ibid., p. 66.

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Two things are worthy of our consideration. First, even though the division of the indivisible luminescence produces the dyad of light and vessel, in its source the vessel is constituted by the light that lingers subsequent to the contraction. The dualism of light and vessel thus gives way to a monism wherein the vessel is subsumed in and by the light. Second, even though before the ṣimṣum the distinction between exteriority and interiority was not discernible, the potential for this distinction must have been in the infinite essence based on the principle that the perfection of infinity is such that it can lack nothing, not even the ability to lack. Paradoxically, we must posit the capacity for boundary that is completely incorporated within the boundless. However, we are still faced with a philosophical quandary with respect to the matter of time. The dilemma is captured succinctly in the following passage from Ma’amar Yiḥud ha-​Yir’ah, a text that circulated amongst the students of Luzzatto. Even if it is not certain that he is the author, it is valid to assume the contents are in accord with his teaching: All of the worlds are naught but the disclosure of what was already arrayed in the perfection of the infinite, blessed be he … for the reality of all the worlds is naught but as one who dreams a dream and sees the matter in the imagination. Similarly, the entire potency of the infinite, blessed be he, which has no temporality [she-​ein bo zeman], is seen according to the way of time [nir’eh lefi derekh ha-​zeman], and when one wants to remove the imagination from this—​the reality is thus nothing [harei ein ha-​meṣi’ut kelum], and this is the secret “When you are aroused you despise their image, as one does a dream after waking, O Lord” (Psalms 73:20). … Thus, the infinite, blessed be he, acts in the way of his perfection, and there is placed before him the curtain of withdrawal [masakh ha-​ṣimṣum] in which are dependent all these colors, and they are all the laws of nature from beginning to end. All of these things vis-​à-​vis the infinite, blessed be he, are in a verily different manner, which we cannot comprehend … Similarly, the matter of time is nothing at all but how we imagine nature as it appears to us in accord with the withdrawal [lefi ha-​ ṣimṣum]. So it appears—​in the dream itself it appears to us that days and years pass within one dream, and it seems to the dreamer that this is how it actually is. Analogously, when we are awake, we imagine the matters of nature in accord with what we see, and we call this imagining—​time, as if there could be one hour or one moment like the years of a dream, which are in truth a single moment [rega eḥad].113 113 Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, pp. 150–​151. For an expanded discussion of this passage and related texts, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 118–​119. The

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Luzzatto utilizes an archaic trope in order to elucidate the relationship of the infinite to the finite. This teaching, which probably originated in Chinese Confucianism and Daoism, and was then transported into the various schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, and eventually found its way into both Islamic and Jewish mystical sources, is predicated on the insight that the spatio-​ temporal world is but a dream.114 Luzzatto appropriates this wisdom to explain one of the deepest mysteries of the kabbalah. If we assume, as we must, that everything was contained in the incomposite oneness of Ein Sof prior to the ṣimṣum, then what appears to us as the progression of time itself is simply the manner in which the one single instant of eternity—​a moment marked by the absolute simultaneity of infinite velocity that is infinite rest—​is manifest on the phenomenal plane. On the one hand, we cannot speak of anything position of Luzzatto is famously criticized by Solomon Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai. 2005), pt. 1, 5:8, pp. 162–​163. Eliashiv objects to Luzzatto’s view that all language about the divine realm is to be treated metaphorically since this leads to diminishing the ontic reality of the sefirot and viewing them as merely an apparition (mar’eh) or as an image (dimyon) akin to prophetic visions (mar’ot ha-​nevi’im). See discussion in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 120–​122; idem, “Heeding the Law beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 253–​255; Shlomo Dov Rosen, “Between the Homunculus Fallacy and Angelic Cognitive Dissonance in Explanation of Evil: Milton’s Poetry and Luzzatto’s Kabbalah,” in Evil, Fallenness, and Finitude, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and B. Keith Putt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 57–​75, esp. 68–​70. The radical skepticism about the nature of existence outside the infinite is criticized by Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, 5:8, p. 164: “Furthermore, I have seen very strange things in the words of some kabbalists in our generation, who ponder explanations. For they say that all of existence entirely is only by way of image and idea [dimyon we-​hassagah] and it is not a true reality [meṣi’ut amittit] at all. And this is insomuch as Ein Sof, blessed be his name, does not change at all with respect to his essence and his necessary truth, and thus he is now also as he was verily prior to the creation, for there is no place devoid of him [Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), § 57, 91b, § 70, 122b] as is known. … And therefore they say that, in truth, there is no other reality at all, for all the worlds are only an image and an idea, in accord with the verse ‘and through the prophets I was imaged’ (Hosea 12:11), and they said … that the reality of the world and of the human, in truth, have no existence at all, and their entire existence is only ideational. For we apprehend ourselves as if we are in the world, and we apprehend ourselves with all our senses and thus we apprehend through our senses the whole world, and it follows that all the reality of the human and of the world is entirely ideational and not a true existence, for it is impossible for there to be a true reality since he fills all worlds.” The idealist and acosmic view criticized here is reminiscent of Ḥabad, but this is a topic beyond the confines of this note. On Eliashiv’s relation to Ḥabad, see Wolfson, “Heeding,” p. 257 and reference to Bezalel Naor cited there in n. 131. 114 Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 255–​274.

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absolutely new occurring as a consequence of the withdrawal, since all was encompassed in the infinite, and hence time would appear to be illusory like a dream; on the other hand, the trace that remains in the space after the withdrawal is the emanated light (or ne’eṣal) that provides the “place for all that exists” (maqom le-​khol nimṣa), and thus it is viewed as a “new light” (or ḥadash).115 Time is accorded the significance of the trace that is the genuine novelty of repetition.116 To grasp this paradox, which is the secret of time, we must distinguish two connotations implied in the word reshimu.117 An imprint (roshem), as it is ordinarily construed, is a mark of what is no longer ready at hand, a sign that evokes the absent presence of something that is presently absent. In Luzzatto’s image, the trace is what remains from the writing after the letters have been removed. Likewise, with respect to the divine, the trace is an impression that endures in the place of the void after the light of the infinite has been withdrawn. However, the word reshimu is also related to the notion of inscription (reshimah), which is a portent that previews what is hidden from sight. One must bear in mind that rabbinically the term roshem connotes an act of inscripting or drawing aligned with but distinguished from writing (ketivah).118 Even more relevant is the use of reshimah in kabbalistic sources—​based on the rabbinic texts—​to name an amorphous form of writing, a pre-​scripting that precedes the letters that assume a more determinate shape. For example, in a passage from Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim, the formation of the 1 15 Luzzatto, Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, ch. 26, p. 66. 116 Compare Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Shorshei ha-​Miṣwot, edited by Joseph Spinner (Jerusalem: Aṭeret Soferim, 2020), p. 92: “And indeed you must know that each day that is renewed from the six thousand years is a new gradation [madreigah ḥadashah] that comprises all of the existence of creation in its entirety, and everything is renewed in accordance with the aspect of the day. Therefore, each day requires a new rectification [tiqqun ḥadash] in the aspect of this generality [zo’t ha-​kelalit], that is, that the totality of the separate beings [she-​kelal ha-​nifradim] will come close to this splendor, and they will be bound to it in accord with what is appropriate for them, in accord with all the root matters and their offspring on all sides, and the entities will ascend in rectification on all sides above and below, and the matter will ascend until the disclosure of the unity [gilluy ha-​yiḥud], and then all of creation will be rectified in the aspect of that day.” Each day is novel but its novelty consists of comprising all of creation that has previously transpired in time. 117 I am here reworking the discussion in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu—​The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 111–​113. What I argued there with respect to Ḥabad speculation can be applied to Luzzatto. 118 Mishnah Shabbat 12:3, 4; Makkot 3:6; Tosefta Shabbat 12:5.

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letters involves four consecutive stages, reshimah, ḥaqiqah, ḥaṣivah, and asiyyah.119 Concentrating on the first of these, reshimah denotes the highest or most sublime verbal gesticulation, which is not only the marking of a trace of what has been removed but a semiotic signpost that foreshadows what is to emerge, akin to the blueprint of a building that an architect etches on a tablet before commencing the actual construction. To plumb the depths of the myth of ṣimṣum, one must attend to the amalgamation of the two connotations of reshimah as trace and omen. The intermingling of these two connotations illumines the circular linearity that is emblematic of the curvature of time: the inscription presages the reality that must be its precursor; what is left behind, therefore, is the trace of what is yet to be. From the notion of the trace, we may adduce the elementary constituency of time as the retroactive not yet, the achronic fecundity of the future that is the origin continually emptying itself in the coming to be of the beginning that passes away incessantly. The first beginning is, as Heidegger mused, an original repetition.120 Sounding a similar note, Derrida wrote of the beginning that comes forth from the withdrawal, “from the first it will have come second. Two times at the same time, originary iterability, irreducible virtuality of this space and this time.”121 It may be useful to translate the kabbalistic symbolism into the evolutionary logic articulated by Peirce: the infinitely remote initial state is identified as the pure zero, which is to be distinguished from the nothing of negation. The former is the “germinal nothing,” the “womb of indeterminacy,” the “absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility,” the origin that is prior to every first; the latter, by contrast, is the leap, the springing forth of something new, the principle of firstness by which being is differentiated from nonbeing. The nullity of the monad yields the correlativity of the beginning, and the first mathematically assumes the status of the second, indeed the potentiality of the first is determined from the actuality of the second, which entails the “nothing of not having been born” as opposed to the “nothing of death.”122

119 Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2000), 16:9, p. 208, affirms the correlation of reshimah, ḥaqiqah, ḥaṣivah, and asiyyah respectfully with the four worlds, aṣilut, beri’ah, yeṣirah, and asiyyah. See ibid., 27:27, p. 447. 120 See above, n. 74. 121 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 163 (emphasis in original). 122 Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 1–​ 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

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We can apply the same trinitarian logic to the kabbalistic cosmogony. The trace of infinity is, concomitantly, antecedent and consequent to the withdrawal. The posteriority of the trace is its anteriority, that is, it comes before as what comes after. The potential for finitude is thus coiled within the folds of infinity—​it could not be otherwise because the inclusivity of the infinite is such that it must possess even the capacity to be exclusive, the capacity to be less than infinite. In virtue of its all-​encompassing nature, infinity must embrace its own other in a unity of opposition that is opposed to any opposition to itself. Within the indeterminate confines of Ein Sof, every other is reduced to the identity of the same in relation to which there is no other, but that potential is not perceptible, since otherness qua otherness is dissipated in the indifferent oneness that includes the excluded other. Insofar as the trace is the capacity for boundary within the boundless, the capacity for imperfection that the boundless must contain as a facet of its perfection, it follows that we are led logically to an infinite regress, the paradox of the point of the trace, which cannot be disentangled from the trace of the point, that is, the trace of infinity in which there can be no trace that is not itself the trace of a trace, a nonphenomenal trace of what cannot be incorporated within the either/​or economy of absence or presence, the erasure that is the inception of writing, the concealment of the concealment that is prior to there being anything to conceal, the timeless point that propagates the encircling line that is time. 1931–​1935), 6:217, cited in John K. Sheriff, Charles Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle: Grounds for Human Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 4.

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Suffering Time

Maharal’s Influence on Ḥasidic Perspectives on Temporality

Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt, daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt. Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird. Es ist Zeit. celan, “Corona”

∵ In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem offered a cursory but astute observation about Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, and the popularization of mystical ideas that had begun before the rise of Ḥasidism*: I am thinking here of the now almost forgotten writings of Jehudah Loewe ben Bezalel of Prague. … In a sense, one could say that he was the first Hasidic writer. It is certainly no accident that so many Hasidic saints had a penchant for his writings. Some of his more voluminous tracts, such as the great book Gevuroth Adonai … seem to have no other purpose than to express Kabbalistic ideas without making too much use of Kabbalistic terminology. … The Hasidim themselves did not go so far in their popularization of Kabbalistic thought as the Exalted Rabbi Loewe, who appears to have renounced the Kabbalistic vocabulary only in order to give the widest possible range of influence to Kabbalistic doctrine.1 Since the time that Scholem penned these words, a number of scholars have documented in more detail the impact of Maharal’s literary style, his proclivity * “Suffering Time: Maharal’s Influence on Ḥasidic Perspectives on Temporality,” was originally published in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 44 (2019): 7–​71. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), p. 339.

© Elliot R. Wolfson, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449343_006

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to propagate esoteric matters in the guise of the exoteric, and many of his speculative-​mystical ideas on Ḥasidism.2 Bezalel Safran offered a reasonable summation of this influence when he noted that the “Hasidic temper” found Maharal’s ideas to be “congenial, explicated them, cast them into a system and popularized them for large groups of people.”3 Maharal’s work thus “provided a convenient literary and conceptual frame” for Ḥasidic masters, such as Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk, in their attempts to transmit the teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, the Ba‘al Shem Ṭov, as well as the spiritual depths of their own religious experiences to a larger audience.4 In this chapter, I will focus on a theme that, to the best of my knowledge, has not commanded the attention it deserves. I will explore Maharal’s theory of temporality and demonstrate its effect on discussions of time in Ḥasidic masters.5 Given the massive size of these corpora, my analysis will of necessity be limited, but it is my hope that it

2 Byron L. Sherwin, Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), pp. 52–​54, 131–​133, 138–​140, 164–​165; Bezalel Safran, “Maharal and Early Hasidism,” in Hasidism: Continuity or Innovation? edited by Bezalel Safran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 47–​144, and reference to other scholars cited on p. 91 nn. 1–​4; Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 11. The possibility that the Maggid of Mezhirech drew from the works of Maharal is briefly noted in David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gilman, Samuel C. Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodzinski, Hasidism: A New History, with an afterword by Arthur Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 77. On p. 150 mention is made of the extensive use of Maharal’s books made by Israel Hopstein, the Maggid of Kozhenits, who also initiated their republication beginning in the late eighteenth century, thereby widening their readership among Ḥasidim. See also p. 345 where the influence of Maharal on Yehudah Leib Alter, the leader of the Ger Ḥasidim, is noted. See, in more detail, Benjamin Brown, “‘The Two Types of Unity’: Maharal, Sfat Emet and the Dualistic Turn in Late Hasidic Thought,” in Maharal: Overtures—​Biography, Doctrine, Influence, edited by Elchanan Reiner (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015), pp. 411–​447 (Hebrew). 3 Safran, “Maharal and Early Hasidism,” p. 90. 4 Ibid., p. 91. 5 See ibid., p. 90, where Safran briefly notes that Maharal’s notion of a “mystical realm,” which is “beyond time,” is employed by Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk. The category of “higher than time” (le-​ma‘lah me-​ha-​zeman) in early Ḥasidism, especially in the teachings of the Maggid of Mezhirech and some of his disciples, is discussed by Moshe Idel, “‘Higher than Time’: Observations on Some Concepts of Time in Kabbalah and Hasidism,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 197–​208, an expansion of the comments about the Maggid’s ideal of cleaving to thought in Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 48–​49. No mention is made of the possible influence of Maharal in either study. But compare the brief remarks in Idel, Hasidism, p. 224. See the reference to another study of Idel cited below, n. 203.

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will shed light on a decisive dimension of Maharal’s philosophy that informed the phenomenology of time to be elicited from pietistic sources. 1

Time of Suffering in the Suffering of Time

I begin with a comment in Maharal’s Derekh Ḥayyim, an extensive commentary on Pirqei Avot. The relevant remark is extracted from a longer discourse in which the respite of the world to come is differentiated sharply from the disquiet of this world. The sages alluded to this matter in the tractate Megillah,6 “In every place that it says “it was in the days of” [wa-​yehi bimei],7 it is the language of affliction [ṣa‘ar].” … The language “it was” [wa-​yehi] relates to a being that is not at rest [hawayah bilti naḥah], and thus it denotes affliction. But when it says “it was in the days of,” this indicates that the being is in time, and every being in time is a being that has no rest, for time is dependent on motion that has no cessation. Therefore, in every place that it says “it was in the days of,” which is a being dependent on time, there is no being at rest, and every being that is without rest is one of affliction.8 Maharal’s analysis rests on the grammatical rule of the waw ha-​hippukh; that is, the prefix of the consecutive or conversive waw that converts the perfect 6 Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 10b. The exegesis of the word wa-​yehi as a sign of distress is transmitted by either R. Levi or R. Yonatan as a tradition that has been received from the men of the great assembly (anshei kenesset ha-​gedolah), traditionally thought to be a synod of sages, scribes, and prophets, which was operative from the early Second Temple period until the early Hellenistic period. After a discussion about this principle, it is reported in the name of R. Ashi that the expression “and it was in the days of” (wa-​yehi bimei) unfailingly indicates misfortune. 7 Genesis 14:1, Isaiah 7:1, Jeremiah 1:3, Ruth 1:1, and Esther 1:1. 8 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2007), 4:18, pp. 385–​386. Compare the almost exact language in Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, the disciple of Maharal, in his Keli Yaqar, 2 vols. (Ṣafed: Heychalot, 2014), 1:5 (ad Genesis1:14): “And all things that fall under time have in them affliction, as our rabbis, blessed be their memory, said ‘In every place that it says wa-​yehi it is naught but the language of affliction,’ and they concluded specifically that in the place that it says wa-​yehi bimei it is the language of affliction. The reason for the matter is that everything that is dependent on days, that is, time, has affliction, but all the supernal existents, which are above time and over them time does not rule, do not have any affliction. Therefore, it says yehi me’orot [written] defectively [without the waw], for all entities beneath the sun have misfortune and affliction because time destroys everything.”

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tense of the predicate into the imperfect tense. If the waw of reversal is placed before a verb that relates to the past, the word denotes a futuristic event, but if it is placed before a verb that relates to the future, the referential meaning changes into the past. An example of the former is we-​hayah, whose literal meaning “and it was” is transposed into “and it shall be;” an example of the latter is the expression wa-​yehi, whose literal meaning “and it shall be” is transposed into “and it was.” From this syntactical principle, Maharal draws the following philosophical truism: “Moreover, wa-​yehi itself with the waw ha-​ hippukh is the being that does not rest, for yehi is the language of the future, and there is here no beginning to being at all. But wa-​yehi is speaking about the being that has begun and does not rest. … And every being that does not rest is surely a matter of affliction.”9 Analogously, the expression wa-​yehi bimei connotes the coming to pass of an event both in the past and in the future, simultaneously an antecedent and an aftermath. The bending of the temporal arc intimated by this midrashic exegesis challenges the standard view of time as a linear progression through three discrete points of past, present, and future—​stereotypically contrasted with the depiction of time as cyclical10—​ and proffers instead the notion of the same that is recurrently unique; the past event recurs in the future as that which has not yet occurred. Translated into Heideggerian terms, the waw ha-​hippukh bespeaks the repetition of the again that is altogether otherwise.11 The stance promulgated by Maharal thus defies the dyadic distinction between the diachronic and the synchronic perspectives on time, postulating instead a third alternative wherein the present is portrayed as the channel through which past becomes future and future becomes past.12 On occasion, Maharal communicates the point more technically by referring to the present as the moment (et) that is not characterized by the duration of time (hemshekh 9 10

11

12

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 4, 4:18, pp. 385–​386. For a survey of the scholarly assumption that linear time is characteristic of the biblical worldview as opposed to the Hellenistic conception of cyclical time, see Eunsoo Kim, Time, Eternity, and the Trinity: A Trinitarian Analogical Understanding of Time and Eternity (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010), pp. 32–​36. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 33, p. 58; idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [ga 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 73. For my previous discussions of this Heideggerian notion, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 243–​ 244; idem, “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 33–​34 (reprinted in this volume, p. 357). Compare the formulation of Nishida Kitarō cited in ch. 1 at n. 126, and see below, n. 116.

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ha-​zeman) as opposed to other commonplace units such as an hour (sha‘ah). Insofar as the moment is the instant (rega) that has no temporal magnitude—​a present that resists representation except as nonpresent13—​no moment is like another moment (we-​ein et zo ke-​mo zo). The diremptive nature of the instant is such that what takes place therein is renewed recurrently in a moment that is distinctive (u-​mitḥaddesh lo davar be-​et meyuḥad).14 Even though we habitually assume a degree of homogeneity—​a semblance of continuity that undercuts the obdurate discontinuity that would prove to be psychosocially disorienting—​each moment is a heterogeneous intermingling of stasis and change whereby the constancy of the constant is determined by the indeterminacy of the intermittent and the indeterminacy of the intermittent by the constancy of the constant.15 The unpredictability of the moment transforms its presentness into absolute futurity (attid legamrei). Maharal concludes, “Everything that comes to be constantly in each moment is in the present and will also be in the future, and thus it is expressed in the language of the future.” The inversion of past and future is attested in Maharal’s exegetical conjecture that the word az, literally “then,” applies to the moment that is without temporal duration.16 We may deduce further that the moment epitomizes the paradox of being in but not of the spatial world subject to the sovereignty of time conventionally conceived.17

13

14 15 16 17

For a more detailed analysis of the problem of the present and the metaphysics of presence, particularly according to Husserlian phenomenology, see Rudolf Bernet, “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence,” Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85–​112, and idem, “La présence du passé dans l’analyse husserlienne de la conscience du temps,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 88 (1983): 178–​198. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Avodah, ch. 18, in Netivot Olam, Berkowitz edition (Jerusalem: Tif’eret Hoṣa’ah le-​Or, 2015), p. 173. See Michael North, What Is the Present? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 31–​32, 35–​39. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1991), pp. 292–​293. See below, n. 70. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Biṭṭaḥon, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, p. 564. In light of this passage, and many parallels from Maharal’s corpus that could have been cited, I take issue with the conclusion of Benjamin Gross, The Eternity of Israel: The Messianic Doctrine of the Maharal of Prague on Exile and Redemption (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1974), p. 220 (Hebrew), that Maharal’s eschatology precludes the possibility of exerting pressure on the historical process either by constricting time into one moment or by locking it into a cyclical duration. I concur that Maharal rejected the feasibility of calculating the historical time of the messianic redemption (see ibid., pp. 240, 246–​247), but I do not agree that this implies that it is impossible for one to withstand the experience of time compressed as the instant of eternity.

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I shall return momentarily to Maharal’s notion of the durationless moment, but at this juncture, we would do well to contemplate what is portended in his appropriation of the rabbinic idea that the word wa-​yehi conveys an element of sorrow. Specifically, how does this relate to the reversal of the timeline? To understand this we must delve more deeply into the comportment of the temporal as an abiding ephemerality. As Maharal reiterates in many of his treatises, time is dependent on the movement of bodies—​the Aristotelian perspective that he likely derived from Maimonides18—​and movement invariably entails variation, which is inherently evil. It follows that anything corporeal subject to temporal fluctuation—​in contradistinction to the divine matter that is incorporeal and hence immutable—​is a cause of anguish.19 We note, parenthetically, that the dependency of time on physical matter20 underlies the supposition that space and time are the same.21 Maharal elaborates the nexus between time, change, and evil in Or Ḥadash, his commentary on the scroll of Esther:

18 Gross, The Eternity of Israel, pp. 241–​243. 19 For example, see Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1997), ch. 36, p. 672; idem, Gevurot ha-​Shem, vol. 1, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2015), ch. 7, pp. 347–​348. The inescapable torment of time is related to Maharal’s view that history mimetically reflects the dialectical pattern of nature. See André Neher, The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz, translated by David Maisel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 234: “In the sixteenth century, the Maharal of Prague showed how history copies nature: there is no construction without ruin, no rise without a fall, no development toward a higher condition without a previous erosion within.” 20 On the identification of time and body, see Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2019), ch. 46, pp. 365–​367, 397; idem, Be’er ha-​Golah, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2003), 6:4, p. 187. 21 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2000), ch. 26, p. 390; idem, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, edited and annotated by Ḥayyim Pardes (Tel Aviv: Makhon Yad Mordecai, 1996), p. 79. See Sherwin, Mystical Theology, p. 142. As Sherwin remarks, p. 225 n. 1, Friedrich Thieberger and Benjamin Gross compared Maharal’s theory of time to Bergson. With regard to the identification of space and time, I do not see any affinity to the Bergsonian perceptive. Indeed, for Bergson, the routine approach to time depends on the attempt to measure the mobility of duration (la durée) and thereby translate it into the immobile spatial time of science. Ironically, the closest analogy to Bergson’s signature notion of time as duration is Maharal’s depiction of the moment as without duration. For a different interpretation of the identification of space and time in Maharal, see my discussion in “Linear Circularity/​(A)Temporal Poetics.”

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Know that, according to the grammar, wa-​yehi instructs about a continuous being that is not completed, and this is the duration of time, and if this were a being that already happened and was completed, there would be here no time, for time is a being that prevails and time does not elapse. … Wa-​yehi has within it future and it has within it past, for yehi is the language of the future, and the waw turns it into the past, and thus it has past and future. And this matter instructs about the duration of time, for time is welded from the past and the future, and this is the duration of time. … In any event, wa-​ yehi instructs about the being that is incomplete, and this is the duration of time. A being that is in time is change because the essence of the being is to change from one matter to another, and all change is evil. Therefore, it is presumed that in every place that it says wa-​yehi, it is naught but misery.22 In suffering time as transient beings, we partake in the suffering that is time.23 The inexorable tensiveness of our finitude—​the ontologizing of time that would preclude any opening to the radical alterity of infinitivity—​points to the inescapably tragic and solicitous complexion of our being in the world.24 22 23 24

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Or Ḥadash, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2014), pp. 147–​149. For a wide-​ranging and erudite discussion of this theme, see Raymond Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2017). I am here indebted to the analysis of Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” Diacritics 26 (1996): 11–​32, esp. 27 and 32. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1969), p. 303 (idem, Totalité et Infini: Essai sue l’extériorité [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980], pp. 279–​280): “The founding of truth on freedom would imply a freedom justified by itself. There would have been for freedom no greater scandal than to discover itself to be finite. To not have chosen one’s freedom would be the supreme absurdity and the supreme tragic of existence; this would be the irrational. The Heideggerian Geworfenheit marks a finite freedom and thus the irrational.” As Levinas notes, in Totalité et Infini, he sought to describe the metaphysical exteriority, that is, the surplus of the infinite other beyond the totality, a frame of reference that offers a justification for human freedom. For my own treatment of the inherently tragic sense of being in Heidegger’s thought, see Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 109–​130. I regret that I forgot to mention Levinas’s 1932 essay in my discussion, and I was kindly reminded of that oversight by Michael Fagenblat, who commented on my examination of tragedy in Heidegger’s thought that it was “all there” in Levinas. I accept that Levinas is to be given credit for grasping at this early stage the inherently tragic nature of Heidegger’s notion of solicitude and the finitude of human existence that emerge from his identification of ontology and time, but the interested reader will see that my examination incorporates many elements that were not in Levinas’s purview, including discussing the theme as it appears in the totality of the Heideggerian corpus without being limited

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Time out of Time: Eternality and the Temporal Transcendence of Temporality

The negative assessment of time is tempered by Maharal’s embrace of the moment to which I have already alluded. By speaking of the moment as lacking duration, Maharal introduces an aspect of eternity that both impedes and upholds the contingency of the temporal flux. That is, the moment cannot be dissected into past, present, and future as distinct modalities allocated to a spatial continuum; the flowing presence of the now is not only the connective tissue that loops a present that is no longer and a present that is not yet,25 but it is the chiastic in-​between of the present that concomitantly transmutes the past into future and the future into past.26 Not yet, on this score, is absolutely now because absolutely now can only be what is not yet. From this it follows that eternality is instantiated in the temporal not yet. As such, the threefold compresence of the instant—​the interval of permanent impermanence that is always the same because always different27—​affords the Jewish people

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principally to material published before 1932, principally Sein und Zeit. One would do well to consider the summation of Heidegger’s thought in Hannah Arendt, “What is Existenz Philosophy?,” Partisan Review 1 (1946): 49, “Heidegger’s philosophy is the first absolutely and uncompromisingly this-​worldly philosophy. Man’s Being is characterized as Being-​ in-​the-​world, and what is at stake for this Being in the world is, finally, nothing else than to maintain himself in the world. Precisely this is not given him; hence the fundamental character of Being-​in-​the-​world is uneasiness in the double meaning of homelessness and fearfulness. In anxiety, which is fundamentally anxiety before death, the not-​being-​ at-​home in the world becomes explicit. ‘Being-​in-​the-​world appears in the existentiel mode of not-​being-​at-​home.’ This is uneasiness.” Although Arendt does not use the word “tragic” in her characterization of Heidegger’s thought, she clearly understood that his view of the human being entailed the agonizing awareness that it is impossible for one to become oneself in the world except by confronting the nothingness of self that is laid bare in the departure from the world. In her own words, “Death may indeed be the end of human reality; at the same time it is the guarantee that nothing matters but myself. With the experience of death as nothingness I have the chance of devoting myself exclusively to being a Self, and once and for all freeing myself from the surrounding world” (p. 50). Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2008), 5:6, p. 221. My discussion here reflects the influence of Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, translated by M. J. Hanak, based on the abbreviated version translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 325 and 329. Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 71–​72 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 129–​134). Consider Franz Rosenzweig’s description of the language of love as the moment in which everything is “equally present, equally fleeting and equally alive,” and his depiction of revelation as being “always new because it is immemorially old,” cited

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in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 62–​63. The chiasmic nature of time was expressed as well by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 267–​268 (idem, Le visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail, texte établi par Claude Lefort accompagné d’un avertissement et d’une postface [Paris: Gallimard, 1964], p. 315): “The Urtümlich, the Ursprünglich is not of long ago. It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world (and not in the past) an ‘ever new’ and ‘always the same’. … In what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to … other moments of time and the past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side ‘in time’. … The Stiftung of a point of time can be transmitted to the others without ‘continuity’ without ‘conservation,’ without fictitious ‘support’ in the psyche the moment that one understands time as chiasm. Then past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping-​enveloped—​and that itself is the flesh” (emphasis in original). The characterization of the present as simultaneously toujours neuf and toujours la même is reminiscent of Heidegger’s description of repetition as the again that is altogether otherwise; see above, n. 11. On the Husserlian background of the notion of the interweaving, Ineinander, of the present and the past of the invisible in the living present, see Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 16. Compare Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–​ 1955), foreword by Claude Lefort, text established by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé, translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 157: “Dreams are not temporally circumscribed acts. Thus, the ubiquity of dreams thanks to our symbolic matrices—​And also, they are transtemporal. Waking consciousness: time of consciousness and time of its object—​Oneiric consciousness: it touches all times and does not incorporate this cleavage. The question arises, with respect to dreams, of knowing whether it makes sense to say that it began at such and such moment, and ended at such and such moment.” The idea expressed by Merleau-​Ponty in his later works is a continuation of his privileging the thickness of the pre-​objective present in the Phenomenology of Perception as the zone in which being and consciousness coincide. See Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 457. See Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-​Ponty’s A-​Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 8–​ 9; Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-​Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 114, 118–​125. For a more elaborate discussion of Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological depiction of time as a sequence that is simultaneously the coexistence of multiple moments in the one moment that is accessible as a field of presence, see Glenn A. Mazis, Merleau-​Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), pp. xiv-​xv, 230–​231, 311–​312, 315–​316. Mazis is correct to argue that, for Merleau-​Ponty, this quality fosters the analogy of time and the oneiric phenomenon as well as the relationship of silence and language. Concerning the latter theme, see Stephen A. Noble, Silence et langage: Genèse de la Phénoménologie de Merleau-​Ponty au seuil de l’ontologie (Leiden: Brill, 2014). The delineation of the moment as the compresence of the past, present, and future in the instant that has no duration brings to mind the quality of time within the dreamscape that is in the status of always now that is different because the same and the same because different.

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the possibility of experiencing the immaterial transcendence materialized ideally in the Torah. In Tif’eret Yisra’el, Maharal educes the point exegetically from the verse “For every time and moment for everything under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1): It is appropriate to say of the body, which falls under time, “for every time” [la-​kol zeman]. But the matter that is solely an intellect, and this is the receiving of the Torah, is not a physical entity, and this matter is not under time. Concerning this it says “and moment for everything” [we-​et le-​khol ḥefeṣ], for the present [ha-​attah], which joins past and present, is not temporal [eino zeman]. That is to say, the matter that is intelligible [muskal] does not fall under time, and it comes to be in the present [na‘aseh be-​attah].28 The presumption regarding a present that is not temporal—​effectively, a present without duration and hence a time that is not in time—​provides the reason why the Torah was revealed in the third month after the Israelites exited Egypt (Exodus 19:1): “Since the Torah is intelligible [sikhlit], and does not fall under time, the third was suitable for it, for as we have said, the present, which is not temporal, belongs especially to the Torah. Because the present is the third, for the present joins the time [meḥabber ha-​zeman], and it is the third, therefore the Torah was given in the third month … as it is written ‘and moment for everything’.”29 Reiterating this notion in Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, Maharal writes, “The matters that are under time, as all corporeal entities, which are under time, and even the giving of the commandments, for the commandments—​that is, their fulfillment—​are consequent to the person who is physical, and therefore there was a set time that circumcision was given to Abraham. But the Torah, since it is exclusively intellectual, does not fall under time. However, the moment [et]

28 29

This insight is buttressed by a numerology affirmed in the concluding section in Ḥayyim Viṭal, Mavo She‘arim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2016), p. 447: the letters of the Aramaic term for dream, ḥelma (8 + 30 + 40 + 1), have the numerical sum of 79, which is the same sum as the words hayah (5 + 10 + 5 = 20), we-​howeh (6 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 22), and we-​yihyeh (6 + 10 + 5 + 10 + 5 = 36), with the addition of one for the word itself (im ha-​kolel). The numerology anchors the idea that the time of the dream is like the moment in which there is no duration but a convergence of what was, what is, and what will be. From that standpoint, the dreamtime emulates the eternal temporality that is the esoteric connotation of the Tetragrammaton. See Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 252–​255, 319 n. 42. See below, n. 137. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 25, p. 376. Compare ibid., ch. 39, p. 597. Ibid., ch. 25, p. 377. See text cited below at n. 68.

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is pertinent to this, for the present is not temporal [ki ein ha-​attah zeman]. … Thus, it says ‘and moment for everything,’ for the present is not temporal, and in the present that was prepared for this it was appropriate for the Torah to be given.”30 From Maharal’s standpoint, the moment (et) signifies the interlude of the present (attah) that is not beholden to the constraints of quotidian time. Hence, rather than viewing the instant as a mathematically constructed point that has no extrinsic extension or mobility,31 it can be delineated as the hypertime, the secondary order of time that is the frame of reference against which we measure the oscillating dilations and contractions of the gravitational field of time’s movement.32 The paradigm of time that is outside time—​the hypertime of the present that cannot be represented as presence in the sequence of events but which nevertheless is the unconditional marker that safeguards the provisional drift of time33—​is exemplified by the Torah, which Maharal identifies as an incorporeal intellect. Of the many passages in Maharal’s colossal corpus where this theme is enunciated, I will cite from Gur Aryeh, his Pentateuchal commentary: And similarly the Torah is beyond time [al ha-​zeman] in accord with the gradation of the Torah, for time depends on the sun and the movement of the sphere, and the Torah is above [the sun]. … And with respect to all entities that are beyond time the entire matter of time is indifferent [we-​khol ha-​devarim asher hem al ha-​zeman kol inyan ha-​zeman shaweh], and nothing is in time except for time [we-​eino bi-​zeman zulat zeman]. Therefore, they said that each man is obligated to look upon himself as if he left Egypt,34 for the cause [that redeemed] those who left is the same cause in each and every generation, and there is here no distinction. With respect to other things that are under time, since they fall beneath time they are dependent on time, and it is not said about them that one should see as if it were constantly so. However, with respect to a few divine matters [devarim elohiyyim] it is said thus, with respect to the gradation that is above time and that is independent of it, it is spoken of in this way.35

30 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, ch. 27, pp. 558–​559. 31 Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, pp. 140–​141. 32 Ibid., p. 148. 33 Ibid., p. 41. 34 Mishnah, Pesaḥim 10:5. 35 Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, vol. 3, pp. 254–​255.

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Building on the midrashic interpretation of the formulation connected to the promise of the land of Canaan to the Israelites “and has given it to you” (Exodus 13:11), “So that it should not be in your eyes like the inheritance of your fathers, but rather it should be in your eyes as if [ke-​illu] it were given to you today,”36 Maharal infers that the bequeathing of the land is a pledge that is dependent on a metaphysical force that transcends the exigencies of time and hence it is incumbent on every Jew to regard that pledge as if it were renewed unremittingly in each generation. Similarly, since the Israelites departed from Egypt by being conjoined to the supernal gradation that is above the order of time (seder ha-​zeman),37 throughout the course of history, the experience of redemption must be relived as if it were happening de novo. Precisely what is beyond time can be revivified endlessly in time. Finally, the same dynamic applies to revelation: the rabbinic exhortation to reenact the Sinaitic epiphany when one studies Torah38 is based on the assumption that the latter is of an eternal composition impervious to temporal vacillation. Maharal articulates this point frequently in his treatises, and here I will cite an illustrative passage from Netivot Olam: “Torah is not like other corporeal things, which are things that are under time, and if a person behaves with Torah as if it were a temporal entity and his study of Torah is according to an hour and according to time, he does not acquire Torah … for this is a matter of the intellect that is not under time and it is permanent without time.”39 The matter is explicated by Maharal in terms of the contrast between miṣwah, the commandment, which is corporeal and thus temporal, and Torah, which is incorporeal and thus eternal.40 The Torah, the gift conferred

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38

39 40

Mekhilta de-​Rabbi Ishmael, edited by Ḥayyim S. Horovitz and Israel A. Rabin (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970), Bo, 18, p. 70. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, vol. 3, p. 354. Compare Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem, vol. 1, ch. 36, p. 162: “Moreover, know that it was impossible for Israel to depart from servitude except by means of the holy One, blessed be he, himself, and not from the side of a constellation [mazzal] and not by any other aspect except this. … Therefore Israel did not go out by means of a gradation in which there is time but by means of a gradation that has no time, for all things fall under time and are created in time except for God, blessed be he, who does not fall under time. … Israel went out to freedom through the divine gradation that has no time.” Pesiqta de-​Rav Kahana, edited by Bernard Mandelbaum, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), 12:21, p. 219. For a parallel text, see Midrash Tanḥuma, edited by Salomon Buber, 2 vols. (Vilna: Romm, 1885), Yitro, 13, 38b. See below, n. 103. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Torah, ch. 3, in Netivot Olam, p. 18. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 14, pp. 217–​221; ch. 25, p. 376.

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exceptionally on Israel, has the capability to deliver observant Jews from the snare of nature and to lead them to the final felicity (haṣlaḥah ha-​aḥaronah), the life of the world to come.41 Following older philosophic and kabbalistic texts, Maharal depicts the latter as both the conjunction of the particular intellect (sekhel peraṭi) of the human and the universal intellect (sekhel kelali) of the divine42 and as the restoration of the sundry entities in the material world to the immaterial essence of nondifferentiated unity to the point that there is no palpable separation between the spiritual and the physical, God and the cosmos.43 Torah is variously described as the “absolute intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​ gamur),44 the “supernal intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​elyon),45 or the “divine intellect” (ha-​sekhel ha-​elohi),46 that comprises the “rational order” (seder sikhli) or “intelligible order” (seder ha-​muskal)47 by means of which the world was created, and thus it belongs to the “intelligible matters [ha-​inyanim ha-​sikhliyyim] whose actions are not in time since they do not fall under time and they do not act by means of the movement from which there is time, and according to the gradation of their importance they act without time … the act of God, blessed be he, is completely without time.”48

41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 9, p. 149; idem, Derekh Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2010), 6:9, p. 322. For discussion of Maharal’s understanding of Jewish suffering related to their alienation from this world, see Shalom Rosenberg, In the Footsteps of the Kuzari: An Introduction to Jewish Philosophy, edited by Joel Linsider from a translation by Gila Weinberg, 2 vols. (New York: Yashar Books, 2007), 1:122–​123. Despite the fact that the Jewish people belong to another world, Rosenberg insists that, according to Maharal, their role is to transform this world by observance of the laws of the Torah. For a similar interpretation, see Marvin Fox, “The Moral Philosophy of MaHaRaL,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 167–​185, esp. 169–​172. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 39, p. 597, and references to other sources cited in n. 33. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, ch. 47, p. 789; idem, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 14, pp. 217–​ 218, 221–​223. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 26, p. 391; see passage from Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag cited below, n. 59. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Torah, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, p. 10. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Torah, ch. 3, in Netivot Olam, p. 17. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 8, p. 132; idem, Derekh Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2007), 3:14, p. 361; idem, Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 5, 5:22, p. 531. See also Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, pp. 8, 31, 49. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh, vol. 3, p. 215.

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Maharal lucidly enunciates the kabbalistic understanding of halakhah as the somatic means for the soul to flee the bondage of the somatic.49 Cast in temporal terms, the rootedness of the Jew in the metaphysical realm beyond time empowers the Jew to sanctify time in the physical world.50 Adopting

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I have discussed this topic in several of my studies. See, most recently, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Judah ben Solomon Canpanton’s Leqaḥ Ṭov: Annotated Edition and Introduction,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 43 (2019): 23–​29. This cardinal principle of the rabbinic-​kabbalistic ethos is epigrammatically expressed, utilizing a play on words from Sefer Yeṣirah (A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation, and Text-​ Critical Commentary [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004], pp. 98–​100, § 18), by Isaac Meir Morgenstern, Sefer Liqquṭei Yam ha-​Ḥokhmah: Mo‘adim (Jerusalem: Makhon Yam ha-​ Ḥokhmah, 2019), p. 165: the affliction (‫ )נגע‬of physical desire must be subdued by the delight (‫ )ענג‬of the words of Torah. See the discussion below on avodah be-​gashmiyut. The principle is stated cogently by Raphael Moshe Luria, Seder Leil Shimmurim (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 21. Commenting on R. Jonah’s explanation of the expression meqaddesh ha-​ shabbat we-​yisra’el we-​ha-​zemannim, “he who sanctifies the Sabbath, Israel, and the festive seasons,” that Israel is sanctified (meqaddesh yisra’el) because they sanctify the festive seasons (meqaddeshim ha-​zemannim) through the power of the sanctity of the Sabbath (qedushshat ha-​shabbat), Luria writes, “We must explain his words why it is specifically through the power of Sabbath that they could sanctify the festive seasons. Israel has in them a holiness from the perspective of the essence of their substance [mi-​ṣad eṣem mahutam] that was sanctified in the giving of the Torah. We must expound this explanation, for the drawing forth of holiness on the festive seasons was not possible except by one who is above the aspect of time since he then overpowers the time of the mundane and he can sanctify it and make it as a holy day. … Time is a creation like all the other creatures, and if Israel sanctify the festive seasons, it is incumbent on them to ascend above the aspect of time, and then they can sanctify temporality. This is not possible except by means of the power of Sabbath.” The notion that the Jewish people have the capacity to determine the appointed times of the festivals because they are conjoined to the divine and are therefore above time is expressed by the Maggid of Mezhirech. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Or Torah, edited and annotated with indices by Jacob I. Schochet (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2006), sec. 393, p. 416. The passage is found as well in the collection of the Maggid’s teachings Or ha-​Emet (Husyatin, 1899), 7a, and see Idel, “‘Higher than Time’,” pp. 205–​206. Idel suggests that the union of divine and human intellects in the Maggid presupposes a “Neoaristotelian psychology and theology” but, in the final analysis, he displays a “much more Neoplatonic propensity.” See the early formulation in Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 48–​49. Bracketing the question of historical taxonomies, I would suggest that the speculation of the Maggid on this matter likely reflects the influence of Maharal. This may also be the case with regard to the notion of the primordiality of the intellect (qadmut ha-​sekhel) discussed by Gershom Scholem, The Latest Phase: Essays on Hasidism by Gershom Scholem, edited by David Assaf and Esther Liebes (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008), pp. 268–​276 (Hebrew). According to Scholem, the Maggid’s idea of qadmut ha-​sekhel denotes a region that is distinct from consciousness, which has something in common with the character of the unconscious affirmed by the Romantic philosophers (p. 274). Scholem’s analysis, as has been noted in the scholarly literature, was a response to the attempt to

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an ostensibly dualistic posture, Maharal states unequivocally that the Torah, which is the intelligible matter (davar sikhli) that is “entirely good,” stands in diametric opposition to the corporeal that is “entirely evil.”51 The ascetic—​ almost gnostic—​implications of this dualism are reinforced by Maharal’s explanation that the Torah was revealed in the desert to impart that one must become like a desert by separating oneself from bodily desires to merit receiving the Torah.52 By withdrawing from the physical, the Jew attains the highest degree of holiness, an internal perfection that corresponds to the topographic preeminence of the holy of holies.53 Through hardship the body is diminished so that the soul can attain the world to come, an ontic plane utterly separated from the physical.54 Interpreting the injunction attributed to R. Meir, “Do less business and busy yourself with Torah,”55 Maharal opines, “By being engaged in the Torah, a person removes himself from the matter of the world [mesalleq ha-​adam aṣmo me-​inyan ha-​olam] and is conjoined to the divine gradation

51 52 53 54 55

discover the unconscious in the teachings of Ḥasidic masters proffered by Ahron Marcus, Hartmann’s inductive Philosophie im Chassidismus (Wien: Moriz Waizner, 1888). The notion of the unconscious and the psychological dimensions of Ḥasidism have been discussed by other scholars, and of special note is the Jungian analysis of the material cited by Scholem in Siegmund Hurwitz, “Psychological Aspects in Early Hasidic Literature,” translated by Hildegard Nagel, in Timeless Documents of the Soul (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 149–​240. The application of Jungian categories to the study of Ḥasidism was advanced as well by Erich Neumann, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, vol. 2: Hasidism, edited by Ann Conrad Lammers, translated by Mark Kyburz and Ann Conrad Lammers (London: Routledge, 2019). The views of Scholem and Hurwitz are analyzed in the section “Hasidic Psychology and the Unconscious” in Alan Brill, Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 2002), pp. 111–​119. On the concept of the unconscious and the Maggid’s qadmut ha-​sekhel, see also Shmuel Weinstein, “The Notion of the Unconscious in Chabad Thought: Mystical Psychoanalysis in ‘The Book of Tanya’ by Rabbi Shneur Zalman from Ladi,” PhD dissertation, Bar-​Ilan University, 2016, pp. 152–​175 (Hebrew); idem, “Kadmut ha-​Sekhel and the Metaphysical Unconscious,” Da‘at 87 (2019): 439–​464 (Hebrew). Also relevant are the studies by Clémence Boulouque, “From Wissenschaft des Judentums to Geisteswissenschaft: Early Kabbalah Scholarship and the Construction of the Unconscious,” Journal of Religion 99 (2019): 288–​311, and idem, “Abraham Unbound: The Prefiguration of the Unconscious in the First Generation of Musar and Hasidic Movements,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 334–​354. The matter of qadmut ha-​sekhel and the unconscious is discussed on pp. 337–​338, 348–​349. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 1, 1:2, p. 173. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, p. 54. Compare Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 1, 1:2, p. 181. On Maharal’s depiction of the Torah as the meta-​natural order through which the impulses of nature are to be controlled, see Safran, “Maharal and Early Hasidism,” p. 65. Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Netiv ha-​Perishut, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, p. 420. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, p. 8. Mishnah, Avot 4:10.

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[u-​mitdabbeq be-​madreigah elohit].”56 This is the import as well of the rabbinic maxim57 that the Torah is not sustained except by one who kills himself over it: “The person, who is corporeal, is not worthy of the intelligible gradation except by discarding the matter of his body entirely [yesalleq inyan ha-​guf shelo legamrei] until the point that his body is not considered as anything in his eyes, and he kills himself and eradicates himself for the sake of the intelligible Torah.”58 Returning to this talmudic dictum in his sermon on the Torah, Maharal writes, “Since the Torah is the absolute intellect, and the intellect is entirely separate from the body, how is it possible for two opposites to be in one subject, that is, the Torah, which is an absolute intellect, and man who is corporeal? Therefore, it is impossible for the Torah to exist except in one who kills himself and removes his body entirely. However, when one removes his body entirely, then surely the rational Torah will subsist in him, and if not the Torah will not subsist in him.”59 The portrayal of the Torah as intellect beyond time serves as the ideational basis for the belief that revelation of what is received and reception of what is revealed are ongoing; one can, indeed must, reexperience the Sinaitic theophany repetitively, for in every moment both text and interpreter are fashioned anew, fashioned anew precisely because they were conceived long ago.60

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Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 4, 4:10, pp. 197–​198. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 83b. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 4, 4:10, p. 199. See ibid., Derekh Ḥayyim, vol. 6, 6:5, p. 112; idem, Neṣaḥ Yisra’el, ch. 7, pp. 182–​183; idem, Ḥiddushei Aggadot, Berkowitz edition, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Tif’eret Hoṣa’ah le-​Or, 2015), 1:59, 2:429. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, pp. 54–​55. I note, parenthetically, that Maharal’s rhetorical use of the expression shenei hafakhim be-​nose eḥad may have been an important conduit for the ubiquity of this idea in Ḥasidic sources. On the utilization of this motif in Ḥabad thought, see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism, translated by Jeffrey M. Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 97–​100; Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 2, 145, 303 n. 7. Maharal’s appropriation of the rabbinic notion of an ongoing revelation of the Written Torah is expanded by him to include the Oral Torah. At the same time, however, Maharal adamantly insists that there is a decline in generations that has created a chasm distancing the reader of his own time from the wisdom expressed by the rabbis. On this theme, see Jacob Elbaum, “Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague and His Attitude to the Aggadah,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 30–​ 31; Giuseppe Veltri, “Science and Religious Hermeneutics: The ‘Philosophy’ of Rabbi Loew of Prague,” in Religious Confessions and the Sciences in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Jürgen Helm and Annette Winkelmann (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 133–​134. The possibility of recovering the ancient wisdom of the rabbinic sages is predicated on the hermeneutical bridging of past and present, a

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Maharal’s insistence that Torah does not fall under time does not signify that the law is atemporal, but rather that it exhibits the hypertemporal measure of time that transcends the threefold division into past, present, and future. In the moment of revelation, what was and what will be are compresent in what is indefatigably never the same. From the rabbinic notion of mattan torah or qabbalat torah, expressions that convey the twofold gesture of the gift of revelation—​the giving of the gift that the recipient, no matter his or her credentials, is unworthy to receive and the receiving thereof that elevates the recipient to the level of the giver61—​we comprehend the property of time that is independent of body, and consequently independent of space, a time that can be attributed without contradiction to incorporeal beings that are eternal.62 Support for this interpretation may be extricated from the following remark of Maharal in his commentary on the talmudic aggadot: “Just as there are actual days for physical human beings, so there is a time that is not actually time [kakh yesh zeman we-​eino zeman mammash], and it applies to entities that are not corporeal [devarim bilti gashmiyyim].”63 The paradoxical locution time that is not actually time compels us to ponder what kind of time that might be. We learn more of this time that is not really time from a previously cited passage in Tif’eret Yisra’el wherein Maharal addresses how the Torah, the pristine form of intellect beyond temporal demarcation, is manifest in historical time.64 Maharal distinguishes between zeman, the mode of timeliness that applies to corporeal beings subject to generation and corruption, and et, the mode of temporality that may be attributed to intelligible beings not subject to generation and corruption. The latter is described more specifically as the present (attah) that unites past (avar) and future (attid). Hence, the time in which the Torah is given, the time of revelation, divulges something axiomatic about the disposition of time more generally: in the time of the moment, which is experienced at all times as the moment of time that liminally exceeds possibility strengthened by the ontological conjecture concerning the time of the moment and the novel recurrence of what has never been. 61 See Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5731, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2018), pp. 250–​252. 62 Maharal distinguishes three different levels of immaterial being, which correspond to three forms of holiness implied in the Trisagion (Isaiah 6:3): the soul (nefesh), which has a force (koaḥ) in the body; the intellect (sekhel), which has a connection (heqsher) with the body; and God who is completely separate from all things bodily. See Judah Loewe of Prague, Netiv ha-​Perishut, ch. 1, in Netivot Olam, p. 420. 63 Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Ḥiddushei Aggadot, 2:160. 64 See above, n. 28.

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the allocation of time, the present is the middle (emṣa) that bridges past and future, a bridging that sustains the distance of what is bridged by placing in proximity what must be kept apart. Here we detect an application of a logical structure that Maharal applies to a variety of speculative schema in his philosophical presentation of Jewish piety. Rather than viewing the intermediary as that which unites opposites dialectically,65 I would argue that the third term should be construed as the belonging together of opposites that are the same in virtue of being different; that is, in contrast to the sublation of antinomies presupposed by the Hegelian dialectic, the stance I am proposing—​in line with Heidegger—​maintains that the convergence of the divergence preserves rather than dissipates the sense of difference. The truth of the intermediary dictates, against the law of noncontradiction, that A and not-​A are equally characteristic of A.66 Applying this nonconceptual conceptuality—​thinking within the space of nonthinking67—​to Maharal’s cogitations on the nature

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André Neher, Le Puits de l’exil; Tradition et modernité: la pensée du Maharal de Prague (1512–​1609), new edition, revised and enlarged (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1991), pp. 47–​ 56, 133–​143; and see the critique offered by Gross, The Eternity of Israel, pp. 68–​69 n. 28. For a different approach, see Avinoam Rosenak, “The Unity of Opposites in Maharal’s Writings and Its Implications for Jewish Thought,” in Maharal: Overtures, pp. 449–​487 (Hebrew). The position I have attributed to Maharal is well attested in Ḥabad-​Lubavitch literature. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu—​The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 92–​105, esp. 93–​94. When I wrote that study, I referred to the paradox of the intermediary as the coincidence of opposites. I would modify my language today and speak instead of the juxtaposition of opposites. Coincidence presumes a surmounting of difference, whereas juxtaposition sustains it. My thinking about nonthinking and conceptualizing nonconceptuality is informed by Heidegger’s rendering of inceptual thought as the fugal conjuncture of beyng, which is by nature nonconceptual (unbegriffliches), and by Blumenberg’s notion of Unbegrifflichkeit to elucidate the historical phenomenology undergirding his metaphorology. Regarding the former, see Heidegger, Contributions, § 13, p. 30; Beiträge, p. 36; Pauli Pylkkö, The Aconceptual Mind: Heideggerian Themes in Holistic Naturalism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998). Regarding the latter, see Hans Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, translated by Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1997), pp. 81–​102, and idem, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, herausgegeben von Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007); Anthony Reynolds, “Unfamiliar Methods: Blumenberg and Rorty on Metaphor,” Qui Parle 12 (2000):77–​103, esp. 97–​98. A comparison of Heidegger and Blumenberg on this topic would prove instructive. On the face of it, the view that Blumenberg’s turn to metaphorology is a turn away from Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein and world as it relates to Technik seems too simplistic. See Rüdiger Campe,

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of temporality, the juxtaposition of past and future in the present discloses the deportment of the hypertime, that is, the fixed point of the now-​time that is outside the partition of time—​a point that does not display punctiform extensionality—​but through which all time must move: Since the Torah does not fall under time and its classification, as every intelligible matter is not under the category of time, it was not appropriate for it to be given except in the third month, for as we already know every [aspect of] time is divided into past and future, and the present is the third that mediates between them and that fastens time together, for by means of it past and future time are conjoined. … The term et is suitable for the intelligible matter since it does not fall at all under time. … Hence, the present unites the time [of the past and the future], for the end of the past and the beginning of the future is the present, as is known to those who know [and apprehend] the matter [and the content of the substance] of time. The present, therefore, is the third that joins together the time that is divided into two parts, past and future, but it is not essentially time [zeman ba-​eṣem]. Thus, the third month alone was selected for the giving of the Torah, as it is written “and moment for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:1), for the moment [et] is the intermediary and the third that is in between the two boundaries of time.68 With this in mind, we can explain the paradoxical expression time that is not actually time that Maharal ascribes to the Torah and other incorporeal entities. This time, which is not subject to the taxonomy of temporal phenomena, is the time of the present that binds past and future and thereby endows cohesiveness and coherence to the chronicle of history with beginning, middle, and end. The three existential ecstasies of time correspond theologically to creation, revelation, and redemption—​a narratological model of history that distinguishes the Jewish people from other nations whose time is bound to the sun or to the rotation of the sphere,69 the eternal cycle of return that has no beginning or end, and, hence, no possibility for authentic novelty or creativity in the middle. The esoteric significance of the metaxy of the now is elucidated from

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Jocelyn Holland and Paul Reitter, “From the Theory of Technology to the Technique of Metaphor: Blumenberg’s Opening Move,” Qui Parle 12 (2000):105–​126, esp. 125 n. 33. Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, pp. 79–​82. For instance, see Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1990), pp. 19–​20; idem, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, vol. 3, p. 255; idem, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, edited and annotated by Joshua David Hartman, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1991), p. 105.

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the scriptural account that ties the epiphany at Sinai to the third month. This seemingly insignificant detail underscores that the temporal modality appropriate to the eternality of the Torah is the “distinctive present wherein there is no division of time at all” (he-​attah ha-​meyuḥad she-​ein bah ḥilluq zeman kelal).70 The transtemporality of the moment—​the word et alludes to the time that has no temporal duration and therefore is above time (u-​mipnei she-​eino hemshekh zeman hu lema‘lah min ha-​zeman)71—​accounts for its inimitability and volatility, the instant marked, as in the Sabbath at the end of creation, by the “reception of form [qabbalat ha-​ṣurah], which is being without movement [hawayah beli tenu‘ah] … a spontaneous being in which there is no being [ha-​ hawayah pit’omit we-​ein ba-​zeh hawayah], for every being is in time. … That is to say, the reception of form is the completion of being [hashlamat ha-​hawayah]. … And this matter is not called ‘work’ [mela’khah], for there is no work here that has movement; on the contrary, this matter is the acquisition of completion and rest [qinyan ha-​sheleimut u-​menuḥah]. … The reception of form is on the Sabbath … and thus the reception of form has no need for a temporal reality [hawayah zemanit], and this is not called ‘work,’ for work involves movement, and movement is related to the body, but the completion of the world in its totality … is not in time at all [eino bi-​zeman kelal].”72 The time of the present, which is not in the present of time, undergirds the spontaneity of revelation as well as the sabbatical rest that seals the act of creation and the salvific repose of messianic redemption. All three occurrences transpire in a moment in which rest is motion and motion is rest, where there is no discrepancy between the streaming of time and the steadfastness of eternity, where time has been eternalized in the temporalization of eternity and eternity temporalized in the eternalization of time. Here it is apposite to recall the remark of the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann on the absoluteness of the present moment and its relation to the ideal of an actualized messianism in Ḥasidism:

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Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem, vol. 3, ch. 47, p. 470. The point is adduced exegetically from the word az; see ibid., p. 472, and above at n. 16, and the following note. Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Gevurot ha-​Shem ha-​Shalem, Berkowitz edition (Jerusalem: Tif’eret Hoṣa’ah le-​Or, 2015), ch. 65, p. 514. In that context as well, the point is connected to the exegesis of the word az. It is possible to detect the influence of Maharal on the decoding of the word az in Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Yesamaḥ Lev, printed in Me’or Einayim, 2 vols. (Benei Beraq: Peer Mikdoshim, 2015), p. 834: the one who worships God must draw the alef, which is the master of the world, alufo shel olam, into the zayin yamim, seven days, which correspond to the seven attributes, and by so doing, the worshipper is conjoined to the divinity that is above this world. Judah Loewe ben Bezalel, Tif’eret Yisra’el, ch. 40, pp. 615–​616.

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When a human being is put to the test, it always concerns his specific situation. For this reason, each person is always contained in the unconditionality and newness of the present moment. This is a radical reversal of the doctrine of the helpful merits of the fathers. Not even one’s own merits from yesterday are helpful, for the new situation demands an absolute, not a historical, commitment. This antihistorical concept represents a revolution against the merits of the fathers, against tradition, and against relying on the past for security. Taken together with what we have called actualized messianism, it constitutes a basic teaching of Hasidism. Neither the past nor the future has priority over the present, which is fulfilled by the secret, divine light. Actualization places the individual at the center of destiny, for the world and also for God. All that matters is this individual and his existence in the here and now. The Christian doctrine of redemption, according to which the Messiah has already come, and the doctrine of the pre-​Hasidic Judaism, according to which he has yet to come, are both abolished here. Individual life actualizes messianism, and the messianic stage of the individual actualizes the work to be fulfilled.73 Neumann astutely discerns that the impulse that animates Ḥasidic messianism presumes that the present moment in which the redemption takes place is, paradoxically, outside time but within time, indeed, within time as that which is outside time. I concur with Neumann’s contention that we can elicit from Ḥasidism a denunciation of viewing time as an amorphous continuum as opposed to an endless series of now-​points, each one a distinctive contraction of the infinite light, a reiteration of that which is continually different because continually the same and continually the same because continually different. Nonetheless, I would resist the characterization of this experience of time as antihistorical. To be in the moment—​the most concrete abstraction of the abstract concretization of human temporality—​is to be deeply enrooted in historical context. Pitting history against phenomenology is a false polarity. This is not to deny that on occasion such a view has been expressed. Thus, for example, Henry Corbin, the scholar of Islamic esoteric philosophy, unabashedly confessed that the “concern for truth” required of him to explain that “history as such” did not interest him. “Delineating what a spiritual greatness manifested in the past means for us ‘in the present’ is doing something other than history.”74 Despite my great 73 Neumann, The Roots, p. 103. 74 Henry Corbin, Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia: Unpublished Writings from the Philosopher of the Soul, edited by Michael Cazenave with the assistance of Daniel Proulx, translated by Jack Cain (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2014), p. 10.

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admiration for Corbin and the ready acknowledgement that he has critically influenced my thinking, I would contend that his dismissal of history as pertinent to phenomenology is imprudent.75 A more compelling phenomenological orientation should be rooted in an historical enframing that epistemologically problematizes the conventional belief that we can be certain that the future does not flow into the past through the present or that the past is not as much occasioned by the future as the future is by the past. In contrast to the more conventional standpoint that views time as a sequence of now-​points and thus privileges the presence of the present, the temporal presupposition buttressing the hermeneutical phenomenology that has informed my thinking entails the prospect of a reversible timeline—​what I have called the timeswerve of linear circularity—​such that the present may be considered the cause of the past as the past is considered the cause of the present; the past persists in the present as the trace that is reconfigured anew each moment through the agency of anamnesis. From that perspective, memory is not simply the repetition and reliving of past events; it is directed forward and therefore may be considered progressive as opposed to regressive. Building on the insights of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, the scholarly reconstruction of history should be construed as a futural remembering, or a remembering expectation, an act of recollecting that has the capacity to redeem the past, not by describing how the past really was but by imputing to it meaning that it never had except as the potential to become what it is not.76 The radical possibility of time as future implies that the past itself is only past insofar as it is the reiteration of what is yet to come, the recurrence of the similar that is entirely dissimilar. What is required to assess the spiritual comportment of Ḥasidism is a variant construal of historicity along these lines, that is, an idea of history that is not beholden to a linear historicism, which is predicated, in turn, on a chronoscopic conception of time made up of discrete points such that the present at hand, as it were, is positioned between a present that is no longer and a present that is not yet. The recurrence of the past in the present does not entail the quantifiable and predictable repetition of the identical but rather the indeterminable and incalculable iteration of an original occurrence of the same, a recapitulation of what is incomparable, the interminable termination that opens the possibility of thinking about the relation of time to eternity in a manner that is decidedly nonbinary. Eternity designates neither timelessness nor the endless 75

My own phenomenological method has been incorrectly cast as metaphysical and anti-​ historical by Philip Wexler, Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation (New York: Herder & Herder, 2019), pp. xiii-​xiv. 76 Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 10 and references cited on p. 26 nn. 102–​103.

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duration of time; it is the mutual simultaneity and succession of past, present, and future in the moment that is a replication of the same difference that is differently the same. From the human perspective, the moment is, as Hannah Arendt put it, the “non-​time-​space in the very heart of time,” the present situated between the memory of an infinite past and the anticipation of an infinite future;77 from the divine perspective, however, that moment has no past and no future, and thus it warrants neither recollection nor expectation; it is the quintessential hypostatization of time in the Tetragrammaton as the union of past, present, and future, a time that flows motionlessly without duration. In the words of Maharal, “In this name there is he was, he is, and he will be [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh], and it is all in this name to indicate that his being is in all times, which are past, present, and future, and he is one in them and his mind does not change.”78 The contemporaneity of the three temporal modes constitutes God’s eternality: “He, may he be elevated, is eternal [niṣḥi], he was, he is, and he will be … and all the times are in him.”79 Far from being a timeless state or a tenseless time,80 eternity is saturated with an overabundance of time that renders each moment past, present, and future all at once. 3

Infinity and the Eternity of Time in Ḥasidic Sources

Maharal’s interpretation of the Tetragrammaton as the signpost that heralds the temporal eternality of God’s eternal temporality had a profound bearing on many Ḥasidic masters, a perspective poetically captured by Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Time, however, is beyond our reach, beyond our power. It is both near and far, intrinsic to all experience and transcending all experience. It belongs exclusively to God. Time, then, is otherness, a mystery that hovers above all categories.”81 As Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye succinctly expressed the point, “Just 77 78 79 80 81

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 13. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Gur Aryeh ha-​Shalem, vol. 3, p. 104. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Derashot Maharal mi-​Prag, p. 229. For a theological discussion and survey of these different philosophical options, see Kim, Time, Eternity, and the Trinity, pp. 44–​47, 156–​158. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath Its Meaning for Modern Man: Expanded Edition (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), p. 99 (emphasis in original). On the primacy allocated to time in Heschel’s religious phenomenology, see the sources cited in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 322–​323 nn. 184–​190. For discussion of the topic of eternity and time in the Ḥasidic view of the divine, see Ariel Evan Mayse, “Reflection: Eternity in Hasidism: Time and Presence,” in Eternity: A History, edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 231–​238.

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as he, may he be blessed, is eternal, he was, he is, and he will be [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh], so too is his name, blessed be he, for he and his name are one.”82 The tripartite compresence signified by the Tetragrammaton communicates that God transcends time. For instance, Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl writes: As it is written in the holy Zohar, “when it arose in his will to create the world,”83 verily in his will, from him and within him [minneih u-​veih], without any arousal from below. … For the beginning of the ascending of thought [seliqat maḥashavah] that arose in his incomposite will to create the world was truly from him. And all of this is because the Creator, blessed be he, was, is, and will be in a single occurrence as one [be-​fa‘am aḥat ke-​eḥad], since he is not in time [she-​eino bi-​zeman] as he is above temporality [lema‘lah mi-​zemanniyyut], for time is created by the Creator, and thus in relation to him past, present, and future are homogeneously one [ken eṣlo shaweh he-​hayah we-​ha-​howeh we-​ha-​yihyeh ke-​eḥad].84 In a second passage of this author, we discern that this quality of compresence of the three temporal modes in the moment that is above time not only describes Ein Sof but it can be achieved by the Jew in an ecstatic state of mystical union, a state of mindfulness in which one’s matter has been transposed into form: “It is known that God, blessed be he, is above time, for with respect to God, blessed be he, that he was, he is, and he will be are equal, for he was, he is, and he will be in one instant [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh be-​rega eḥad] because the Creator, blessed be he, is infinite and he has no beginning and no end. Hence, the one who merits the resplendent light, which is the aspect of the one, by becoming unified with the blessed One [she-​na‘aseh aḥdut immo yitbarakh], he is also above temporality [lema‘lah mi-​zemanniyyut] and he can see from one end of the world to the other, the past, future, and present, as has been said, and not like the nations of the world.”85 From a third passage, we get a better sense that Menaḥem Naḥum considered the quality of eternity, which 82

83 84 85

Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef (Korzec: Ṣevi Hirsch and Shmuel Yissaskhar Ber Segal, 1780), 2c. Jacob Joseph utilizes this theme to ground the idea that the commandments of the Torah, which derive from the essence of the divine personified in the name, are likewise eternal. See ibid., 63b, 64b, 84c, 116a, 125c, 194b. Zohar 1:86b. Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Yesamaḥ Lev, printed in Me’or Einayim, pp. 920–​921. Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, pp. 245–​246. On the possibility of the transforming the physical act of eating, which is subsumed in the temporal, to a higher state of divinity that is above time by affixing specific times to eating through the proper mindfulness (da‘at), see ibid., pp. 418–​419, and see below, n. 217.

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transcends time, a component of the temporal: “It is known that the Torah consists of the names of the holy One, blessed be he, and God, blessed be he, was, is, and will be, living and persisting eternally, and similarly is the Torah … and certainly, in each moment and time [be-​khol et u-​zeman], the Torah is garbed [mitlabbeshet] in accord with the needs of the moment and the time.”86 God’s eternity is hypostatized in the fact that the Torah recurringly begets a different garb in accord with the demands of the moment.87 Based on the zoharic identity of God and the Torah, it follows, moreover, that if the former is infinite, the latter will be as well. “Thus, the Torah is eternal [niṣḥit], for the Torah and the holy One, blessed be he, are one,88 and it must be infinite [ein sof] insofar as it was, it is, and it will be, and inasmuch as it is germane to every person and in every time.”89 Again, we see that eternality is not antithetical to temporality but it is rather its fullest incrementalization. Just as the infinite is accessible only through the pretense of the finite, so the eternal is apparent only through the façade of the temporal. Metaphorically, the eternal can be compared to the liminal state of twilight (bein ha-​shemashot), the transitional moment—​the in-​between wherein one enters and the other departs fleetingly like the blink of the eye (ke-​heref ayin)90—​that is neither day nor night,91 the 86 87

88 89

90 91

Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 427: “Moreover, the Torah is eternal and is appropriate in every time, for if this were not the case, there would be, God forbid, only narrative accounts [sippurei ma‘asim] of a previous time.” And ibid., p. 682: “Thus, the Torah in all of its principles is operative everlastingly in each moment and time according to the alteration of the times, the moments, and the generations [lefi hishtannut ha-​zemannim we-​ha-​ittim we-​ha-​dorot], and it gives advice on how to be bound to his blessed name.” Zohar 2:90b. Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 279. See ibid., p. 481: “The light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, overflows in the letters [mushpa be-​ha-​otiyyot] and in everything that is created by the letters, which are all the worlds and their fullness, for the Torah and the blessed holy One are one, and the power of the agent is in the recipient [we-​khoaḥ ha-​po‘el ba-​nif‘al]. … The vitality of the life of the light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, overflows in the concealment of the letters that are garbed and hidden in this matter, and particularly with respect to the Torah, the light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, overflows in the letters.” Compare the tradition about the Torah being garbed in this world transmitted in the name of the Maggid in Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, Or ha-​Me’ir, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Frank, 1995), 1:244, and see ibid., 2:77. On the study of Torah as the means to comprehend the incomprehensible infinitivity of the divine, see Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, Degel Maḥaneh Efrayim (Benei Beraq: Peer Mikdoshim 2013), pp. 36–​38. On the eternality of the Torah, related specifically to the ability of making a tabernacle for God in one’s heart “in every moment and in every time” (u-​ve-​khol et u-​ve-​khol zeman), see ibid., pp. 316–​317. Following the rabbinic description of twilight in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 2b; Shabbat 34b. The prooftext cited is Zechariah 14:7.

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intermezzo that divides and thereby conjoins the nocturnal attribute of judgment and the diurnal attribute of mercy in the showing of the nonshowing. This is the mystical intent of the adage that divine salvation comes like a blink of the eye (teshu‘at yhwh ke-​heref ayin),92 that is, “salvation that is according to nature requires time, for nature is in time, but the salvation of the Lord, which is above time and nature, is something that is called twilight, that which unites the two but is neither day nor night, merely the blink of the eye for which time is not appropriate.”93 Analogously, the rectification of repentance (tiqqun ha-​teshuvah) occurs as if in a second (ke-​rega), since it ensues from the state before the world was created, that is, from a state that is above temporality (lema‘lah mi-​zemanniyyut), and hence everything can be repaired in a blink of the eye without any endurance of time (shehiyyat zeman). By cleaving to the source that is above time, the repentant becomes a new creation (beri’ah ḥadashah) in time, albeit outside the division into past, present, and future.94 92

93

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See, for instance, Isaac ben Judah Abravanel, Yeshu‘ot Meshiḥo, edited and annotated by Oren Golan, introduction and indices by Moshe Zuriel (Ashkelon, 2018), pt. 2, 1:1, p. 54; Samuel ben Isaac di Uceda, Midrash Shmu’el (Benei Beraq: Me’orei Or, 1989), 5:4, p. 362; Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Asarah Ma’amarot im Perush Yad Yehudah (Jerusalem: Beit Oved, 2014), Ma’amar ha-​Ittim, 6, p. 477; Nathan Nata Shapira, Megalleh Amuqot al ha-​Torah, 2 vols. (Benei Beraq, 2001), p. 367; Isaiah Horowitz, Shenei Luḥot ha-​Berit ha-​ Shalem, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Oz we-​Hadar, 1993), 4:181; Eliezer Papo, Pele Yo‘eṣ (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 235 (s.v. ṣafuy), 303 (s.v. teshu‘at yhwh). On the slightly different formulation, yeshu‘at yhwh ke-​heref ayin, see Tobias ben Eliezer, Midrash Leqaḥ Ṭov al Esther, in Sammlung Agadischer Commentare zum Buche Esther, edited and with notes by Salomon Buber (Vilna: Romm, 1886), 4:17, p. 103; Moses ben Judah Ibn Makhir, Seder ha-​Yom, edited and annotated by Abraham Yeḥiel ha-​Levi Deutsch (Jerusalem: Makhon Seder ha-​Yom, 2015), p. 345. Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 629. On the similar connotation of the rabbinic description of twilight as the blink of the eye signifying a time that is without time, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Kenotic Overflow and Temporal Transcendence: Angelic Embodiment and the Alterity of Time in Abraham Abulafia,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 18 (2008): 161–​162 (reprinted in this volume, p. 305). Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 714. I previously cited this passage in Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 396 n. 60, and see also Idel, “Higher than Time’,” p. 207. On the messianic implications of repentance occurring in one instant, a time that is not in time but above time, in Ḥabad thought, see the passages cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 279–​280, and idem, “Revealing and Re/​veiling: Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Secret,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 64–​65, 84–​85. The connection between repentance and the present moment is affirmed in earlier rabbinic sources. See, for instance, Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, critical edition with notes and commentary by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965), 21:6, p. 201: “‘And now [we-​attah], what if he should stretch out his hand’ (Genesis 3:22). R. Abba bar Kahana said, this teaches that the blessed holy One opened up for him an opening of repentance. ‘And now’ [we-​attah]—​[the meaning of] ‘and now’ is naught

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The resistance to bifurcating eternity and temporality is repeated often in Ḥasidic literature. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye pithily formulated the principle, “Because the Torah is eternal, it must be for every person and for every time.”95 Rather than being the nullification of time, God’s eternity is its perpetual implementation.96 In Yosher Divrei Emet, the collection of dicta from Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh, we read in language that betrays the influence of Maharal: For all the commandments are intellectually eternal [niṣḥiyyot ba-​sekhel] even though pragmatically they are in time and in action [she-​be-​fo‘al hem bi-​zeman u-​ve-​ma‘aseh]. In the intellect, they are everlastingly eternal [tamid niṣḥiyyim], for the Torah is his divinity [elohuto] and his divinity is eternal. As all the disciples of the Beshṭ say in his name, the entirety of the Torah needs to be found incessantly in every time in the way of wisdom and intellect.97

but repentance. How do you know? ‘And now [we-​attah], O Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you etc.’ (Deuteronomy 10:12).” See ibid., 38:9, p. 359. Repentance is described frequently in Ḥabad sources as exceeding the natural world and being beyond the distinction of permissible and forbidden indispensable to the nomian framework of the Torah. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 55–​56, 180–​182, 274; idem, “Revealing and Re/​ veiling,” pp. 28, 67. 95 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 7b. See ibid., 8b, 14c, 15a, 17b, 18d. 96 The same paradox is applied to the intractable philosophical question of why the world was created at a particular point in time and not before if the divine will is eternal and not subject to temporal change. The response beckons the “deep secret” (sod amoq) that the temporal arousal of the will at the moment of creation is a facet of its eternality. See Keter Shem Ṭov, edited and annotated by Jacob Immanuel Schochet (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2004), sec. 348, pp. 215–​216; Sefer Ba‘al Shem Tov al ha-​Torah, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 2007) 1:40–​41. See also the collection of the teachings of the Maggid of Mezhirech, edited by Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh, Liqquṭei Yeqarim (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Toledot Aharon, 1974), sec. 131, 37b: “When the blessed holy One gazes [mistakkel], this is the establishment [qiyyum] of all the worlds, for above there are no hours or time, for in one instant [be-​ rega eḥad] the influx comes from the supernal wellspring that flows continually, and its nature is to benefit and to overflow to his creatures provided that the recipient is worthy to receive.” A partial transcription of this passage appears in Keter Shem Ṭov, sec. 111, p. 120. Note that the denial of time to the supernal realm does not preclude the description of the divine effluence overflowing in one instant, the interval of time that is outside of time. 97 Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh, Yosher Divrei Emet (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Toledot Aharon, 1974), sec. 32, 19a-​b. For parallel versions, see Keter Shem Ṭov, sec. 393, p. 239; Aharon Perlow of Apta, Or Ganuz la-​Ṣaddiqim (Jerusalem: Makhon Sod Yesharim, 2008), p. 54.

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Elaborating this notion, Qalonymous Qalman ha-​Levi Epstein, the disciple of Elimelekh of Lyzhansk, wrote, “It is known that our holy Torah is eternal and exists in every moment and time, since the holy spirit is a matter that has no interruption. Even though in the moment the holy spirit is articulated, it concerns the matter that is in that time [inyan she-​hu be-​otto zeman], nevertheless, the eternal and infinite matter [inyan niṣḥi we-​ein sof] is garbed in that holy spirit.”98 The centrality of this idea in early Ḥasidism is attested as well by the following comment of Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk: This is the matter of man’s worshipping his Creator all the days of his life: none of the times [ha-​ ittim] are the same—​“a time to love and a time to hate” (Ecclesiastes 3:8). For this is the whole of man, that he changes every moment and every second … and this is the matter: he takes off a form and puts on a form [posheṭ ṣurah we-​lovesh ṣurah] … The matter of a man’s variation in his worship of God is also called garments [malbushim]—​the clothes one wears in the morning are not what one wears in the evening.99 Expressed in this passage is the temporal underpinning of Ḥasidic psychology: the temperament of the human—​in contrast to the angelic, animal, vegetative, and inanimate forms of life—​is to change from moment to moment, and in this sense, it is typified by the periodic modification of form required by the worship of God.100 Consonant with the description of the Torah being garbed

98 Qalonymous Qalman ha-​ Levi Epstein, Ma’or wa-​Shemesh, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mir, 2008), 1:203. 99 Menaḥem Mendel of Viṭebsk, Peri ha-​Areṣ al ha-​Torah im Be’ur Ṭa‘am ha-​Peri, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Makhon Peri ha-​Areṣ, 2011), 1:107–​108. 100 See Wolfson, Giving, pp. 321–​322 n. 178, where I conjectured that the idea that the texture of time is determined by the liturgical demand of the distinctiveness of each moment may attest to the influence of the remark of Judah Halevi, Sefer ha-​Kuzari, translated, annotated, and introduced by Yehuda Even Shmuel (Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1972), 3:5, p. 101, that for the pious individual (ḥasid) the moment of prayer is “the seed of time and its fruition,” and all other times are “like paths that lead him to this moment … for by means of it he is likened to the spiritual substances and he is distanced from the animals.” Just as the three times of prayer on the weekdays are the fulfillment of time, so the Sabbath is the “fruit of the week” because that day is “summoned for the conjunction to the divine matter.” Time, in its essence, marks the moment of transfiguration for the Jew, the angelic overcoming of his animality, a process that is realized most fully on the Sabbath, a day set aside for the spiritual union with the amr ilāhī (inyan elohi), the term used to designate the effluence of God that materializes in the physical universe but which is perceived uniquely by the people of Israel; of all ethnicities, only the Jews

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differently in each interim of time, the manifold manifestations of worship are labeled as garments. What is critical to our analysis is that the persistent wavering of the temporal investiture is proportionate to the changeless stability of the infinite. Bolstering the apposition of the temporal and the eternal is the paradox of sameness and difference that underlies the notion of time as the linear circle or the circular line: on the one hand, each moment a commandment is fulfilled reflects the moment the commandment was first given, but, on the other hand, each moment that commandment is fulfilled is a retrieval of the unprecedented, a genuine duplication of the same that is always the same in virtue of always being different. In the words of Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, “[With respect] to all the commandments that were commanded, when the moment and the time [et u-​zeman] of each and every commandment comes, there is aroused [nit‘orer] the matter that was in the moment and the time of the commandment from the ancient past [me-​az u-​mi-​qedem].”101 The implicit hermeneutical assumption that again is altogether otherwise, to invoke once more the Heideggerian formulation, is made even clearer in a second passage: “It is [written] in the writings of the Ari, blessed be his memory,102 that in are accorded the potentiality of being conjoined to this effluence, whence derives their prophetic-​angelic status. I also suggested that this phenomenological account is indispensable for understanding the notions of temporality put forward by Rosenzweig and Heschel. 101 Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 207. 1 02 Ḥayyim Viṭal, Peri Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Or ha-​Bahir, 1980), Miqra Qodesh, ch. 3, p. 484, writes that on each of the times of the festivals there is a glowing of the supernal lights (hitnoṣeṣut orot ha-​elyonim) commensurate to the particular time of the given festival. On the application of this principle more limitedly to the celebration of the new year in Tishrei as the recreation of the world, see ibid., Ro’sh ha-​Shanah, ch. 1, pp. 545–​546. For a more technical explication of this process, see Ḥayyim Viṭal, Sha‘ar ha-​Kawwanot, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2019), Derushei Ḥag ha-​ Sukkot, 3, p. 806. The principle seems to underlie the observation of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Shulḥan Arukh: Oraḥ Ḥayyim, vol. 1, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2008) 1:8, p. 4, that even though the determination of clock time will vary from place to place, it has no effect on the sanctity of Sabbath, festivals, or other rituals, since their holiness is dependent not on terrestrial time zones but on the propitious moment (et raṣon) above and the supernal unifications (yiḥudim elyonim) that surpass the category of place and time; the transtemporal efflux of light illumines each place below in accord with the time that is appropriate to it. See also the comments about the appointed seasons of the festivals (mo‘adim) in the Maggid of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, critical edition with commentary, introduction, and indices by Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1976), sec. 64, pp. 104–​105. Interestingly, in that context, the matter is cast in terms of the gender distinction between masculine and feminine days; the exodus from Egypt is the festival that is masculine in relation to all other festivals, which are feminine. The original illumination from the exodus is revealed on every subsequent Passover and

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each time of the festive seasons such as Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, which occur in every year, when the aforementioned time comes it happens as it was the first time, on Passover the departure from Egypt, and on Pentecost the receiving of the Torah, and so on in each time. To understand how the Torah is received on every Pentecost when it was already given, it must be explained according to what the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, every day it must be as new [ka-​ḥadashim] in your eyes as the day it was given,103 and this one must accept on every Pentecost.”104 Striking the same note, Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev writes: We must comprehend how we can say each and every year “the time of our freedom” on Passover and “the time of the giving of our Torah” on Pentecost when many times have well passed. The matter, however, is as follows: every year when we, the children of Israel, fulfill the commandments of the Creator, blessed be he, that is, the commandment to destroy the leaven and to eat the unleavened bread on Passover, and the rest of other holidays. Also at play here is the widespread correlation in kabbalistic symbolism of the masculine with concealment and the feminine with disclosure. See the compilation of Dov Ber’s teachings transcribed by Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev and recently published as Dibrot ha-​Maggid, edited by Ḥananiah Leichtag (Jerusalem: Mechon Genuzim, 2018), p. 227. Compare Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2003), 240a: “The secret of the Lord that is in the commandments of Sabbath and the festivals, which is the time of the disclosure of the supernal lights in the manner of the consciousness [moḥin] of Abba and Ima that are revealed in Ze‘eir Anpin on Sabbath and the festivals.” See ibid., 243b-​244a. In that context, the illumination from above in vessels below, which vary in accord with specific times and places, is illustrated by the example of the light of the intellect (or ha-​sekhel) being hidden by the language of the parable (mashal). Through the concealment of the parabolic images—​overtly described as consisting of strange matters (inyanim zarim)—​the wisdom contained therein is revealed. Just as the mashal concomitantly veils and unveils the intended meaning of the nimshal, so the vessel that is in time discloses the light that is above time. See ibid., 192a, previously discussed in Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 325 n. 164. On the role of mashal in Dovber Shneuri, see Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 154–​157, 167–​173. The function of the parable in Ḥabad thought, related especially to the image of the Torah as the primordial parable (meshal ha-​qadmoni), is also examined in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 58–​65, 97–​98; idem, “Revealing and Re/​veiling,” pp. 56–​63; idem, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu,” pp. 98–​99. 103 The precise language is closest to Solomon ben Isaac, Perushei Rashi al ha-​Torah, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1983), p. 238 (ad Exodus 19:1). Rashi’s comment is based on earlier rabbinic texts. See Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 63b; Sifre on Deuteronomy, edited by Louis Finkelstein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969), 33, p. 59; and additional sources cited above, n. 38. See Wolfson, Alef, pp. 64–​65 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 119-​120). 1 04 Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 289.

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the commandments that are dependent on it, then a great illumination is incited for us by his great lovingkindness, just as a great illumination occurred for our forefathers at the time they exited from Egypt as a reward for the commandments that they fulfilled. … Therefore, we say on Passover “the time of our freedom” and on Pentecost “the time of the giving of our Torah” because there is aroused upon us the time of freedom and the time of the giving of the Torah in accord with our good actions and the fulfillment of his commandments.105 Although Maharal’s ruminations on time are evident in any number of Ḥasidic sources, this influence is most pronounced in the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch dynasty.106 Given the vastness of this corpus, I will here present only a modest sampling of applicable sources to corroborate my claim. Let me begin with a statement from Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud we-​ha-​Emunah: For the name yhwh indicates that he is above time [lema‘lah min ha-​ zeman], for he was, is, and will be in one moment [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh be-​rega eḥad]107 … and he is also above the aspect of place [lema‘lah 105 Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev, Qedushat Levi, 3 vols. (Benei Beraq: Peer Mikdoshim, 2016), 2:621. See ibid., p. 1090: “It is known that all the miracles and all of the illuminations, which were revealed in previous days, are revealed in each and every year, for example, on Ḥanukkah, the miracle of Ḥanukkah and the mercies that occurred to Mattityahu the high priest, when we light the candles of Ḥanukkah; and on Purim, each and every year there are revealed the miracles and mercies that were revealed in the days of Mordecai and Esther; and similarly the illumination of Pentecost, the sanctity of the giving of the Torah is revealed each and every year; and likewise on Ro’sh ha-​Shanah the illuminations of the creation of the world are revealed, as it is explained in the writings of the Ari, blessed be his memory.” 106 Sherwin, Mystical Theology, p. 139, notes that the influence of Maharal on the Ḥabad-​ Lubavitch school is enhanced by the tradition that its founder, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, is his direct descendant. 107 Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2 vols. (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1998), 2: Derushim le-​Ro’sh ha-​Shanah, 61a: “Thus, as it were, above in the source of the vitality and the permutations, which is the life of lives, the light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, there is no division of time into past, present, and future, for there they are all integrated as one. … But when the vitality extends from above to below to sustain the worlds, the aspect of time comes to be. Prior to the world having been created, there was no aspect of time at all. … When a person places these matters on his heart that all of the world is under time, and that time is considered as an instant [rega] before him, blessed be he, for he is above time and before him there is no division of time at all, his heart will be like an ember of a burning fire and his soul will yearn to be conjoined to him, blessed be he.” Compare Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 170, p. 267, where the words of prayer are said to ascend to the infinite “in one instant that is above time [be-​rega eḥad lema‘lah

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mi-​beḥinat maqom], for he constantly brings into being the entire aspect of place from above to below, and to the four sides. Even though he, blessed be he, transcends place and time, he is also found below in place and time; that is, he is united in the aspect of his kingship [she-​mityaḥed be-​middat malkhuto] whence there issue and come to be place and time. This is the lower unity [yiḥuda tata’ah] … that is, his substance and his essence, may he be blessed [she-​mahuto we-​aṣmuto yitbarakh], which is called by the name Ein Sof, blessed be he, verily fills all of the earth in time and place … for everything is in the aspect of place that is nullified in existence in the light of the infinite, blessed be he [ki ha-​kol hu beḥinat maqom ha-​baṭel bi-​meṣi’ut ba-​or ein sof barukh hu], which is cloaked in it [ha-​mitlabbesh bo] by means of the attribute of his kingship that is unified with him [ha-​ meyuḥedet bo], blessed be he. The attribute of his kingship, however, is the attribute of contraction and concealment [middat ha-​ṣimṣum we-​ha-​ hester] to hide the light of the infinite, blessed be he, so that time and place will not be nullified from their existence entirely [she-​lo yibaṭlu ha-​ zeman we-​ha-​maqom mi-​meṣi’utam legamrei] such that there would be no aspect of time and place in existence even for the lower beings.108 On the one hand, the ascription of temporal and spatial properties to God is categorically denied, since this would imply a change in the divine ipseity that is ipso facto impossible;109 on the other hand, the sempiternity betokened by me-​ha-​zeman], for there is no division of time [hitḥallequt ha-​zeman] there.” On the messianic implications in Ḥabad thought of the description of the now as an instant, or as the miniscule interval of time (rega qaṭan), see sources cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 277–​280, 395 n. 52, 396 n. 60. 108 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1979), pt. 2, ch. 7, 82a-​ b. Regarding this passage, see Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, translated by Jonathan Chipman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 265–​266. On p. 263, the author correctly notes the fundamental paradox of Ḥabad cosmology—​the concealment of the divine from the world makes possible the disclosure of the divine in the world; alternatively expressed, the withdrawal is the bestowal. See also Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent, pp. 25–​ 31, 79–​91. Compare Keter Shem Ṭov, sec. 354, pp. 220–​222. From other passages in the works of Shneur Zalman, we may deduce that the infinite essence is outside the category of the world and thus it is beyond the ontological demarcation of transcendence and immanence, or in the technical zoharic language by which these concepts are often expressed, sovev kol almin and memalle kol almin, encompassing all worlds and filling all worlds. See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Behar, 42a-​b; Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn of Kapust, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit (Berditchev: Ḥayyim Ya‘aqov Shefṭel, 1902), 30a-​b. 1 09 See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Balaq, 70c, translated in Wolfson, Alef, p. 109 (reprinted in this volume, p. 215). Compare Aaron Halevi Horowitz of Staroselye,

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the ineffable name is inherently temporal and spatial inasmuch as it triggers the never-​ending regeneration of the invariable in the capriciousness of the variable.110 The propensity of the infinite to assume the attire of the finite is tied specifically to the attribute of Malkhut, the quality of judgment that delimits the limitlessness of the infinite by constricting and concealing its light to the point that it dissembles in the semblance of the autonomous spatio-​temporal world.111 Even so, as Shneur Zalman is quick to point out, “since the attribute of his kingship, may he be blessed, is united to his substance and to his essence [meyuḥedet be-​mahuto we-​aṣmuto], may he be blessed, in the absolute unity [be-​takhlit ha-​yiḥud] … it follows that the aspect of place and time as well will be actually abrogated in existence [beṭelim bi-​meṣi’ut mammash] vis-​à-​vis his substance and his essence like the light of the sun that is nullified in the sun [ke-​viṭṭul or ha-​shemesh ba-​shemesh], and this is the amalgamation [shilluv] of the name for lordship [adnut] with the name yhwh.” 112 The purpose of the ṣimṣum, therefore, is the disclosure of the aspect of Malkhut, the mystery of the Sha‘arei ha-​Yiḥud we-​Emunah (Shklov: Azriel Zelig ben Ya‘aqov, 1820), pt. 1, 2a; Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn of Kapust, Magen Avot al Sefer Shemot (Berditchev: Ḥayyim Ya‘aqov Shefṭel, 1902), 17b. On the attribution of primordiality to God and the denial of the temporal division of past, present, and future, in part based on the language of Maimonides, see Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 57a-​58b. According to the precise language of the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq, God, or the essence of Ein Sof, is in a state of the perpetual present (howeh tamid) that is above time entirely and even above the inestimable duration (hemshekh ha-​bilti meshu‘ar) such that there is no distinction between past, present, and future, and no discernible difference between before and after. See Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ḥaqirah (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2003), 31a; and analysis in Jacob Gottlieb, Rationalism in Hasidic Attire: Habad’s Harmonistic Approach to Maimonides (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2009), pp. 63–​64, 79–​80 (Hebrew). 110 Compare Ḥayyim Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2013), 1:1, 11a: “The great name, which is the name of the four letters yhwh, is called this way to instruct about his eternal being and everlasting existence, past, present, and future—​prior to the creation, in the time of the perdurance of creation, and after it returns to what was.” 1 11 Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Shir ha-​Shirim, 48d: “The Ein Sof, blessed be he, is called the source of the delights … but since the souls are created and finite, it was impossible for them to receive the delight from Ein Sof, blessed be he, himself except by means of the splendor from the aspect of his kingship, blessed be he, which fills all worlds, from the language ‘I dwelled in their midst’ (Exodus 25:8).” On the incarnational import of the expression “fills all worlds,” consider Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Ḥuqat, 64d: “The aspect of fills all worlds is the light and divine efflux garbed and grasped in the worlds, and it results in the order and gradation of the worlds from cause to cause, each one in accord with its measure, until it is also garbed in the corporeal heaven and earth in accord with their significance.” 112 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 2, ch. 7, 82a.

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lower unity marked semiotically by the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton through the mantle of its epithet Adonai. What is especially noteworthy for this analysis is that the spatial coordinates are derivative from the temporal emplacement of the infinite in the concurrence of past, present, and future.113 The perspective of Shneur Zalman, which has reverberated in the writings of the other Ḥabad-​Lubavitch masters through many decades, is made clear in Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, the third leader of the movement often referred to as the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq: “Thus, the yod of the Tetragrammaton instructs about the contraction [ṣimṣum] by which he withdrew the aspect of his essence from everything and he resided in time [we-​yishreh bi-​zeman], the aspect of the world [that is] concealment [olam he‘lem]. … Even though he, blessed be he, is above the category of place, he nevertheless resided as well in the aspect of place. … Similarly, it must be said with respect to the matter of time, even though he, blessed be he, is above the aspect of time, he nonetheless radiates from this aspect also in time.”114 The act of contraction/​ withdrawal results in the confining of the infinite light within the contours of space and time such that the world (ha-​world) assumes the phenomenological status of being the concealment (he‘lem)115 by which that light is revealed. The ontic condition that shapes the polyontological enframing of the metaontological beingness of being is thus the manifestation of the nonmanifest, the exposure of what is hidden that perforce must be a hiding of what is exposed. From this vantage point, the spatial and the temporal are threads that cannot be disentangled; I would contend nevertheless that the former is an offshoot of the latter.116 Concentrating on the temporal dimensions of the mystery of 113 See Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, 3 vols., revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), pp. 920–​922. 114 Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Devarim, vol. 6 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2013), p. 2492. 115 On this wordplay, which is a cornerstone of Ḥabad meontological cosmology, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 26–​27, 52, 93, 103–​114, 128–​129, 132, 215, 218. 116 I respectfully take issue with the observation of Wojciech Tworek, Eternity Now: Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady and Temporality (Albany: State University of Albany Press, 2019), p. 28, that Shneur Zalman “conceptualizes time in spatial terms.” In my judgment, the opposite is true, the spatial is conceptualized in temporal terms, especially as the latter is related to the triadic division implied by the Tetragrammaton. From another perspective, one could argue that there is coalescence of the spatial and the temporal. See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: We-​Zo’t ha-​Berakhah, 98a: “Place and time are both created in one aspect.” On the interface between time and place, see also Schneersohn, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 240a-​b. Related to this claim is the emphasis placed on the unity of place and time in the realm that is above the emanation. See Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 921. Curiously, the Ḥabad position has resonance with the perspective enunciated by Nishida Kitarō. See references cited and analyzed in ch. 2 at nn. 12–​25.

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the incarnation of the infinite in the finite,117 the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq writes, “The explanation of the matter of how time can be comprised multivalently at once [nikhlal harbeh be-​vat aḥat] is in accord with what we introduced above that his essence, blessed be he, is entirely above time but in the aspect of the perpetual present [howeh tamid], and the being of the root of time is on account of the contraction and the expansion [ṣimṣum we-​hitpashsheṭut] that was in the beginning of the creation of the world … Hence, the aspect of contraction and expansion is what causes the prolongation of the time of the instant [shehiyyat zeman ha-​rega].”118 There is much to say about this complex of ideas and the intricate interplay of the spatial and the temporal that emerges from the conception of time as the instant that arises from the withdrawal of the light to create a space devoid of the light—​the infraction of time that cannot be measured in time—​ but what is most apposite for our purposes is that eternality is proffered as an aspect of temporality, the limitless extension of the limit that cannot be extended. Needless to say, the corollary of this statement is equally true: time is not primarily the measure of bodies in motion but it is rather the propulsion of the eternal impulse—​the essence of the light of the infinite (aṣmut or ein sof) completely beyond the category and demarcation of the aspect of time Let me note, finally, that insofar as the Tetragrammaton denominates the manifestation of the light of the infinite in the concatenation of the four worlds, particularly as the compresence of the three tenses of time in the triadic aspect of the governance of divine kingship (Malkhut) expressed as he reigned, he reigns, and he will reign, Tworek’s suggestion (Eternity Now, p. 27) that my generalization that the kabbalistic conception of time is based on the intermingling of temporality and luminosity (Wolfson, Alef, p. 229 n. 266) does not apply to Shneur Zalman can easily be dismissed as disproportionate nitpicking. Identifying Malkhut as the source of time, a point that Tworek himself well recognizes, is predicated on the presumption that temporality is the measure of the immeasurable light taking shape within the concatenation of the worlds that originate in the infinite essence that is beyond the dyad of transcendence and immanence. The only reality is that essence, which is the luminescence that emanates the light that is the vitality of all that assumes the semblance of independent being. 117 On the use of the term incarnation to describe the paradox in Ḥabad cosmology of the immaterial light of infinity taking on the garment of the finitude of material nature, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 71, 78, 84, 89, 97–​98, 129, 138, 237, 329 n. 26, 333 n. 68. To date, the most comprehensive discussion of the topic of incarnation in Eastern European pietism is Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Ḥabad is mentioned sporadically in Magid’s monograph. 118 Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 59a. On the connotation of the term rega in Ḥabad speculation, particularly related to the messianic, see passages translated and analyzed in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 277–​280, 395 n. 52, 396 n. 60. See also Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/​veiling,” pp. 64–​65 n. 140.

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(lema‘lah mi-​sug we-​geder beḥinat ha-​zeman legamrei), even beyond the compresence of past, present, and future signified by the Tetragrammaton in the world of emanation119—​that dissimulates in the form in the temporal order of the lower six sefirotic emanations and then subsequently in the six millennia that constitute the span of historical time of the terrestrial world.120 The world 119 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 322–​323. See, however, ibid., p. 301: “The light of Ein Sof, blessed be he, is above time, and thus it is not possible to say with respect to it that there is a difference between he was, he is, and he will be, but rather he was, he is, and he will be are undifferentiated [shawin].” And compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot mi-​Kol Shanah, 2 vols., revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2019), 121c-​d. After considering and rejecting the response of Viṭal to the philosophical question why creation did not occur at a time prior to when it did transpire (Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:1, 11b), Shneur Zalman offers the following explanation: “The true response is known in the name of the Rav, the Maggid, blessed be his memory, that time itself comes and proceeds in the aspect of creation of something from nothing, and it is the aspect of a new creation [nivra meḥuddash] like the rest of the created beings. And so it is in the aspect of the emanation of time, for there it is in the aspect of the emanated from nothing to something; that is, it proceeds and comes from above time where there is no aspect of time at all. The aspect of time consists of these three, past, present, and future, and above time there is no previous in the past and no posterior in the future but rather past and future are both one, and the previous is posterior and the posterior is previous because it is divested of the aspect of time in the past, present, and future. Therefore, there is no question at all why the emanation or creation were not in a prior or later time since before the concatenation of [the worlds of] emanation, creation, formation, and doing, it was still above the matter of time in the past or the future, and the posterior was prior and the prior posterior.” 120 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 339–​341. Compare the following comment in the explication of Isaiah 33:6—​a discourse that plumbs the depth of the temporal implications of each festival—​in Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn of Kapust, Magen Avot, pt. 6 (Berditchev: Ḥayyim Ya‘aqov Shefṭel, 1902), 34b: “On festivals we say ‘who sanctifies Israel and the festive seasons [meqaddesh yisra’el we-​ha-​zemannim],’ that is, drawing down the light of the infinite, which is above time, in the aspect of time. Therefore, it is the rectification of time [tiqqun ha-​zeman] from above to below.” The Sabbath, by contrast, is characterized by the ascent of the worlds from below to above, and thus it stimulates the elevation of time to the light of infinity, which is above time. On the transtemporal status of Ein Sof, which is identified as the aspect of eternality, see Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 30a-​b, 33d. I am again struck by the affinity of the kabbalistic perspective, especially as it has been articulated in Ḥabad literature, and Schelling’s characterization of time as the movement of the eternal nature. Through this movement, which entails the ascent from the lowest to attain the highest and then the retreat in order to ascend again, the eternal nature discerns itself as eternity. On the one hand, the eternity of the Godhead, according to Schelling, is indivisible and beyond all time, and thus is “no more eternal in the succession of all times than in the moment.” On the other hand, the Godhead “counts and gauges” in the clockwork of time to the extent that time itself is the “constant repetition” of eternity. Much like the kabbalistic Ein Sof, the Schellingian Godhead is beyond all time but its eternality is not reckoned as the blending of successive moments of time strung together linearly but rather as the circuitous movement by which the nonbeing of the everlasting being is displayed distinctively in every moment that comes to be and Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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of emanation (olam ha-​aṣilut), the pleroma of the divine potencies, encapsulates a time that is above the time of this world, a time, designated as seder ha-​ zeman based on the rabbinic nomenclature seder zemannim,121 that comprises all the division of the temporal particularities of our world (she-​hu ha-​kolel kol ha-​hitḥallequt peraṭei ha-​zeman she-​ba-​olam shelanu) according to the principle there is nothing disclosed in the particular (peraṭ) that was not concealed in the general (kelal).122 The relationship between the temporal and the eternal is made clear in the following passage from Shneur Zalman: passes away. See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World (Fragment) from the Handwritten Remains, Third Version (c. 1815), translated, with an introduction, by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 79–​80. For a preliminary comparison of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Ḥabad acosmic naturalism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Achronic Time, Messianic Expectation, and the Secret of the Leap in Habad,” in Habad Hasidism: History, Thought, Image, edited by Jonathan Meir and Gadi Sagiv(Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2016), pp. 57–​73 (English section). The specific issue of time and eternity is discussed on pp. 67–​68. Many have written on the possible impact of kabbalah on Schelling. For a representative list of relevant studies, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 392–​393 n. 2, and additional sources cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 18–​19 n. 40, to which one might now add Paul Franks, “Mythology, Essence, and Form: Schelling’s Jewish Reception in the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (2019): 71–​89, and idem, “From World-​Soul to Universal Organism: Maimon’s Hypothesis and Schelling’s Physicalization of a Platonic-​Kabbalistic Concept,” in Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, edited by G. Anthony Bruno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 71–​92. In my effort to compare the role of the leap in Ḥabad speculation to Schelling’s notion of the Sprung, I neglected to mention this precise comparison already made in the nineteenth century by Joseph Sossnitz. See Eliyahu Stern, Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 98–​99. The comparison of Schelling and Ḥabad can also be found in Fabius Mieses, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Leipzig: Moritz Schäfer, 1887), pp. 155–​156 (including reference to the notion of the leap) and in Samuel Alexandrov, Mikhtevei Meḥqar u-​Viqqoret (Vilna: Romm, 1907), p. 77. Alexandrov goes so far as to say that the source for Schelling, “the father of modern philosophy,” is in the “Ḥabad masters and the kabbalists, and even if we presume that the source for the foundations of the wisdom of the kabbalah is in the words of the ancient gnostics, nevertheless it appears that these images circulate in the human species without dependence on place and time.” I am grateful to Reuven Leigh of Cambridge for drawing my attention to these references. 121 On the kabbalistic interpretation of the rabbinic expression seder zemannim, see the texts (including other Ḥabad sources) cited and analyzed Wolfson, Alef, pp. 62, 73, 77–​79, 84–​ 88, 94, 109, 111, 115 (repinted in this volume, pp. 113, 136, 142–143, 156-162, 171, 215, 222-223, 228). 1 22 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1, pp. 320–​321. See ibid., p. 324; and the hanaḥah of Dovber Shneuri on the root of the coming to be of time (shoresh hithawwut ha-​zeman) in Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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Regarding that which is actually under time, it does not endure in the aspect of eternality, and with respect to that which is above time in the aspect of the infinite, the terminology of eternality [niṣḥiyyut] and everlastingness [olamiyyut]123 is not appropriate there, for this terminology applies only to the aspect and category of time [bi-​veḥinat we-​geder zeman] in which there is a considerable duration of time. The temporal duration [hemshekh ha-​zeman] does not apply at all to what is not in the aspect or category of time, but it is rather [in the state of] he was, he is, and he will be all at once [hayah howeh we-​yihyeh ha-​kol eḥad]. This aspect and the terminology of everlastingness and eternality pertain only to the aspect of his kingship [malkhuto], blessed be he, for it is in the aspect and category of time, he reigned, he reigns, and he will reign. … Even so, this is the illumination of the infinite, blessed be, and it is as its name, without any end.124 The Tetragrammaton signifies an equiprimordiality based on the continuity of discontinuity propelling the eternal unfolding of the timewave enfolding in the folds of infinitivity. In its most rudimentary sense, temporality consists of the achronal order that precedes the measurable durée of time, a time before the more prosaic sense of time, a time that is not dependent on the physical universe. The originary time—​the time before time, the foretime—​is the measure of the immeasurable ebb and flow of infinity that generates the polarities of light and dark, which translate into the sentient experience of the temporal forged by the bicameral rhythm of day and night, engendered respectively as feminine judgment and masculine mercy.125 5566, vol. 1, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 88–​89. On the division of time into the general and the particular, compare the hanaḥah of Dovber Shneuri in Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5566, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 535–​536. See also Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 59a; Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 40c. 123 In the printed text the word here is olamot, which would translate as worlds, but I suspect this is a typographical error and that the correct word, as it appears subsequently in this passage, is olamiyyut, which denotes the sense of existing everlastingly or imperishably. 1 24 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Derushim le-​Shabbat Shuvah, 67c. 125 On time as the conjunction of masculine mercy and feminine judgment, see Wolfson, Alef, pp. 79, 91, 98 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 147, 167, 186–187); idem, “Retroactive Not Yet,” pp. 42–​44 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 366–369). According to some kabbalists, the pulse of time seems to be related to the throbbing of the divine phallus, but according to other kabbalists, time is associated with the feminine Shekhinah—​particularly the words et, zeman, and zo’t—​although in some passages, even this association is linked to the heteroerotic coupling of the female and the male, as in the expression itto de-​ṣaddiq, the moment that belongs to the righteous one. See Zohar 3:58a; Tiqqunei Zohar, edited

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As Shneur Zalman formulated the matter in another passage, “And thus the aspect of time comes to be from the aspect that is exceedingly above the aspect of time and boundary [mi-​beḥinat asher lema‘lah ma‘lah mi-​beḥinat zeman u-​ gevul], the aspect of encompassing all worlds [sovev kol almin]. And this is [the import of] ‘the Lord reigned, the Lord reigns, and the Lord will reign forever’ [yhwh malakh yhwh melekh yhwh yimlokh le‘olam va‘ed]126 because, prima facie, it is not appropriate to utter an aspect of time with respect to yhwh, which is the aspect of encompassing all worlds.”127 The liturgical formula that affirms God’s dominion in past, present, and future is the textual foundation for the attribution of time to the quality of governance and therefore it is ascribed to Malkhut, the locus for boundary and division within the boundless indivisibility of the divine economy. “And the aspect of Malkhut is verily the aspect of the power of the agent in the recipient [beḥinat koaḥ ha-​po‘el ba-​nif‘al mammash] and there the time actually comes to be from nothing to by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), sec. 6, 21a (in that context, itto de-​ṣaddiq is identified more specifically as the night of Sabbath, commonly held by kabbalists to be the time of the hieros gamos), sec. 21, 43a, and sec. 69, 101b; Joseph Giqatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, edited by Joseph Ben-​Shlomo, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1981), 1:134–​ 135; Meir Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​ Sefarim, 2004), 2:18, p. 135; Ḥemdat ha-​Yamim al Shabbat Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2003), p. 266; Horowitz, Shenei Luḥot ha-​Berit, 1:64; Yiṣḥaq Isaac Katz, Berit Kehunat Olam (Jerusalem: Weiss, 1950), p. 325; Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei Zohar im Be’ur ha-​ Gra (Vilna: Shemaryahu Zuckerman, 1867), 44a; Wolfson, Alef, pp. 88, 100, 104–​106, 227 n. 245 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 162, 188-​189, 189 n. 359, 195-​198); idem, “Imago Templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-​Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007), pp. 121–​135, esp. 127–​ 132. Independently, and utilizing a different methodological apparatus, Ḥaviva Pedaya, “The Divinity as Place and Time and the Holy Place in Jewish Mysticism,” in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land—​Proceedings of the International Conference in Memory of Joshua Prawer, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1998), pp. 84–​111, discusses the manner in which the divine is described in terms of the concepts of time and space in kabbalistic sources. Although her primary emphasis is on the spiritualization of the holy place, Pedaya does emphasize the concurrence of the spatial and the temporal such that we have the “ability to feel place as time, or to feel time as place,” and this is particularly relevant to the state of redemption (p. 101). For another approach to the issue of time, especially as it relates to the construction of the feminine imaginaire, see Biti Roi, Love of the Shekhina: Mysticism and Poetics in Tiqqunei ha-​Zohar (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2017), pp. 38–​39, 201, 228–​229, 320 (Hebrew). 126 The formulation is derived from the morning prayer yehi khevod yhwh le‘olam, which is based in part on the language of Psalms 104:31. See Seder Avodat Yisra’el, edited by Seligman Baer (Berlin: Schocken, 1937), p. 68. 1 27 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen: Al Inyanim, vol. 2, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2015), p. 496.

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something as in the six thousand years that the world will exist.”128 An obvious parallel is drawn between the triadic physiognomy of that governance—​he reigned, he reigns, and he will reign forever—​and the three tenses combined in the Tetragrammaton—​he was, he is, and he will be.129 The concomitance of these tenses signifies the perpetuity (temidut) that is above the temporal horizon.130 Attunement to the point yields the paradoxical insight that invariability secures the unvarying variability: “In each and every hour, there is a different dissemination [hamshakhah aḥeret] from the supernal worlds to sustain the lower ones, and the dissemination of the vitality from the previous hour returns to its source [in the secret of running to and fro that is in Sefer Yeṣirah131] with all of the Torah and the good deeds of the lower beings. For in every hour there rules a permutation [ṣeruf] from the twelve permutations of the blessed name yhwh in the twelve hours of the day and the permutations of the name Adonai in night as is known.”132 The end of the passage sheds light on the inherently linguistic nature of the temporal undulation regulated diurnally by the twelve permutations of the Tetragrammaton and nocturnally by the twelve permutations of the epithet of that name. As we may adduce from a passage in Iggeret ha-​Qodesh, Shneur Zalman understood the illumination of the divine as the diffusion of the vitality [hitpashsheṭut ha-​ḥiyyut] from the ineffable name, which comprises the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew 128 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1, p. 320. See Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 160. Compare Dovber Shneuri, Be’urei ha-​Zohar, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2015), 87b-​c: “It is known that the source for the coming into being of time [hithawwut ha-​zeman], past, present, and future, is all in the aspect of Malkhut as in [the case of] he reigned, he reigns, he will reign [malakh melekh yimlokh]. The name yhwh of Ze‘eir Anpin, however, entails that he was, he is, and he will be as one, that is, past, present, and future are comprised as one.” See also Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 59a; Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​ Ma’amarim 5668 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), p. 183; idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5678 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2014), p. 304; Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 40c, 48a-​b; and other passages cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Alef, pp. 108–​112 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 212-​224). 129 Dovber Shneuri, Perush ha-​Millot (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 59c, translated in Wolfson, Alef, p. 110 (reprinted in this volume, p. 219). Compare Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 48a. 130 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 823. 131 Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, p. 72, § 5. The expression raṣo wa-​shov is derived from the depiction of the celestial beasts bearing the chariot in Ezekiel 1:14. 132 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 1, ch. 41, 58b. Compare Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 2: Derushim le-​Ro’sh ha-​Shanah, 61a. On the nexus between time and Malkhut, related to the letters of divine speech, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5564 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), p. 205, cited and analyzed by Tworek, Before Eternity, pp. 26–​27.

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alphabet and their different combinations: “And thus all the variations of the details [shinnuyei ha-​peraṭim] in each and every world are in accordance with the variations of the permutations of the letters [shinnuyei ṣerufei ha-​otiyyot], and similarly, the variations of the times [shinnuyei ha-​zemannim] in the past, present and future, and the variations of all the events in the changing of the times [kol ha-​qorot be-​ḥillufei ha-​zemannim], everything is from the permutations of the letters, which are the dissemination of the vitality [hamshakhat ha-​ḥiyyut] from his attributes, may his name be blessed.”133 The connection established between the vitality of light emanating from the infinite, which sustains the physical world, and the permutation of the letters contained in the name highlights that the true nature of materiality is to be understood as the hyperliteral body, that is, the body whose mass is the vestment woven by the letters of the Torah, which are comprised in the Tetragrammaton.134 All that transpires temporally ensues from the disparate combinations of the letters that are constantly changing in their immutability and enduring immutably in their constant change. Even the concept of eternity is to be assessed from this perspective; it is not fitting to speak of that which is above the aspect and category of time as if it were eternal, since the latter term applies only to that which falls under the aspect and category of time, that is, the temporal duration that is forever without boundary and cessation (hemshekh ha-​zeman beli gevul we-​hefseq le‘olam).135 Paradoxically, when the light of infinity, which is above the aspect of time divided into the three tenses, illumines that which falls under the governance of the temporal, then time itself becomes eternal. Giving voice to the full scope of the dialetheic nature of the paradox,136 133 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 4, 110a. For a more extended discussion in Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud we-​ha-​Emunah of the divine creativity as the dissemination of the light through the permutations of the Hebrew letters, see ibid., pt. 2, ch. 11, 88a-​89a. On the fluctuation of the moments of time in accord with the polarity of good and evil (shinnuy ha-​ittim bi-​zemannim de-​ṭov wa-​ra), see Schneersohn, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 308c. 134 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 130–​160. 135 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5568, vol. 1, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), p. 430. 136 In contrast to dialectic, at least understood in a Hegelian sense, which entails a sublation of the difference between antinomies and their resolution in a higher synthesis, the neologism dialetheia, in defiance of the logical principle of noncontradiction, signifies that there are true contradictions and thus a statement can be both true and false, the contradictory nature of which is syllogistically diagrammed in the form of “α and it is not the case that α.” See Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 3; idem, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–​6. For an extended discussion of dialetheism and the problem of truth and falsity, see ibid., pp. 53–​72.

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Shneur Zalman writes, “From this it is understood that in the eternality of time [be-​niṣḥiyyut ha-​zeman] there is the union and conjunction of that which is above time with time [yiḥud we-​ḥibbur mi-​lema‘lah min ha-​zeman im ha-​zeman], and even though they are two absolute opposites, the aspect of temporal eternality [beḥinat ha-​niṣḥiyyut she-​ba-​zeman] is comprised of both together. With this we can understand that this is also the matter of the union of the blessed holy One and Shekhinah, which is the unity of yhwh and Elohim … for it is known that the aspect of time of past, present, [and future] is in the aspect of the kingship of emanation [malkhut de-​aṣilut], which is called Shekhinah, as it is said ‘the Lord reigned, [the Lord reigns], and [the Lord] will reign,’ past, present, and future.”137 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, the RaShaB, reiterates the 137 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5568, vol. 1, p. 430. Dov Schwartz, Habad’s Thought From Beginning to End (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2010), p. 37 (Hebrew), duly notes that, according to Shneur Zalman, the light of Ein Sof is both above time and that which makes the existence of time possible. In n. 33, ad locum, Schwartz suggests that the assumption that time proceeds from the infinite stands in contrast to the dichotomous perspective attributed to the Maggid of Mezhirech, which distinguishes sharply between that which is above temporality and the temporal. The passage that Schwartz cites as prooftext is from Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh, Liqquṭei Yeqarim, sec. 290, 108b. Explicating the aggadic tradition that Elijah lives eternally, the Maggid contrasts the temporal life and the eternal state that is above timeliness (lema‘lah mi-​zemanniyyut). The latter is compared to the one moment (rega eḥad) that one experiences in a dream, a jouissance (ta‘anug) beyond the temporal strictures that cannot be endured in this world. The passage appears as well in the compilations of the Maggid’s teachings Or Torah, sec. 391, p. 415, Or ha-​Emet, 6b, and Liqquṭei Amarim (Jerusalem: Shuvi Nafshi, 2009), p. 107. The text is cited and interpreted by Idel, “‘Higher than Time’,” pp. 203–​204. The term ta‘anug denotes the erotic rhapsody and noetic bliss that result from the expansion of consciousness (harḥavat ha-​da‘at), which the Maggid often aligned symbolically with the divine and human phylacteries. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 45, p. 68; idem, Liqquṭei Amarim, p. 1. Regarding the concept of ta‘anug in Ḥasidic sources, see Idel, Hasidism, pp. 133–​140, 234–​235; idem, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 228–​229; idem, “Ta‘anug: Erotic Delights From Kabbalah to Hasidism,” in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraff and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 131–​145; Ron Margolin, The Human Temple: Religious Interiorization and the Structuring of Inner Life in Early Hasidism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), pp. 218–​220 (Hebrew). See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Or Torah, sec. 245, pp. 298–​299: “Speech and action are in time but thought is not in time. Even though it is also in time, since the supernal world corresponds to the lower world, it is not in time. For example, an intelligent person can understand a matter in one moment [rega eḥad], but when he wants to speak he needs several hours. This is [the import of the statement] ‘More beautiful is one hour of the even-​tempered spirit of the world to come than all the life of this world’ (Mishnah, Avot 4:17). Ostensibly, this is an exaggeration, but in truth what can be in the world to come in one hour would need several thousands of years in this world just as a person

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sees in a dream in one moment what would take a year or more if he wanted to accomplish.” The dualistic approach is enunciated clearly in the conclusion of the passage about Elijah in Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh, Liqquṭei Yeqarim, sec. 290, 108b: “For time is a created entity and it cannot receive that which is above time.” I concur with Schwartz that Ḥabad thought is in opposition to this perspective insofar as it is predicated on the incongruity of time emanating from that which is above time, the enigma of the infinite light incarnate in the veneer of the finite. See, however, Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 56, p. 83 (found as well in Or ha-​Emet, 9b-​10a). Responding to the question concerning the veracity of the pronouncement that God and the Torah are one (Zohar 2:60a) if we posit that God is infinite and the Torah is finite, the Maggid notes that the Torah is the divine wisdom, which comes from the infinite and therefore embodies its force according to the principle “the power of the agent is in the recipient” (koaḥ ha-​po‘el ba-​nif‘al). This philosophical locution is used frequently by the Maggid to impart the mystery of the incarnation of the immaterial light in the material. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 97, p. 150 (compare Liqquṭei Amarim, pp. 166–​167, which is copied verbatim in the beginning of Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, p. 1), and sec.122, p. 200: “It is known that the agent and the recipient are an incomposite unity and they are not separate, but if not for the agent in the recipient, it would be null and void [efes we-​ofes].” See ibid., sec. 154, p. 254; and Or Torah, sec. 315, p. 363 (Liqquṭei Yeqarim, sec. 250, 76b): “Of necessity there will be in the agent what is in the recipient, for the power of the agent is in the recipient.” This language is much closer to the view promulgated by Shneur Zalman and other masters of the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch dynasty. On occasion, they employ the expression koaḥ ha-​po‘el ba-​nif‘al to convey the sense of the immaterial assuming the form of the material. See Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 216, 398–​399 nn. 150–​151, and reference cited above, n. 128. See also the passage from Shneur Zalman’s Seder Tefillot cited above, n. 119. The paradoxical intent of this teaching mandates that the disclosure of the concealment must be a concealment of the disclosure. See the articulation of this viewpoint in Dibrot ha-​Maggid, p. 314: “Thus, there is nothing in this world that does have power from the Creator [koaḥ mi-​bore] and a portion of divinity [we-​ḥeleq me-​elohut], but it very much assumes the garbing by way of cause and effect, and in the first garment there is also no essence of the Creator [aṣmut ha-​bore], since it is an effect, and it is not possible for the cause to be garbed entirely in the effect, rather what is found there is what he constricted of himself to be there [raq nimṣa sham mah she-​ṣimṣem aṣmo le-​sham], and there is the yod, as the young boy shall write [na‘ar qaṭan yikhtevu based on we-​na‘ar yikhtevem in Isaiah 10:19], as we wrote above with respect to the verse ‘I was a youth and I have aged’ [na‘ar hayiti gam zaqanti] (Psalms 37:25), and it comes afterwards to be garbed [lehitlabbeshut] and the waw comes out, and afterwards the other letters of yhwh, and then it is already called name [we-​az kevar niqra shem], for the Creator himself has no name at all, but only in the garment is he called by this name.” On the time appropriate to the dream, see above n. 27, and see the analysis of the views of the oneiric phenomenon in the Maggid and Pinḥas of Korzec discussed in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 266–​269, and see especially the comparison of prayer to the dream based on their supratemporal status in the text of Pinḥas of Korzec, Imrei Pinḥas ha-​Shalem, edited by Yeḥezqel Shraga Frankel (Benei Beraq: Mishor, 1988), pp. 47–​48: “And so in prayer, when one prays with intention, one restores the letters face to face, for one reaches above time [lema‘lah min ha-​zeman] like a dream in which one dreams something that happens for a quarter of an hour that in truth is in an instant [ba-​rega], for in the dream one is above time. So, too, the Torah and prayer, everything can be in one instant.” I have retranslated

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crucial, albeit somewhat counterintuitive, insight, “The matter of eternality is not pertinent at all to that which is entirely above time, since it is not at all in the category of time; only with respect to the matter of time is it possible to speak of the matter of eternality, for time is the aspect of boundary and it is possible to say of it that it is without bound, and this is the time that never ceases.”138 Since the quality of the eternal does not apply to that which is entirely above time but this passage, which was previously cited in Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 468–​469 n. 212. For discussion of the dream in Shneur Zalman of Liadi, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Oneiric Imagination and Mystical Annihilation in Habad Hasidism,” ARC, The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies 35 (2007): 1–​27; idem, A Dream, pp. 197–​198, 203–​217. See also Weinstein, “The Notion of the Unconscious,” pp. 145–​150, who lamentably seems unaware of my previous analysis of the role of the imagination as the locus for the coincidence of opposites in Shneur Zalman’s view of the dream. The depiction of the dream as the locus of the coincidentia oppositorum is buttressed by the link established by kabbalists between the word ḥalom and the vowel ḥolem, which, on account of its being written as the dot above the letter, is symbolic of Keter, the first sefirah, wherein it is no longer possible to distinguish between opposites. See R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Kabbalistische Buchstabenmystik und der Traum (Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilas Exkurs über Herkunft und Bedeutung der Träume),” Zeitschrift für Religions-​und Geistesgeschichte 8 (1956): 164–​ 169; Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 195–​196, 237–​244, 267, 410 n. 53, 445 nn. 85–​86. It is of interest to consider the following comment in Carl G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2: 1951–​1961, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, translation by R. F C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 122–​123. In a letter to Werblowsky, written on September 2, 1953, Jung writes: “Best thanks for kindly sending R. Gikatilla’s text on dreams. The identification of Chalom and Cholem with Kether is very interesting for all its scurrility. When I read that, I had to think of the question recently raised by a mathematician, as to whether it was possible to produce absolute chance groupings. The same statements have to be made about each unit qua unit. To that extent all units are identical. The unit is necessarily the ἀρχή and the origin of multiplicity. Because it is undifferentiated the unconscious is a unity and hence the ἀρχή μεγάλη and indistinguishable from God” (emphasis in original). 138 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 1345. See my previous discussion in Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu,” pp. 95–​97. And compare Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 48b: “With regard to this aspect it is written ‘You and your years never end’ (Psalms 102:28), and this applies to the aspect of ‘you are the last,’ the kingship of the supernal crown [malkhut keter elyon]; that is, eternality can also be in the time that extends and comes to be from the aspect of Malkhut because it never ceases … This is only in the aspect of the lower union [yiḥuda tata’ah], for time is actually time [she-​ha-​zeman hu zeman mammash] but it continues without pause. However, there is also the aspect of the supernal unity [yiḥuda ila’ah], that is, the aspect that is above time extends into time, and that is the emanation from the aspect ‘I am first’ in [the aspect of] ‘I am last’ (Isaiah 45:6), for the duration of time [hemshekh zeman] is not at all appropriate there, and past, present, and future are not appropriate there since everything is integrated [ha-​kol be-​ hitkallelut]. … And this is the disclosure and emanation of what is above time verily in physical time.”

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only to that which falls under the category of time in the aspect of past, present, and future, eternality can also be demarcated as the ceaseless duration of time (hamshakhat zeman beli hefseq); when the illumination of the light of the infinite, which is above the category of time—​in the aspect of he was, he is, and he will be commingled indifferently as one—​shines on the event in time, the latter, even though it is created, adopts the attribute of being above time. Hence, in the eternality of time, there is the union of two opposites, signified by the names yhwh and Elohim, the masculine and feminine potencies of the divine.139 There is no eternity set over and against time, only the moment of temporal eternity calculated at the fringe of the supratemporal in the manner that the murmur of silence envelops the margin of the verbal or the aura of invisibility suffuses the domain of the visible. Time is overcome, therefore, not in the obliteration of time but in the enowning of the ubiquity of time expended kenotically as that which lingers in the lapsing of lingering and lapses in the lingering of lapsing. From the Ḥabad teaching, we may postulate that eternity is the cyclic elongation in time of the infinite that is entirely above time. Commenting on the eternalization of the temporal, Dovber Schneuri of Lubavitch, the son and successor of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, writes, when the essence of the light of the infinite (aṣmut or ein sof), which is entirely above time (lema‘lah mi-​beḥinat zeman legamrei), is joined with Malkhut, which is the aspect of the boundedness of time (ha-​zeman bi-​gevul), then time, too, becomes eternal in the eternality of his essence (az ha-​zeman niṣḥi be-​niṣḥiyyut de-​aṣmuto).140 This point appears often in Ḥabad sources, including by Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn of Kapust: “The transitory life [ḥayyei sha‘ah] is the duration in the aspect of the source of time [ha-​hamshakhah bi-​veḥinat meqor ha-​zeman], but the eternal life [ḥayyei olam] is the durations of the light of the infinite [hamshakhot or ein sof], which is entirely above time. Therefore, it is called ḥayyei olam, denoting 139 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5668, pp. 182–​183. Compare the variant of this tradition in Schneersohn, Or ha-​Torah: Devarim, vol. 6, p. 2492, where time is said to come forth from the twelve permutations of ywhw and the twelve permutations of Adonai. 140 Dovber Shneuri, Imrei Binah, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2008), 66d. For other Ḥabad sources that affirm the eternalization of time as a result of the coupling of that which is above time and that which is in the aspect of time, see Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-​ Reshimu,” p. 97 n. 89, and another passage from Imrei Binah cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Alef, pp. 108–​109 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 213-​214). See also Wolfson, “Achronic Time,” pp. 51–​52; idem, “Eternal Duration and Temporal Compresence: The Influence of Ḥabad on Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience: Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson, with editorial assistance of Sarah Leventer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 229–​232.

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eternality [niṣḥiyyut].”141 In a second passage, the matter is rendered in slightly more technical terminology: The Torah is called the eternal life and prayer the transitory life. For the explanation of the transitory [sha‘ah] is the source of time, that is, the aspect of Malkhut—​he reigned, he reigns, and he will reign [malakh melekh we-​yimlokh]—​is the aspect of the final he of the name yhwh. The transitory life is the aspect of yhw of the name yhwh, for this is the matter of the contraction, the expansion, and the extension [ṣimṣum we-​hitpashsheṭut we-​hamshakhah] so that the aspect of the final he, the source of time, will be dispersed. After the contraction of the yod of the name yhwh, from the three letters yhw, it was not possible for there to be in the final he, the source of [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing, and how much more so in [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing themselves, the disclosure of the light of the infinite, blessed be he [or ein sof barukh hu] as it is in the infinite, which is entirely above time. Therefore, all three letters ywh are called only the transitory life. However, the eternal life, the language of eternality, that is, when the disclosure of the light of the infinite, which is above time, extends into Malkhut and in [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing, by means of the dissemination from the very essence of the light of the infinite [ha-​hamshakhah me-​aṣmut or ein sof mammash], which is above the contraction of the yod, that is, verily from the aspect of anokhi, which is above the name yhwh. Hence, the Torah and the commandments, which are verily the extension and the revelation from the aspect of anokhi, are called the eternal life.142 The path of Ḥabad thought—​forged by an orientation well established in older kabbalistic teaching—​champions a geometric confabulation of time that is circular in its linearity and linear in its circularity. In Lurianic terms, time can, indeed must, be viewed from the two vantage points that apply to the sefirot, the circle (iggul) and the straight line (yosher);143 the division 1 41 Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 30c. See ibid., 33d. 142 Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn of Kapust, Magen Avot al Sefer Devarim (Berditchev: Ḥayyim Ya‘aqov Shefṭel, 1902), 1b. 143 Many scholars have discussed this Lurianic theme and its impact on subsequent thinkers. For a comprehensive analysis, see Mordecai Pachter, “Circles and Straightness—​A History of an Idea,” Da‘at 18 (1987): 59–​90 (Hebrew), and the English translation in idem, Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), pp. 131–​184.

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into the aspect of beginning and end (hitḥallequt beḥinat ro’sh we-​sof) applies only to the latter.144 The inclination to bifurcate these two perspectives is augmented by our predilection to experience time as either a line or a circle, but the enlightened consciousness appreciates that time is a paradoxical combination of both; our temporal discernment revolves concurrently around the axes of the line that rotates and the circle that distends. Ḥabad masters well grasped that the two models in Lurianic kabbalah are to be treated synchronously and not sequentially; that is, the texture of time is circular and linear at one and the same time. The architectonic of time, we might say, is in the form of a cylinder shaped by straight parallel sides and a circular or oval cross-​section. When apperceived from this angle, what is brought forth in each moment is a renewal of what has been, albeit always from a different vantage point.145 The hermeneutic implied here is based on the assumption that the one true being is comprehended through the multifaceted compossibility of becoming. Ein Sof can be envisioned, therefore, as the infinite fractal curve of differentiable points of nondifferentiality. Wholeness implies not an immutable substance but an elaborate web of interrelated processes in which every part can be read as a metonymy for the continually evolving interweave of the cumulative that is resistant to inclusion in a system that would undercut the reciprocal totalization of the fragment and the fragmentation of the totality. In Peircean terms, the plural singularity, which is constitutive of the singular plurality of infinity, is precisely the potentiality of the abnumeral multitudes that are indeterminately determinable in their determinate indeterminability.146 The singleness of the one is ascertained, accordingly, not by the dissolution of difference in the sameness of the immeasurable expanse of indifference but by the unlimited differentiation of that indifference in the spectacle of inestimable forms that appear and disappear in the shadowplay of the world of multiplicity. 144 See Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5562, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 477–​479; and discussion of this text in Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn, Iggerot Qodesh, vol. 15 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), pp. 141–​143. This insight seems to be implied in the distinction made by Schneersohn, Magen Avot al Sefer Bere’shit, 48b, between two types of vitality in the nature of time, the first is purely in the aspect of encircling (maqqif) and encompassing (sovev), and the second is the actual dividing of the aspect of time (she-​mitḥalleq bi-​veḥinat zeman mammash) into years, months, days, and hours. It is reasonable to correlate the former with circularity and the latter with linearity. 145 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 23, 171–​172. 146 Charles S. Peirce, “The Logic of Continuity,” in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings, edited by Matthew E. Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 185–​186.

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As I have argued elsewhere, we can elicit from the Ḥabad sources an ideal of universal singularity as opposed to singular universality; that is, the universal is constructed continuously in light of the singular rather than being concretized comprehensively in the singular.147 This is not to deny that the infinite essence, or even the light of that essence compressed within the infinitesimal point of Ḥokhmah, is designated as the aspect of absolute oneness and integration (beḥinat takhlit ha-​aḥdut we-​hitkallelut).148 The worlds that are hidden in the light of Ein Sof emerge in the world of separation (alma di-​peruda) as the diversified anatomization (hitḥallequt) of created beings.149 The indescribable essence of Ein Sof, therefore, is described by Shneur Zalman of Liadi as the “aspect of the general that comprises the plurivocality” (beḥinat ha-​kelal she-​kolel ha-​ribbuy).150 It is plausible to theorize from this language that the 147 I am here summarizing my argument in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Mysticism and the Quest for Universal Singularity—​Post-​subjective Subjectivity and the Contemplative Ideal in Habad,” in Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation: Hasidism and Society, edited by Philip Wexler (New York: Herder & Herder, 2019), pp. 37–​58. The analysis in that study was an expansion of the remarks in Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/​veiling,” pp. 48–​53. 148 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Ma’amar Heḥalṣu 5659 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1999), sec. 5, p. 8. The text is printed as well in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), p. 228. For an analysis of the social and mystical repercussions of this work, see Eli Rubin, “Purging Divisiveness, Embracing Difference: Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn’s Manifesto Against Self-​Righteousness in Interpersonal Discourse,” chabad.org/​380039, posted on September 27, 2017. On the term hitkallelut and the contemplative ideal of devequt, see Moshe Idel, “Universalization and Integration: Two Conceptions of Mystical Union in Jewish Mysticism,” in Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1989), pp. 27–​57, and especially the discussion of Shneur Zalman of Liadi on pp. 41–​45. 149 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, 1: Balaq, 67c. 150 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Tefillot, 297d. It is of interest to recall Abraham Abulafia’s description in the epistle We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah of the “first source”—​also referred to by the theosophic symbol “supernal crown”—​to which the inner potencies and hidden spirits return after being separated from the body as the “one without duality” but comprising “multiplicity until the infinite.” See Adolph Jellinek, Auswahl kabbalistischer Mystik, Erstes Heft (Leipzig; A. M. Colditz, 1853), p. 20; We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah in Abraham Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba, edited by Amnon Gross, third edition (Jerusalem: Aharon Barzanai, 2001), p. 25. Despite the considerable differences between Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah and Ḥabad thought, the depiction of the primary source as one that lacks duality but that nevertheless contains multiplicity bears conceptual affinity to the conjecture of Shneur Zalman and his successors that the indivisibility of the infinite engenders limitless divisibility. Regarding the passage from Abulafia, see Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience of Abraham Abulafia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 132 and idem, “Universalization,” p. 37. In the second study, Idel notes, “According to this text, God comprises a certain multiplicity, so that the ascending spiritual forces experience no loss in

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particular (peraṭ) is contained in the general (kelal) and that the chain of being evolves from the latter to the former. According to this explanation, the comment of Shneur Zalman would be consonant with the idea that multiplicity comes forth from the incomposite oneness of infinity. A more radical reading, however, would propose that the incompositeness—​a quality attributed most frequently in Ḥabad sources to the will or the light of the infinite151—​is itself constituted by the plurivocality, an explanation that would undermine the Maimonidean import of this philosophical conception. From that vantage point, unity and multiplicity are not antithetical opposites that need to be sublated dialectically; on the contrary, the unity is what causes the multiplicity insofar as the multiplicity is expressive of the nature of the unity.152 Support for my interpretation is attested, for instance, in the explication of the zoharic reworking of the aggadic tradition that God looked into the Torah and created the world153 offered by the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq: By means of the general there extends afterwards the particular, and it is not that the Torah created the world; that is, it is not thought itself that creates, God forbid, but rather Ein Sof creates the particulars by means of the universal thought [ha-​maḥashavah ha-​kelalit]. In the Torah, it is written “and there was light” (Genesis 1:3), that is, the existence of the light that was contained in the universal thought … he looked into it and he extended it to come to disclosure in the creation of the individuated light [or peraṭi]. … Thus, it is understood from this that the order of the concatenation of the worlds is in the aspect of the general and the particular [she-​seder ha-​hishtalshelut ha-​olamot hu bi-​veḥinat kelal u-​feraṭ] so that there could be the generation of the discrete existents [peraṭei

the divine realm.” This insight accords phenomenologically with my interpretation of the unitive experience in Ḥabad sources, which entails overcoming the multiplicity of individuated somatic existence by being integrated into the infinite one that is constituted by multiplicity. Compare my comments on a passage of the contemporary kabbalist Isaac Meir Morgenstern in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 231: “The task is to ascend to the point where emanator and emanated are conjoined. From this point, which is no point at all, the nonlocality of the pointless, one is absorbed in the infinite. Epistemically, being attached to this spot propagates the awareness that unification is discriminated through division, that identity is envisaged against the foreground of heterogeneity.” 151 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 1, ch. 48, 67a, and other sources cited and discussed in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 73, 101, 103, 172, 183, 185, 210, 301 n. 1. 1 52 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Hagahot le-​Dibbur ha-​Matḥil Pataḥ Eliyahu—​5658, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), pp. 58–​59. 153 Zohar 2:161a.

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ha-​nimṣa’im] from the Ein Sof, blessed be he, for he is also above the general.154 The transcendence of the infinite essence necessitates that it is even beyond the binary of the general and the particular,155 just as it is beyond the polarity of encompassing all worlds and filling all worlds,156 and beyond the dimorphism of the masculine donor and the feminine recipient.157 The delimitation (hitḥallequt) of all the variegated singularities, manifest in the serial passage of time, are comprised within the totality of the universal thought. The cosmological order reflects the hermeneutical principle alluded to above, there is nothing in the particular that is not in the general, whence we can further extrapolate that the particular does not express novelty (hitḥaddeshut) vis-​ à-​vis the general unless we understand novelty as the disintegration of the particularity (hitḥallequt peraṭiyyut) in the integration (hitkallelut) of the general.158 It would stand to reason that just as epistemologically the particular is the disclosure of what was hidden in the general, so ontologically all that comes to light in the myriad of beings was concealed in the unity of the primordial and universal divine thought.159 The integration of the particular in the general can be interpreted, however, as alleging that the assimilability of the latter is fabricated by the unassimilability of the former rather than the unassimilability of the former being contained indiscriminately in the assimilability of the latter. The imparticipability of the kelal consists of the illimitable participability of the peraṭ; of the general we could say that it is infinitely particular, that is, the relational manifold unfolding from the transcendent immanence of the absolute differentiation enfolded in the immanent transcendence of the absolute nondifferentiation. Curiously, the Ḥabad interpretation of the Lurianic kabbalah leads to a position that resonates with the view regarding the undivided wholeness promulgated by David Bohm: the entities of the explicate order that we experience as separate in the everyday world of space and time—​an illusion fortified by scientific theories that offer ways of looking at the world predicated on making distinctions that uphold a sense of fragmentation—​at the quantum level are not separate because they are part

1 54 Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 58b. 155 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1, p. 325. 156 See above, n. 108. 157 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Bere’shit (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1993), 8c. 158 Schneersohn, Derekh Miṣwotekha, 58b. 159 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1, p. 325.

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of the enfolding-​unfolding of the underlying implicate order or the undefinable and immeasurable holomovement of the unbroken and undivided totality wherein everything is connected.160 To cite one of the many articulations of this worldview in Bohm’s writings: The notion of an atomic path has only a limited domain of applicability. In a more detailed description the atom is, in many ways, seen to behave as much like a wave as a particle. It can perhaps best be regarded as a poorly defined cloud, dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the observing instrument. Thus, one can no longer maintain the division between the observer and observed (which is implicit in the atomistic view that regards each of these as separate aggregates of atoms). Rather, both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.161 The interrelatedness of all things, consequently, underscores that the oneness of the imperceptible reality is not antinomical to the observable manifold. It follows, moreover, that transcendence is immanent to the extent that immanence is transcendent. There is thus no outside the inside that is not inside the outside nor an inside the outside that is not outside the inside. Confirmation of this interpretation can be elicited from another passage where the Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq argues that in the same manner that various permutations of the letters of speech (ṣerufei otiyyot ha-​dibbur) give voice to the multitude of ideas integrated silently in the unity of the intellect, the derivation of the limitless division (hitḥallequt ein qeṣ) of the infinite light in the miscellaneous forms of finite existence is commensurate to the incomposite oneness (aḥdut pashuṭ) of Ein Sof.162 From this we may presume further that the inexorability of the general is calibrated always on the basis of the contingency of the particular. The 160 On fragmentation and wholeness, see David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–​33, and on the notion of holomovement, see ibid, pp. 190–​199, 247–​248. Another striking similarity between Bohm’s quantum worldview and Ḥabad thought is viewing consciousness as a more subtle form of matter. See references in ch. 2 nn. 424 and 435. 161 Bohm, Wholeness, pp. 11–​12. Compare David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 176–​177; David Bohm, On Creativity, with a new preface by Leroy Little Bear, edited by Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 90–​98. 162 Menaḥem Mendel Schneersohn, Or ha-​ Torah: Bemidbar, revised edition, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2012), pp. 482–​483.

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ideal of totality, therefore, is to be sought in the disjointedness of the essence of infinity that proliferates—​like the nature of consciousness (moḥin)—​into a plethora of particulars (ribbuy peraṭim).163 The unicity of the polyvalent one is constellated by the indivisible divisibility of the divisible indivisibility. In the Ḥabad lexicon, the supernal unity (yiḥuda ila’ah) concealingly manifests itself in the lower unity (yiḥuda tata’ah).164 Typically, the former denotes the integration (hitkallelut) of everything in the light of infinity and the latter the diffusion (hitpashsheṭut) of that light in the profusion of differentiated beings. The deeper intent of Ḥabad teaching, however, problematizes positing integration and diffusion as binary opposites. On the contrary, the diffusion is itself an expression of the integration; the one is compiled by the many, not in the sense of an aggregate but in the manner of the plural constantly unsettling the unity by expanding the boundaries of the boundless. Crystalizing this sensibility, the RaShaB distinguished two types of division (hitḥallequt) corresponding to the rabbinic distinction between an argument for the sake of heaven and an argument that is not for the sake of heaven.165 The first type of division is the cause of integration (sibbat ha-​hitkallelut) as we find in the sefirot, the plentitude of attributes individuated through the contraction of the simple oneness of the light of infinity; the second type of division is the cause of separation (sibbat ha-​perud) to the point that there is no connectivity or incorporation between the parts as we find in the sefirotic gradations in the world of chaos, whose source is characterized not by a centripetal unity but by the discordant amplification of light (ribbuy or).166 In the RaShaB’s own words, “when two things are partitioned, the division between them is the cause of separation, but when one thing is divided into an array of particulars, this division is actually the cause of cohesion.”167 The former type of division results in the dispersal of the one into the many, whereas the latter type occasions the assimilation of the many into the one.168 1 63 Schneersohn, Ma’amar Heḥalṣu 5659, sec. 5, p. 8; idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 229. 164 Loewenthal, Communicating, pp. 50, 137, 147, 153, 168, 175, 184 n. 144, 275 n. 39. 165 Mishnah, Avot 5:17. 166 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 40. See ibid., p. 938. 167 Schneersohn, Ma’amar Heḥalṣu 5659, sec. 5, p. 8; idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5659, p. 229. 168 My perspective is sympatico with Rubin, “Purging Divisiveness,” who renders the RaShaB’s distinction between two kinds of hitḥallequt as “divisive fragmentation” versus “interinclusive fragmentation.” The thrust of Rubin’s argument is encapsulated in the comment, “Divisive fragmentation assumes that differences are fundamental and it therefore reinforces those differences to the point of antithesis and rupture. Interinclusive fragmentation, on the other hand, assumes a fundamental oneness even as it critically identifies and differentiates all the multifarious elements of the whole.”

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The eternality of time is anchored in the aporetic notion of the one that is not one, that is, the one that is one by virtue of being more and therefore less than one, the one whose consolidation and identity is realized in the promulgation of the world of multivocality and otherness. Moreover, given the longstanding identification of the ineffable name and the mystical essence of the Torah, we are justified in assuming that the Ḥabad masters, in consonance with Maharal, viewed the Torah as the confluence of the hypertemporal and the temporal. This conjunction is the mystery of the union of the divine names, yhwh and Elohim, the former correlated with that which is above time and the latter with the aspect of time. The pairing of the two provokes an illumination of that which surpasses time in that which is circumscribed within time until the latter becomes eternal, yielding the paradox that “time itself will be above time [she-​ha-​zeman aṣmo yihyeh lema‘lah me-​ha-​zeman]. … The truth of the matter of the unity is that time itself is without limit, that is, that time itself is without time [she-​zeman aṣmo hu beli zeman] … this is the eternality of time, that is, time itself is in the aspect of the eternal and in the aspect of limitlessness.”169 As was his wont, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe in the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch lineage, stated this paradoxical tenet straightforwardly by emphasizing that we can say of the Torah that “its actual fulfillment below is in a particular time, but its matter is eternal.”170 In a discourse delivered on the second day of Pentecost 1952, Schneerson remarked that even though the fiftieth day, the day the Torah was given, is essentially “above the boundary of time and above the worlds” (lema‘lah me-​hagbalat ha-​zeman u-​lema‘lah me-​olamot), it “disseminates and is revealed in time [nimshakh u-​mitgalleh bi-​ zeman]. … As it extends below in time, so is the matter that is above time, that 169 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 1345–​1346. See ibid., p. 922, where the RaShaB speaks of the place and the time within the essence of the light of infinity being without place or time (de-​ha-​maqom we-​ha-​zeman hu beli maqom u-​zeman). See ibid., p. 921, where the nature of place and time in the realm that precedes division is said to be of a spiritual nature (maqom u-​zeman ruḥani). Compare Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5718, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Vaad Hanochos BLahak, 2002), pp. 6–​7: “yhwh is from the language of he was, he is, and he will be as one, for he is above time, that is, time itself is in the aspect of being without time [she-​ha-​zeman aṣmo hu bi-​veḥinat beli zeman], and this is [the meaning of] he was, he is, and he will be as one. Similarly with respect to the matter of place, for the place itself is in the aspect of what is above place [she-​ha-​maqom aṣmo hu bi-​veḥinat she-​lema‘lah me-​ha-​maqom], and even higher is the aspect of yhwh as there is in him no points [of differentiation], since it is the essential being [hawayah she-​be-​aṣmut].” 170 Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5710, second edition (Brooklyn: Vaad Hanochos BLahak, 2002), p. 30.

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is, as it is above time so it is found in time.”171 The allegedly illogical affirmation of being above time but also found in time—​transcendent to nature as that which is immanent in nature, indeed within nature as that which is outside nature and outside nature as that which is within nature172—​is bolstered by the additional assumption widely attested in Ḥabad sources that the light of the infinite is garbed in the supernal wisdom (ḥokhmah elyonah), which is the eternal Torah.173 To cite one representative text from Shneur Zalman of Liadi explicating the incarnation of infinity in the divine thought that is without boundary or limit: “However, in the inwardness that is in the depth, which is the inwardness of the Torah, it is united entirely in the light of the infinite, blessed be he [meyuḥedet legamrei be-​or ein sof barukh hu], which is garbed in it in the absolute unity [ha-​melubbash bah be-​takhlit ha-​yiḥud], and in relation to the infinite, blessed be he, all the worlds are verily as nothing [kol ha-​olamot ke-​ lo mammash], the actual nothing and naught [we-​ayin wa-​efes mammash].”174 Theurgically, when an individual studies any aspect of the Torah—​whether the written or the oral—​the light of the infinite is drawn into this world.175 The rabbinic axiom that Torah study grants to every Jew the opportunity to reexperience the Sinaitic revelation anew at each moment rests on the assumption that the Torah—​the primordial parable (meshal ha-​qadmoni), a mythopoeic trope that communicates the belief that the infinite light is incarnate in the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet176—​bears the essential concealment of the infinite (he‘lem ha-​aṣmi de-​ein sof)177 and hence it is both in the aspect of time and not in the aspect of time (bi-​veḥinat zeman we-​lo bi-​veḥinat zeman), that is, in the aspect of time insofar as it garbed below in 171 Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5712, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1997), p. 242. 172 I have discussed this fundamental paradox of transcendence and immanence in Ḥabad cosmology in several studies. See, for instance, Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 87–​103. 173 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 5, 160a. This facet of Ḥabad thought is an elaboration of the Maggid’s emphasis on the divine constricting himself and dwelling within wisdom. See, for instance, Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 60, pp. 91–​92, and sec. 94, p. 163, interpreting the verse “The Lord founded the earth by wisdom,” yhwh be-​ḥokhmah yasad areṣ (Proverbs 3:19): “The blessed holy One is garbed in wisdom and by means of this he dwelt in earthliness [shoreh be-​arṣiyyut].” Compare ibid., sec. 154, p. 254. 174 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 5, 160b. On the distinction between efes as the nothing of being-​not and ayin as the nothing of not being, which corresponds to the two aspects of denegation, biṭṭul ha-​yesh, the nullification of disparate beings, and biṭṭul ha-​ayin, the nullification of nullification, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 111–​112. 175 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 5, 159a. 176 See above, n. 102. 177 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Yom Ṭov shel Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 5666, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), p. 121. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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the form of the ritual laws to be fulfilled in the appropriate space, but not in the aspect of time insofar as it is the primeval wisdom (ḥokhmah qedumah) of Adam Qadmon that emanates from and embodies the light of infinity that exceeds all spatial delineation.178 Echoing the perspective of Maharal, the commandments are the spatiotemporal instantiations of the light that is above place and time. “It is known,” writes Dovber Shneuri, “that the days [ha-​yamim] are the aspect of time that proceeds from the aspect that is above time; that is, the created beings could not comprehend the supernal splendor that is above time without its descending below to be garbed in the aspect of the vessel and the garment verily in place and time [lehitlabbesh bi-​veḥinat keli u-​levush ba-​maqom u-​zeman mammash], and these are the Torah and the commandments, which are the garments and the vessels of the supernal splendor.”179 Because the Torah personifies the paradox of being above time but within time—​indeed, it is above time as that which is within time and within time as that which is above time—​it has the potential to be rejuvenated constantly as that which already was in the capacity of that which is always yet to come. The Torah, accordingly, is the intermediary between transcendence and immanence, and thus, dialetheically—​as opposed to dialectically180—​we can say that “it is time and not time” (hu zeman we-​lo zeman).181 4

Timefully Retrieving Instant beyond Time: Ascesis and Corporeal Worship

Although the roots for this understanding can be uncovered in Maharal, there is one very significant element that distinguishes him and the Ḥabad masters. The interdependence that Maharal established between time and suffering does not seem to have had a conspicuous resonance in the Ḥasidic adaptation of his ideas. One notable exception is the following comment of Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev, “affliction is in time because above time there is no affliction, no sorrow, and no sighing at all.”182 In Ḥabad writings, by contrast, there is no 178 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 343–​344. On the description of the primordial thought (maḥashavah ha-​qedumah) or the universal thought (maḥashavah ha-​ kelalit), also called the universal light (or kelali), of Adam Qadmon as the intermediary that connects the essence of the light of the infinite, which completely transcends time, and the emanated beings, which are the aspect of the temporal order, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Ma’amerei Admor ha-​Zaqen 5565, vol. 1, pp. 323, 325–​327. 179 Dovber Shneuri, Torat Ḥayyim: Shemot, 280d. 180 See above, n. 136. 181 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 343. 182 Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev, Qedushat Levi, pp. 253–​254. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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negative representation of temporality; time is valorized consistently in positive terms as the means by which the illumination of the infinite proceeds into the finite world without disruption or impediment. Through the disclosure of the luminosity of Ein Sof—​particularly in the aspect of Malkhut, the divine governance that comprises the copresence of past, present, and future—​time becomes eternal, and darkness is transposed into light.183 Thus, one might counter that in contrast to Maharal, Ḥabad thought does not envisage the Torah as the means to escape from the physical world. Quite to the contrary, the commandments are deemed the bodily means to transfigure the body, even to the point that the contrast between spiritual and material is no longer efficacious as is attested in the pietistic ideal of worship through corporeality (avodah be-​gashmiyyut). It would appear that this ideal mollifies the austere tenor of Maharal’s avowal that the Jew must destroy the body through extreme abstinence. Careful scrutiny of the aforementioned expression, however, or its equivalents in Ḥabad teaching, not to mention other Ḥasidic texts, suggests that there is a closer connection to Maharal insofar as there is no demonstrative endorsement or unreserved exaltation of the material flesh. Indeed, as Scholem noted in his debate with Buber, the Ḥasidic ideal of corporeal worship actually involves the stripping off of corporeality and a tearing open of another dimension in the here and now.184 I would tweak Scholem’s language by noting that the stripping off entails an alchemical transformation of the base materiality into a more reified sense of embodiment, a process that is effectuated through compliance to the ritual obligations. The transformation that results is a recalibration of the concrete rather than its elimination. The influence of Maharal is particularly clear, for example, in the instruction of Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezhirech, “Every man must not be in the aspect of the feminine in relation to anything [kol adam ṣarikh she-​lo yehe beḥinat nuqba le-​shum davar], that is, he should not be inflamed [lahuṭ] by desires and receive pleasure from them, for then he is in the aspect of the feminine with regard to desire, but rather he should be in the aspect of the feminine with regard to the worship of God, blessed be he. … The one who is conjoined185 to wisdom, however, surely is not conjoined to any desire, for

1 83 Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, p. 1345. 184 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 243. See Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, pp. 29–​30, 52–​57, 108–​110, 268, 296–​297. 185 I have here followed the reading davuq as opposed to the variant bekhor, that is, the firstborn. See the apparatus of Schatz Uffenheimer in Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 69, p. 116 n. 2.

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desire is only in one who is conjoined to time … But the one who is conjoined to wisdom, which is above time … is in one instance without separation [be-​ fa‘am aḥat bilti nifrad].”186 Sensuous desire is tethered to time since the craving satiated in one moment invariably gives way to another craving that must be satiated in the next moment; the relentless pursuit of gratification resembles the continuous ebb and flow of chronological succession. Fulfillment of our physical cravings—​always in and of the moment—​is never anything but temporary, and hence timebound.187 By contrast, the one who obliterates the allure of desire is conjoined to divine wisdom, which like the primordial Torah, is the incomposite unity (aḥdut pashuṭ) above the divisiveness of time. The righteous, who constrict themselves in the act of humility and are thereby divested of corporeality (mufshaṭim mi-​gashmiyyut), are uniquely capable of discerning the incarnational mystery of God constricting himself and dwelling in this world by means of the Torah and the commandments.188 Looked 186 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 69, pp. 115–​116. The passage is found as well in idem, Or Torah, sec. 53, p. 72. On the metaphorical depiction of desire as female, see Or Torah, sec. 157, p. 208, and Liqquṭei Amarim, p. 165. Underpinning the gender symbolism is the longstanding correspondence in kabbalistic literature between the feminine and the capacity to receive, which is contrasted with the bestowing potency of the masculine. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 161, p. 259. 187 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 128, p. 221: “When we attach ourselves to the action of the lower beings and to the temporal pleasures, then we are as nothing before him, blessed be he, but when we despise all the temporal pleasures in contradistinction to the love of God, blessed be he, then we are awaiting him and, as it were, we cause delight to God, blessed be he. And this is [the meaning of] ‘Draw me after you, let us run!’ (Song of Songs 1:4), that is, as it was in the primordial thought.” On the nexus between time, desire, and the imagination, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse,” in God’s Voice From the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 103–​154, esp. 119, 123–​128 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 443-499, esp. 480, 490-499). An interesting exception to the rigid connection between change and the corporeal is the tradition about the nature of ta‘anug that Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev reports in the name of his teacher in Dibrot ha-​Maggid, p. 45: “Once I heard from my master, my teacher and rabbi, that delight is when a thing changes, for example, on Purim when there is joy in the change of garment from a woman to a man and from a man to a woman. He also said that in the ascent of the worlds, the world of doing comes to the world of formation, and formation to creation, and hence the interiority of formation is garbed in the garments of the letters of doing, and creation in the letters of formation. There is thus a change of garments, and this is joy.” 188 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 134, pp. 234–​235. In that passage, the Maggid affirms the paradox that the immutable Torah is garbed in mutable forms of the different worlds in the cosmological hierarchy. A parallel is found in Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Or Torah, sec. 80, pp. 112–​113, and idem, Or ha-​Emet, 69a-​b. On the incarnational implications of ṣimṣum, compare idem, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 189,

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at from another perspective, abnegation of self—​literally, to consider oneself as nothing (laḥashov et aṣmo ke-​ayin)189—​is the means to achieve a state of conjunction to the world of thought (olam ha-​maḥashavah), also identified as the world of delight (olam ha-​ta‘anug), the absolute unity (aḥdut gamur) that is above temporality (lema‘lah mi-​zemanniyyut) and above the corporality

pp. 289–​290. And see ibid., sec. 191, pp. 296–​297: “It says that Jacob ‘is so small’ [ki qaṭon] (Amos 7:2), that is, the essence of his beauty with which he is gloried in Israel is that he embraced the attribute of humility and he diminished himself [u-​maqṭin et aṣmo] … and since he diminished himself and did not consider himself to be anything, then the blessed holy One also constricted his presence [meṣamṣem shekhinato] and dwelt upon him.” See the slightly different version in Dibrot ha-​Maggid, pp. 226–​227. For the depiction of God constricting himself (ṣimṣem aṣmo) in the Torah, see idem, Or ha-​Emet, 54b. See Ariel Evan Mayse, Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), pp. 133–​135. On the fulfilment of the commandments as a form of spiritual activism in the Maggid’s teaching, see Margolin, The Human Temple, pp. 352–​357, and compare Mayse, Speaking Infinites, pp. 161–​198. Adam Afterman, “Time, Eternity and Mystical Experience in Kabbalah,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 162–​175, argues that devequt in the prophetic kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia—​as we find in the example of eating the three meals on Sabbath as a way to inculcate the indwelling of the holy spirit—​similarly entailed an experience of union with God that ensues above and beyond time in contrast to the model of union that entails cleaving to time construed hypostatically or theosophically. Afterman’s interpretation of Abulafia is in line with Idel, “‘Higher than Time’,” pp. 185–​197, an analysis that, lamentably but predictably, seems to be driven in no small measure as an effort to attack my contention—​at times in a tone that smacks of an ad hominem animus—​that the experience of ecstasy in Abulafia’s kabbalah resists the dichotomization of time and eternity. According to my reading, the texture of time experienced psychically in the moment of conjunction—​the blink of an eye—​is a mysterium coniunctionis of the temporal and the eternal. See Wolfson, “Kenotic Overflow,” pp. 146–​163 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 289-307). 189 On the via passiva in the Maggid’s mystical pietism, see Joseph Weiss, Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism, edited by David Goldstein (Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1985), pp. 69–​94. See also the chapter on annihilation and extinction of the will in Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, pp. 67–​79, and the chapter on contemplative prayer, pp. 168–​188. And compare Scholem, The Messianic Idea, pp. 214–​218, 225–​227; idem, The Latest Phase, pp. 237–​258; Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 65–​66; Daniel C. Matt, “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, edited by Robert K. C. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 139–​145; Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent, pp. 173–​178; Margolin, The Human Temple, pp. 357–​361; Netanel Lederberg, Gateway to Infinity: Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid Meisharim of Mezhirich (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 2011), pp. 251–​281 (Hebrew); Menachem Lorberbaum, “Attain the Attribute of ‘Ayyin: The Mystical Religiosity of Maggid Devarav Le-​Ya‘aqov,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 31 (2014): 169–​235 (Hebrew); Adam Afterman, ‘And They Shall Be One Flesh’: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 233–​235.

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of this world predicated on the division (hitḥallequt) between good and evil characteristic of the seven days of the edifice, that is, the seven lower sefirot, which are the paradigms for the temporal nature of the seven days of creation.190 “One must grasp oneself as nothing [le’eḥoz et aṣmo le-​ayin], for when he thinks of himself as something, then the blessed holy One is not arrayed in him, since the blessed One is infinite and no vessel can bear it. When he thinks that he is nothing, however, and he forgets himself, and he does not ask anything for himself but only for the Shekhinah, for when he asks about himself he is conjoined to corporeality and to temporality, but when he forgets himself and he is not conjoined at all to the desires of this world, then he can reach above the temporality, that is, the world of thought, where everything is identical [shaweh], life and death, sea and dry land.”191 The Jew, in particular, is afforded the opportunity to know the spiritual essence of what is in time

190 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 110, p. 186. For citation and analysis of this passage, see Idel, “‘Higher than Time’,” pp. 199–​201. I concur with Idel that the ascent to the supratemporal realm assumes a unitive experience (p. 200), but I have put more emphasis on the ascetic dimension and the renunciation of the corporeal. The identification of wisdom or thought as the olam ha-​ta‘anug to be attained by impeding sensual pleasure appears often in the teachings attributed to the Maggid. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 85, p. 148, sec. 88, p. 155, sec. 125, p. 212, sec. 161, pp. 258, 261, sec. 169, p. 266; idem, Or Torah, sec. 84, p. 119, sec. 203, p. 268, sec. 382, pp. 408–​ 409; idem, Dibrot ha-​Maggid, p. 43. Compare idem, Or Torah, sec. 281, p. 341, where the mandate is to pray with all one’s might to the point that one is removed from corporeality (she-​yufshaṭ me-​ha-​gashmiyyut) and forgets oneself (we-​yushkaḥ me-​aṣmo). All this happens, we are told, in one moment (be-​rega aḥat) that is above temporality (lema‘lah me-​ha-​zemanniyyut) like the appearance of lightning. See ibid., sec. 429, pp. 446–​447, where the passage is partially repeated. See also idem, Or ha-​Emet, 2b-​3a, and with slight variants in idem, Liqquṭei Amarim, p. 88. Compare idem, Or Torah, sec. 278, p. 338, where the incomposite will (raṣon ha-​pashuṭ), which is called the void (efes), is said to be without time (we-​sham ein zeman). The Maggid’s teaching that one has the capacity through Torah to attain a level of being that is above quotidian temporality is repeated often by his disciples. See, for instance, Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, Or ha-​Me’ir, 1:34, 234–​235, 304. 191 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Or Torah, sec. 387, pp. 412–​413. Only by removing oneself from corporeality does one ascend through the various worlds until one attains union (aḥdut) with the divine, and only when one is annihilated from existence (yevuṭal mi-​meṣi’ut) is one called a human (adam) in the truest sense. See Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 24, pp. 38–​39. The model for the spiritual ideal is Moses. See ibid., sec. 177, pp. 275–​276: “For Moses was bound and conjoined to the nothing [qashur we-​ davuq la-​ayin], and thus he was able to combine one [letter] to another and construct the tabernacle. … One cannot bind oneself to the lower pleasures and therefore Moses separated from his wife.” On the rabbinic tradition of Moses separating from his wife (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 87a; Yevamot 42a) and its equivocal interpretation in different zoharic passages, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 313, 321, 568 n. 138, 571 n. 198.

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because his nature is rooted in what is above time. Hence, since God and the Torah are one, by heeding the commandments and attaching oneself to the letters of the Torah, one is bound to the divine.192 From the nexus that is established between unitive experience, eradication of self, and attainment of hypertemporal ecstasy, which like a dream is experienced in one instant (rega eḥad) that can traverse immense temporal distances,193 we can surmise that the task is to curb rather than to celebrate carnality. Consider Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye’s statement, “The purpose of the creation of the human being through matter and form is that the material may be purified so that from matter form is made [na‘aseh min ḥomer ṣurah].”194 There is no ambiguity in these words: the ideal consists of matter being transposed into form, turning one thing into its opposite.195 The mandate to turn matter into form partakes of the mystery of the pure issuing from the impure, an idea linked exegetically to Job 14:4,196 the paradox of the light emanating from the darkness.197 To be sure, there are other contexts in Jacob Joseph’s writings wherein the more starkly negative assessment of the physical and the asceticism prompted thereby are attenuated. Thus, for instance, he distinguishes between two types of worship, one that is in accordance with nature, correlated with the word shamor, which signifies the negative commandments,

192 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 86, p. 149. See idem, Dibrot ha-​ Maggid, p. 417, where the Lurianic metaphor of the broken vessels is used to designate the descent of the letters into corporeality, while repentance (teshuvah) consists of restoring the letters to their source in divine thought. And see ibid., p. 418, where the pietistic ideal for the sage involves the disposal of one’s corporeality even as one is involved in mundane matters, an idea that can be traced to Naḥmanides, whose interpretation of devequt had a notable influence on the spiritual ethos cultivated by Ḥasidism. See Scholem, The Messianic Idea, pp. 204–​205. For a reassessment of the Maggid’s appropriation of the zoharic identity of God, the Tetragrammaton, and Torah, see Mayse, Speaking Infinities, pp. 136–​139. Margolin, The Human Temple, pp. 170–​215, exhaustively reexamined the Maggid’s attitude to the phenomenal world. 193 Dov Ber of Mezhirech, Maggid Devaraw le-​Ya‘aqov, sec. 135, p. 236. Compare ibid., sec. 170, p. 268 where the Maggid asserts that all the acts of goodness that are shrouded in time are made above in one instant. In the divine nothing (ayin) that is above time, one discovers the secret of the entirety of time (kol et). 194 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 17b. 195 The characterization of matter and form as opposites is reiterated frequently by Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye; see, for example, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 40c, and sources to secondary literature cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Walking as a Sacred Duty: Theological Transformation of Social Reality in Early Hasidism,” in Hasidism Reappraised, edited by Ada Rapoport-​Albert (Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996,) p. 187 n. 22. 196 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 145c. 197 Ibid., 166c.

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and one that is above nature, correlated with the word zakhor, which signifies the positive commandments.198 Also relevant is the interpretation of the verse “and the beasts ran to and fro” (Ezekiel 1:14) that Jacob Joseph reports having heard from the Beshṭ.199 The inclination of the soul is to return to its source, which would give rise to its nullification from existence (titbaṭṭel mi-​meṣi’ut), and hence it was necessary that the soul be encased in a body so that there will be periods when the soul does not desire to depart from the world and, as a consequence, the rectification and sustaining of the body (tiqqun we-​qiyyum ha-​guf) together with the soul can be attained,200 an idea that probably reflects the Maimonidean distinction between two types of perfection, tiqqun ha-​nefesh and tiqqun ha-​guf.201 Jacob Joseph applies these two perfections respectively to the states of magnification (gadlut) and diminution (qaṭnut) in the sefirotic world. Elsewhere the gratification of physical needs is described as fulfilling the “higher purpose” (ṣorekh gavoha) of purifying the sparks.202 The higher purpose is not only the theurgical benefit to the divine, according to the meaning imparted by this locution in older kabbalistic sources, but also the transformation of the corporeal. The following explanation cited by Jacob Joseph in the name of the Beshṭ accentuates the point: “The reason for material pleasure [ṭa‘am le-​oneg ha-​ḥomer] on Sabbath—​this is a commandment because by means of it form 1 98 Ibid., 24c-​d. 199 Ibid., 83c. In other passages from his compositions, Jacob Joseph elicits from the verse from Ezekiel the states of magnification and diminution that mark the volatility of human existence and the need to descend before one can ascend, whether to attain a higher level of spiritual mindfulness or to elevate to the divine source the sparks of the Shekhinah or the sparks of one’s soul that have fallen into the demonic domain. See Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 15b, 17b, 42d, 48b, 83c, 146c, 154b, 166c, 200c; Wolfson, “Walking,” p. 197 and references cited in n. 82. 200 See Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, Degel Maḥaneh Efrayim, p. 32. On the tradition reported in the name of the Beshṭ concerning the need for the body to prevent the annihilation of the soul’s existence, see Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ben Porat Yosef (Korzec: Avraham Dov of Melnyk, 1781), 34a, and idem, Ṣofnat Pa‘neaḥ, critical edition with introduction and notes by Gedalyah Nigal (Jerusalem: Institute for the Study of Hasidic Literature, 1989), p. 319. Compare Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ben Porat Yosef, 42a; Keter Shem Ṭov, sec. 367, p. 229; and the elucidation of the Beshtian tradition in Isaac Judah Yeḥiel Safrin of Komarno, Netiv Miṣwoteikha, edited and annotated by Abraham Mordecai Safrin (Jerusalem, 1983), Netiv Emunah, 3:15, p. 29. For a similar idea, see Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, Degel Maḥaneh Efrayim, p. 583. 201 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:27, pp. 510–​512. 202 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toledot Ya‘aqov Yosef, 48c.

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can be more elated in its conjunction with God, blessed be he [bi-​devequt ha-​ shem yitbarakh].”203 Sabbath is exemplary of the more general presupposition that ritual engagement with the body is for the purpose of elevating the form and abandoning the body. As Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev remarked, all of the commandments are for the sake of the purification of matter (lehizdakkekhut ha-​ḥomer) so that one can attain the virtue of fear and be conjoined to the attribute of divine nothingness.204 This is the import of the dictum attributed to Aqavya ben Mahalalel, “Know whence you came and whither you are going,” da me-​ayin ba’ta u-​le’an attah holekh,205 “‘Know whence you came,’ the explanation is that a person should constantly contemplate the concealed nothing [ayin ha-​ne‘lam], how it sustains and brings into being all of the worlds in every moment verily from nothing to something [me-​ayin le-​yesh] and without its vitality everything would be naught. This is also [the import of] ‘whither you are going,’ that is, all of the fulfillment of the commandments is so that one will come close to the attribute of the nothing, which is not the case, God forbid, if one does not comply with the will of God and attaches oneself to corporeality.”206 The ultimate purpose of ritual practice is to facilitate the mystical state of absorption within the divine nothing, a teleology that culminates in the surpassing of teleology insofar as the goal to be accomplished is the abnegation of all goals. The nonteleological telos—​ the telos beyond teleology—​ is conveyed by Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow in language reminiscent of Maharal: “When a person attaches himself to the aspect of corporeality and materiality [gufaniyyut we-​gashmiyyut], he separates himself from the light of his intellect. … When a person is conjoined with all his faculties to the aspect of the light of his intellect, all of his corporealities [ha-​gufaniyyim] become intelligibles [sikhliyyim].”207 The model for the transfiguration implied by the annihilation of self is elicited from the verse “And Moses ascended to God,” u-​moshe alah el ha-​elohim (Exodus 19:3): “all of the ascents of Moses were only so that he would become the aspect of divinity [elohim], that is, by means of the purification of his matter, he became entirely form, which is the vitality of the divine light. According to this way, we can also speak of the verse ‘This is 203 Ibid., 43d. For discussion of Sabbath as an experience of plentitude in Ḥasidism, see Moshe Idel, “Sabbath: On Concepts of Time in Jewish Mysticism,” in Sabbath: Idea, History, Reality, edited by Gerald J. Blidstein (Beer-​Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2004), pp. 84–​88. 204 Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev, Qedushat Levi, p. 577. 205 Mishnah, Avot 3:1. 206 Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev, Qedushat Levi, p. 578. 207 Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, Degel Maḥaneh Efrayim, p. 426.

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the blessing that Moses, the man of God, blessed’ [we-​zo’t ha-​berakhah asher berakh mosheh ish ha-​elohim] (Deuteronomy 33:1); that is, this is the blessing with which Moses blessed Israel, that they make from the man [ish], which is indicative of the matter created from nothing to something [me-​ayin le-​yesh], the aspect of divinity [elohim], which is form and the divine light; that is, that they will be assimilated into the highest gradation, to purify their matter so that it is entirely light, the aspect of divinity.”208 Transmitting an explication in the name of the Beshṭ of the correlation between wisdom and the graveyards of desire (qivrot ha-​ta’awah)209 established in Berit Menuḥah,210 wisdom is so called “because when a person cleaves to wisdom, all the desires are abrogated from him … that is, by means of wisdom he buries and annuls the power of desire from himself.”211 Drawing out the implication of his grandfather’s teaching, Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim proclaims that by cleaving one’s intellect to the wisdom of the Torah, the physical limbs themselves become spiritual and matter is thereby transposed into form.212 Insofar as the physical and the spiritual are equated in the infinite, by attending to the needs of the former one is attending to the needs of the latter,213 but if one is focused exclusively on 2 08 Ibid., p. 4. 209 Numbers 11:34. 210 Oded Porat, Sefer Berit ha-​Menuḥah (Book of Covenant of Serenity): Critical Edition and Prefaces (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016), pp. 168–​169 (Hebrew). In that context, the import of the nexus between the scriptural idiom qivrot ha-​ta’awah and wisdom is that out of the abundance of the radiance of wisdom and the desire to know the essence (ha-​iqqar), one is devoured in the holiness of the great and hidden light (ha-​or ha-​gadol ha-​ne‘lam). 211 Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, Degel Maḥaneh Efrayim, p. 6. Compare ibid., p. 439, where the explanation of the passage from Berit Menuḥah in the name of the Beshṭ is repeated, “for wisdom is called the graveyards of desire, that is, whoever attaches himself to wisdom, as a consequence all the corporeal desires are nullified from him.” See, however, p. 512, where the language of the tradition transmitted in the name of the Beshṭ is somewhat modified: “Wisdom is called the ‘graveyards of desire’ because when a person comes to wisdom, then all the strange physical desires [ha-​ta’awwot ha-​gashmiyyot ha-​ zarot] are eradicated from him with the exception of what is necessary for the sake of the existence of the person in this world [raq le-​ṣorekh qiyyum ha-​adam ba-​olam ha-​zeh]. He said this in the name of the book Berit Menuḥah, that is, the one who possesses wisdom and is pious with his Creator has compassion and he is victorious over the materiality.” In this version of recounting his grandfather’s teaching, the attainment of wisdom results in the eradication of intemperate and unwarranted physical desires that cause one to be estranged, and not the physical desires that are necessary for human sustenance in the world. Still, even in this ameliorated account, reference is made to the seemingly unqualified victory over the material. 212 Ibid., p. 7. 213 Aaron Halevi Horowitz of Staroselye, Sha‘ar ha-​Tefillah (Jerusalem: Maqor, 1972), 144b.

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the pleasures of this world, then they becomes a curtain that separates the light of God that is one’s brain from being revealed in the heart, an obstruction that perpetuates the exilic agony and prevents the birth of the messianic redemption.214 Expressed in a different terminological register, what is intended by corporeal worship is the directive to transform through ritual observance the corruptible body into the body that is made up of the Hebrew letters contained within the Tetragrammaton, the hidden reality of all that is manifest. The body that is glorified, therefore, is not the coarse body controlled by the need to gratify sensual appetites but the somatic body that has been purified of these cravings and transmogrified into a semiotic body, the imaginal body composed of the letters of the Torah, the mystical essence of the Tetragrammaton.215 The precept at work here is illustrated by Shneur Zalman’s explanation of the mystical import of eating foods that are halakhically permissible: “Whoever worships the Lord through the power of this eating learns and prays to the Lord, and hence the letters of the Torah and the prayer ascend to the Lord from the force of what is purified from this food.”216 The homology between eating, on 2 14 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2001), 57c-​d. 215 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 138–​147; idem, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah: Some Sabbatian and Ḥasidic Affinities,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, edited by Glenn Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), pp. 193–​195, and references to primary sources cited on p. 219 n. 159. For a different approach to the subject, see the exhaustive study with documentation of previous scholarship by Tsippi Kaufman, In All Your Ways Know Him: The Concept of God and Avodah be-​Gashmiyut in the Early Stages of Hasidism (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2009), pp. 226–​397, 403–​404, 459–​460 (Hebrew). It behooves me to note the skewed conclusion reached by Neumann, The Roots, pp. 171–​ 172: “Another historical trend in the decline took the form of regressing, going back to the rationalism of Kabbalistic rabbinism. For example, the Hasidic movement Chabad went in this direction. It began by attempting to find a compromise with the Kabbalah and rabbinism, and in the end it was devoured by the same old dragon of rational rabbinism, against which early Hasidism had aimed its original act of liberation and redemption. Here, the ‘evil principle’ was interpreted once again in the manner of medieval Christians and Jews, seeing, ‘body and blood’ as the source of evil, and body and world as hindrances to the soul.” The characterization of Neumann that the physical is a hindrance to the soul does not do justice to Ḥabad teaching, which insists on the need to transform the base material into a more ethereal sense of the corporeal and to thereby reveal the world as the place where the concealment of the light of infinity can be revealed. 216 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 4, 26, 143b. For discussion of this motif, see Louis Jacobs, “Eating as an Act of Worship in Hasidic Thought,” in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History Presented to Alexander Altmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe, (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 157–​166. On pp. 163–​164, Jacobs cited a passage from Shneur

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the one hand, and the ritual acts of study and prayer, on the other hand, rests on the premise that by eating one transforms the unrefined materiality (ḥomriyyut) of the food into its more ethereal state of corporality (gashmiyyut), that is, the bodiliness (gufaniyyut) configured by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.217 The act of consumption is a template for the commandments more generally: although the commandments involve material objects, which have a boundary and measure, the light of the infinite is garbed in them, and hence they serve as the means by which one transmutes the purely physical into the spiritual.218 The body that is affirmed in Ḥabad philosophy is the body that has been transfigured by its incorporation into the name that is the Torah, the primordial parable in which the light of the infinite is garbed.219 In the expanded mindfulness that ensues from this metamorphosis, one grasps, as the RaShaB expressed it, that “the coming to be of time [hithawwut ha-​zeman] is from the perspective of the descent of the vitality that is sustaining [mi-​ṣad yeridat ha-​ḥiyyut lehaḥayot], which is the aspect of withdrawal and propagation [histallequt we-​hitpashsheṭut], and in the aspect of running and returning [raṣo wa-​shov]. … Therefore, time is also called world [olam], for the cause of the coming to be of time is from the perspective of the concealment [mi-​ṣad ha-​he‘lem], which is the descent of the vitality that comes in the aspect of the garbing in concealment [hitlabbeshut be-​he‘lem].”220 Zalman of Liadi’s commentary on the prayers (Seder Tefillot, 298a-​299c) related to the matter of food and the struggle between the holy and unholy. The role of eating in Shneur Zalman is discussed briefly in Roman A. Foxbrunner, Ḥabad: The Hasidism of R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Northvale: Aronson, 1993), pp. 96–​97. For an illuminative study of eating in earlier kabbalistic sources, which served as the background for the Ḥasidic texts, see Joel Hecker, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), and the more recent survey in Moshe Ḥallamish, The Daily Life Routine of the Kabbalist (Tel Aviv: Idra, 2019), pp. 341–​365 (Hebrew). 217 Compare the elaboration of this theme of transforming the physical food into spiritual sustenance (mazon ruḥani) in Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, pp. 473–​ 478, and the interpretation of part of this passage in Joel Hecker, “Eating as a Spiritual Ecosystem,” in Jewish Mysticism and the Spiritual Life: Classical Texts, Contemporary Reflections, edited by Lawrence Fine, Eitan Fishbane, and Or N. Rose (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011), pp. 78–​85. See above, n. 85. 218 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya, pt. 4, 10, 114b, and see other passages cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 140–​141. 219 Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 159. On the symbolic intent of the image of the Torah as the primordial parable, see above, n. 102. 220 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5680 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), p. 59. On the limited versus the limitless nature of time connected to the matter of raṣo wa-​ shov, see Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwwa‘aduyyot 5720, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Vaad Hanochos BLahak, 2004), pp. 296–​298.

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By reclaiming the material immaterially, one unearths that the world is naught but the concealment of the divine concealment, and hence through the veil one sees the veil and discerns thereby that God is present in the very world from which God is absent. The disclosure of the will of the infinite withholds its presencing, not as a presence that refuses to come to presence at present and is thus presently absent, but as the presence that can only be present as nonpresent and is thus always absently present, the pure futurity of the now that is perpetually not now. In its most essential inessentiality, time embodies this paradox of the incessant bestowal of what is continually withdrawn, the givenness of the nongiven that creates the space of retraction—​the opening of the openness—​wherein time expands indefinitely in the oscillation between the incursion of its recoil and the recoil of its incursion. Phenomenologically, the superfluity of time protracts our experience of time’s depletion even as the depletion of time curtails our experience of time’s superfluity. To suffer time in its tragic exuberance is, paraphrasing Leonard Cohen, to fathom that what happens next is always something in between, looking like freedom but feeling like death.221 221 Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 379.

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The Cut That Binds

Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse in Naḥman of Bratslav

i needed so much to have nothing to touch—​ but i’ve always been greedy that way leonard cohen

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Memory, Mindfulness, and Masculinity*

Throughout the ages commentators have given a host of explanations to account for the significance of circumcision, arguably one of the most important rites in the history of Judaism when viewed from both anthropological and theological perspectives. A rather innovative attempt to characterize circumcision is found in David M. Levin’s study The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (1985).1 In the context of discussing the correlation of bodily limbs and the “body” as a “primordial text,” Levin casts his attention to the part of the blessing of grace that is traditionally uttered after one eats a meal with bread, the birkat ha-​ mazon, which mentions the covenant of circumcision that God “has sealed into our flesh.” Constructing a midrashic reading of this liturgical text in an obvious Derridean vein,2 Levin observes, “‘Sealed’ protects the truth of which *

1 2

“The Cut That Binds: Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse in Naḥman of Bratslav,” was originally published in God’s Voice From the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by Shaul Magid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 103–​154. Permission to reprint granted by the publisher. David M. Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1985). See ibid., p. 363 n. 77, where Levin cites Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The issue of circumcision, which may be viewed as a trope for the method of deconstruction as the cut that binds, is found in a number of Derridean compositions. See Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth,” in Midrash and Literature, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sandford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 307–​348; idem, Glas, translated by

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circumcision would remind us, viz., that the ancestral body of the Jewish people was created by grace of a primordial incision or inscription: the writing and attesting of the divine signature, the grammatology of the original divine de-​cision.”3 Reflecting further on the use of the expression to circumcise the foreskin of the heart in Deuteronomy 10:16, Levin notes that “circumcision is symbolic of a process of opening,” indeed “the very essence of circumcision—​ the heart of the matter, as it were—​lies in the fact that the incision opens. Circumcision therefore corresponds to the breaking open of a path.”4 This act of incision/​inscription sealed upon the sexual organ, resulting in what Levin aptly calls the “breaking open of a path,” in turn constitutes an act of re/​membering, for it reminds the male Jew of the sign imprinted upon his member, the seal inscribed upon the flesh that bespeaks the consecrated union between God and the community of Israel that must be realized in time but that is not essentially of time. Circumcision, therefore, “initiates the ancestral body into a spiritual process which Jews call ‘remembrance.’”5 The remembrance spoken of here obviously is not the common everyday memory of isolated experiences that are timebound, the capacity to retain images in the present of that which is past to help one anticipate events of the future, but it is rather a recollection that transcends the linearity of time by gathering together past, present, and future in the circular resumption of what has never been, a calling to mind that allows one, in the words of Heidegger, “to see old things with a newer, farther look.”6 Circumcision is the cut that opens the flesh of the spirit to the reminiscence of a primordial bond, a kind of memorial thinking,7 which involves concentration on the point in which consciousness John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 41–​ 46; idem, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 59–​ 60, 65–​74, 87–​88; and the analysis in John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), s.v. circumcision. See also Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 157–​159, 163–​166, 179–​180, 183–​187. 3 Levin, Body’s Recollection of Being, p. 202. 4 Ibid., p. 203 (emphasis in original). 5 Ibid. 6 The remark of Heidegger reported by Paul Shih-​yi Hsiao, as cited in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences On His Work, translated by Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 3. 7 I have borrowed this expression from a remark of Heinrich Wiegand Petzet cited in May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, p. 3. For a different English rendering of the relevant remark as “mindful thinking,” see Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin

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in its entirety is ground, a return, that is, to one’s origin.8 In a word, circumcision is a rite de retour,9 a retrieval of the beginning that stands not in the past but unfolds always in the future, the breaking open of the path that engenders memory across the divide of time. Nowhere in the biblical or classical rabbinic texts, so far as I am able to surmise, is the ritual of circumcision connected specifically with the words memory or remembrance.10 At best, it may be argued that, inasmuch as the rite of circumcision is referred to as a “sign of the covenant” (Genesis 17:11) and the nature of a sign is such that it brings to mind,11 there is an implicit connection between the covenant of circumcision and memory. Such is the case explicitly in several biblical verses with reference to the word covenant. For instance, in the narrative regarding the sign established by God with Noah after the deluge, the rainbow, the word for memory is used in conjunction with the word covenant (see Genesis 9:15 and 16).12 Or again, in Leviticus 26:42, we read of God guaranteeing that he will remember the covenant that he made with each of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Notwithstanding these and other pertinent examples that could have been mentioned,13 there is no specific correlation in the traditional sources between the covenant of circumcision and the word remember, let alone a substantiation

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Heidegger 1929–​1976, translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 73. My formulation is based on the description of memory in Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 145. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 261, applies this term in his examination of the ritual of circumcision as performed by Moroccan Arabs (see pp. 265–​280). In Babylonian Talmud, Menaḥot 53b, the verb “to remember” is connected with berit milah, for Abraham says to God on behalf of the people of Israel at the time of the destruction of the temple, “You should have remembered the covenant of circumcision.” Even in this context, however, no essential relationship between memory and circumcision is advocated. See, e.g., Exodus 13:9 where the words sign (ot) and memorial (zikkaron) are used synonymously. See Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 59a. According to one rabbinic opinion, the blessing to be uttered at the occasion of seeing a rainbow is “Blessed is the one who remembers the covenant.” See, e.g., Leviticus 26:45; Ezekiel 16:60; and Psalms 105:8 (1 Chronicles 16:15), 106:45. Compare also the prayer in the traditional liturgical service for each morning, “Master of the universe, let it be your will, the Lord our God and God of our ancestors, to remember on our behalf the covenant of the patriarchs.”

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of the idea that circumcision initiates a spiritual process of remembrance. To be sure, in the immense body of literature produced by Jewish thinkers through the centuries one can find textual evidence for the interpretation of circumcision as a sign that fosters the memory of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. An interesting example of such an approach is found in the tenth-​century commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah by Dunash Ibn Tamim who interpreted the statement “a covenant of oneness set in the middle, in the circumcision of the tongue and in the circumcision of the foreskin” as a reference to the fact that “God made the circumcision as a memorial of the unity [zikkaron ha-​yiḥud], since Abraham was the first of the circumcised and of those who believed in one God.”14 According to this interpretation, Jewish males bear the sign of circumcision on their flesh as a reminder of God’s unity that was originally proclaimed by Abraham, the first to enter the covenant of circumcision. The rationale for circumcision is projected here from the philosophical standpoint, which is developed further by Maimonides in the second of the two reasons he offers in the Guide of the Perplexed to explain this rite.15 The incision on the penis, according to Maimonides, is the “bodily sign” that fosters a social alliance among the sons of Abraham who enter the covenant that “imposes the obligation to believe in the unity of God.” The sign of circumcision is the physical cut that binds together the community of Israel through the fundamental tenets implicit in the monotheistic faith, to wit, the belief in God’s oneness, incorporeality, and utter dissimilarity to all other beings. In medieval kabbalistic sources, we find an elaborate application of the correlation of circumcision and memory in an altogether distinctive tone. The special relationship that pertains between the two is suggested by the symbolic identification of the membrum virile as the seat of memory. This connection is based in kabbalistic texts, beginning already in Sefer ha-​Bahir,16 on a wordplay 14 15

16

Dunash Ibn Tamim, Sefer Yezirah with the Commentary of Abusahl Dunash ben Tamim, edited by Manasseh Grossberg (London: Elijah Zvi Rabbinowicz, 1902), p. 26 (Hebrew). Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:49, pp. 609–​610. For an illuminating study, see Josef Stern, “Maimonides on the Covenant of Circumcision and the Unity of God,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, edited by Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 131–​154. The second reason offered by Maimonides is linked to the presumed weakening of the sexual drive affected by the cut of circumcision. See below, n. 113. The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts, edited by Daniel Abrams with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), § 124, p. 207 (Hebrew). See Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, translated by Allan Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 142–​143, 158–​159;

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between zakhor, “to remember,” and zakhar, “masculine.”17 The play on words suggests an ontological connection between masculinity and memory; that is, that which most singularly marks the male Jew is the circumcised penis, which bears the scar that affords him access to the site of memory in the Godhead, to enter the mystery of faith.18 The link between masculinity and memory was further strengthened by thirteenth-​century kabbalists, primarily from northern Spain, who identified zakhor as the divine potency that corresponds specifically to the phallus.19 Basing themselves on the supposed linguistic correlation between zakhar and zakhor, the kabbalists refer to this divine gradation by the names zikkaron and/​or zekhirah,20 “memory,” for it is the masculine

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Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, translated by David Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 1223; Elliot K. Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 107–​108. The bahiric correlation is based in turn on a talmudic statement (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 20b, Shevu‘ot 20b) that identifies zakhor with the positive time-​bound commandment to sanctify the Sabbath day over wine and shamor with the prohibitions that are to be observed on the Sabbath. Insofar as the former category generally applies to males and the latter to females as well as males, there is an implicit correlation of zakhor with the masculine and shamor with the feminine. The terse remark in the bahiric compilation became a cornerstone of subsequent kabbalistic exegesis. For instance, in thirteenth-​century Spanish kabbalah, beginning with the Gerona circle, the correspondence of zakhor to male and shamor to female was used as a basis to explain the fundamental rabbinic division of the commandments into positive and negative. For a more complete discussion of this theme, see Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León, The Book of the Pomegranate: Moses de León’s Sefer ha-​Rimmon, edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 63–​71 (English section). On the connection of memory and the phallus, and the supposition that the two terms derive from the same Hebrew root, see Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon R. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 87. Particularly poignant are the passages of Moses de León translated and discussed in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Woman—​The Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah: Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, edited by Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 186–​187. Zohar 1:48b; 2:92a (Piqqudin), 118b (Ra‘aya Meheimna), 138a; 3:80b. For various ramifications of this symbolic motif, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Re/​membering the Covenant: Memory, Forgetfulness, and the Construction of History in the Zohar,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef H. Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, David M. Myers, and John Efron (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), pp. 214–​246. Zohar 1:159b; 2:70a, 200a; Joseph Giqatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, edited by Joseph Ben-​ Shlomo, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1981), 1:105. See also Moses ben Naḥman, Perushei ha-​Torah le-​Rabbenu Moshe ben Naḥman, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1984), 2:153–​154 (ad Leviticus 23:24), and the supercommentary on Naḥmanides by Isaac of Acre, Sefer Me’irat Einayim, edited by Amos

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potency par excellence.21 Moreover, insofar as this gradation corresponds to the phallus, and the latter is the focal point of the covenant of circumcision, the former is referred to metonymically as the “upper covenant.”22 In a plethora of kabbalistic sources, a connection is established between masculinity, memory, and circumcision. The circumcised phallus is the quintessence of memory,23 for what is remembered most basically, that is, what is recollected

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Goldreich (Jerusalem: Akkademon, 1981), p. 107; de León, The Book of the Pomegranate, pp. 147–​148, 152 (Hebrew section). It should be noted, however, that kabbalists writing in the later part of the thirteenth century, such as the anonymous voices preserved in the zoharic anthology and Gikatilla, distinguish between two senses of memory, peqidah, corresponding to the feminine Shekhinah, the tenth sefirah, and zekhirah, corresponding to the masculine Yesod, the ninth sefirah. Compare Zohar 1:115a, 159b, 160a; 3:163a; de León, The Book of the Pomegranate, pp. 152–​ 153; Giqatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, 1:105; Isaac of Acre, Sefer Me’irat Einayim, p. 128. See, in particular, the following remark of Moses Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah (Warsaw: Isaac Goldman, 1883), 51c-​d: “Even though we have proclaimed that zekhirah refers to the masculine and peqidah to the feminine, this is only in a general way [derekh kelal]. However, in a more particular way [derekh peraṭ], both aspects are in the masculine and both are in the feminine, and thus it is written, ‘And God remembered [wa-​yizkor elohim]’ (Genesis 30:22), even though the name Elohim refers to the feminine [Shekhinah] and zekhirah to the masculine. And it is written, ‘And the Lord remembered [wa-​yhwh paqad] Sarah’ (ibid., 21:1), even though the name yhwh refers to the masculine and peqidah to the feminine. And this is because the secret of the masculine is in the feminine and the feminine is in the masculine, and they are configured as one in the other [zeh ba-​zeh we-​zeh ba-​zeh]. For this reason the entities [he-​hawayot] are rooted in the male himself, in the female that is within the male, in the female herself, and in the male that is within the female. It follows that zekhirah is in the feminine that is within the masculine and peqidah is in the masculine that is within the feminine.” Despite the obvious gender implications of the terms zekhirah and peqidah, Cordovero states that they refer to the sefirotic emanations, which are intelligible (sikhli) and spiritual (ruḥani), and do not denote anything corporeal (ṣad ha-​gashmut). Zohar 1:95b, 96b; 2:92b, 116a; 3:14a, and elsewhere. The symbolic correspondence of this gradation to the covenant of circumcision predates the period of the Zohar. It should also be noted that in zoharic homilies the word berit (covenant) corresponds symbolically to either Yesod or Shekhinah, the underlying assumption being that the covenant comprises in its totality masculine and feminine aspects. See Gershom Scholem, “Colours and Their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism,” Diogenes 109 (1980): 69. For example, see Zohar 3:115b: “Ṣaddiq [i.e., Yesod] and Ṣedeq [i.e., Shekhinah]: [both] refer to the covenant and they are called covenant. … Therefore, zakhor and shamor are bound together, zakhor in the day and shamor in the night.” Giqatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, 1:114–​117, distinguishes three symbolic usages of the word berit referring respectively to Binah, Yesod, and Shekhinah. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 153 n. 81. Zohar 2: 26a, 92b; Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León, Shushan Edut, edited by Gershom Scholem, “Two Treatises of R. Moses de León,” Qoveṣ al Yad n.s. 8 (1976): 363 (Hebrew); de León, The Book of the Pomegranate, p. 128 (Hebrew section).

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at the root, is the mark of circumcision, the sign of the covenant, the letter yod inscribed on the corona of the phallus (aṭeret berit) that is exposed as a result of the peeling away of the foreskin (peri‘ah). The exposure of the sign through the cut of the flesh calls forth to memory the attribute of God that corresponds to the phallic sign disclosed as a result of the circumcision, a sign that betokens the initiatory bond that links the divine to the male members of the community of Israel. This memory, however, is not only a retrospective glance back to the beginning, but it is also a foreboding glimpse ahead to the future. The mark of circumcision is thus symbolically interchangeable with the messianic sign of the rainbow that will appear in the cloud, the portent of peace beheld by Noah after the deluge. Exile is repeatedly depicted in kabbalistic texts as a time of forgetfulness when the divine phallus is covered by the shells of demonic impurity, collectively symbolized by the foreskin, whereas redemption is characterized as the recollection heralded by the removal of the covering to expose the corona of the phallus, the semiotic seal of the covenant incised upon the penis, a disclosure of the disclosure occasioned by the showing of what appears in the guise of nonshowing—​in Lacanian terms, the signifier veiled in the unveiling of its veiling and unveiled in the veiling of its unveiling.24 The dissimilitude is sharply conveyed by the image of the rainbow, the appearance of which is caused by the refraction of the rays of sunlight in the drops of rain. The bow of prismatic colors is naught but image, indeed an image of an image, the doubling of vision that renders visible the invisible in the invisibility of the visible, a revelation that reveals itself in the laying bare of that which is withheld.25 According to the kabbalistic interpretation, the (un)seeing of the phallic sign is the fulfillment of the prophetic promise of the

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Elliot R. Wolfson, “Circumcision, Secrecy, and the Veiling of the Veil: Phallomorphic Exposure and Kabbalistic Esotericism,” in The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite, edited by Elizabeth Wyner Mark (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), pp. 58–​62; and the revised version in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 128–​132. This, in a nutshell, is my thesis regarding the visual imaging of the imageless God in kabbalistic sources, which I presented in Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See especially pp. 273–​275, 306–​317, 336–​345, 348–​355, 357–​368, 386–​ 392, 397. For a more in-​depth discussion of the hermeneutic of not-​showing in zoharic literature, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 1999), pp. 113–​154.

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vision of the ancient glory in the end of days.26 To anticipate the future, then, is to retrieve the past, not, however, as a factual event that transpired in time, 26

On the phallic signification of the symbol of the rainbow, see Zohar 1:72b, 117a; 3:215a; Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), §§ 18, 36a–​b, 37, 78a. See the discussion of this pivotal zoharic symbol in Wolfson, Through a Speculum, pp. 274, 286, 334 n. 30, 337–​338 n. 40, 340–​341 n. 48, 361, 368–​369 n. 149, 386–​387; idem, “Re/​membering,” pp. 228–​231; idem, Language, pp. 377–​382; and the latter reverberation of this symbol in idem, “Tiqqun ha-​Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto,” History of Religions 36 (1997): 326–​329. See also the remark of Avraham Elqayam, “The Rebirth of the Messiah: New Discovery of R. Issachar Baer Perlhefter,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 1 (1996): 143 n. 72 (Hebrew). For a recent attempt to challenge my claim that prevalent in kabbalistic sources is a phallomorphic understanding of the rainbow as the sign that characterizes the phenomenological texture of visionary experience, see Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 214 n. 41. Although Fishbane readily admits that the rainbow can be interpreted as symbolic of the male sexual potency, he contends that the “arc of colors is perceived as the whole divine Glory in a form like a Man. It is this anthropomorphic configuration as a whole that enters the Kingdom (Malkhut) of the beloved, symbolized by the cloud.” In my judgment, the notion of body as it appears in the classical kabbalistic literature is predicated on the assumption that the body itself is metonymically the phallus since the kabbalists maintained that the phallus is the glory (kavod, which should be deciphered in terms of its philological root, kaved, weightiness, that which impresses itself upon the surface of another) of the body inasmuch as it comprises all of the energy of the body. The point is epitomized in the expression, guf u-​verit had hu, “the body and the phallus are one,” which appears in a passage in Sefer ha-​Bahir wherein the limbs of the divine anthropos are delineated. See The Book Bahir, § 114, p. 199. The phallic nature of the body as such is also expressed in the anatomic presumption well attested in kabbalistic sources that the male organ comprises the energy of all the limbs, which is the implicit significance of the designation of the phallus (in both the human and the divine realms) by the term kol, the “all.” See, for example, de León, The Book of the Pomegranate, p. 227 (Hebrew section), “You must know that the secret of this limb is the secret of all the limbs that are placed in him from the head to his feet, for all of them exist through its foundation. … Thus, you should know that it is the containment of all the limbs of the body [kelal kol eivarei ha-​guf].” Similar language is used by de León in Sod Eser Sefirot Belimah, edited by Scholem, “Two Treatises,” p. 381: “The phallus … is called kol, for it is the containment of all the limbs [kelal kol ha-​eivarim] and the containment of the entire body [kelal kol ha-​guf].” And see Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León, R. Moses de León’s Sefer Sheqel ha-​Qodesh, critically edited and introduced by Charles Mopsik with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1996), p. 50 (Hebrew): “For the secret of the phallus is the foundation of the whole body [qiyyum kol ha-​guf] in desire and inclination, and all the limbs in an abundance of yearning and love are aroused in relation to it, and they are joined in the union of inclination and love in accord with its will.” Even if one brackets the phallic conception of the male body, I am not sure how we can (following Fishbane) speak of the whole anthropomorphic

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but as the originary evocation that sends one forth on the temporal path that leads beyond time. configuration entering the feminine without privileging the phallic potency, which is, after all, the mechanism by which the male penetrates the space of the female, here depicted symbolically by the bow appearing in the cloud. The texture of the theosophical symbolism employed by kabbalists is based on the phenomenal contours of the embodied conditions of human experience. If in the human sphere it is impossible to imagine the male cohabiting with the female except through phallic penetration (and this is not to deny other forms of contact or intimacy, but only to focus on cohabitation in the most technical sense), then it is impossible to conceive of the theosophical symbol in the manner suggested by Fishbane. Finally, the remark that the arc of colors refers to the whole anthropomorphic form neglects the subtle nuance of the relevant kabbalistic passages to which I have referred in previously published scholarship, and many more examples that I could add, according to which the manifestation of these colors through the prism of the Shekhinah signifies her transformation and restoration into the masculine potency in the image of the corona or the sign of the covenant that makes visible that which is concealed. Consider the unambiguous formulation of de León in Sheqel ha-​Qodesh, p. 76, “How delightful it is to contemplate the notion that this sign of the covenant is the secret of the corona that is known in the secret of the covenant that is inscribed and sealed,” u-​mah neḥmad ha-​inyan lehaskil bihyot zo’t ot ha-​berit she-​hi sod ha-​aṭarah ha-​yedu‘ah be-​sod ha-​berit reshumah we-​ḥatumah. This is precisely the point of the symbol of the bow in the cloud, which, in my judgment, is one particular way of expressing the highly complex idea that the Shekhinah is the visible image that renders the invisible image of the masculine phenomenologically accessible. See Wolfson, Through a Speculum, pp. 315–​316. Regarding the phallic nature of the symbol of the rainbow, see, in particular, the passage from de León’s Shushan Edut, cited in Wolfson, “Re/​membering,” pp. 230–​231. The rainbow as the sign of the covenant, which is associated more particularly with the disclosure of the corona, is also emphasized in Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León, “Sefer ha-​Mishkal: Text and Study,” edited by Jochanan Wijnhoven, PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1964, pp. 132–​133. Finally, consider Tiqqunei Zohar, § 37, 78a, wherein it is stated explicitly that the three colors of the rainbow correspond to the three colors of the eye, which correspond in turn to the three shells of the foreskin surrounding the Shekhinah, or the three shells of the nut. Precisely through these colors the Shekhinah assumes the title “pupil of the eye,” bat ayin, the point that is the sign of the covenant concerning which it is said “I will see her to remember the everlasting covenant” (Genesis 9:16). On the symbol of the bat ayin in zoharic sources, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Weeping, Death, and Spiritual Ascent in Sixteenth-​Century Jewish Mysticism,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, edited by John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 241–​242 n. 69. Redemption is depicted as the time in which the three shells are removed so that the sign of the covenant, which is identified further as the letter yod of the phallic inscription, is disclosed through the three luminous garments of the Shekhinah, a mystery related exegetically to the verse “Then your master will no longer be covered, but your eyes will see your master” (Isaiah 30:20). For a parallel to this passage, see Tiqqunei Zohar, § 58, 92a-​b. See texts cited below at nn. 95–​96.

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Returning Beyond: Recollecting the Future in Anticipation of the Past

In this chapter, I will explore the nexus of the rite of circumcision as the inscription of the covenantal sign on the body and the spiritual process of memory in the thought of Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav (1772–​1810).27 In particular, 27

The motif studied here is one example of the phallocentric orientation of Naḥman, which is consistent with the dominant symbolic approach of the kabbalists through the ages. For an attempt to retrieve a feminist sensibility in Naḥman’s teachings, see Ora Wiskind-​Elper, Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 103–​114. It lies beyond the scope of this study to respond in detail to Wiskind-​Elper’s analysis, but let me simply state in general terms that it suffers from an inability to evaluate the use of gender terms in a contextually nuanced way. Naḥman’s references to the feminine cannot be lifted out of context in order to argue that he was positively disposed toward the female. Each of the references to the female, especially those that are drawn from the repository of kabbalistic symbols, have to be evaluated carefully in terms of the gender valence that is implicit in the particular literary tradition. The author herself alludes to such a problem on p. 260 n. 104 after citing Arthur Green’s uncritical affirmation of feminine images in rabbinic and kabbalistic literature, but she fails to heed her own caution in the presentation of her thesis. Indeed, she relies on this very essay of Green as support for her claim that Naḥman’s “intuitive sense of the female” is continuous with an “interest in experiences unique to women” that is “intrinsic in Jewish mystical thought as a whole” (p. 104). In my judgment, as I have argued in a variety of studies, this is a very problematic and questionable characterization of the images of the feminine in the traditional kabbalistic sources. Finally, let me note that it is remarkable that in a book on Naḥman there is no sustained engagement with the motif of shemirat ha-​berit, “guarding the covenant,” applied in an essential way to the ṣaddiq as an antidote to pegam ha-​berit, the “blemish of the covenant,” which refers to sexual transgressions. Also conspicuous is the lack of attentiveness to tiqqun ha-​kelali, the “comprehensive rectification,” Naḥman’s unique remedy for the sin of spilling semen in vain, which he considered to have soteriological significance. Regarding this seminal theme in Naḥman’s messianic orientation, see Yehuda Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali and his Attitude towards Sabbatianism,” Zion 45 (1980): 201–​245 (Hebrew); English translation in idem, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism, translated by Batya Stein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 115–​150. Consider, for example, the words of Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN (BeneiBeraq: Yeshivat Breslov, 1972), i, 29:4, 40c, “And this is the essence of Israel’s coming close to their father in heaven, that is, by means of the rectification of the covenant [tiqqun ha-​berit]. By means of this is the essence of Israel’s coming close to their father in heaven in the aspect of ‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me’ (Exodus 19:4). The eagle is the comprehensive rectification [tiqqun ha-​kelali], which is the aspect of ‘He declared to you the covenant’ (Deuteronomy 4:13) … that is, the rectification of the covenant.” See ibid., i, 10:5–​10, 13b-​14c; 205, 112a-​b; ii, 92, 41b. And in Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Eṣot (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​Ḥasidei Breslov, 1976), s.v. berit, § 25, 13a: “By means of the comprehensive rectification, which is the rectification of the phallus, the [states of] consciousness [moḥin] are exalted, for the essence of the rectification of knowledge is in

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I will focus on the depiction of circumcision as the ceremony that fosters the recollection of the future through anticipation of the past, the retrieval of what has never been in the time-​consciousness that overcomes the consciousness of time, remembering the sign in the phallic gratification of the ascetic impulse.28 In one of his expositions on circumcision in the collection, Liqquṭei

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accordance with the rectification of the phallus, and the essence of Israel’s closeness to their father in heaven is by means of guarding the phallus.” See ibid., § 38, 13b: “When one rectifies the sign of the holy phallus, then his consciousness is in perfection, and he can comprehend the words of the righteous man, for one’s comprehension is in accord with one’s rectification, for this is a great principle that no man can comprehend and grasp the word of the righteous man if he has not first rectified the sign of the holy phallus as is appropriate.” Given the overwhelming preponderance of phallic images in Naḥman’s teachings, it is truly astonishing that a whole book on Naḥman could be written with no reference to the patent phallomorphism. Even if one were to grant that there is a genuine voice of the female to be retrieved from Naḥman’s discourses and tales, it would be reasonable to expect at least some mention of the phallocentric elements in an effort to present a more balanced picture. I would contend that the positive images of the feminine in Naḥman (as well as in Ḥasidic sources more generally) have to be examined very carefully in order to discern if the female as such is valenced in a positive way or rather, as I suspect, the female is accorded value when she is transposed into the male. I concur with Wiskind-​Elper’s observation that in the worldview of Naḥman, “‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ do not designate qualities that belong, respectively, to men and women but rather are ontological valences simultaneously inherent in all of reality—​from the world of the sefirot to human beings and even to ‘inanimate’ things” (Tradition and Fantasy, p. 261 n. 108). What Wiskind-​Elper ignores, however, is that these ontological valences even in Naḥman’s thinking reflect a gender hierarchy that is evident as well in the social sphere. For a more accurate account of the status of the feminine in Ḥasidic literature, see Ada Rapoport-​Albert, “On Women in Hasidism, S. A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludmir Tradition,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, edited by Ada Rapoport-​Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Orion Publishing, 1988), pp. 495–​ 525. For a response to Rapoport-​Albert, see Nehemiah Polen, “Miriam’s Dance: Radical Egalitarianism in Hasidic Thought,” Modern Judaism 12 (1992): 1–​21. Polen’s study suffers from the same criticism that I leveled against Wiskind-​Elper: no attention is paid to the cultural dimension of the gender construction, which at least raises questions about the presumed correlation of biological sex and gender attribution. The ascetic and anti-​erotic tendencies in Eastern European Ḥasidism, which in some measure approximate the Christian monastic renunciation of sexuality, have been well noted by David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 121–​148. Biale briefly, but incisively, discusses the specific case of Naḥman on pp. 135–​136. The recognition of the ascetic aspect of some of the key proponents of Beshtian Hasidism is an important corrective to the one-​sided portrayal of this phenomenon as essentially nonascetic in contrast to earlier forms of ḥasidic asceticism linked to the kabbalistic ethos. For a recent articulation of this position, see Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 30, 33–​35, 37–​38, 115. On the affirmation as well as the qualification of mystical asceticism in Eastern European sources prior

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Halakhot,29 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov (1780–​1845),30 the leading disciple and personal secretary of Naḥman, sets out to explain this rite in terms of his master’s teaching concerning the illusion of time and the knowledge of that which is above time. The “ultimate purpose” of circumcision, Nathan writes, is “that one should merit perfect knowledge,” da‘at shalem.31 Naḥman taught, however, that the perfection of knowledge was dependent upon consciousness of “that which is above time,”32 for temporal sensibility ensues from the

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to the rise of Ḥasidism, see Mendel Piekarz, The Beginning of Hasidism: Ideological Trends in Derush and Musar Literature (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978), pp. 37–​39, 48–​49, 62–​63, 74, 78, 113, 153, 157, 168, 230–​231, 262, 339–​340 (Hebrew). For a balanced analysis of the ascetic and anti-​ascetic tendencies in Beshṭian Ḥasidism, and the attitude toward physical pleasure, see Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 80–​87. On the ascetic tendencies in Naḥman, see Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 27–​28, 35–​40. See also Mordecai Mantel, “The Meaning of Suffering according to Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov,” Da‘at 7 (1981): 109–​118 (Hebrew). On the intrinsic connection between asceticism and the spiritual ideal of communion with God (devequt) in early Ḥasidic sources, see Miles Krassen, Uniter of Heaven and Earth: Rabbi Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh and the Rise of Hasidism in Eastern Galicia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 55, 108–​121. Particularly interesting is a passage in Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 68, 31d-​32a, wherein the clash between the ascetic ideal of the abrogation of the body and the traditional norm of procreation is applied to the specific case of the ṣaddiq. Even though it is necessary for the righteous man to repudiate physical needs and sensual desires, his perfection depends on his leaving progeny above in the spiritual plane and below in the physical world. See ibid., ii, 71, 32c, where it is stated that by means of producing offspring the glory of God is augmented insofar as the essence of this glory is revealed only by man. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​ Ḥasidei Breslov, 1974), Yoreh De‘ah: Milah, 4:2, 73d-​74a. For a detailed account of Nathan of Nemirov, see Joseph Weiss, Studies in Braslav Hasidism, edited by Mendel Piekarz (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1974), pp. 66–​83 (Hebrew). See also Green, Tormented Master, index, s.v. “Nathan Sternharz.” Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De‘ah: Milah, 4:2, 73d. Knowledge in the thought of Naḥman does not signify a discursive, abstract knowing but rather a mystical or spiritual awareness that may lead to unio mystica. Compare Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 4:4, 3b-​c, 21:11, 30d, 53, 60c-​d, 58:5, 69c, 255, 118a; ii, 1:5, 1c; and see the comments of Green, Tormented Master, pp. 320–​322. Similarly, the higher sekhel, which I have translated as intellect, should not be understood as the power of ratiocination, but rather as a mindfulness that exceeds reason. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 61, 29b. Since the publication of this chapter, the theme of the “super-​temporal experience” was explored by Moshe Idel, “‘Higher than Time’: Observations on Some Concepts of Time in Kabbalah and Hasidism,” in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 177–​210. Idel, p. 201, briefly comments that the theme of “higher than time” is found in the writings of Naḥman of Braslav

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absence of knowledge. “Know, however, that the essence of time [iqqar ha-​ zeman] is only due to the fact that we do not understand, that is, on account of our small minds. As the mind becomes greater, time becomes smaller and is more abolished.”33 As an illustration of this principle, Naḥman notes that in a dream state, when reason (sekhel) is absent and one has only the faculty of imagination (koaḥ ha-​medammeh),34 a short interval of time may seem very long. Similarly, what we consider to be a long period of time in a higher state of consciousness is very short. Naḥman thus depicts the ascent of the soul from a state of imagination in which the illusion of time dominates to a state of mindfulness in which time is considered as nothing at all: “And so higher and higher until there is an intellect so high that there all of time in its entirety is not considered at all, for on account of the greatness of the intellect all of time is nothing and absolutely nonexistent [ayin we-​efes legamrei].”35 Not

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but he does not discuss this in detail and, unfortunately, he neglected to discuss my analysis of this subject in Naḥman in this chapter, which was originally published in 2002. Idel also failed to note my references to this topic in Ḥabad thought in Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 62, 71, 74, 89, 121, 202, 263–​ 264, 279, 330 n. 43, 349 n. 298, 396 n. 60. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 61, 29b. For an alternative translation and analysis, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 321–​322. For a negative characterization of a spiritual state in which there is neither time nor intellect, a state that is depicted as the constant thirst for God, see Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 76, 91d. The means to rectify this condition is through cleaving to the righteous. By drawing close to the righteous one attains the form of worship that is in the aspect of vision, which has a fixed boundary and time. This term reflects medieval philosophical usage. See Weiss, Studies, p. 48 n. 17. On Naḥman’s complex and contradictory views regarding the role of the imaginative faculty in religious faith, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 341–​342. For discussion of the oneiric phenomenon and the role of the imagination in Naḥman, see primary and secondary sources cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 428–​429 n. 175. The negative depiction of the imaginative faculty, koaḥ ha-​dimyon, is well-​attested in Ḥasidic literature, in large measure following the view of Maimonides, perhaps as mediated through the writings of Abraham Abulafia. See, e.g., Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ṣofnat Pa’aneaḥ, critical edition with introduction and notes by Gedalyah Nigal (Jerusalem: Institute for the Study of Hasidic Literature, 1989) p. 176. For another negative assessment of the mundus imaginalis (olam ha-​dimyon) in Ḥasidic literature, see Israel Dov Baer of Weledniki, She’erit Yisra’el (Brooklyn: M. Oberlander, 1985), Sha‘ar ha-​Zemannim, 4c. For the possible Ṣūfi background of this conception in earlier kabbalistic writings, which were influenced by the ideas and practices of Abulafia, see Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 73–​90. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 61, 29b. On the “unreality of time” in Naḥman’s tales, see Wiskind-​Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, pp. 53–​54, 57–​58.

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only is God characterized by this quality, but the Messiah, says Naḥman, is one who possesses this expanded consciousness, an idea that is suggested by the verse “You are my son, this day I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). Although the Messiah (referred to as God’s son) is coeval with the creation of the world,36 it is as if he were created anew each day, for in his consciousness all time is abolished. According to another passage, Naḥman assigns this quality of transcending temporality to Moses who is equated with the “unity of times” (aḥdut ha-​zemannim), for the Hebrew letters of his name are decoded as mah she-​ hayah hu she-​yihyeh, “what was is what shall be”(Ecclesiastes 1:9).37 The consciousness that transcends time underlies Nathan’s statement that a “great principle” (kelal gadol) taught repeatedly by Naḥman is that “a person should begin each time anew.”38 Moreover, Nathan indicates that the quality of constantly being reborn was a hallmark of Naḥman’s own comportment in the world. In fact, not only did Naḥman actualize this principle by starting from the outset repeatedly, but on some days he actually experienced several initiations, which Nathan further depicts in terms of the older rabbinic idea (linked exegetically to Deuteronomy 6:6) that it is incumbent upon the Jewish male to consider the Torah as if it were given anew each day so that he can enter afresh into the covenantal relationship.39 From this vantage point it is detrimental to view oneself as an old person (zaqen), for this would result in the loss of hope in the possibility of genuine change in the future, which is based on the prospect of always beginning at the beginning. Indeed, the key to repentance, the mystery of teshuvah, is the turning back by looking ahead, a return that

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The preexistence of the Messiah is an old Jewish apocalyptic idea that had an important influence on subsequent Christological and rabbinic speculation. See Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 156–​165. See, in particular, Midrash Tehillim, edited by Salomon Buber (Vilna: Romm, 1891), 2:9, 14b, where Psalms 2:7 is interpreted as a reference to the preexistence of Messiah. See, in contrast, Acts 13:33 where the same verse is cited as a prooftext for the resurrection—​rather than the preexistence—​of the Messiah. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 79, 37a. See ibid., i, 58, 69c: “And in the future, in the time of the resurrection, Moses will rise, comprised of the three patriarchs as before, the aspect of what was is what shall be [mah she-​hayah hu she-​yihyeh].” And compare ibid., ii, 7, 12b. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​ Ḥasidei Breslov, 1974), Yoreh De‘ah: Basar be-​Ḥalav, 4:1, 98b. Nathan alludes to Sifre on Deuteronomy, edited by Louis Finkelstein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969), 33, p. 59, which is paraphrased by Rashi in his commentary on this verse (as Nathan himself notes). The connection between the present, which is the only aspect of time that is real, and divine worship in Naḥman’s thought is highlighted in Mordecai Menaḥem Mendel Kossowsky, Emunat Ittekha (Piotrków, 1914).

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is predicated precisely on the awareness of constant renewal, a secret that is indicated by the verse “Take us back, O Lord, to yourself, and let us come back; renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21). The act of repentance affords one the opportunity to transcend the limitations of time, the awakening from the slumber of time by lifting and binding it with the aspect that is above time. “On the day that a person repents he is above time, and he elevates all the days above time, and thus Yom Kippur is above time … for repentance is the aspect40 of the nullification of time [biṭṭul ha-​zeman], that is, time is unified, that is, time ascends and it is bound and contained in the aspect of that which is above time.”41 From the example of repentance Naḥman adduces a more general point about the purpose of pious devotion: “For in truth the essence of worship is to bind and to annul the aspect of time, to elevate it and to unite it in the aspect that is above time. And this is the aspect of the temporal-​bound commandments [miṣwot zemanniyyot], in order to be purified by means of the time-​bound commandments so that time will be unified and time will ascend to the aspect that is above time.”42 The Jewish people are endowed with the ability to abrogate time by elevating it and binding it to that which transcends time. The means to achieve this transtemporal state are the temporally bound ritual actions. Just as the way to overcome the body is through the body, so the way to surpass time is through time. The law thus provides the Jewish people with the unique opportunity to repeatedly start over from the beginning. Even for one who is completely righteous it is not good to worship as an elder, for such a focus sustains the evil inclination, which is called the “old and foolish king” (Ecclesiastes 4:13).43 To combat the strategy of the demonic potency to paralyze human hope by forcing one to focus on the misfortunes of the past, it is necessary to cultivate the sense that each venture is truly a new beginning.44 In Naḥman’s own words, 40 41 42 43

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On the use of the technical term beḥinah in Naḥman’s writings, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 286–​287. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 79, 37b. Ibid., 37d. The image of the “old and foolish king” (Ecclesiastes 4:13) is related to the evil inclination in older rabbinic sources. See Midrash Qohelet Rabbah, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), 4:15, p. 72; Midrash Tehillim, 9:5, 41b; Avot de-​Rabbi Natan, edited by Solomon Schechter (Wien: Ch. D. Lippe, 1887), version B, ch. 16, 18b; and Pesiqta de-​Rav Kahana, edited by Bernard Mandelbaum, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), p. 460. Based on the line from “East Cocker,” the second of the Four Quartets, in Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 191: “And so each venture /​is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.”

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When a person falls from his gradation, he should know that it is from heaven, for keeping distant is the beginning of drawing near [ki hitraḥaqut teḥillat hitqarevut].45 Thus he fell so that he might be more aroused to draw close to God, blessed be he. His advice is that one should begin anew to enter into the worship of the Lord as if he had never started before. This is a great principle in the worship of the Lord, that it is verily necessary to begin each day anew.46 Naḥman’s teaching is predicated on the existential belief that the only time that matters spiritually is the beginning; indeed, time in its phenomenological essence is naught but the beginning since each moment is marked by the recurrence of that which has never been before, a paradox that can be expressed as well as the return of what has remained, for only what has remained may return.47 As T. S. Eliot insightfully remarked in “The Dry Salvages,” the third of the Four Quartets, “the way forward is the way back.”48 Naḥman expresses the matter in the following way in another context: The essence of all things is the beginning, for “all beginnings are difficult,”49 since one goes out from one opposite to the other. … Thus, each and every time that one travels to the righteous man, he must envision it as if each time he comes anew, not as if he was already by the righteous man and now he is coming a second time, but rather it should be as if he was never by the righteous man, and he is with him anew in the present as if it were the first time. For the essence is the beginning because “all 45

Compare Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 74, 89c: “And the beginning of drawing close is keeping a distance [we-​hatḥalat hitqarevut hu hitraḥaqut].” Compare ibid., ii, 45, 27a: “When a person enters into the worship of the Lord, the way that is shown to him is keeping a distance [hitraḥaqut], and it seems as if they keep him at a distance from above, and they do not allow him at all to enter into the worship of the Lord. In truth, all of the distancing is only entirely a drawing near [hitqarevut].” On the possible influence of the Psalms in engendering the terms hitqarevut and hitraḥaqut to characterize Naḥman’s devotional states, see Green, Tormented Master, p. 28. 46 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 261, 118c. 47 Here my language is indebted to Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, with an introduction by John M. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 68, “But remaining is a returning.” See n. 136. 48 Eliot, The Complete Poems, p. 197. 49 Mekhilta de-​ Rabbi Ishmael, edited by Ḥayyim S. Horovitz and Israel A. Rabin (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970), Baḥodesh, 2, p. 208, and see Solomon ben Isaac, Perushei Rashi al ha-​Torah, edited by Ḥayyim D. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1983), p. 239 (ad Exodus 19:5).

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beginnings are difficult”. … Hence, the essence of the potentiality of worship on all of the days is only in the beginning … and in accordance with the power and enthusiasm of the beginning so he proceeds and is habituated in his worship, for the essence is in the beginning. … Thus, one must start each time anew … and one must come to the righteous man anew with the potency of great enthusiasm and renewed vigor in the worship of God, blessed be he, so that his worship will be appropriate according to the power of the beginning.50 For Naḥman, the only segment of time that is real is the present, for the past is no longer and the future is not yet. If the moment is the only time that is not illusory, then the life of piety requires that one always begin again at the beginning.51 This conception of temporality underlies Naḥman’s ostensibly peculiar 50 51

Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 62:6, 77a-​b. This conception of time realized in pious worship, which points to the world to come, the time that lies beyond time, is implicit as well in the following remark in Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 38:1, 52a: “Every man must examine himself in every moment [be-​khol et] if he is conjoined to God, blessed be he. And the sign of conjunction is the phylacteries because the phylacteries are a sign regarding conjunction.” The emphasis that Naḥman placed on innovating words of Torah must be understood in this context as well. See Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 262, 118c; ii, 21, 22c; 118, 43c. The same idea is implicit in ibid., i, 246, 116c, where the greatness that a man achieves is related to the task of forgetting all the wisdom that he previously acquired. The need to begin anew constantly is related to Naḥman’s method of dialectical negation according to which each attainment is perceived only as a rung on the ladder leading to a higher attainment; every form of knowledge is perceived, accordingly, as ignorance. See Green, Tormented Master, p. 294. Also relevant here are the words attributed by Nathan to Naḥman in Ḥayyei MoHaRaN (Brooklyn: Moriah, 1974), Shivḥei MoHaRaN, Gedullat Nora’ot Hassagato, § 6, 5a: “Thus, now you know the substance of the world. Had the world not been as it is, I would have been a novelty [hayiti ḥiddush]; that is, had there not been the corporeality and the density of the events of the current world, which greatly conceal and hide him, everyone would have seen the distinctiveness of his wonders, for he is a wondrous novelty [ḥiddush nifla], awesome and exalted.” Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 201 (English translation, p. 115), cites this comment in support of his claim that the “messianism of Bratslav contrasts sharply with Judaism’s traditional messianic views.” Leaving aside the thorny problem of ascertaining in an unambiguous manner the “traditional messianic views” of Judaism, I would counter that the operative understanding of ḥiddush in the view expressed by Liebes as a total innovation that breaks with everything that proceeded it does not take into account the paradoxical nature of Naḥman’s view that what is new is new only because it is old. For an explicit formulation of this paradox, consider the passage from Shivḥei MoHaRaN cited in n. 135. In more general terms, the monolithic and dogmatic presentation of Naḥman’s position on the part of Liebes fails to consider the profound sense of paradox (see below n. 62) that he embraced and the identification of the logical antinomies that ensue therefrom. Particularly relevant to the passage that Liebes cites, not only is it the case that what

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advice that one who wants to comprehend the true comprehension (hassagah shel emet) with regard to the Torah should first go to the palaces of forces that are seemingly opposite to holiness (heikhalot ha-​temurot). By entering into the space of the oppositional powers, one can discern more definitively that one has not begun to enter into the true chambers of the Torah (ḥadrei torah ha-​ amitiyyim), and consequently one will strengthen one’s resolve in the worship of God. One may think that one has entered these chambers but one is, in fact, still standing entirely on the outside—​the opposite to the situation in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” in which the old man is denied entry into the door that was intended just for him whence he learns that he can be inside only by staying outside.52 From Naḥman’s vantage point, the task for one who seeks to enter the chambers of the Torah is to discern that imagining one is inside is a true sign that one is outside. Even the righteous man, who has already merited to comprehend great comprehensions of holiness in truth, must consider these previous accomplishments as nothing so that he can strengthen his effort each time to receive anew God’s illumination of the light of Torah as if he never began to comprehend anything all of his days.53 Nathan expands the teaching of his master and connects it to the matter of the “rectification of the intellect”

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is new is new because it is old, but what is revealed is revealed because it is concealed. Thus, when Naḥman speaks of his being hidden by the density of the corporeal world, this must be decoded as the ultimate sign of the manifestation of his unique and superior holiness. Consider Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 243, 116b: “Know that there is a very great ṣaddiq, and the world cannot endure his holiness. Thus, he is greatly concealed, and concerning him no one sees any holiness or additional abstinence; this is on account of the greatness of his holiness.” In the continuation of the passage, the disclosure of the holiness of the ṣaddiq through his concealment is ingeniously related to the rabbinic idea that the Song of Songs is the holy of holies whereas all other songs are holy (according to Naḥman’s rendition). That is, the one book in which there is ostensibly no reference to matters of cultic purity is deemed to be the most sacred book. The apparent lack of holiness is directly proportionate to its supreme sanctity. See as well Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 63:1, 77b-​c, where the paradox of concealment and disclosure pertaining to the ṣaddiq is related to the secret intent of circumcision. On the necessity for the true ṣaddiq to become a simpleton (ish pashuṭ), see ibid., ii, 78, 35d. See the analysis of Kafka’s parable in Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 249–​259, esp. pp. 252–​253: “This is the lesson the priest set out to teach K. through the parable: the obsessive desire to get out from under the authority of law is equivalent to the intractable urge to enter the door through which one would access the law that cannot be accessed. The man is outside the law not because he wants to go in … but precisely because he is already inside, that is, the inside is the vantage-​point from which he imagines that he is outside. … The relentless quest to enter indicates that one has never exited; being outside is what it is to be inside.” Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 245, 116c.

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(tiqqun ha-​sekhel) that occurs by means of the aspect of Malkhut—​also identified as the letter nun, symbolic of both the fiftieth day of the omer when the Torah was revealed and the messianic name yinnon (Psalms 72:17)54—​which is the “principle of all the constrictions and attributes” (kelal kol ṣimṣumim we-​ ha-​middot) of the intellect, that is, the limitation implemented by the attribute of judgment that facilitates the “reception of consciousness” (qabbalat ha-​moḥin) as opposed to the “aspect of the constriction of consciousness” (beḥinat ṣimṣum ha-​moḥin), which is the foolishness (ha-​kesilut) of the “privation of knowledge entirely” (he‘der ha-​da‘at legamrei): For by means of this is the essence of the reception of knowledge and the true intellect [qabbalat ha-​da‘at we-​ha-​sekhel ha-​emet], for this is the aspect of the constriction of consciousness [ṣimṣum ha-​moaḥ] … the aspect of Malkhut, the aspect of nun … which is the aspect of measure and constriction [middah we-​ṣimṣum]. That is, it is impossible to receive any knowledge and the true intellect [da‘at we-​sekhel amitti] unless he makes himself like an animal as if he does not know anything. As the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said “the Torah is not sustained except in one who makes himself like one who does not know” [ein ha-​torah mitqayyemet ella be-​mi she-​mesim aṣmo ke-​eino yode‘a], 55 and then by means 54 55

Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 8 (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​ Ḥasidei Breslov, 1974), Ḥoshen Mishpaṭ, Hilkhot Piqqadon 4:2, 125b. Babylonian Talmud, Soṭah 21b. The version of R. Yoḥanan’s dictum cited by Nathan is a variant that is attested in some manuscripts (see, for example, the textual witness in ms Oxford, Bodleian Library 2675 available digitally in the Friedberg Project for Talmud Bavli Variants, Hakhi Garsinan, https://​bavli.genizah.org/​ResultPages/​Difference,Soṭah 21b) and is cited in this way by a number of Ḥasidic masters. The more prevalent reading, however, preserved in most manuscripts and in the published edition, is ein divrei torah mitqayyemin ella be-​mi she-​mesim aṣmo ke-​mi she-​eino, “the words of Torah are not sustain except in he who makes himself as one who is not.” This reading seems to work better with the verse offered as the prooftext for R. Yoḥanan’s teaching “and from nothing you will find wisdom,” we-​ha-​ḥokhmah me-​ayin timmaṣe (Job 28:12), that is, wisdom can be found in the person who considers himself nothing. This corresponds to Naḥman’s admonition in Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 14:5, 19a, that a person does not merit the Torah except by means of humility (shiflut), which demands that the person diminishes himself (lehaqṭin et aṣmo) to the point that he imagines that he is beneath his own level. Compare ibid., i, 219, 113d-​114a: “‘If a man enters a hiding place, do I not see him?’ [im yissater ish ba-​ mistarim wa-​ani lo erennu] (Jeremiah 23:24)—​when a person diminishes himself [maqṭin et aṣmo], then God, blessed be he, also diminishes himself, but when a person is prideful and aggrandizes himself, then God, blessed be he, shows his pride and greatness. And this is ‘If a man enters a hiding place’—​when a person diminishes and hides himself in the hiding place [maqṭin u-​mastir et aṣmo ba-​mistarim]; that is, when he hides, conceals, and diminishes himself in modesty and humility [ba-​anawah we-​shiflut], then ‘do I not see

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of this he assuredly merits to receive the intellect and the consciousness in degree and in measure. Moreover, when he receives some intellect and knowledge, he must know each time that he still does not know anything as our master and teacher, blessed be his memory, said several times. By means of this one merits to receive a new consciousness and knowledge [moaḥ we-​da‘at ḥadash] each time. And this is the aspect of ṣimṣum and the measure of holiness, the aspect of Malkhut, the aspect of nun … for through this is the essence of the reception of consciousness.56 In this connection, it is of interest to recall Nathan’s explanation of his choice of the title Ḥayyei MoHaRaN for the biography of Naḥman. “For he was a man of life in truth of which there is no copy, and he lived constantly a true life, and each time he lived a new life [ḥayyim ḥadashim] as I heard from his holy mouth, for one time he said, ‘Today I lived a life that I have never lived before,’ and then he began to reveal a bit of the chapter headings of Torah … and the principle is that the essence of life is the true life, which is the true wisdom.”57 In a similar vein, Nathan wrote in another context, “I have seen and I have heard several times from the mouth of our master, blessed be his memory, that he lived a new life [ḥiyyut ḥadash] every time, as I heard him say several times ‘Today I lived a life that I have never lived a life like this before.’”58 An essential aspect of Naḥman’s teaching is that spiritual existence requires a renewal of consciousness (hitḥaddeshut ha-​moḥin) on each and every day, for no day has any vitality but the novel mindfulness (sekhel ḥadash) that comes forth on that very day.59 As he put it elsewhere, “‘O, if you would but heed his voice this day’ (Psalms 95:7). This is the great principle in the worship of the Lord that he should not place before his eyes anything but that very day … for a person has nothing in his world except for that very day and that very hour in which

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him?’—​for I, too, show myself to him in the aspect of the not [lo], which is the aspect of nothing and naught [ayin wa-​efes], the aspect of modesty and humility.” See below n. 104. On humility as a form of transgressive piety in kabbalistic sources, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 286–​316. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 8, Ḥoshen Mishpaṭ, Hilkhot Piqqadon 4:4, 125c-​d. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Ḥayyei MoHaRaN, Introduction, 2c. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​ Ḥasidei Breslov, 1974), Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Tefillin 5:5, 62d. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 76, 91d-​92a. Naḥman’s notion of renewal can also be expressed in terms of drawing down mercy to ameliorate judgment, an act that reproduces the pattern operative in the creation of the world. See Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 8, Ḥoshen Mishpaṭ, Hilkhot Matanah 5:1, 19d-​20a.

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he stands, for the next day is an entirely different world.”60 Building upon this dictum of Naḥman, Nathan explains the ritual of counting the forty-​nine days of omer between Passover and Pentecost as well as the nature of the Sinaitic revelation itself in terms of this principle. It is forbidden for a person to procrastinate from day to day, but he should well know that this day shall not be again all the days of his life, for another day is an entirely different matter. … It is as our master and our teacher, blessed be his memory, said with respect to the verse “O, if you would but heed his voice this day” (Psalms 95:7), for the essence of worship of the one who wants to heed the voice of the blessed one and to cleave to him is to know that the essence is this day, “this day” precisely. … This is the aspect of the commandment of counting the omer, which is the beginning and the preparation for receiving the Torah, to demonstrate that it is impossible to receive the Torah unless it is known that the essence is this very day in which a person stands. … This is the aspect of “O, if you would but heed his voice this day,” that is, if you want to heed his voice and to receive the Torah, you cannot receive except by means of the aspect of today.61 The mandate is to begin each day anew, to see oneself reborn in every moment. However, the nature of the beginning implies a paradox62 that Naḥman expresses in his explanation of the rabbinic dictum that “all beginnings are difficult.” The beginning is difficult because it marks the transition from one state to its opposite. But if the beginning is understood in this way, then the beginning presupposes a state of affairs that exists prior to the beginning. Alternatively expressed, the notion that the beginning is a changeover entails that origin involves duplicity.63 Authentic worship is predicated on an 60 61 62

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Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 272, 119c. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 8, Ḥoshen Mishpaṭ: Piqqadon, 4:5, 126d-​127a. In this study, I recurrently use the term paradox to characterize Naḥman’s thinking. On the role of paradox in Naḥman, see Weiss, Studies, pp. 109–​149; and idem, Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism, edited by David Goldstein (Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1985), pp. 49, 53–​54. Here my formulation is indebted to Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 17: “Since everything has to be said in two words, let us give two names to the duplicity of these origins. For every origin is duplicity itself, the one and the other.”

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awareness of the paradox of beginning at the beginning that is itself a shift from what has already been. The truth of the beginning exemplifies a duplicitous nature insofar as no beginning can begin without already having begun. As I have noted, this is precisely the paradox that Naḥman assigns to the Messiah who is said to be beyond time. The savior is reborn each day, but to be reborn each day he has to have already existed. To be beyond time, therefore, implies this confluence of novelty and repetition. From another statement of Nathan we learn, moreover, that the righteous in general are characterized by this messianic quality: “The essence of hope is by means of the aspect that is above time, which the righteous comprehend for they are in the aspect of Messiah.”64 In the continuation of that passage, Nathan revealed that close to his departure from this world (samukh le-histalquto), Naḥman disclosed the meaning of the teaching from Liqquṭei MoHaRaN concerning the Messiah’s posture as one who is above time derived from the verse “You are my son, this day I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). “It is impossible,” writes Nathan, “to explain this matter in writing at all.”65 From the remainder of the passage, however, the implication seems to be that the attribute of transcending time attributed to the Messiah was in fact applicable to Naḥman himself in his function as one who sought to redeem souls.66 His messianic efforts were somewhat thwarted by the limitations of corporeality, but in the end “we will all return in truth to God, blessed be he, and the former days will fall, for all time will be abolished and everything will be contained in the aspect of that which is above time, and there everything will be perfected.”67 In the present state of existence, the inwardness of Torah is concealed by the polarity of night and day, the love that is marked by temporality (ahavah she-​ ba-​yamim), the love of God for Israel that is actualized on a daily basis. By contrast, in the future, the Torah of the ancient concealed one will be revealed and, consequently, the secrets of Torah will be disclosed without any garments. This disclosure is depicted, moreover, as the love that is beyond the division of time and the delimitation of measurement, the love that is strictly in the mind (ahavah she-​ba-​da‘at), which is the love that God has for Israel before the creation of the world when they existed only as a potentiality in thought.

64

Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Ḥayyei MoHaRaN, Siḥot MoHaRaN, Avodat ha-​Shem, § 117, 34c. 65 Ibid. 66 Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 202 n. 7 (English translation, pp. 185–​187 n. 7). 67 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Ḥayyei MoHaRaN, Siḥot MoHaRaN, Avodat ha-​Shem, § 117, 34c.

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In a reversal of the standard philosophical orientation, Naḥman’s distinction between the two kinds of love is predicated on the assumption that potentiality is greater than actuality, for the latter, in contrast to the former, is limited by specific forms that are determined by temporal and spatial laws. In this state of potency prior to creation, which is retrieved in the eschaton beyond nature, there is no day or night, but only the perfection of peace that transcends all strife and discord.68 The conception of time underlying Naḥman’s eschatological view of redemption as the promise of the future that resurrects the past in the ever-​ recurring present bears a remarkable similarity to the following phenomenological description of time offered by Emmanuel Levinas: For the production of an instant of time cannot come from an infinite series, which it would have to traverse, but shows an indifference to that series; it can cut the Gordean knot of time without untying it. It can be, out of itself. That way for an instant to be is to be present. The present is an ignorance of history. In it the infinity of time or of eternity is interrupted and starts up again. The present is then a situation in being where there is not only being in general, but there is a being, a subject. Because the present refers only to itself, starts with itself, it refracts the future. … Of itself time resists any hypostasis; the images of current and flux with which we explain it are applicable to beings in time, and not to time itself. Time does not flow like a river. … The present is a halt, not because it is arrested, but because it interrupts and links up again to the duration to which it comes, out of itself. Despite its evanescence in time, in which alone it has been envisaged, or rather because of that evanescence, it is the effectuation of a subject. It breaks with the duration in which we grasp it.69 68 69

Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 33:5, 47c. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis, foreword by Robert Bernasconi (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 71–​72. Consider as well the reflections of Edmund Husserl, “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 239: “The entire physical perceptual field as a constituted manifold of things that appear in perspectives is a harmonious unity of perspectivity; one perspectival style governs and continues to govern throughout the changing perceptual field. … Furthermore, it governs not just in each instantaneous present, but in the concrete and flowing present with its continuous synthesis. This synthesis is also concerned with the perspectival coexistences and successions as they pass over into one another and thereby suitably fit together with one another” (emphasis in original).

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According to Naḥman, the sequential flow of temporality—​the succession of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on—​is naught but illusion for one who has achieved a level of cognition appropriate to God or what may be called “messianic consciousness.” To express the matter in terms of the formulation of Levinas just cited, the evanescence of time gives way to the duration of eternity, the world that is to the world that is coming, for that which comes eternally is always on the way to becoming what it is. Messianic hope lies, paradoxically, in remembering the future, which is the return of the present that has never been past.70 In that present, time is conquered by the memory of the past that lies ahead as the future that lies behind.71 Nathan applies Naḥman’s teaching concerning the awareness of that which transcends time to the rite of circumcision. The commandment to circumcise the child is to be carried out on the eighth day, for the seven days preceding the day of circumcision represent the aspect of time, the weekly cycle, and the eighth, by contrast, is the dimension beyond time.72 For Naḥman, temporal consciousness is really a lack of consciousness and supratemporal consciousness is perfected consciousness. Circumcision is the means by which one attains knowledge, which is the perspective of being beyond time that is allocated

70 71

72

A similar observation about time in Naḥman’s thinking, particularly as it relates to his conception of the story, is offered by Wiskind-​Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, pp. 142–​143. Here, too, one is reminded of a stanza in the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets cited in ch. 1 n. 39. According to my interpretation of Naḥman, consciousness similarly involves being beyond time, but the only way to be beyond time is through the memory in the present of the future that is past, the end that is the beginning. This symbolic significance of the number eight may underlie Naḥman’s positive attitude toward the spiritual value of music whose basic structure is the octave. It is particularly noteworthy that Naḥman, according to a report of Nathan, affirmed that the effectiveness of songs is dependent upon the capacity to “despise the sexual desire.” See reference cited in Mendel Piekarz, Studies in Braslav Hasidism (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1972), p. 45 (Hebrew); and Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 236 n. 125 (English translation, p. 206 n. 121); and, most recently, Wiskind-​Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, pp. 90–​103, 195–​199. As will be seen from our following discussion, the symbolic rationale for circumcision is also predicated upon the eradication of the sexual drive. On the eschatological significance of the number eight in earlier rabbinic sources, see the reference in n. 74. Let me remark, finally, that the ṣaddiq is also related by Naḥman, following the standard kabbalistic symbolism, to the number six insofar as this attribute comprises the lower six emanations of the divine, which correspond to the six days of the week. See Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 63:1, 77b, where the phallus is depicted as comprising the six potencies, but it is also equated with the Sabbath, which is the seventh.

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distinctively to the Jews,73 a seemingly impossible state of mind for consciousness to comprehend in its temporal deportment. In Nathan’s words: It is impossible for one to attain the aspect of that which is beyond time, which is the perfection of knowledge, until one passes first under time, which is the aspect of the lack of knowledge. … Then he will assuredly merit through time to ascend and to be contained in the aspect of that which is beyond time. This is the aspect of the cutting and removal of the foreskin, which is the rectification of the phallus [tiqqun ha-​berit], that is, the perfection of knowledge [sheleimut ha-​da‘at]. This is merited precisely after the passing of seven days, which are the totality of time [kelal ha-​zeman], for all time is contained in the seven days of the week. Then does one assuredly merit the aspect of that which is above time, which is the perfection of knowledge that one merits by virtue of the commandment of circumcision on the eighth day, for that is the aspect of that which is above time. The eighth day is the aspect of that which is above time, for it is the aspect of Binah, the world to come,74 which is 73

74

Naḥman’s perspective is expressed succinctly by Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 4, Yoreh De‘ah: Ribbit, 3:3, 189d: “God, blessed be he, is above time and place, and Israel arose first in thought [Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, edited by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965), 1:4, p. 6], and the blessed holy One, Torah, and Israel are all one [Zohar 3:73a], and thus Israel are also above time. And all of the worship of Israel in this physical world, which is in time and place, is only so that they merit to elevate and bind the aspect of place and time to the aspect that is above time and place, that is, to elevate, to bind, and to incorporate all of creation in that which precedes creation.” On the emplacement of Israel in the divine thought, which is the aspect of Torah that is above the four worlds of emanation, creation, formation, and doing, see Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah de-​ Ḥasidei Breslov, 1974), Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Tefillat ha-​Minḥah, 7:93, 227b. The attribution of the ability to transcend time and place uniquely to the Jewish people would be another striking example of the incontrovertible ethnocentrism that informed the Ḥasidic worldview based on rabbinic and kabbalistic precedent. Already in early kabbalistic literature, Binah is identified as the eschatological world to come. See, e.g., Zohar 1:49a; 2:27b, 115b, 204a, 225a; 3:278a; Gikatilla, Sha‘arei Orah, 2: 65–​66. Binah is associated with the number eight, moreover, for it is the eighth of the ten emanations when counting from below. On the eschatological significance of the number eight in rabbinic haggadah, see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 5:130–​131 n. 142, 6:262 n. 81. Especially important for an appreciation of Naḥman’s messianic symbolism is the rabbinic idea (mentioned by Ginzberg) that the harp to be used in messianic times consists of eight strings compared to the seven-​stringed harp of David (although some maintained that David’s harp had ten strings). On the comparable significance of the number eight in Christian gnosis, see Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation

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above time, above the “seven days of the edifice,”75 in which there is the hold of time [aḥizat ha-​zeman] as is known.76 Perfection of knowledge, which entails the transcendence of time and the abolition of temporal limitations, is the esoteric intent of the rite of circumcision. To clarify this matter, we must embark on a deeper path by undertaking an excursion into the notion of time in the thought of Rebbe Naḥman. 3

Perfection of Memory, Rectification of the Phallus, and the Conquest of the Eros of Time

Knowledge is in an inverse relation to temporality. But what is it about time that leads Naḥman to characterize knowledge as the negation of time? Let us recall Naḥman’s homiletic reflection on the verse “But you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that God shall speak to the children of Israel” (Exodus 19:6). “It is written, ‘Reproach breaks my heart’ (Psalms 69:21); that is, acts of shame and disgrace break the heart of a person, and the rectification comes about by his binding his heart to the point that belongs to his heart in this moment [be-​et ha-​zo’t]. By means of this the shame that dwells on his heart will be nullified.”77 Naḥman decodes the meaning of his opening remark in the balance of the homily. The heart is identified as the “aspect of the waw” and as the “aspect of the tablets,” terms that no doubt symbolically signify the masculine element or, more specifically, the phallic gradation. The shamefulness that breaks the heart refers to illicit sexual relations, the evil passions (ahavot ra‘ot) that seduce a man, the aspect of fallen and broken love (ahavah nefulah u-​shevurah), also identified as the foreskin of

75

76

77

and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, translated by Richard F. C. Hull, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 403–​404. That is, the sefirot from Ḥesed to Malkhut. This terminology likewise can be traced back to early kabbalistic sources. The seven lower emanations are called “seven days of the edifice,” for the structure of the cosmos is fashioned out of these seven archetypes. See Georges Vajda, Le commentaire d’Ezra sur le cantique des cantiques (Paris: Aubier-​ Montaigne, 1969), pp. 169–​170. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De‘ah: Milah, 4:3, 74c-​d. Compare idem, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 4, Yoreh De‘ah: Ribbit, 5, 192a, where the expression aḥizat ha-​zeman is linked to the lust for money, which is the aspect of foolishness, that is set in contrast to the Torah in which there is no time at all. In particular, the taking of interest connected to a loan (ribbit shel halwa’ah) is demarcated as the blemish of the entire Torah. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 34:1, 48a.

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the heart (orlat ha-​lev) and as the broken tablets (shivrei luḥot).78 In another passage, the broken heart (lev nishbar) is described as the heart that is warmed by the fallen passions (ahavot nefulot). The rectification for this state of brokenness is the shevarim, the broken sounds of the shofar blowing.79 The linkage of spiritual breakage and sins related to the penis is a motif expressed in much older kabbalistic sources. For instance, in one passage in Tiqqunei Zohar, the matter is expressed in terms of the association of the word basar, which denotes the flesh in general but that relates specifically to the male organ, and shever, a word that means both “fracture” and “grain”: What is the secret of this flesh [basar]? It is as it is written “since he too is flesh” [beshaggam hu vasar] (Genesis 6:3). This secret has been transmitted to the wise of heart. The [letters of the word] basar can be transposed into shever, concerning which it says “your starving households” [shever ra‘avon bateikhem] (ibid. 42:19). If they are meritorious, the flesh is holy [basar qodesh], concerning which it says “From my flesh I will see God” [u-​mi-​besari eḥezeh eloha] (Job 19:26), and if they do not guard this flesh, the sign of the covenant, it is transposed for them into a calamity [be-​ shever] (Lamentations 410).80 If one is sexually pure, then the male organ is the locus of beatific vision for one beholds God from that place, but if one is impure, then this very location is transformed into a source of affliction and misery. When the heart is overwhelmed by the feeling of disgrace brought about by sexual transgression, the soul is dominated by the evil inclination and the demonic shells, which originate from the shattering of the vessels of mercy (shevirat kelei ha-​ḥesed). The brokenhearted man can rectify his condition only by binding his heart to the point of the yod, which is identified as the ṣaddiq. When the heart is sunk in shame, which is the foreskin of the heart, the aspect of the broken tablets, then “Reproach breaks my heart” (Psalms 69:21). But when he binds the heart, which is the aspect of the waw … to the yod, that is the point, which is the aspect of the ṣaddiq, wherein the light of the holy love dwells, for the light of mercy remains in the foundation of the emanation [yesod de-​aṣilut], then the evil passions will be abrogated … for the ṣaddiq, who is the point wherein the holy love dwells, 78 Ibid., 34:7, 48c. 79 Ibid., ii, 5:13, 10a. 80 Tiqqunei Zohar, § 19, 41b.

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shines upon the waw, which is the aspect of the heart, and the shame is nullified.81 In the same context, Naḥman expresses this symbolism in slightly different terms. The waw, which is the heart, refers to the males of Israel, the supporters of Torah (tomkhei oraita) or the hooks of the posts (wawei ha-​ammudim), and the yod alludes to the righteous, the sages of the community (ḥakhmei ha-​edah).82 From one perspective the former support the latter, but from another the latter the former. Hence, the heart that is broken, imaginatively represented by the shattered tablets and/​or the divided waw, is healed (in the sense of being made whole) by attaching itself to the yod, the phallic point of the ṣaddiq. “The point is the aspect of the ṣaddiq in relation to his comrade [ḥaveiro], and this point illumines the heart of his comrade, which is called waw.”83 The brokenhearted individual finds his healing by attaching himself to the righteous one and receiving the illumination that radiates from him into his heart. The ṣaddiq serves as a conduit through which the divine influx flows and he is thus called by the aspect melo fum, the mouth that is full (‫מלא פום‬, the letters of melofum, ‫מלאפום‬, a term used to designate the ḥolem or the shuruq) to show that his mouth is “full from divinity” (male me-​elohut).84 The intent of the attribution of the expression melofum to the ṣaddiq is clarified from another passage: “And this is the aspect of melofum, melo fum. The matter is that melofum consists of yod waw, and this [yod] is the aspect of the ten types of knockings [defiqin] corresponding to the ten commandments … and the waw is the aspect of drawing the spirit [hamshakhat ha-​ruaḥ] … for by means of drawing the spirit the lack is perfected.”85 The yod and the waw together signify the double aspect of the phallic gradation to which the ṣaddiq is attached. The yod is the sign of the covenant, which is linked to the corona of the penis that is disclosed by the act of peri‘ah, the splitting and pulling down of the membrane in the rite of circumcision. In this passage, the yod is related to the ten knockings that correspond to the ten commandments, which represent the spirit that is in the Torah, and the waw is the elongation of the penis that is associated with the drawing forth of the spirit. How so? The ṣaddiq manifests

81 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 34:7, 48c. 82 Ibid., 34:6, 48c. 83 Ibid., 34:8, 48d. 84 Ibid., 34:3, 48b. 85 Ibid., i, 8:9, 11b. See ibid., i, 66:1, 82a, where Naḥman says that the student who attaches himself to the ṣaddiq in the manner of the branches to the tree experiences the ups and downs that characterize the life of his spiritual mentor.

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the phallic potency of the divine, which is the creative energy of the universe, through his speech, the drawing forth of the spirit/​breath.86 The words of the righteous come forth from the dissemination of the vital spirit that breathes life into the world. The special power of the ṣaddiq thus lies in the fact that the “full mouth,” melo fum, constitutes the perfection of what is lacking, sheleimut ha-​ḥissaron. Naḥman interprets the prophetic dictum that all the people of Israel are righteous (Isaiah 60:21) in light of this quality of the ṣaddiq as one who possesses a mouth that is full. Each male Jew has the capacity to repair the broken heart by means of the power of the mouth of the ṣaddiq, which is expressed through prayer and Torah study.87 One of the characteristic features of Naḥman’s thought, and Ḥasidism more generally, is the identification of these two verbal activities, although priority is given to prayer such that the words of Torah study are themselves transformed into liturgical utterances.88 As Naḥman puts it in one context, “With respect to all of the Torah that a man learns in order to observe and to practice, all of the letters are sparks of the souls, and they are garbed within the prayer, and 86

It should be noted, however, that in ibid., i, 64.3, 79a, the ṣaddiq, who embodies the attribute of Moses, is identified further as the aspect of silence (beḥinat shetiqah). See ibid., i, 64.5, 79b-​c, where silence is related to the song of the righteous man (niggun shel ṣaddiq), the “supernal faith” (emunah ha-​elyonah) or the “head of faith” (ro’sh emunah), the gradation of thought that is above speech, alluded to in the saying attributed to God in response to the query of Moses regarding the fate of Aqiva, shetoq kakh alah be-​maḥashavah, “Be silent, for thus it arose in thought” (Babylonian Talmud, Menaḥot 29b). On the nexus between silence and thought, see also Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 234, 115b; 251, 117d; ii, 7:8, 13c-​ d. On the symbolic identification of silence and the lower point, which is the Shekhinah, see ibid., i, 6:5, 7a. 87 Ibid., i, 34:4, 48b. Compare ibid., i, 73, 89b-​c. In that context, the vessel that facilitates the conjunction of thought and speech through prayer is the ani, the “I,” which consists of the ṣaddiq, represented by the alef, speech (dibbur) or Malkhut, represented by the nun, and thought (maḥashavah), represented by the yod. In the word ani, therefore, is encoded the unity of the sefirotic potencies. The vessel is constructed by means of the prayer of every Jewish male, and it is in this sense that Naḥman understands the prophetic claim that all of Israel are righteous. The converse of this relationship is Naḥman’s claim that one who sins sexually, and thereby blemishes the phallic covenant (pogem ba-​berit), cannot pray properly; see ibid., i, 50, 59a. Although Naḥman placed great emphasis on the auditory aspect of hearing and receiving the words spoken by the ṣaddiq, his overall theory of language was such that he privileged the written over the verbal; indeed, he viewed the latter as a species of the former. See, for instance, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 17:5, 23b, where Naḥman describes in elaborate fashion the engraving of the “words of faith of the truly righteous one,” dibburei emunah shel ha-​ṣaddiq ha-​emet, in the air in a manner comparable to the graphic inscription of letters in a book. 88 On the Ḥasidic inversion of the hierarchy of prayer and study of Torah and the response of the Lithuanian rabbinic elite, see Nadler, The Faith of Mithnagdim, pp. 50–​77.

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they are renewed there in the aspect of impregnation.”89 Or, in the language of another passage, “In each and every level, as in each and every world, there is an aspect of ‘Let us do and let us hear’ (Exodus 24:7), for each one in accordance with its gradation has an aspect of ‘Let us do,’ the aspect of Torah, that is, those things that are revealed to him, and the aspect of ‘let us hear,’ which is the aspect of the hidden things, the aspect of prayer.”90 According to this passage, the aspect of prayer is higher than that of Torah study insofar as the former corresponds to the esoteric dimension, which is correlated further with the religious response of contemplation, whereas the latter corresponds to the exoteric dimension, which is correlated with action. In a third passage, however, the hierarchical relationship between prayer and Torah study is described in somewhat different terms since the highest kind of prayer is liturgical utterance that is composed of words of Torah. “It is also good to make prayer out of the Torah, that is, when one learns or hears some discourse on Torah from a veritable righteous man, then he should make from this a prayer, that is, to entreat and to beseech before the blessed One with regard to everything that was said there in that very discourse. … The matter of this speech rises to a very high place, and especially when he produces prayer out of Torah. From these very great delights [sha‘ashu‘im] are made above.”91 The quality of transforming every speech utterance into a liturgical act endows the ṣaddiq with messianic potentiality, which is related more specifically to the sexual purity attained by the ṣaddiq in virtue of the phallic gradation of the divine that he embodies.92 In Naḥman’s own words: 89

Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 2:6, 2a. See i, 44, 54d: “By means of prayer the secrets of Torah are revealed.” 90 Ibid., i, 22:10, 33a. 91 Ibid., ii, 25, 23a. On the delights (sha‘ashu‘im) that God derives from human actions below, see ibid., ii, 7:4, 12c. The principle that the master’s teachings can be transformed into prayers is applied to Naḥman’s own discourses in Nathan’s Liqquṭei Tefillot as is evident from the introduction to this work. See Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 239. 92 On Naḥman’s personal struggles to conquer erotic desire and his interpretation of the role of the ṣaddiq as one who attains sexual purity, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 37–​ 39. I am not sure I agree with Green’s suggestion that Naḥman’s “teachings on the conquest of sexual desire” reflect “an emphasis far beyond that of other Hasidic writings” on account of his “youthful trials.” While I would not quibble with Green’s surmise regarding Naḥman’s personal torment, I would argue that the conquest of sexual desire, and especially the act of spilling semen in vain, lies at the phenomenological core of Ḥasidism, a task that is related to the distinctive role of the ṣaddiq. See the remark of Eliezer Zweifel cited by Green, Tormented Master, p. 61 n. 79, regarding the predominance of sexual sins in the confessions offered before the ṣaddiq according to early Ḥasidism. Green suggests that Zweifel had Bratslav sources in mind from which he generalized about Ḥasidism.

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The essence of the weapon of the Messiah is prayer … and this weapon he must receive by means of the aspect of Joseph, which is vigilance with respect to the phallus [shemirat ha-​berit]. … And every man must intend in his prayer to bind himself to the righteous ones of the generation, for each righteous one of the generation is the aspect of Moses the savior [mosheh mashiaḥ]. … And each and every prayer that every man prays is the aspect of a limb of the Shekhinah.93 By joining oneself to the ṣaddiq through prayer one ontologically transmutes the words of worship into a part of the body of the divine presence; indeed, one is justified in speaking of the imagistic construction of the divine body (or, according to the accepted idiom of the ancient esoteric tradition, the shi‘ur qomah) out of the words of prayer of the ṣaddiq, which comprise the prayers of all those who attach themselves to him. In another context, Naḥman makes explicit the connection between the letters of prayer, the garments of the Shekhinah, the colors of the rainbow, and remembering the phallic covenant. “When he saw that they were in distress, when he heard their cry, [he was mindful of his covenant and in his great faithfulness relented]” (Psalms 106:44). By means of music the judgments are sweetened. As it is written in the holy Zohar,94 the rainbow is the Shekhinah. The three colors of the rainbow are the patriarchs, and they are the garments of the Shekhinah. When she is clothed in the luminous garments, then “I will see it to remember the everlasting covenant” (Genesis 9:16), and, consequently, “the king’s fury abated” (Esther 7:10). This may be compared to a king who was angry at his son, but when the king sees the queen in luminous garments, he has pity on his son. The letters of prayer are the Shekhinah, as it is written, “O Lord, open my lips” [adonai sefatai tiftaḥ] (Psalms 51:17), for the speech is the name adonai, and it is called the rainbow. … The vocal

93 94

Perhaps this suggestion is correct, but it seems to me that Zweifel touched upon a central nerve in the Ḥasidic movement, which indeed is marked by an obsessive attitude toward shemirat ha-​berit or avoiding sexual offenses, and especially the act of masturbation, which is consonant with the intense focus on this topic in the moralistic and pietistic works (betraying the ascetic influence of the kabbalistic orientation) written by rabbinic figures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Biale, Eros and the Jews, pp. 113–​ 118, 123–​130. One cannot understand the social and religious function of the ṣaddiq in Ḥasidism unless one appreciates this phallocentric fixation. Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 2:1–​2, 6, 1d-​2a. On the designation of Israel as the “parts of the Shekhinah,” see ibid., i, 260, 118a. Zohar 3:215a.

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sound of music consists of the three colors of the rainbow, for in the voice there is fire, water, and spirit, which are the three patriarchs, for the patriarchs are the three luminous colors, concerning which it says “I will see it to remember the everlasting covenant.” Thus, the one who musically plays the letters of prayer, with a voice of the melody that is meritorious and in great clarity, clothes the Shekhinah, that is, the letters, in luminous garments, and the blessed holy One sees her and then “the king’s fury abated.” … [This occurs] as well by means of belief in the sages, for the one who believes that all of their words and actions are not simple, but there are secrets in them, thereby clothes the rainbow in luminous garments, and [consequently] “I will see it to remember the everlasting covenant,” for the ṣaddiq is the aspect of the rainbow.95 Naḥman explains the sweetening of judgment by means of the voice of song in terms of the zoharic theme of the appeasement of God’s anger by means of his looking upon the sign of the covenant manifest in the colors of the rainbow. Interestingly enough, the aspect of the rainbow is assigned to both the feminine Shekhinah and to the masculine Yesod. Following closely the intent of the zoharic symbolism, Naḥman asserts that initially the rainbow is the Shekhinah, but the garments in which she is cloaked are the three patriarchs who correspond respectively to the three central emanations, Ḥesed (Abraham), Din (Isaac), and Raḥamim (Jacob). Naḥman adds that these luminous garments are made up of the letters of prayer. Only when the rainbow is cloaked in these garments, which occurs as a consequence of the theurgical activity of prayer, does it become the everlasting covenant remembered by God, which signifies as well the transformation of the rainbow into the phallic sign. In this sense, the rainbow signifies the ṣaddiq, the earthly manifestation of the gradation of Yesod, which corresponds to the phallus. The facility for prayer, in particular, is expressive of the righteous man’s phallic potency, which has messianic implications as well. “By means of the rectification of the phallus [tiqqun ha-​ berit], which is the rainbow, he can bring forth the arrows, which is the prayer that consists of the eighteen liturgical blessings, which are the three wawin, the aspect of the arrows, and their place is in the phallus in the aspect of ‘My covenant with him shall endure’ [u-​veriti ne’emenet lo] (Psalms 89:29). Faith [emunah] is the aspect of prayer in the aspect of ‘thus his hands remained steady’ 95

Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 42, 54a. See ibid., 3, 3a, where Naḥman states that the song (neginah) emanates from the “place of the prophets, from the aspect of the consciousness and knowledge of the kingship of holiness [moḥin we-​ da‘at de-​malkhut di-​qedushshah].”

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[wa-​yehi yadaw emunah] (Exodus 17:12), and as a result there is the beginning of the uplifting of the horn of the Messiah in the aspect of ‘There I will make a horn sprout for David’ (Psalms 132:17) in the aspect of ‘rays proceed from his hand to him’ (Habakkuk 3:4), this is the aspect of prayer.”96 The special efficacy of the speech of the ṣaddiq in terms of both prayer and the study of Torah, which is by no means unique to Bratslav Ḥasidism,97 is predicated ultimately on the correlation of the mouth (or, more specifically, the tongue) and the phallus, a motif that is one of the fundamental principles—​or what I would call a “ground concept”—​of Jewish esotericism.98 To cite but one representative passage where Naḥman articulates the point by drawing the analogy between rectification of the phallus (tiqqun ha-​berit) and perfection of the sacred language (leshon ha-​qodesh), an analogy that is dependent on the aforementioned homology between the phallus (berit) and the tongue (lashon): By means of the sacred language the lust of temptation for adultery is tied up and bound. … The rectification of the phallus is dependent on the sacred language, for from the aspect that is here illicit sexual relations were prohibited for them. The one without the other cannot possibly be, that is, the rectification of the phallus and the perfection of the sacred language are dependent on one another … for the one who blemishes the phallus destroys the sacred language.99 96 Ibid., ii, 83, 38d. 97 The pairing of Torah study and prayer is found frequently in Ḥasidic sources, and it is even transmitted as a direct teaching of the Beshṭ. See Weiss, Studies, p. 59. The insight concerning the intricate connection between prayer and Torah study as a mystical-​magical praxis in Ḥasidic sources underlies the analysis in Idel, Hasidism, pp. 147–​188. 98 Thus, in Sefer Yeṣirah 1:3, a correspondence is made between the covenant of the foreskin and the covenant of the tongue. For select references to this motif, see Wolfson, Circle, pp. 149–​150 n. 59, 150–​151 n. 62. An important source, which I neglected to mention in previous studies, is Midrash Esther Rabbah 7:11, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), p. 71. In that midrashic context, circumcision and Torah are described respectively as the “covenant in their flesh” (berit bi-​vesaram) and the “covenant in their mouths” (berit be-​fihem). The reference to the two covenants in Sefer Yeṣirah has been repeatedly interpreted by kabbalists as an allusion to circumcision and the Torah. 99 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 19:3, 25d-​26a. See Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v., berit, §§ 11–​12, 12a: “The essence of the subjugation and the abrogation of all desires, and in particular the desire for adultery, for this is the main one that needs to be abrogated, is by means of the sacred language, that is, by means of the multiplication of holy words, which consists of Torah, prayer, and the conversation between himself and his Creator. … The rectification of the phallus and the perfection of the sacred language are dependent on one another. Inasmuch as they increase the articulation of holy words, which are in the aspect of the holy language, they

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Given the correspondence between the tongue and the phallus, it follows that sins committed with respect to the latter may be rectified by means of the former, and specifically through the utterance of the sacred language in acts of study or prayer. In one passage, the link between the sacred language and the rectification of the phallus is presented as the secret intention of circumcision (sod kawwanat milah): “The sacred language comes from above, but it is still lacking rectification, for there is still a need to elevate the good from the Aramaic translation [targum], and this is the secret intent of circumcision … for the sacred language is the aspect of the rectification of the phallus that comes from above, but it is still lacking rectification, for the essence of its rectification is from below in this world by means of the fact that we elevate the good in the Aramaic translation and complete the sacred language.”100 The final perfection of the phallus, which is connected to the sacred language, is based on the elevation of the good from the sensual plane, which is represented by the Aramaic translation, a mixture of good and evil, the shell of nogah that is in the liminal state between the holy and the unholy. Tiqqun ha-​ milah thus relates to the transformation of the sexual impulse, tiqqun ha-​berit, which is brought about by the perfection of the Hebrew language through Aramaic. For many, however, the mending of the heart, which is shattered by the yielding of the flesh to sexual temptation, comes only by way of cleaving passionately to the words that come forth from the mouth of the ṣaddiq101 by also merit the rectification of the phallus, and in accordance with the rectification of the phallus, they merit the perfection of the holy language.” On the delineation of the blemish of the covenant (pegam ha-​berit) and the evil that comprises the languages of the non-​Jewish nations, which are sustained from the Aramaic of the Targum, see Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 19:9, 27c. The nexus between speech and the phallus also underlies another passage in Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 5, 4a: “The perfection of speech is the aspect of the sacred language, for all the languages of the nations are deficient and they do not possess perfection as they are called ‘stuttered speech’ [leshon illegim] (Isaiah 32:4), and there is no perfection except for the sacred language. And the sacred language is bound to the Sabbath. … When we merit the aspect of the sacred language, which is bound to the Sabbath, we draw by means of it the holiness and the joy of the Sabbath to the six days of the week.” On the phallic connotation of the Sabbath in Naḥman’s thought, see above, n. 72. 100 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 19:9, 27c. 1 01 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v., berit, § 17, 12b: “The essence of the perfection of the sacred language, which is the essence of the rectification of the phallus that comprises the rectification of all the desires and attributes, cannot be received except from the mouth of veritable righteous men. On account of this it is necessary to travel to the veritable righteous man to listen to [what comes from] his mouth precisely … for the essence of the perfection of speech, which is the aspect of the perfection of the sacred language, which is the essence of the rectification, cannot be received except from his holy mouth itself precisely, for there is the source of fear, which is the perfection of

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means of which the yod completes the waw, an act that clearly has homoerotic overtones in Naḥman’s teaching,102 reflecting a much more widespread phenomenon in Ḥasidic thought based on earlier kabbalistic literature wherein the relationship between master and disciple is portrayed in terms of the constitution of the androgynous unity of the divine located symbolically in the phallus.103 As Naḥman explicitly states, the obligation of being bound to the righteous man, hitqashsherut le-​ṣaddiq, is the perfect love (ahavah sheleimah) that even exceeds the love of man for women (ahavat nashim).104 If the sacred language, which is the rectification of the phallus that is comprised of all the rectifications.” 102 Naḥman’s struggle with and rejection of homosexuality are noted by Green, Tormented Master, pp. 51–​52. See also Green’s interpretation, ibid., pp. 71–​72, of the puzzling incident of Naḥman and the young Arab during the former’s sojourn in Haifa. Despite Naḥman’s unequivocal rebuff of homosexuality, the relationship of the ṣaddiq and his Ḥasidim is depicted in explicitly phallocentric and homoerotic terms. 1 03 See Wolfson, Through a Speculum, p. 371 n. 155. Biale, Eros and the Jews, p. 122, duly notes the eroticized nature of the Ḥasidic community, which is based on “male companions” organized “around a charismatic leader.” His concern, however, is not with the implicit homoeroticism, but with the displacement of erotic desire from carnal sexuality to the passionate love of God. For a discussion of some facets of the use of erotic symbolism in Ḥasidic sources, see Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. 60–​61, 127–​129; and Idel, Hasidism, pp. 133–​140. On the pious eros of Ḥasidic spirituality and the consequent model of feminized masculinity, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 55–​68. As one might expect from a predominantly heterosexual culture, the homoerotic relationship of master to disciple is depicted in terms that reflect the accepted norm. One striking illustration of this is found in Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 185, 109d: “By means of the desire and the will to travel to the ṣaddiq, the impression of the vessel is made, just as when a craftsman wants to make a vessel, he must first form and etch out the impression and the shape of the vessel, and afterwards he can make the vessel. Similarly, the will to travel produces the shape and the impression of the vessel, and afterwards when he comes to him the vessel is made.” The disciple is thus characterized as the vessel that receives the overflow from the master. In the continuation of this passage, the union of master and disciple is signified by the word adam, for the first two letters, alef and dalet, spell ed, that is, the vapor that rises as the female waters, also identified with the pietistic quality of fear, and the final letter, mem, is the vessel that contains that which overflows. Here, too, we see that the bonding of the male disciple to the male master constitutes the completion of the anthropos. 104 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 135, 103a. The principle of gender, which is derived from much older sources, is the simple binary correlation of the masculine with the power to overflow and the feminine with the desire to receive. Consider ibid., i, 73, 89c: “It is known that the one who receives pleasure from another is called female. … Thus when God, blessed be he, receives pleasure from the prayers of Israel, he becomes, as it were, female in relation to Israel. This is [the intent of] what is written ‘an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the Lord’ (Numbers 28:8), for by means of the pleasing

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the attachment to the ṣaddiq is appropriately depicted in erotic terms, it follows that the reception of the words of the ṣaddiq would be experienced and described in the language of marriage and sexual intercourse, as we find in the following passage: It is impossible to come to the truth except by coming close to the righteous [hitqarevut le-​ṣaddiqim] and walking in the way of their advice, and on account of receiving from them advice the truth is engraved in him. … For the advice he receives from them is the aspect of matrimony and conjugality [nissu’in we-​ziwwug]. Receiving advice from the wicked is the aspect of matrimony with the shell [nissu’in bi-​qelippah]. … And why is advice called by the aspect of matrimony? For the kidneys give counsel,105 and the kidneys are the instruments of procreation, the instruments of the semen. It follows that receiving advice from a person is like receiving semen from him, and everything is in accordance with the person, whether he is wicked or he is righteous … and the advice of a righteous man is entirely truthful semen [kullo zera emet] (Jeremiah 2:21).106 odor that God, blessed be he, receives from the prayers of Israel, he becomes the mystery of the woman [ishshah, which has the same consonants as the word ishsheh, the fire offering]. ‘And the female surrounds the man’ (Jeremiah 31:21). If so, the inwardness becomes external.” On the feminization of God vis-​à-​vis Israel, see also Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 219, 113d. In that context, the operative image is that of God becoming humble and impoverished, that is, diminishing and constricting himself, in order to disclose his kingship and his fear. The qualities of humility and poverty, as well as those of kingship and fear, are related to the attribute of Malkhut, the feminine potency of the divine. The homoerotic bond between master and disciple is predicated on a similar gender transformation of the party that receives into the female in relation to the male. I assume that the gender transposition is implicit as well in Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 72, 33a, where Naḥman notes that by means of envisioning oneself with the ṣaddiq one receives a sense of greatness, but the “essence of greatness is humility,” iqqar ha-​gedullah hi shiflut. That is, attachment to the ṣaddiq elevates and aggrandizes the individual, but true greatness is docility. See above, n. 55. To express the matter in gender terms, the Ḥasid, who cleaves to the ṣaddiq, is phallically empowered, but that empowerment is expressed through diminishing the power of the phallus by means of ascetic renunciation, which is the ideal of the feminized masculine. The nexus between attachment to the righteous master and sexual abstinence is affirmed in other Ḥasidic sources as well. Consider the passage from Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl cited and analyzed by Biale, Eros and the Jews, pp. 129–​130. For discussion of erotic imagery employed in Ḥasidic texts to depict the relationship between the masculine God and the feminized soul of the male, see Idel, Hasidism, pp. 133–​140. Idel does not engage the evidently homoerotic implications of the relevant material wherein the soul of the male is feminized in relationship to the male potency of the divine. 105 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a. 1 06 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 7:3, 8d.

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To be conjoined to the ṣaddiq is comparable to sexual mating, for the words uttered by the ṣaddiq are like drops of semen that he ejaculates into the ear of the recipient.107 Analogously, to receive words from an evil person is a form of illicit copulation. In a second passage, Naḥman repeats this point: Know that the words of the wicked, who is without knowledge, produce adultery in the listener, for the acts of copulation proceed from knowledge, as it is written, “And Adam knew his wife Eve” (Genesis 4:1), and it is written, “every woman has known a man” (Numbers 31:17). However, there are two types of copulation, the copulation of holiness, which is attachment to the righteous [hitqashsherut le-​ṣaddiqim], to the Torah, and to God, blessed be he, and this proceeds from the knowledge of holiness [mi-​da‘at di-​qedushshah], but the transgressive acts of copulation proceed from the knowledge of the shell [mi-​da‘at di-​qelippah]. Speech is the disclosure of the mind [hitgallut ha-​da‘at], for what is in the mind cannot be known except through speech.108 The seminal teaching that comes forth from the full mouth of the ṣaddiq sustains the one who receives it in the manner that the semen that oozes from the penis fertilizes the egg in the act of physical intercourse between a man and his wife. Know that the essence of the living spirit is received from the righteous one and the master of the generation, for the essence of the living spirit is in the Torah … and the righteous cleave to the Torah, and thus the essence of the living spirit is with them. When one is bound to the righteous one and the master of the generation, and one sighs and extends one’s breath,

107 On occasion Naḥman describes the task of cleaving to the ṣaddiq in a way that places the emphasis on the need of the individual to bind himself to the words of prayer or Torah that issue forth from the mouth of the ṣaddiq. For instance, in Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 9:4, 12b, Naḥman writes that each person (kol adam, which for him means every male Jew) must tie his prayer to the righteous one of the generation, for only he has the knowledge and capacity to lift up the prayers to their appropriate celestial gates. See ibid., i, 10:10, 14c, where Naḥman mentions the prideful ones, ba‘alei ga’awah, who consider themselves righteous and thus try to dissuade others from going to the true ṣaddiqim to ask them to pray on their behalf. 108 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 43, 54b.

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one draws forth the living spirit from the righteous one of the generation,109 for he cleaves to the Torah wherein is the spirit.110 The rectification of illicit sexuality is by means of attachment to the righteous soul, an attachment that occurs like the propitious worship in “this moment,” et ha-​zo’t.111 The cleaving to the ṣaddiq must be realized fully in the present, in the perpetuity of the eternal now, the moment of the centered point that grounds and stabilizes the ceaseless flux of time. For Naḥman, chronological succession—​with its continuous ebb and flow—​structurally resembles carnal desire, which likewise is characterized by impermanence and incompleteness. The fulfillment of such desire—​which is always in and of the moment—​is never anything but temporary, and hence timebound.112 Time is overcome by the genuine moment in which the disciple cleaves to the master. In this moment, the momentariness of time is redeemed by the fullness of the present, which is concurrently a recovery of the end and an anticipation of the beginning. The revocation of time by the consciousness of the moment that is timeless is occasioned by cleaving to the ṣaddiq, for the latter represents the mastery of eros, which constitutes the unending and boundless duration of time. The ṣaddiq attains pure consciousness, which does not signify empty mindedness, but purification from all guilt related to sexual improprieties. The cessation of physical (especially sexual) desire eventuates in the nullification of time, which is the perfection of knowledge. This is the intent of Nathan’s claim that the rectification of sins related to the phallus, tiqqun ha-​berit, is identical with the perfection of knowledge, sheleimut ha-​da‘at. That is, the cutting of the foreskin, long considered in Jewish sources to be a symbolic suppression of sexual desire,113 is the precondition for the attainment of supratemporal 109 On this technical expression in Naḥman’s writings, which is likely based on the description of Noah in Genesis 6:9, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 19, 116–​122, 143, 159, 169, 186, 191–​196, 201, 205. 110 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 8:2, 9c. 111 Moshe Joshua Bezhilianski, Hishtappekhut ha-​Nefesh (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah shel Ḥasidei Breslov, 1978), 78, p. 103. 112 For an extensive discussion of this theme, see Nicolas Grimaldi, Le désir et le temps (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1992).This characterization of eros as inherently insatiable and transient in nature has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy. See Bruce S. Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 127–​134. 113 The symbolic interpretation of the cutting of the foreskin as a weakening of sexual desire is to be found in earlier sources such as Philo of Alexandria as well as Judah Halevi and Maimonides. See Richard Hecht, “The Exegetical Contexts of Philo’s Interpretation of Circumcision,” in Nourished with Peace: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism in Memory of

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(or messianic) consciousness.114 However, to attain the aspect of that which is beyond time, symbolized by the number eight, one must pass through the seven days of the week, collectively symbolizing the aspect of time or the imperfect state of consciousness. According to Nathan, this is the esoteric meaning of the verse “And Abraham was old” (Genesis 24:1). Abraham merited the “aspect of elderliness of holiness [ziqnah di-​qedushshah],” which is the aspect of “this one who acquired wisdom [zeh qanah ḥokhmah],”115 that is, the “perfection of knowledge,” which is, in turn, “the aspect of that which is above time.” Abraham merited such a state for he was the “first of those circumcised,” and “by means of the commandment of circumcision we merit to abolish time and to be contained in the aspect that transcends time, for there is the essence of elderliness.”116 Abraham was the first elderly person ever to exist, for only through the rite of circumcision can one merit the aspect of elderliness that is the abolishment of time. This sense of elderliness is to be

Samuel Sandmel, edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn, Earle Hilgert, and Burton L. Mack (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 51–​79; Judah Halevi, Sefer ha-​Kuzari, translated, annotated, and introduced by Yehuda Even Shmuel (Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1972), 1:115, p. 44; Abraham Ibn Ezra, Yesod Mora we-​Sod Torah: The Foundation of Piety and the Secrets of the Torah (RamatGan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2002), ch. 7, p. 141 (Hebrew); Maimonides, The Guide, 3:49, p. 609; Abraham Gross, “Reasons for the Commandment of Circumcision—​Historical Currents and Influences in the Middle Ages,” Da‘at 21 (1988): 25–​34 (Hebrew); Biale, Eros and the Jews, pp. 91–​92; James Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in the Guide of the Perplexed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 35. See also the use of this motif in the Provençal figure, Isaac ben Yedaiah, discussed by Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-​Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 97–​98. An echo of this explanation is found in Jacob Böhme for whom the spiritual meaning of circumcision is to cast aside one’s bestiality epitomized in sexual desire. See Wolfson, Language, p. 485–​486 n. 180. On circumcision as a symbolic or ritualized castration, see sources cited in Wolfson, op. cit., pp. 485 n.173, 486 n. 188. 114 On the struggle to eradicate the sexual impulse in Naḥman’s teaching, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 167–​170. 1 15 According to the rabbinic explanation, the word zaqen is an acrostic for zeh qanah ḥokhmah, “this one who has acquired wisdom.” See the teaching of R. Jose the Galilean in Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 32a, ein zaqen ella mi she-​qanah ḥokhmah, “zaqen is naught but he who has acquired wisdom,” and compare the language in the commentary of Rashi, ad locum, ein zaqen ella zeh she-​qanah ḥokhmah, a reading that is attested in ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica ebr. 110–​111 as well as in the printed version in Guadalajara (dated variously between 1480–​1482). See the Friedberg Project for Talmud Bavli Variants, Hakhi Garsinan, https://​bavli.genizah.org/​ResultPages/​Difference, Qiddushin 32b. 116 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De‘ah: Hilkhot Milah, 4:4, 74d.

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distinguished from the negative connotation of this term related to one who is incapable of perceiving the potential novelty of each moment, a condition that was just discussed. The old man who transcends time, by contrast, is perpetually reborn.117 The paradox embraced by the one who is authentically elderly is that he is ancient because he is always new, but he is always new because he is ancient. Nathan further identifies this perfection of knowledge as the perfection of memory, sheleimut ha-​zikkaron. “For the perfection of knowledge is the aspect of the perfection of memory … for memory is the aspect of knowledge and forgetfulness the aspect of folly.118 Thus, memory is the perfection of knowledge, which is the aspect of that which is above time.”119 Insofar as memory is depicted as the state of knowledge of that which is beyond time, and, as we have seen, this state is achieved by means of circumcision, it follows that memory itself is attained through the act of circumcision. Nathan thus forges a clear link between memory and circumcision. The essence of memory is the abolishment of temporal consciousness (imagination-​desire), and the concomitant perfection of knowledge by means of which one is cognizant of the aspect that is beyond time. But it is precisely the ritual of circumcision that allows one to reach this state, for the very nature of circumcision—​the removal of the impure foreskin covering the holy covenant—​is such that it negates the natural instincts that are timebound and connects the individual with the spiritual root in a dimension above time. Nathan unabashedly spells out the phallogocentric and androcentric implications of Naḥman’s teaching about knowledge, memory, circumcision, and the transcendence of time: Thus, the rectification of memory [tiqqun ha-​zikkaron] is by means of the aspect of the nullification of time [biṭṭul ha-​zeman] that we merit through the perfection of knowledge. And this we have to rectify by means of the commandment of circumcision, for it is necessary to rectify the memory, which is the aspect of the masculine [zakhar], the language of zikkaron, and there is the essence of the commandment of circumcision. …. For the essence of the rectification—​to remove the foreskin

117 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 60:2, 71b. In that passage, wealth is associated with the rectifications of Attiq, the first of the sefirot, and it is also identified as the aspect of the length of days or the aspect of elderliness. Since Abraham merited the aspect of being elder, or the length of days, he also merited wealth, a point exegetically supported by Genesis 24:1. 118 Compare Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 37:2, 51a. 119 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De‘ah: Hilkhot Milah, 4:5, 75b.

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covering the covenant, which is the foolishness covering the brain—​is to merit the aspect of nullification of time, to exit from the vanities of time and its desires … in order to merit memory, which is the aspect of the side of the masculine [siṭra di-​dekhura] … to subdue and to abrogate the desire for women [lehakhni‘a u-​levaṭṭel ta’awat nashim], for from there is the essence of forgetfulness [iqqar ha-​shikheḥah] … and there is the essence of the hold of time [aḥizat ha-​zeman], for the essence of the hold of time is from the side of the feminine [siṭra de-​nuqba], which is the aspect of the deficiency of knowledge [ḥesron ha-​da‘at], the aspect of women are of weak minds [nashim da‘atan qallah],120 for all of the order of times and moments is from the aspect of Malkhut, which is the aspect of the feminine. … For the essence of time is in the aspect of sleep and slumber, the deficiency of knowledge … and thus in the time of sleep knowledge is greatly diminished, and the entire construction of woman was by means of sleep and slumber as it is written “So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, [he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman]” (Genesis 2:21-​22). And thus the essence of time is there.121 According to Nathan, the idea of memory as the abolishment of time provides the key for interpreting Naḥman’s tale “The Seven Beggars.”122 Although it is beyond the confines of this study to discuss all the intricate details of this tale, it is necessary to summarize it briefly before proceeding to the part that is relevant to our analysis. The tale begins with the episode of a transference of power from a king to his son. The king, who predicts the downfall of his 1 20 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33b. 121 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De‘ah: Hilkhot Milah, 4:6, 75c-​d. 122 Naḥman’s stories have been translated in several editions. For the purpose of this study I have made use of the standard Hebrew-​Yiddish edition, Sippurei Ma‘asiyot (Jerusalem: Qeren Hadpasah shel Ḥasidei Breslov, 1975), and of the English translation, Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, translation, introduction and commentary by Arnold J. Band, preface by Joseph Dan (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). All translations are taken from the latter volume. For Band’s interpretation of the tale “The King and the Wise Man” in Sippurei Ma‘asiyot, see Arnold J. Band, “The Function of the Enigmatic in Two Hasidic Tales,” in Studies in Jewish Mysticism: Proceedings of Regional Conference Held at the University of California, Los Angeles and McGill University in April, 1978, edited by Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982), pp. 193–​ 198. The Hebrew and Yiddish versions of the tale and an English translation are provided in the second appendix, pp. 204–​209.

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son, nevertheless gives him advice concerning the need to always be joyous123 even—​or especially—​in the loss of royal power. We are then told about the son’s being led to apostasy through his attachment to rational wisdom. The narrative then shifts124 to an account of a mass flight from a certain country in the course of which two children get lost in a forest. The children are sustained by the graciousness of seven beggars, each of whom has a particular physical deformity. The first beggar is blind, the second deaf, the third a stutter, the fourth possesses a twisted neck, the fifth a hunchback, the sixth is without hands, and the seventh without feet. In due time the two children, who have survived the forest ordeal, get married. Six of the seven beggars make an appearance at the wedding to offer gifts to the couple. The presentation of each of the gifts is accompanied by the telling of circuitous tales that purport 123 The need to be joyous is one of the fundamental themes of Naḥman’s teachings. See, e.g., Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 5:3, 5c-​d; ii, 10, 19c; 23–​24, 22c-​d; Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v. simḥah, 90b-​93a; idem, Siḥot ha-​RaN (New York, 1972), § 20, p. 13, §§ 41–​ 45, pp. 27–​29, § 131, p. 89. See the remarks of Green, Tormented Master, p. 50; and Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” pp. 236–​237 (English translation, pp. 139, 206–​207 n. 128), who emphasizes that joy for Naḥman connotes in particular the overcoming of sexual desire. On this point, see Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v. berit, § 54, 14b: “The essence of the blemish of the phallus [pegam ha-​berit] is through sadness and melancholy, and conversely the essence of the guarding of the covenant [shemirat ha-​berit] is through joy.” See ibid., s.v. simḥah, § 7, 91a: “Joy is the aspect of the faces that are illuminated, the aspect of truth and faith, and by contrast sadness is the aspect of idolatry, the faces that are dark, death. The essence of joy is merited in accordance with the rectification of the phallus [tiqqun ha-​berit], and in accordance with one’s drawing close to the truly righteous men, who are the joy of all Israel. By means of this he will bind himself to God, blessed be he, and he merits ‘to see the splendor of the Lord’ (Psalms 27:4), and he illumines himself by the ‘light of the face of the living God’ (Proverbs 16:15).” On the role of joy in the spiritual comportment of Naḥman, see, more recently, Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination, pp. 168–​172, 173–​184. 124 For a possible explanation of this shift, see Band’s commentary, Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, pp. 322–​323. Band, relying on Joseph Dan’s interpretation, suggests that the opening sequence is representative of the twin-​process of withdrawal (ṣimṣum) and the breaking of the vessels (shevirat ha-​kelim), two processes that form part of the Lurianic myth of creation. The second sequence, beginning with the flight and the meeting of the two children in the forest, signals the start of the process of rectification (tiqqun), the final stage in the Lurianic myth. See Joseph Dan, The Hasidic Story—​Its History and Development (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1975), p. 147 (Hebrew). While I cannot analyze this interpretation in detail here, it seems to me that the spontaneity of the shift in the tale is left unexplained by this reliance on the “cosmic cataclysm” and its “rectification” according to Lurianic myth. Perhaps it is not even desirable to try to explain the narrative’s structure along such systematic lines. Was Naḥman’s sudden shift an intentional ruse to confound the reader’s power of reason and argumentation? After all, the faux pas of the king’s son was his admiration of the rational sciences!

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to illustrate that the given beggar’s apparent deformity is actually a virtue connected with his particular gift. Indeed, we learn that these deformities are, in truth, no deformities at all, but are perceived as such only from a limited perspective. What appears to be blindness appears as such only to one who cannot truly see; what appears to be deafness appears as such only to one who cannot truly hear; and so on. As Naḥman of Cheryn, one of Nathan’s disciples, expressed the matter in his commentary on Naḥman’s tales, the fact that the beggars appeared to the world as physically deformed was due to both the “superlative distinction of the perfection of their level and stature,” and to the great measure of “concealment and hiddenness of the truth in this world.”125 Or, as Arnold Band put it: “In general, the six beggars who appear to present gifts are similar in one respect: They demonstrate, as delightful raconteurs, that the world of reality we live in is really an illusion.”126 The truly real world is a negation of this world: The blind man in truth sees, the deaf man hears, the one who stutters is an extraordinary orator, the one with a twisted neck in fact has a perfectly straight and handsome neck, the hunchback is one who truly carries a heavy load for he is characterized as “the little that holds much,”127 and the one without hands in truth has extraordinary power in his hands to perform miraculous deeds through the playing of music. The tale ends abruptly after the appearance of the sixth beggar, and we are not told at all about the arrival of the seventh beggar, the one without feet. The seventh beggar, it seems, represented the completion of the wedding feast, the ultimate rectification and hence the coming of the Messiah.128 Logically, 1 25 Rimzei Ma‘asiyot, published in Naḥman’s Sippurei Ma‘asiyot, p. 124. 126 Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, p. 253. See also Dan, The Hasidic Story, pp. 153–​154; Henie G. Hidenberg and Michal Oron, The Mystical World of R. Nahman of Bratslav: Six Stories of Rabbi Nahman (Tel Aviv: Papyrus Publishing House, 1986), pp. 123–​124 (Hebrew). 127 The expression mu‘aṭ ha-​maḥaziq et ha-​merubbeh has its origin in rabbinic sources. Compare Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 5:7, p. 36; Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah, edited by Mordecai Margulies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993,) 10:9, p. 216; see also Solomon ben Isaac, Perushei Rashi al ha-​Torah, p. 339 (ad Leviticus 8:3). 128 In the standard edition of the tales, there is a postscript that explains, “The end of the story, i.e., what occurred on the seventh day concerning the beggar without feet, as well as the end of the first part of the story concerning the king, we have not merited to hear. … We will not merit to hear it until the Messiah comes.” On the messianic implications of the tale’s ending, see Dan, The Hasidic Story, p. 169; Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” pp. 207 n. 22, 237 (English translation, pp. 139, 190 n. 22). Compare also Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 2, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Tefillat ha-​ Minḥah, 7:93, 227c, where the Messiah, son of David, is said to be comprised of the seven true righteous ones, ṣaddiqei ha-​emet, who are further identified with the seven beggars of Naḥman’s tale. According to Nathan, Naḥman revealed something of the “greatness of

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of course, one would not expect the beggar without feet to arrive on his own at the celebration. His inability to walk, however, is only apparent: he does not come because it is not time for him to come and not because he cannot come. His deformity, as that of the others, is only such for those who cannot penetrate beneath the surface. Yet, whereas the other six beggars can reveal the truth of commonly held illusions, the seventh beggar cannot. In truth, he is the “consummate dancer,”129 and if the world were ready for his coming, he would have arrived, or better yet, the world would have already perceived his

the Messiah,” who is the “aspect of Malkhut,” in the aforementioned tale. All the beggars were involved in the rectification of the world, but it was not completed by their efforts. The ṣaddiq, who is on the level of the Messiah, is further identified with the blind beggar, the first of the beggars and the only one that reaches the level of the divine nothing, the first sefirah or Keter. Prima facie, it would seem that there is a contradiction here between saying, on the one hand, that the Messiah is the aspect of Malkhut (the tenth sefirah) and asserting, on the other hand, that the Messiah is on the level of the one that reaches Keter (the first sefirah). In fact, however, there is no contradiction because the ultimate tiqqun involves the unification of the last and the first sefirot, divine action and thought. To realize this unification is the task of the Messiah and the true ṣaddiq. In Nathan’s words, op. cit., 227d: “Thus, the completion of the rectification [sheleimut ha-​tiqqun] is by means of the aspect of the kingship of the Messiah [beḥinat malkhut mashiaḥ] … which is to draw forth the end of action from the beginning of thought [sof ma‘aseh mi-​maḥashavah teḥillah]. The end of action is the aspect of the revelation of his kingship [hitgallut malkhuto] that first arose in thought, for the beginning of ṣimṣum was entirely for the sake of creation, in order to disclose his kingship, as was mentioned above. … And the great ṣaddiq, who is the aspect of Messiah, merited to purify himself to such a degree that from the inception of thought and the beginning of all the gradations that are above thought, above nefesh, ruaḥ, neshamah, until the final end of action, he stood in war in all the aspects until he merited to reveal his kingship in completion. But there is no king without a nation, and it is necessary to inform all people in the world of his kingship. Therefore, the essence of the rectification of everyone, in general and in particular, is by means of him.” The messianic tiqqun is embodied in the statement sof ma‘aseh mi-​maḥashavah teḥillah, which is based on a stanza in the kabbalistic hymn Lekhah Dodi composed by Solomon Alqabeṣ in the sixteenth century. The unification of the first and the last sefirot is an idea expressed in much earlier kabbalistic sources, often linked to the description of the ten sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end.” See Ithamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yeẓira,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 142, § 6; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation, and Text-​Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 74, § 6. On the dynamic connection between Keter and Malkhut, see, for example, David ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, The Book of Mirrors: Sefer Mar’ot ha-​Ẓove’ot, edited by Daniel Chanan Matt (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), pp. 26–​27 (Introduction). A detailed study, tracing this theme from the writings of the zoharic circle to the Lurianic texts and then beyond into Ḥasidic sources, would prove instructive. 129 Nahum of Bratslav: The Tales, p. 253. And see reference to Dan in the preceding note.

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absent presence rather than misperceiving his present absence.130 For our purposes the section dealing with the first beggar is of central importance. The first of the seven beggars, who is blind, bestows the following gift upon the couple: “You should be as old as I.” He then proclaims, “Do you think that I am blind? Not at all. It is just that the entire world does not amount to an eye’s wink (moment) for me. … For I am very old and yet I am still young. I haven’t even begun to live, yet I am very old.”131 The beggar explains his rather cryptic remarks with the following story: Once after a storm a group of people assembled in a tower. They began to converse and decided that each one had to “recite an old tale, one he remembered from his earliest recollection, that is, what he remembered from the inception of his memory.”132 Each of the eight men, the eldest first, related an “ancient story” concerning some prenatal memory, ranging from the first who recalled the time of his birth (the “cutting of the apple from the branch”) to the last who recalled the coming-​to-​be of the higher spirit before birth (the “appearance of the fruit before it was on the fruit”). The younger the person, the more ancient the memory. The blind beggar, who at the time was an infant, spoke last. “I remember all of these tales and I remember nothing [ich gedenk gornisht].”133 As Nathan already pointed out,134 the first beggar possessed the level of knowledge that Naḥman himself attributed to the Messiah, a state of mind in which time is abolished. Like the Messiah, moreover, the beggar was at one and the same time the youngest and the oldest of all those who were present.135 130 Compare the remark of Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 81: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.” Regarding this statement, see Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 268 and 288. 131 Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, p. 259. 132 Ibid., p. 260. 133 Ibid., p. 261. 134 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 2, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Hilkhot Tefillat ha-​Minḥah, 7:93, 227d, where the first beggar is identified explicitly with the Messiah. See above, n. 64. 135 On the possibility that Naḥman described himself in these very messianic terms, specifically in the context of his polemic with Aryeh Leib of Shpola, see Weiss, Studies, p. 48; Piekarz, Studies, p. 142; Dan, The Hasidic Story, p. 155; and Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 204 n. 11 (English translation, p. 188 n. 11). Leib was known as the Zeide, that is, the Elder, but it was the younger Naḥman who asserted that he was truly the “eldest of the elders” (sava de-​savin). See Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Ḥayyei MoHaRaN, Shivḥei MoHaRaN, Gedullat Hassagato, § 32, 7a. Nathan already connected this remark of Naḥman with the description of the first beggar in the tale of the Seven Beggars: he was at once the oldest and the youngest. On the relationship of Naḥman and the Shpoler Zeide, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 100–​115. And compare Ḥayyei

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Since time was negated in his consciousness, it was as if he were born again each day—​hence, he was the youngest; yet, he was the oldest, for his memory reached further back than the rest, indeed to a point where memory itself was not appropriate. “I remember all these tales and I remember nothing.” The first beggar was thus truly old—​and thus truly young—​for he lived beyond time.136 This is the meaning of his wedding gift to the couple “You should be as old as I am.” His old age, as his youthfulness, was rooted in the spiritual awareness MoHaRaN, Shivḥei MoHaRaN, Gedullat Hassagato, § 24, 6b, where Naḥman reportedly said, “I will lead you in a novel way that never existed before [derekh ḥadash shelo hayah me-​olam], even though it is an ancient way [she-​hu be-​derekh ha-​yashan mi-​kevar] it is entirely new [hu ḥadash legamrei].” The description of Naḥman’s method of teaching involves the same paradoxical convergence of what is old and what is new that is found in the description of the first beggar. See Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​ Kelali,” pp. 211–​212 n. 38 (English translation, p. 193 n. 38). 136 See Hidenberg and Oron, The Mystical World, p. 124. See, however, Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 212 n. 38 (English translation, p. 193 n. 38). According to Liebes, the paradoxical description of the first beggar as the oldest and the youngest should not be explained “as an expression of eternity beyond time, but precisely as life in the present, renewed each moment.” Liebes’s interpretation of Naḥman’s aspect of that “which is above time” is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same in which the incessant flow of time and becoming is broken not by an escape to some transcendental eternity, the world of being beyond time and space, but by experiencing and willing the ever-​returning present in the here and now. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, a new translation by Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale, edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), § 617, p. 320: “To impose upon becoming the character of being—​that is the supreme will to power. … That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being:—​high point of the meditation” (emphasis in original). And ibid., § 708, p. 377: “Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment … the present must absolutely not be justified by reference to a future, nor the past by reference to the present.” See Michel Harr, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” in The New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison (New York: Random House Publishing, 1977), pp. 24–​34; Gilles Deleuze, “Active and Reactive,” op. cit., pp. 85–​86, 102–​103; Pierre Klossowski, “Nietzsche’s Experience of the Eternal Return,” op. cit., pp. 107–​120. See also Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thought of the Eternal Return (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 13–​16; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 211–​233. It is not clear to me, however, that such a reading is appropriate for Naḥman who affirms the transcendental realm of divine emanations in general, and particularly the third emanation, Binah, which is the eighth when counting from the bottom up, when he speaks of the aspect beyond time. The issue is not a constantly renewed lived moment, but rather a supratemporal grade that is the ontological source of Messiah, the blind beggar, and the true ṣaddiq. In light of that source, one can speak of the paradox of the eternal return of that which has never been in the Heideggerian sense of the again that denotes what is altogether otherwise.

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of that which transcends time. This “transcending of time” holds the key to understanding the beggar’s blindness. “He looked like a blind man because he did not look at the world at all, since the entire world did not amount to an eye’s wink for him. Therefore seeing and looking at this world did not pertain to him.” That is, all time was illusory to him for he was fundamentally beyond time.137 His blindness is only apparent—​to one who is truly blind—​for his vision is a true vision, a seeing without temporally bound objects.138 A similar reversal is applicable to his memory, which may be characterized as the epitome of remembrance and forgetfulness. That is, his memory extended to the highest and deepest reaches possible where he remembered “nothing,” that is, he remembered the very source of memory, the nothing that lies beyond time and therefore beyond anything memorable. Here we may have, as Nathan maintained,139 an allusion to Keter, the first of the ten divine emanations, identified in the standard theosophical symbolism of the kabbalists as the absolute nothing.140 If that interpretation is correct, then Naḥman’s point is that the blind beggar, as the Messiah himself, is able to reach Keter where the supernal source of his soul is to be found—​indeed, according to Nathan, we can even say of the blind beggar that he was contained in the infinite (nikhlal ba-​ein sof) and therefore he was beyond memory—​signified by Naḥman’s assertion that the blind beggar recalled everything but still recalled nothing at all.141 The one whose memory stretches this far back indeed remembers gornisht, that is, the nothing that is the root of all things. Paradoxically, the most sublime memory turns out to be a state of obliviousness, for in such a frame of 1 37 For a similar explanation, see Wiskind-​Elper, Tradition and Fantasy, pp. 203–​204. 138 On the nexus between faith, vision, and consciousness, see Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 225, 114b-​c. On the depiction of vision in terms of the limitation of boundary and time, see ibid., i, 76, 91d. 139 See Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 1, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Hilkhot Tefillin, 5:3, 62b; and Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 2, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Tefillat ha-​Minḥah, 7:93, 227c. 140 See Dan, The Hasidic Story, pp. 154–​155; Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​ Kelali,” p. 208 n. 26 (English translation, p. 190 n. 26); Hidenberg and Oron, The Mystical World, p. 125. On occasion Nathan applied this symbolism of the divine nothing (Keter) to Naḥman himself; see Piekarz, Studies, pp. 142–​143. On Naḥman’s self-​identification with Keter, see also Mark Verman, “Aliyah and Yeridah: The Journeys of the Besht and R. Nachman to Israel,” in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. 3, edited by David R. Blumenthal (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 164–​165. For a useful discussion of the symbol of nothing in kabbalistic sources, see Daniel C. Matt, “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, edited by Robert K. C. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 121–​159. 141 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 1, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Hilkhot Tefillin, 5:3, 62c.

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mindfulness—​or mindlessness as the case may be—​nothing but nothing can be remembered.142 As we shall presently see, this positive ideal of forgetfulness, which is identified as the most sublime memory, is to be contrasted with the negative view of forgetfulness found in Naḥman’s writings. According to the latter view, rooted in earlier kabbalistic documents,143 oblivion is the force of the shells of the demonic side, the abandonment of knowledge (histallequt ha-​da‘at), associated with the power of imagination, the potency of animality (koaḥ ha-​bahamiyyut) by which memory is impaired.144 When the remembering signified by the statement ich gedenk gornisht is specularized from a gender perspective, forgetfulness, associated with the feminine, is transposed into the masculine, the locus of memory. What is typically female becomes the highest property of the male. 4

Ascetic Renunciation and the Eschatological Triumph over Time

Memory is, for Naḥman, the perfection of knowledge.145 But knowledge is perfected only when the phenomenal world is transcended and the somatic desires are nullified, when one becomes fully aware of that which is beyond time, beyond the limitations of eros.146 In one passage, Naḥman expresses this idea in terms of the opposition of forgetfulness and the miraculous, which is also identified as the aspect of prayer (tefillah) and the aspect of faith (emunah).

142 The paradoxical coincidence of memory and forgetfulness in Naḥman’s description of the blind beggar has already been noted by Liebes, “R. Naḥman of Bratslav’s Ha-​Tiqqun Ha-​Kelali,” p. 208 n. 26 (English translation, p. 190 n. 26). On forgetfulness as an ideal in Naḥman’s thought, see Liebes, op. cit., p. 211, and references in n. 38 (English translation, pp. 121, 192–​193 n. 38). 143 See Wolfson, “Re/​membering,” pp. 227–​228. 144 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 54:6, 62b. 145 In Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 37:2, 51a, Naḥman sets up the following antinomies: body and soul, animal and human, matter and form, folly and sagacity, darkness and light, death and life, forgetfulness and memory, external (or foreign) sciences and the wisdom of Torah. Forgetfulness is thus the realm of materiality, ignorance, and darkness. For a discussion of the concept of forgetfulness in Naḥman, particularly with reference to his interpretation of the talmudic dictum “the sage who has forgotten his learning” (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 96a), see Weiss, Studies, pp. 47–​54. On forgetfulness as a distinguishing characteristic of the demonic realm, Siṭra Aḥara, in zoharic theosophy, compare Zohar 1:193b; 3:14b. 146 On ascetic renunciation (perishut) as an antidote for the blemish of the mind (pegam ha-​da‘at), see Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 78, 36d. On the equation of pegam ha-​berit and pegam ha-​da‘at, see ibid., i, 20:10, 29a.

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Prayer is the aspect of faith, and this is the aspect of miracles, for the miracle transcends nature, and for this one needs faith. … On account of this prayer is effective for memory [mesuggal le-​zikkaron], for prayer is the aspect of faith … and forgetfulness is related to having something before us that is forgotten, and it passes from us. … The miracle is the opposite of forgetfulness, for miracles are the aspect of prayer, the aspect of faith, which is the opposite of forgetfulness.147 The access to that which transcends nature, the infinite will of God,148 is prayer, but only one who has faith in the possibility of the impossible can pray.149 Prayer is effective for memory, for prayer itself is a miraculous event, an act of faith, predicated on the impossible, whereas forgetfulness is an obscuring of the sign of the covenant that calls forth to memory. This notion is expressed in another passage in the following way: “We must very much protect the memory so as not to fall into forgetfulness, the aspect of the death of the heart. And the root of memory is to remember always the world to come.”150 What is intended in this passage is rendered clear in another context wherein the connection between memory and the world to come is described as follows: “It 147 Ibid., i, 7:5, 9a-​b. On the correlation of prayer, miracles, and the land of Israel, see ibid., i, 9:5, 12c. On the eschatological power of the prayer of the ṣaddiq to overturn the natural order, see ibid., i, 62:6, 76d: “When the righteous man through his prayer abrogates some necessity of the order of the constellations, then from what is disclosed it is known about what is hidden that God exists, for he listens to the prayer of the righteous man, and he destroys the orders, and he changes nature. All this will be in the future.” On the overturning of nature by means of prayer, see ibid., i, 216, 113c. And see ibid. i, 250, 116d-​117a, where the people of Israel are described as being governed solely by divine providence (hashgaḥah), for by nature they are “above nature,” but in the exile they suffer because they fall from knowledge and follow the ways of the idolatrous nations, who are controlled by the natural forces. In the messianic future, nature will be entirely abrogated. 148 In Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 4:6, the “philosophers of nature” (ḥakhmei ha-​ṭeva) are identified as the “evil beasts” (ḥayyot ra‘ot), who mistakenly claim that everything happens according to nature (al pi ha-​ṭeva) as if there was no will of God unrestrained by the limitation of time and the circumscription of space. On the description of the miracle of the splitting of the Reed Sea as a nullification of time (biṭṭul ha-​zemannim), see ibid., ii, 79, 37a. 149 In Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 62:5, 76c-​d, Naḥman relates the ostensible absurdity of faith to the paradoxical depiction in Zohar 2:95a of the body of the beautiful maiden as hidden and revealed, “She is hidden, for if you ask the believer a reason for faith, he certainly will not know how to respond to you with a reason, for faith belongs only to that which has no reason. Even so she is revealed, that is, in relation to the believer the matter is revealed as if he saw with his eyes the thing in which he believes on account of the greatness of his complete faith.” 150 Ibid., i, 54:1, 60d.

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is fitting for a person to accustom himself to be in the world to come, that is, to be separated from desires [mufrash mi-​ta’awwot] as it is in the world to come in which there is no eating and no drinking151 and none of the other ephemeral and perishable animal desires of this world … And surely if one will remember well the pleasures of the world to come, then he could not at all endure the life and pleasures of this world.”152 Memory is linked to the consciousness of the world to come, an openness to time beyond time, to the day that never begins because it could not end. In this time, which is without time, the order is reversed, and that which served as the vessel will rise to serve as the crown. “This is [the import of the verse] ‘After two year’s time, Pharaoh dreamed etc.’ (Genesis 41:1). ‘Two year’s time’ is the aspect of the cycles of days and the cycles of years … which are the aspect of the world to come, for it is a day that is entirely long,153 which is above time, for there the order of times [seder ha-​ zemannim] is the aspect of the encompassing [maqqifin] … which are all the pleasures and delights of the world to come.”154 The joy of the world to come is expressed primarily in terms of the image of the encompassing light, a spatial metaphor employed by the kabbalists to denote the aspect of the female—​ usually depicted as that which is encompassed—​that has been assimilated and integrated into the male. In other words, the aspect of the feminine that encompasses the masculine relates to the masculinized feminine. However, only the feminized male, the male that has subdued the sexual drive by ascetic renunciation, can experience the ecstasy of the world to come, which is related to the aspect of the encompassing light, the female that has been restored to the male in the form of aṭeret tif’eret, the “crown of splendor.”155 As Naḥman emphasizes in another context, the eschatological ecstasy is experienced by those who proffer innovative insights in the study of the ritual laws of Torah, “for when halakhah is renewed, the intellect and knowledge are renewed, and knowledge is the essence of the jouissance of the world to come [sha‘ashua olam ha-​ba].”156 The process of creating new textual insights captures the paradox of that which is new being new insofar as it is old. Only that 1 51 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 17a. 152 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Siḥot ha-​RaN, § 96, p. 70. Nathan goes on to say, however, that only by means of forgetfulness, a vice in itself, can one survive in this world. Hence, memory belongs essentially to the world to come whereas forgetfulness is germane to this world. See also idem, Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v. zikkaron, § 4, 39a. 153 Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 35b; Ḥullin 142a; Midrash Tehillim, 23:7, 101b. 154 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 7:13, 15c. On the rich implications of the notion of maqqifin in Naḥman’s thought, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 292–​320. 155 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 21:8, 30c. 156 Ibid., ii, 2:2, 3b.

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which is ancient can be novel. In another passage, Naḥman remarks that the spiritual pleasure of the world to come (ta‘anug olam ha-​ba ha-​ruḥani) cannot be attained fully by human beings in their limited state of embodiment since this pleasure is without limit. Even in this context, however, Naḥman follows the long-​standing rabbinic tradition157 by asserting that the delight of Sabbath (oneg shabbat) affords one an opportunity to experience something of the texture of the spiritual bliss of the world to come. “The rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, ‘The one who takes delight on the Sabbath receives an inheritance without bounds,’158 that is, without limit, for the pleasure of Sabbath is in the likeness of the world to come, which is the aspect of the limitless. Therefore, the essence of the eternal life of the future to come is the aspect of the pleasure of the world to come, and this will pertain only to the lowliness of every one, for humility and modesty are the aspect of that which has no boundary, for it is the aspect of the actual nothing [ayin mammash], and it has no boundary since it is the ultimate modesty, and the essence of the eternal life of the world to come is only in the aspect of the boundless.”159 Partaking of the pleasure of Sabbath affords one the opportunity to have a foretaste of the spiritual beatitude of the world to come, an eternal state that exceeds the boundary of time. To experience the rapture that has no limit it is necessary for one to transcend the limitations of one’s own embodied condition, but the only way that one attains this transcendence is by becoming that which has no limit, which is the divine nothing, the first of the sefirotic emanations. The means to become this nothingness, which is designated by the paradoxical expression ayin mammash, the “actual nothing,” that is, the nothing that is actual, indeed the wellspring of all that is real, is through the nihilation of self that results from being meek and submissive. One procures the expansiveness of that which is beyond all limit, the joy of the world to come, by diminishing oneself in the world of physical limitation. Excessive delimitation fosters the aggrandizement of consciousness such that one is transformed into the nothing that is everything, the ayin mammash. In a reversal of logic typical of Ḥasidic thought in general, reinforced by Naḥman’s particular psychological disposition, he states that the “essence of

157 For references to both primary and secondary sources related to the motif of the Sabbath being in the pattern of the world to come, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 307 n. 19. 158 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 118a. On the use of the idiom “inheritance without boundary” to denote the eschatological reward, see Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 51a. 159 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, ii, 72, 33a-​b.

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greatness is debasement,” iqqar ha-​gedullah hi’ shiflut.160 By viewing humility as the measure of greatness, Naḥman is following the pietistic ideal expressed in much older kabbalistic sources. To be humbled is to be exalted, or, in the words of the Zohar, “he who is small is great.”161 Even more to the point, the idea expressed by Naḥman reflects the nexus between the virtue of humility and the first of the divine attributes, Keter, which is identified as the nothing. To emulate the quality of divine nothingness, one must humble oneself to the point of becoming nothing.162 In becoming nothing, one experiences something of the bliss of the world to come, since this is a state of consciousness that transcends all limitation and boundary and thus is technically nothing. Naḥman maintained that prayer afforded the individual an opportunity to achieve this utter abnegation of self, which he described further as union with the infinite. “And worship of the heart is prayer, that is, conjunction [devequt] to Ein Sof, for Ein Sof is the aspect of that which cannot be comprehended, and inasmuch as one has no comprehension of this … one is in the aspect of prayer, which is conjunction, that is, only nullification [biṭṭul] vis-​à-​vis Ein Sof.”163 As a consequence of utterly negating oneself to the point of meriting to be contained within the infinite (lehikalel ba-​ein sof), one’s own study of Torah is verily the Torah of God and one own prayer is verily the prayer of God.164 In this mystical state of union, there is no distinction between the finite and the infinite, the limited and the limitless. The individual will is so 1 60 Ibid., 33a. For a more in-​depth context of this statement, see above, n. 104. 161 Zohar 1:122b and parallel in 3:168a-​b. On the virtue of humility in zoharic sources, see Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 1330–​1331; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 288–​289. 162 Moses Cordovero, Tomer Devorah (Jerusalem: Qolmos, 2002), ch. 2, p. 31; Elijah de Vidas, Re’shit Ḥokhmah ha-​Shalem, edited by Ḥayyim Yosef Waldman, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Or ha-​Musar, 1984), 2: Sha‘ar ha-​Anavah, ch. 1:12, p. 580. For the impact of these texts on early Ḥasidism, see Bracha Sack, “The Influence of Reshit ḥokhmah on the Teachings of the Maggid of Mezhirech,” in Hasidism Reappraised, edited by Ada Rapoport-​Albert (Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), pp. 253–​254. See also Idel, Hasidism, pp. 109–​111; Mordechai Pachter, “Traces of the Influence of R. Elijah de Vidas’s Reshit Ḥochma upon the Writings of R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye,” in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, Philosophy and Ethical Literature Presented to Isaiah Tishby on his Seventy-​fifth Birthday, edited by Joseph Dan and Joseph Hacker (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), pp. 569–​591 (Hebrew). On the via passiva in early Ḥasidism, see Weiss, Studies, pp. 69–​94; and Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, translated by Jonathan Chipman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 67–​79, 168–​188. On Naḥman’s interest in ethical works, and particularly Re’shit Ḥokhmah, see the evidence adduced in Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Shivḥei ha-​RaN (New York, 1972), § 7, p. 6; and the comments of Green, Tormented Master, p. 30. 163 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 22:9, 33a. 164 Ibid., 22:10, 33b.

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completely annihilated in the unity of Ein Sof that every action on the part of the individual is perceived as an execution of the divine will, and since the latter is not confined by spatial and temporal limitations, the soul in this unitive condition also transcends these very limitations and thereby experiences the world to come, which is beyond space and time.165 A prolepsis of this state is experienced as well on the Sabbath, a day whose spiritual essence transforms the physical acts in such a manner that satisfying corporeal desires is akin to the ascetic renunciation appropriate to eschatological consciousness. Thus, in contrast to an unambiguous negative attitude toward physical eating, Naḥman associates the pleasure of Sabbath (oneg shabbat) with eating in holiness (­akhilah bi-​qedushshah). Not only is this eating an act of complete holiness with no admixture of evil, but it facilitates the demise of the demonic, which is usually effectuated by fasting. “For in eating related to the six weekdays, the Other Side also derives pleasure from it, but in the eating of Sabbath, there is no portion for the Other Side whatsoever. … For in the eating of Sabbath, holiness and the complete divinity are attained without an admixture of refuse whatsoever. It is possible to achieve through eating on Sabbath what is achieved by means of a fast.”166 When we become, as the first beggar, “blind” to the sensible world, we share in the experience of memory; when, however, we are overtaken by the faculty of imagination, the animal power of the soul, our memory is impaired and we fall into forgetfulness. The unfettered imagination brings about a flawed condition that Naḥman calls the evil eye (ra ayin)167 or the death of the heart (mitat 1 65 See Green, Tormented Master, pp. 319–​320; Idel, Hasidism, pp. 239–​240. 166 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 57:5, 68b. On the role of fasting as a rectification of speech (tiqqun ha-​dibbur), which is related more generally to the overcoming of physical desires, see ibid., i, 62:5, 76b-​c. On the positive valence of eating as a means to unite the masculine and the feminine potencies of the divine in the case of one whose faith is perfect, see ibid., 62:6, 76d. On this theme is Ḥasidism, see Louis Jacobs, “Eating as an Act of Worship in Hasidic Thought,” in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History Presented to Alexander Altmann on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe (University AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 157–​166. 167 The expression is derived from Proverbs 23:6, 28:22. Compare the rabbinic expressions ayin ra‘ah and ayin ha-​ra (Mishnah, Avot 2:9, 11). In both cases, as in the biblical contexts just noted, the meaning is avarice or selfishness. But see Avot de-​Rabbi Natan, version A, ch. 16, p. 31b, where the latter expression is explained in two ways: to hold others in contempt or to give grudgingly (see the translation of Judah Goldin, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955], p. 82). Naḥman’s use of the term, however, comes closest to the Aramaic equivalent, eina bisha, in Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 20a. The expression is used there as a synonym for the evil inclination, but from the context it is evident that the libidinal urge in particular is meant. It seems

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ha-​lev), that is, the strengthening of desire, especially of a sexual nature, which in turn causes a defect in memory. In order to protect the memory … one must be careful not to fall into the aspect of the evil eye, the aspect of the death of the heart, for the essence of memory is dependent on the eye, in the aspect of “for a memorial between your eyes” (Exodus 13:9), because forgetfulness comes by means of the evil eye, by means of the death of the heart, in the aspect of “I am forgotten as one dead to the heart” (Psalms 31:13) … and the death of the heart is the aspect of the broken tablets. The heart is the aspect of the tablets, in the aspect “inscribe them on the tablet of your heart” (Proverbs 3:3), and forgetfulness is by way of the broken tablets, according to the saying of the sages, blessed be their memory, “Had the first tablets not been broken, there would not have been forgetfulness in the world.”168 It follows that the essence of forgetfulness is by way of the evil eye, which is the aspect of the death of the heart, the aspect of the broken tablets, for from there is the essence of forgetfulness.169 The heart overcome by sensual lust is governed by the evil eye of desire, which brings about a state of spiritual stupor, forgetfulness of the covenant, and breaking the tablets. Only one who masters the evil eye overcomes the death of the heart. Guarding the mind from acting on the sexual impulse, therefore, fosters the memory of the covenant. Thus, commenting on the tale of the seven beggars in another context, Nathan identifies the blind beggar with the “aspect of phylacteries,” the latter constituting the “aspect of memory,” as it is written in Scripture, they shall be as a “memorial between your eyes” (Exodus 13:9). “A to me that for Naḥman as well the evil eye refers to desire in general, but especially to the sexual instinct. See below, n. 169. Moreover, in Zohar 2:225a, the demonic force, Siṭra Aḥara, is called precisely by the name ra ayin. Compare Zohar 2:3a, for an interpretation of Proverbs 23:6 that has a definite sexual emphasis. On the connection between semen virile and the light of the eyes, see Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, edited by Yoḥai Makbili (Ḥaifa: Or wi-​Yeshu‘ah, 2009), Hilkhot De‘ot, 4:19, p. 50. 168 Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 54a. The precise wording of the talmudic text reads as follows: “R. Eleazar said: Why is it written ‘[the writing] was the writing of God engraved upon the tablets’ (Exodus 32:16)? Had the first tablets not been broken, the Torah would not have been forgotten in Israel.” This is not the place to elaborate, but within the rabbinic saying a link is forged between breaking the tablets and obfuscation of Torah. 1 69 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 54:4, 61c-​d. Naḥman emphasizes that there are various forms of the evil eye, but it is clear that the root core is sexual desire. Compare ibid., i, 7:4, 8d; Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Eṣot, s.v. zikkaron, § 6, 39a, and s.v. einayim, § 4, 73a.

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‘memorial between your eyes’ precisely, for the essence of memory is dependent on the repair of the eyes [be-​tiqqun ha-​einayim] precisely, as is clear from the aforementioned tale, for this blind person, who was completely blind from the sight of this world, for he had no vision at all in this world until he merited that all of the world did not rise in his eyes even for a blink of the eye, for this is the essence of the perfection of the eyes. He merited the final perfection of memory [zakhah le-​takhlit sheleimut ha-​zikkaron] beyond which there is no perfection.”170 In one passage, Naḥman himself contrasts the efficacy of the phylacteries, which are the beauty and truth that emanate from the aspect of Jacob, and the desire to eat, which is representative of the physical appetites more generally: the former is associated with illumination of the face and the latter with hiding the face. The mystical effect of donning the phylacteries, therefore, is to break the craving for food, which causes the concealment of the divine countenance.171 The function of the sign of circumcision similarly is to protect one against the evil eye of sensual lust that results in spiritual amnesia. Just as the sinfulness of sexual temptation is linked especially to the eyes, so the rectification of this sin is dependent on the covenantal sign of the head phylacteries that lies as a memorial between the eyes.172 The one who resists temptation of the flesh is illumined from the divine light and is thereby protected from the wrath of the demonic force. “By means of the rectification of the holy phallus [tiqqun berit qodesh] he is saved from the face of the Other Side, and by means of the blood of circumcision, the blood of menstruation is rectified, the desire for money173 … for by means of this he is bound to divinity and he is separated 170 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 1, Oraḥ Ḥayyim: Hilkhot Tefillin, 5:3, 61d. 171 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 47, 55c. On the nexus between the desire for food and the concealment of the face and, conversely, the diminution of this desire and the uplifting of the face, see ibid., 67:2–​3, 84c-​d. An important exception to Naḥman’s negative attitude toward physical eating is his explanation of eating on Sabbath; see above, n. 166. On Naḥman’s struggle with eating, see Green, Tormented Master, pp. 28, 39, 49. 172 See Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 7:4–​5, 8d-​9b, where the mystical rationale for the commandment of the ritual fringe garment (ṣiṣit) is presented as a protection against adultery (shemirat le-​ni’uf), which is the aspect of the protection of the phallus (shemirat ha-​berit), the gradation of Yesod, represented symbolically by the figure of Joseph. The logic employed here is that the biblical formulation of this commandment involves the explicit gesture of gazing upon the fringe garment, and the eyes are connected in an essential manner with sexual improprieties. 173 Naḥman relates the desire for money to the side of holiness inasmuch as material wealth originates in the same source as the vital soul (nefesh), which is the attribute of Malkhut, or the Shekhinah. From that perspective one can account for the special connection

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from idolatry, as it is written, ‘From my flesh I will behold God’ (Job 19:26), for by means of the rectification of the phallus he illumines himself with the light of the face of the living king.”174 The act of memory, therefore, is an act of becoming aware of that which is beyond the confines of the physical world. For Naḥman, one attains this state of reexperiencing the world to come by freeing oneself from the ocular yearning of the imaginative faculty175 and from the base animal desires that are generated by it.176 The soul that controls the imagination and erotic passions through ascetic renunciation can perfect its knowledge in such a way as to remember. This very subjugation of animal desire and the consequent attainment of a state of knowledge that epitomizes the perfection of memory is the mystical significance of circumcision. Thus, we can appreciate better a remark of Naḥman reported by Nathan. He also said that the copulation of the true ṣaddiq is a matter that is hard for him, and it is not enough that he has no pleasure at all, but, on the contrary, he has actual sufferings from this like the sufferings of the infant in the time of circumcision. For the ṣaddiq has actual sufferings in the moment of copulation, and he has more, for the infant has no knowledge, and thus his sufferings are not so great, but the ṣaddiq has knowledge, and his sufferings are greater than the infant.177 It is in light of this pietistic ideal of abrogation of carnal desire that Nathan interprets the section of Naḥman’s tale concerning memory in the context of a discussion on circumcision, for only by means of the latter can one merit the former. “The perfection of memory,” writes Nathan, “is by means of the abolishment of time that is merited through the perfection of knowledge. And this

between the people of Israel and money. As the emanations overflow, however, this desire takes on the darker and coarser form of avarice, which is related as well to anger, an attribute that befits the demonic potency. See Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav, Liqquṭei MoHaRaN, i, 68–​69, 85d-​87d. 174 Ibid., i, 23:2, 35a. 175 Ibid., i, 54:5, 62a: “And one must protect the eye from the imaginative faculty, and even one who is of the good eye must be on guard against this as we see that even the one who has good vision can err on account of the fact that he sees from a distance and what appears to him is the opposite of truth.” 176 Ibid., i, 25:4, 38a, where the desires generated by the imagination are depicted as the demonic shells that need to be conquered. 177 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Shivḥei ha-​RaN, § 17, p. 13, cited in a different translation by Green, Tormented Master, p. 39. See also Biale, Eros and the Jews, p. 135.

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we must perfect by means of the commandment of circumcision. For we must perfect memory, that is the aspect of the masculine [zakhar], that is [related to] the word ‘memory’ [zikkaron], and there is the root of the commandment of circumcision.”178 In the final analysis, the phallus is the locus of memory for control over the libido typifies control over the passions in general, and precisely such control is characteristic of the nature of existence in the world to come, the transcendent source of memory. Nathan thus connects his own interpretation with the older kabbalistic linkage between “memory,” zikkaron, and “masculinity,” zakhrut. In a wonderful reversal, characteristic of Ḥasidic thought, the place of the most intense sexual desire becomes the most powerful symbol of memory that is realized only through the sublimation of eros. Through circumcision, then, one enters the world beyond this world; that is the significance of the ritual being held on the eighth day, the day that exceeds the cycle of seven that symbolizes nature, time, corporeality. Hence, the perfection of knowledge, which is the recollection of that which is above time, can be acquired only through circumcision. This is the hidden meaning of the beggar’s tale. The eight other participants represented the eight days of circumcision. Each one had abolished time to the degree to which his given memory reached. But the first beggar, the most ancient and the youngest of them all, abolished time to the utmost degree. Insofar as this beggar represents otherworldliness and thus completely transcended time, his memory was the most perfected. The rite of circumcision is an act of participating in this source, of attaining expanded consciousness of that which transcends time, in a word, of remembering. By virtue of circumcision, therefore, one becomes like the first beggar, “blind” to the world of space and time, but all the while beholding the supramundane realm of divine verities. For Nathan, Rebbe Naḥman’s teaching affirmed that one who is circumcised is initiated into the spiritual process of remembrance. But this is an event that must be constantly relived. In the reliving of circumcision—​primarily through the subduing of sexual desire—​one again remembers the source whence all memory is derived and all time overcome. 178 Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, Liqquṭei Halakhot, vol. 5, Yoreh De’ah: Hilkhot Milah, 4:6, 75c.

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Malkhut de-​Ein Sof and the Temporalization of Space Ṣimṣum in the Teaching of Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv

By building up the imprints of emptiness, the imprint of existence is diminished; and after accustoming oneself to the fact that nothing truly exists, even that diminishes. … When neither an entity nor a non-​entity remains before the mind, then since there is no other possibility, having no object, it becomes calm. śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra

∵ Kabbalistic sources are replete with incisive but not always consistent reflections on the nature of time, a topic that has been discussed from sundry perspectives in philosophical and theological texts through the centuries.*,1 A crucial component of these discussions concerns the relationship between the temporal and the spatial. In this essay, I will explore this theme in the

* “Malkhut de-​Ein Sof and the Temporalization of Space: Ṣimṣum in the Teaching of Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv,” was originally published in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 46 (2020): 7–​78. Permission to reprint was granted by the publisher. 1 I note here some representative studies on the nature of time in kabbalistic sources: Moshe Idel, “Some Concepts of Time and History in Kabbalah,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, David S. Myers, and John Efron (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), pp. 153–​188; Ḥaviva Pedaya, “The Divinity as Place and Time and the Holy Place in Jewish Mysticism,” in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land—​Proceedings of the International Conference in Memory of Joshua Prawer, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1998), pp. 84–​111; idem, Naḥmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003) (Hebrew); Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and the collection of essays in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2015), including my own study “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality,” pp. 15–​50, reprinted in this volume.

© Elliot R. Wolfson, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004449343_008

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thought of the Lithuanian kabbalist Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv.2 From Eliashiv’s massive corpus, I will elicit a conception of time that involves the expansion of duration into place, a temporal extension that is not constituted either by simultaneity or succession, as Husserl famously argued,3 but rather an extension with greater affinity to the monad described by Iamblichus in the Theologumena arithmeticae; that is, the nonpositional, zero-​dimensional mathematical point that exists prior to the point demarcated by the spatial coordinates of length, width, and breadth or the temporal coordinates of past, present, and future.4 As his is wont, Eliashiv creatively expounds the cosmological speculation found in older kabbalistic sources, and especially in texts promulgating the teachings of Isaac Luria. Given his penchant for systematicity—​the characteristic that allowed him to apply the method of Moses Cordovero to the decidedly more disjointed and episodic nature of the Lurianic material—​ Eliashiv attempts a systematic presentation, albeit one that systematically invalidates the idea of system. Inadvertently, Eliashiv demonstrates that the notion of system operative in the theosophic ruminations of the kabbalists 2 I prefer to label Eliashiv an exponent of Lithuanian kabbalah as opposed to a representative of the kabbalistic circle of the Vilna Gaon. Regarding these taxonomies, see the sources cited by Jonathan Garb, Modern Kabbalah as an Autonomous Domain of Research (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2016), p. 63 n. 55 (Hebrew). Garb characterizes Eliashiv as the “leading theoretician” of this school. See ibid., p. 65. Closer to the mark, in my opinion, is the description of Eliashiv’s Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah as “a work largely concerned with the elucidation of the GRA’s mystical commentaries” in Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 37. Concerning this categorization, see also Jonathan Meir, “The Eclectic Kabbalah of R. Shimon Horowitz (A Critical Note on the Term ‘The Lithuanian Kabbalah’),” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 31 (2014): 311–​320 (Hebrew); Raphael Shuchat, “Thoughts on Lithuanian Kabbalah: A Study in the Lurianic Concept of Igulim and Yosher,” Da‘at 79–​80 (2015): 11–​32 (Hebrew). It is worth noting, moreover, that on balance, Eliashiv’s kabbalistic knowledge seems to have been derived mostly from his assiduous reading of texts—​indeed he rarely, if at all, mentions having received a tradition orally from a particular master, and thus we can apply to him the traditional idiom mi-​pi sefarim we-​lo mi-​pi soferim, “from the mouth of texts and not from the mouth of scribes.” See, however, Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2006), p. 4, where he states explicitly that he received from both his paternal and maternal ancestors. He claims, moreover, that a branch of his mother’s family can be traced to Luria and he mentions as well that he comes forth from the lineage of the seventh-​century Polish kabbalist Samson ben Pesaḥ of Ostropolye. 3 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–​1917), translated by John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), pp. 386–​387. 4 Christopher A. Plaisance, “Occult Spheres, Planes, and Dimensions: Geometric Terminology and Analogy in Modern Esoteric Discourse,” Journal of Religious History 40 (2016): 391.

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is akin to a poetics wherein the theoretical structures are ever changing and cohere as points of a contrapuntal polyphony. This sense of an open system implies, moreover, that the diverse aspects, refracted in the five configurations (parṣufim) and ten luminous gradations (sefirot) in the four worlds of emanation (aṣilut), creation (beri’ah), formation (yeṣirah), and doing (asiyyah), are multitudinous manifestations of the infinite light deflected from divergent vantage points, each one expressing the same event interactively as entirely different.5 The simplicity of the infinite emerges from concealment to disclosure as a complex infinity, in Alain Badiou’s terms, the pure multiple, the one that consists of being without-​one, the multiple of multiples.6 Or, to render the matter in David Bohm’s quantum language,7 Ein Sof signifies the coherent but never static whole that propagates infinite diversification and fragmentation, the implicate order of consciousness explicitly materialized in the continuous process of the particulars unfolding into the whole and the whole enfolding back into the particulars. Hence, each being, which we experience in our everydayness as individuated and separate, at a deeper level—​at the level of the invisible hidden variables underpinning empirically visible phenomena—​ is enmeshed in the interconnectedness of an ever-​evolving aggregate. From that vantage point, the entanglement secures the disentanglement and the nonlocality of the indivisible wholeness ensures the appearance of localized centers of energy within the plasmic collectivity.8 5

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It is of interest to note that in the treatise “Against the Gnostics” (The Enneads, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, translated by George Boys-​Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018], 2.9.6, p. 215), Plotinus criticizes the heretical groups who affirm the names attributed to the realities of the intelligible world in emulation of the sensible world rather than reducing them in number to deprive the first emanation of multiplicity. See discussion in Edward P. Butler, “Plotinian Henadology,” Kronos 5 (2016): 143–​159. My reading of the kabbalistic theosophy would be subject to the same criticism. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 56, 59, 81, 265. My composite account is based on David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 2005), and David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993). Compare the summary in Bohm and Hiley, The Undivided Universe, p. 177: “When we come to the underlying quantum world, we find that it has a radically different nature. To be sure we still assume a particle, which at first sight would appear to be what is also done in classical physics. But we now say further than this particle is profoundly affected by the wave function, i.e. through the quantum potential and the guidance condition. … The forces between particles depend on the wave function of the whole system, so that we have what we may call ‘indivisible wholeness’. This means that for different wave functions we can have radically different connections between particles (not expressible, for example, in terms of a predetermined interaction potential). Thus there is a kind of objective wholeness, reminiscent of the organic wholeness of a living being in which the very nature of Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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In my opinion, Eliashiv would concur with the following insight of Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth of the seven masters in the Ḥabad-​Lubavitch dynasty: “Since the light of the infinite is incomposite in absolute incompositeness [she-​ha-​or ein sof pashuṭ be-​takhlit ha-​peshiṭut], it could thus emanate sefirot limitlessly. … The intention is that the matter of multiplicity [inyan ha-​ ribbuy], related to their being in the aspect of limitlessness [bi-​veḥinat ein qeṣ], is specifically from the perspective of the incompositeness, and multiplicity is not the opposite of unity [ha-​aḥdut] but rather it comes specifically from the cause of unity.”9 The more familiar formulation that the many proceeds from

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each part depends on the whole.” And the observation, ibid., p. 179, that “it is just through certain kinds of nonlocality that locality can emerge, e.g. in a measuring apparatus. Similar nonlocality may be required for the brain to have a local and essentially classical sub-​ domain of function.” Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Hagahot le-​Dibbur ha-​Matḥil Pataḥ Eliyahu—​5658, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), pp. 58–​59. For discussion of the constitution of the unity of the universal by the constraints and possibilities imposed by the multiplicity of the particular, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Mysticism and the Quest for Universal Singularity—​Post-​ Subjective Subjectivity and the Contemplative Ideal in Ḥabad,” in Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation, edited by Philip Wexler (New York: Herder & Herder, 2019), pp. 37–​ 58. The messianic future is also depicted in these terms as we see, for example, in the following account of the two aspects of the divine, the transcendental or sovev kol almin, “encompassing all worlds,” and the immanent or memalle kol almin, “filling all worlds,” in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim—​5659, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), p. 104: “However, in the future, the main thing will be the aspect of the disclosure of the transcendent [gilluy ha-​sovev], and thus, by means of the immanent [memalle] the aspect of the transcendent actually will be illumined openly, that is, the particularities of the immanent will openly radiate the aspect of the transcendent infinite [beḥinat ha-​ein sof ha-​sovev] as it is, and they all will be actually equal [be-​shaweh mammash], for in the aspect of the transcendent, there is no division of above and below. Hence, it will radiate verily in all the particulars equally.” Philosophically, the notion of the sameness of the one being constituted by the difference of the many provides an opening to overcome the ethnocentric and parochial tendencies of Ḥabad thought. See Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Liqquṭei Siḥot, vol. 29 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2000), p. 23. In that talk, the seventh Rebbe, developing the idea expressed by the Alter Rebbe in Sha‘ar ha-​Yiḥud we-​ha-​Emunah (see following note), spoke of the diversity of all beings deriving from the distinctiveness apparent in the ten divine sayings (asarah ma’amarot) by which the world was created. The novelty of the messianic future, predicted in the verse “The glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh, as one, shall behold, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 40:5), is not only seeing that all entities are created and sustained by God but discerning that each entity “in its form and individual substance” (bi-​tekhunoto u-​mahuto ha-​peraṭit), that is, “its true matter” (amitit inyano), is expressive of the particular word in which it is garbed (dibbur peraṭi velkher iz in im melubbash). For this reason, according to Schneerson, the Maggid of Mezhirech used the image of a garment (beged) as opposed to a house (bayit) to depict the third Temple to be built in the future, that is, insomuch as the garment must be custom made to fit the specifications of the individual’s measurements, it serves as the appropriate metaphor to convey the idea that the bond to and worship of the divine depends on Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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the one—​through various permutations of the letters by which the worlds are created and the corresponding states of devolution by which the vitality of the universal assumes the forms of the particulars10—​is not sufficient to capture the depth of the paradox, which entails the discernment that the indissoluble oneness of infinity is such that it comprises an inestimable alterity, that is, the one consists of its not being one.11 The tension between unity and difference within Ein Sof is not resolved dialectically in the Hegelian sense but rather dialetheically as the model of individuation in which the one is conceived as both unity and difference because it is neither unity nor difference.12 As I have expressed it elsewhere, Ein Sof is concurrently metaontological and polyontological; that is, the beyondness of its being beyond being implies a limitless and indeterminate multiplicity of limited and determinate beings. The infinite polyontology, therefore, imparts the idea that diversity is at the core of sameness and sameness at the core of diversity.13 This principle is reflected in Eliashiv’s assertion that the world of emanation—​the realm of divinity (elohut) signified by the Tetragrammaton, which encompasses the essence of the infinite—​is a “world abounding with all the particulars that are in the worlds of creation, formation, and doing. … For the supernal is the root comprised of

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the powers specific to each and every soul. See ibid., p. 25. It must be noted, however, that Schneerson, like the masters of the Ḥabad tradition who preceded him, upheld the belief that only the Jews possess the pneumatic capacity to discern this wisdom, and moreover, that the beingness of all things created consists exclusively of the Hebrew letters that make up the speech of God. On the status of the non-​Jew in Schneerson’s messianic teaching, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 224–​264, and idem, “To Distinguish Israel and the Nations: E Pluribus Unum and Isaac Hutner’s Appropriation of Kabbalistic Anthropology,” in Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World, edited by Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 331–​337. In both contexts, I have argued that, for Schneerson, messianic consciousness entails the paradoxical emplacement of the non-​Jew in the differentiated indifference of the infinite essence in such a way as to safeguard the inequality with the Jew. The Jew and non-​Jew, therefore, are identical in virtue of being nonidentical. Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Amarim: Tanya (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), pt. 2, ch. 1, 76b-​ 77a, ch. 12, 89a-​90a. For this Badiouian interpretation of the kabbalistic Ein Sof, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 81–​82, 225–​226. My contention regarding the kabbalistic infinite is in accord with the argument proffered in Yuk Hui, “The Parallax of Individuation: Simondon and Schelling,” in Nature, Speculation and the Return to Schelling, edited by Tyler Tritten and Daniel Whistler (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 75–​87. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heeding the Law beyond the Law: Transgendering Alterity and the Hypernomian Perimeter of the Ethical,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 220.

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the entire forces of all the particulars of the particulars [peraṭei peraṭot] found in the lower according to their quantity, quality, structure, appearance, and form.”14 In the similar manner that the general (kelal) of the infinite is constituted ontologically by the particular (peraṭ), the univocity of the systemless system hermeneutically does not dictate the unconditional subjugation of the particulars under the stamp of generality, but rather the idiomatic sculpting of generality from the variability and volatility of the particulars.15 14

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Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2005), pt. 1, pp. 161–​162. My interpretation of Eliashiv corresponds to the teaching of the contemporary kabbalist Isaac Meir Morgenstern, De‘ah Ḥokhmah le-​ Nafshekha: Parashat Ḥayyei Sarah 5776 (Jerusalem: Yam ha-​Ḥokhmah, 2019), p. 5: “There is in this a deep matter, for immanence and transcendence [memalle we-​sovev] are not as is simply thought that the transcendent light [or ha-​sovev] is an incomposite unity without any details [peshiṭut ha-​yiḥud le-​lo shum peraṭim] and the immanent light [or ha-​memalle] has within it all of the details [yesh bo kol ha-​peraṭim]. Rather, in truth, in the aspect of transcendence there are also details, but this is in the most subtle manner [be-​ofen daq min ha-​daq], in a manner that thought cannot comprehend, and this is the aspect of the concealed Torah, which is also in the aspect of the name yhwh, but it is the supernal and concealed yhwh, and that which is immanent in all the worlds is the revealed yhwh.” The particulars that became manifest through the revealed name after the contraction were already comprised in the hidden name prior to the contraction; the two names together constitute the integration (hitkallelut) of the transcendent and the immanent. Insofar as the infinite light is clandestinely garbed in every particular, the entirety of the indivisible essence is found in each divisible part. Compare Hillel ha-​Levi Malisov of Paritch, Pelaḥ Rimmon al Sefer Bere’shit (Vilna: Samuel J. Fine, Abraham Z. Rosenkrantz, Menachem Shriftzetzer, 1887), 47b. The teaching regarding the two occurrences of the Tetragrammaton can be traced to Ḥabad thought. For instance, see the distinction between the supernal yhwh and the lower yhwh in Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Torah Or (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1991), 61d-​62b. I have explored this matter in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Zeitliche Entzweiung und offenes System. Die Atonalität der Kabbala und Heideggers anfängliches Denken,” in Heidegger: die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2017), pp. 121–​167, and see the greatly expanded version in the chapter “Inceptual Thinking and Nonsystematic Atonality” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 61–​96. My approach to the complex interchange between sameness and difference, novelty and change, as it pertains to the kabbalistic idea of tradition has been flattened by Moshe Idel’s branding my work as a monochromatic essentialism. Ironically, the charge of reductionism is reductionist in the extreme. See Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 580–​581 n. 135; idem, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 100–​101, 128–​131; idem, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 619–​620; idem, Kabbalah in Italy 1280–​1510: A Survey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 312, 449 n. 106; idem, The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), pp. 26, 197–​199, 217–​218. For my response, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition,” in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and

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Chapter 7 Mihaela Frunză (Cluj-​Napoca: Provo Press, 2008), pp. 159–​184; idem, “Retroactive,” pp. 30–​ 37. One of the more egregious examples of the impact of Idel’s polemical diatribe against me is found in Cristina Ciucu and Regan Kramer, “A Female Messiah? Jewish Mysticism and Messianism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Clio: Women, Gender, History 44 (2016): 67 n. 22: “Deliberately monolithic, Wolfson’s approach runs counter to the more historically contextualized ones, such as Moshe Idel’s.” Let me note, first of all, that this assertion is predicated on a specious dichotomization of the constancy of the structural and the variation of the historical. It is entirely possible that the same structure can recur in different chronological contexts. The authors are simply mimicking Idel’s criticism. Secondly, the application of the terms “monolithic” and “monochromatic” to my hermeneutic fails to take into account my contention that the sameness of structure produces variation and multiplicity. See the section “Dynamism and Stasis in Kabbalistic Symbolism” in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 88–​94. Idel’s appeal to Derridean différance fails to understand properly the intersection of the novel and the recurrent in Derrida himself. See the description of writing in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb, translated by Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 47, as proceeding from the same law commanding things that are always different. The comment leaves little room for debate: newness is unintelligible without the presumption of repetition. Différance thus entails the paradox of the trace that marks the recurrence of the similar that is entirely dissimilar. See Ned Lukacher, Time-​Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 139–​159. Idel, The Privileged Divine Feminine, p. 199, concludes that “Kabbalistic literature is both variegated, complex, and in a continuous conceptual flux, although still operating with several stable models.” I have not used the term models, but this statement is not inconsistent with my own view regarding the intricate intermingling of the new and the old that informs the kabbalistic hermeneutic. Curiously, Idel makes no reference to my interventions on this issue. I readily admit, however, that I have emphasized more vociferously that repetition facilitates innovation, that multivocality is a species of uniformity, that the bifurcation of the conservative and the innovative poles does not do justice to kabbalistic creativity through the generations. The hermeneutic that has shaped my thinking is deeply entwined with the understanding of time as the perpetual retrieval of that which has never been, the saying again of what is always left unsaid in what is spoken. The temporal assumption underlying this hermeneutic is that what is old may be envisioned as novel to the degree that the novel is envisioned as what is old. The chain of tradition is thus constituted by the endlessly distended moments, which should not be envisaged mathematically as spatially discrete points strung together and unified by an internal time consciousness, but rather as the mythopoeic instantiations of an infinitely protracted torrent that implements the eternal reappearance of the same, which is to say, the indefatigable duplication of difference. See the chapter “Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 29–​60, esp. 35–​47; and compare Appendix 2 in ch. 2 of this volume. It is incongruous that the guardian against essentialism should render the essentialist judgment that the “scholarly legacy of phallocentrism” is “indubitably” the “most important thesis” I have advanced (Idel, The Privileged Divine Feminine, p. 197). One wonders what authorizes Idel to make such an assessment (see also p. 207 where he patronizingly opines on the future trajectory of how I should apply my “many intellectual gifts”), but even more nefarious is the fact that, given his relentless criticism of my hypothesis, implied in this statement is a wholescale dismissal of my scholarship, which has made numerous other contributions to the field of kabbalah studies and to the Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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phenomenology of religion more broadly. Idel’s insistence that he is not proposing “another exclusive single model” (p. 198) does not absolve him from attempting to control the discourse, and this is not limited to the topic of gender; indeed, it seems any and every claim I have made that differs with or challenges his view must be criticized, and often in a sarcastic or disparaging rhetoric. This need to pass judgment is not limited to me, but I will let other scholars defend themselves. It is curious that the one advocating so stridently for multivalency seems infatuated with correcting other scholars who express opinions at variance with his own. Appeal to heterogeneity may very well be a ploy to mask homogeneity and the claim to inclusivity may turn out to be an exclusivity of its own even though lip service is paid to not excluding my approach (p. 199). Minimally, one must marvel at the totalizing reluctance to totalization and the despotic rejection of the alleged despotism: “The inherent intellectual despotism of the monolithic ‘theory’ about gender, which obliterates the various voices in the texts, reducing them to a single melody, is a sad academic story, detracting them from the richness, ambiguity, and ambivalence of the topics under investigation” (p. 207). Idel objects to my repeating certain clichés ad nauseam (p. 197), but what is truly nauseating is this need to disparage my work with a passion and enthusiasm that defies reason. Perhaps Idel’s complaint that I need to defend myself “fiercely against opposing views” (ibid.) would be rectified if I were not subject to his incessant attacks, which have also encouraged others to take up the sword. Be that as it may, the presentation of my analysis of the role of gender in kabbalistic esotericism by Idel, and following him by Ciucu and Kraemer, is woefully inadequate. Over the years I have made numerous attempts to explain and to revise my position. The argument regarding the ontological containment of the female in the male, or the so-​called theory of one gender, does not deny the sexuated polarity of male and female. Moreover, my work already incorporates the ostensible “second paradigm,” offered by Ciucu and Kraemer as a corrective to me, that the “divine and cosmic harmony can be reached through equality and ontological equilibrium of the masculine and feminine attributes, in accordance with the classic representation of androgyny” (“A Female Messiah?” pp. 67–​ 68). The textual support for the “classical representation of androgyny” is Idel’s Kabbalah and Eros, pp. 53–​103. One might also add idem, “Androgyny and Equality in Theosophico-​ Theurgical Kabbalah,” Diogenes 52:4 (2005): 27–​38. It is far from clear that this egalitarian interpretation is correct, and indeed, other scholars have noted that the notion of androgyny to be elicited from texts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is reflective of an androcentric perspective. See Wolfson, Language, pp. 52–​55, and reference to other scholars cited on pp. 447–​448 n. 122, 471 n. 436, 491–​492 n. 36, 493 n. 45. Perhaps most significantly, the one-​dimensional presentation of my work by Ciucu and Kramer—​limited to the citation of two passages from studies published respectively in 1994 and 1995—​ completely ignores the fact that I have argued that there are two stages in the construction of gender dimorphism: the bifurcation of the originary androgyne engenders the need for the complementariness and reciprocity of male and female—​what they have called “the equality and equilibrium of masculine and feminine attributes”—​in order to restore unity and harmony; once restored, however, there is a reintegration of the female in the male in accord with the biblical paradigm in Genesis 2:23–​24. See Wolfson, Language, pp. 148–​149; idem, “Bifurcating the Androgyne and Engendering Sin: A Zoharic Reading of Gen 1–​3,” in Hidden Truths from Eden: Esoteric Readings of Genesis 1–​3, edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Susanne Scholz (Atlanta: sbl Publications, 2014), pp. 96–​ 106. Although more sympathetic and less antagonistic than Idel and those who follow him slavishly, the same mistake in presenting my thesis can be found in Sanford L. Drob, Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2010), pp. 61–​62. Drob asserts that my claim that redemption in kabbalistic sources “consists of Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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Time as the Measure of the Immeasurable

To understand Eliashiv’s contribution to the specific topic of the temporalization of space, we would do well by first considering a salient characteristic that is common to the competing expositions of Lurianic kabbalah: time and space are not to be construed respectively as the measure of bodies in motion or as the three-​dimensional container in which all bodies are entangled. These philosophical hypotheses were known to the kabbalists who developed Luria’s ideas, and even on occasion explicitly affirmed by them. Consider, for example, the following observation of Joseph Ergas concerning the nature of time and the infinite: Know that prior to the creation of anything, when God, blessed be his name, was alone, there was then no reality of time at all, for time in and of itself has no reality because it is an accident connected to and consequent to the movement of something that came to be and continues to exist, for it falls under time. And there is distinguished in it three temporal distinctions, which are past, present, and future, for of necessity it has today more time than it had in the time that transpired. However, when there was still no other thing but God, blessed be his name, alone, then there was no time.16 This remark, as well as numerous others that could have been cited, attests that some kabbalists categorically denied the attribution of time to infinity.

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the restoration of the female to the male … rather than a unification of two autonomous entities” (Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995], p. xiii) is “not always fully borne out in the texts.” To substantiate his point, he then cites a passage from Zohar 1:85a that describes how the soul separates into male and female when it descends into the world, which sets up the ontic condition for the reciprocal desire of the male for the female and of the female for the male. In my understanding, this zoharic text is not describing the state of redemption; on the contrary, it is depicting the exile of the androgynous soul into this world, an exile characterized by the split into male and female. Given that rupture, the heteroerotic union is appropriate to this world, but the final redemptive gesture entails the restoration of the original oneness wherein the female is incorporated in the male. Joseph Ergas, Shomer Emunim (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 2010), 2:17, p. 106. Compare the depiction of Ein Sof in Isaiah Horowitz, Shenei Luḥot ha-​Berit, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Oz we-​Hadar,1993), 1:263, Sha‘ar ha-​Otiyyot, emet wa-​emunah, ha-​iqqar ha-​revi‘i: “There is no time for his existence, for he is above time and even above the order of times, and he is one unified with the emanation, and prior to everything.” And see the passage from Ma’amar Yiḥud ha-​Yir’ah, attributed to Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 118–​119. See the text of Eliashiv cited below at n. 93.

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Nevertheless, we can educe from other kabbalistic sources an alternate conception of time and space that is related to the incarnational investiture of the light of Ein Sof, a viewpoint that can be traced to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but which is amplified considerably by the Lurianic teaching. As I will argue in more detail below, the primary mode through which that light assumes incarnate form in the kenotic act of ṣimṣum is the temporal whence the spatial materializes.17 Here, too, one must proceed with caution and not rush to literalize the metaphor at the expense of metaphoricizng the literal. It is worth recalling the warning offered by Menaḥem Azariah da Fano. After noting that the expression ein sof, which is numerically equal to or, the word for light, is applied only figuratively to the master of the will (ba‘al raṣon), the being beyond comprehension and language that illumines the world in its entirety,18 he asserts that “he and his will are one, ‘the Lord is God’ [yhwh hu ha-​elohim] (1 Kings 18:39). In order to exclude the eternity of the world through which the Greeks erred, and also to be constructively circumspect about creation, we speak in human language about the contraction of that first light, which is limitless in truth, when it arose in his will [ke-​she-​alah bi-​reṣono]. And these two words, which come to conceal the secret from one who does not understand, they are the essence of the secret explicated well for the one who is wise and understands on his own, for the primal will surely ‘never sleeps or slumbers’ (Isaiah 5:27), but rather there is no time at all or the order of times with regard to these deep concepts.”19 The rhetorical trope of arising in the will suggests a temporal change, but there is no such alteration; indeed, the traditional idiom is dissimulative inasmuch as it hides the mystery from those who are not worthy to receive it. But what is the mystery? As Fano goes on to explain, the stirring of the will is a way to communicate that the disposition of the will is to be beneficent and to be called by the names that denote mercy and compassion, to fulfill the Torah, 17

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Compare Miquel Beltrán, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 38: “Timelessness—​or better, almost temporality, where “almost” is equivalent to a kind of pseudo-​negation—​, is pivotal for the understanding of the Lurianic doctrine and its systematization in Sarug, and it also explains certain inconsistencies in Herrera’s work, which occur when his description, associated with the metaphorical conception of the ṣimṣum and the subsequent unfolding of the multiplicity, is also expressed as an hypostatic process. In Sarug this procession is embodied in a systematic set of symbolic definitions, which introduces specific elements that configure what will proceed from the shrinking.” See below, n. 91. Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Ma’amar Yonat Elem (Jerusalem: Yismaḥ Lev—​Torat Moshe, 2007), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–​4.

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which is the beginning of thought (teḥillat ha-​maḥashavah). To the extent that the will is characterized as the lovingkindness (ḥesed) whence the judgment (din) emanated,20 we can further assume, as difficult as it may be for some scholars to accept, that the feminine is ontologically derivative from the masculine. The secret conveyed by the expression when it arose in his will is that the arousal of the male from below occurred without the other (ki hu kivyakhol he‘elah it‘aruta mi-​tatta she-​lo al yedei zulato), that is, without the stimulation of the female waters (mayyin nuqvin). The mystery of autoerotic incitement is exegetically extricated from—​or, to be more fastidious, eisegetically anchored in—​the verse lema‘ani lema‘ani e‘eseh, “For my sake, my own sake, do I act” (Isaiah 48:11).21 The connection between time and movement prevalent in philosophical literature is thus preserved by kabbalists, but the object of time’s calculation is not a quantifiable magnitude that is of necessity finite. In kabbalistic theosophy, the movement of which time is the measure is the pulsation of the immeasurable plurivocality of the infinite constituted by the infinity of appearances of the many rather than by the absorption of the many in the totalizing unity of the one. The temporal computation, therefore, is not predicated on physical entities as the philosophers long insisted; in its most elemental cadence, time is the calculation of the incalculable that is beyond time, the ebb and flow of infinity that generates the polarities of light and dark, which translate into the bicameral sentient experience of the nocturnal-​diurnal rhythm, engendered respectively as feminine judgment and masculine mercy.22 Specularized from this vantage point, the eventuality of time is hypostatized in the moment that is because it already was what is always to be,23 the present of futural past 20 21 22 23

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. On time as the conjunction of masculine mercy and feminine judgment in kabbalistic literature, see Wolfson, Alef, pp. 79, 91, 98 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 147, 167, 186-187); idem, ‘Retroactive,’ pp. 42–​44 (reprinted in this volume, pp. 366-369). The eschatological application of the linear circularity of time is illustrated by the derivation of the messianic status of Moses from decoding the words mah she-​hayah hu she-​ yihyeh, “what was is what shall be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), as an allusion to his name. The presumed acrostic anchors the belief that just as Moses was the first redeemer (go’el ri’shon), so he will be the final redeemer (go’el aḥaron). See Tiqqunei Zohar, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978), § 69, 111b; Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei Zohar im Be’ur ha-​Gra (Vilna: Shemaryahu Zuckerman, 1867), 137a; Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov, Temunat ha-​Otiyyot, in Kitvei ha-​Ga’on Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov, 2 vols. (Jerusalem 2001), 2: 256; Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 68; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, pp. 49, 273. At first glance, it would appear that the verse from Ecclesiastes confirms a deterministic sense of time as a closed

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circle in which the end will simply repeat the beginning. Such a view was expressed, for instance, by Nathan Neṭa Shapira, Megalleh Amuqot, edited by Eleazar Yonah Ginsburg (London, 2008), sec. 226, p. 311. It is plausible to argue, however, that the indeterminacy of what will be in the future—​in Levinasian terms, the meontological diachrony of time—​ imparts a greater sense of openness to what was in the past; that is to say, the proposition that what was is what will be implies that what will be is what was, but what will be is still, and always, a matter to be determined, and hence the same must be said of what was. See Wolfson, Alef, p. 60 (in this volume, p. 95). The complex of ideas may be adduced from the intricate myth describing the emergence and purification of the primordial earth in the following passage in Zohar 1:16a, “‘And the earth was chaos and void etc.’ (Genesis 1:2). ‘Was’ [haytah] precisely, previously [mi-​qadmat dena]. Snow within the water. Through the power of that snow in the water there emerged the filth [zuhama]. A raging fire struck it and there was refuse [pesolet]. It was impregnated [we-​it‘adi’at] and the chaos was produced [we-​it‘avidat tohu]—​from the abode of the filth a nest for the refuse. ‘And void’ [va-​vohu], a filtering that was filtered [beriru de-​itberir] from the refuse, settling upon it. ‘Darkness’ [ḥoshekh], the mystery of the raging fire, and that darkness covered that chaos, over that refuse, and it was galvanized by it [we-​ittaqanat minneih]. ‘And the spirit of God’ [we-​ruaḥ elohim], the holy spirit [ruaḥ qudsha] that comes from the living God, and this ‘hovered over the face of the waters.’ After that wind blew, a fine substance was purified [ivrir deqiqu ḥad] from within that refuse like the flicker of the filth [ke-​ṭissa de-​zuhama]. It is purified, distilled and refined several times until there remains the filth that has no filth at all.” The text continues to elaborate on the process of purification, but what I have cited is sufficient to make my point regarding the nature of the moment as a compresence of the three modes such that what was is what is what will be; that is, the futurity of the past is determined in the present by the pastness of the future. Building on the hyperliteral reading of the verse from Genesis attested in The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts, edited by Daniel Abrams with an introduction by Moshe Idel (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), § 2, p. 119 (Hebrew), which is itself a reworking of an earlier rabbinic source (Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, critical edition with notes and commentary by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck [Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965], 1:15, p. 13), the author of this zoharic homily emphasizes that the primordiality of the earth relates specifically to its chaotic state; through a process of sifting the hylic matter (tohu) is refined until it assumes a more definite form (bohu). In the language of the zoharic text, “Tohu—​ the place that has no color [gawwan] and no image [diyoqna], and it is not comprised in the mystery of the image. Now it is in the image, yet as one contemplates it, it has no image at all [hashta ihu be-​diyoqna kad mistakkelan beih leit leih diyoqna kelal]. For everything there is a garment in which to be garbed except for this one, for it appears in it, but it is not at all, and never was [de-​itḥazei beih we-​leiteih kelal we-​lo hawei]. Bohu—​ this one has form and an image [ṣiyyura we-​diyoqna]. The stones were submerged within the shell of the chaos; when they emerge from the shell wherein they were submerged, from them extend a benefit to the world. In the form of the garment, they extend a benefit from above to below, and they ascend from below to above.” The passage, I would suggest, is alluding to a catharsis that occurs in the highest recesses of the divine economy, a cleansing that ensues from the formless matter (tohu) taking on the form or garment (bohu) through which the imageless is seen. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Murmuring Secrets: Eroticism and Esotericism in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, edited by Jeffrey J. Kripal and Wouter Hanegraff (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 97. Insofar as tohu is aligned with evil and bohu with

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unfurled in the crevices of memory that is prospective and expectation that is retrospective.24

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good, it is likely that the author of the zoharic text had in mind another passage from The Book Bahir, § 9, pp. 121–​123, in which the verse “God also made this corresponding to this” [gam et zeh le‘ummat zeh asah ha-​elohim] (Ecclesiastes 7:14) is applied to the binary of tohu and bohu as paradigms of evil and good, an interpretation that is reinforced by the medieval philosophical understanding of tohu as matter and bohu as form. See the section of deleted passages in Zohar 1:263a, no. 30. The process of purgation is alluded to in different language at the beginning of Sifra di-​Ṣeni‘uta, “Before there was a balance [matqela] they did not gaze face to face, and the primordial kings died. Their weapons were not found and the earth was desolate. Until the head of the desire of all that is desired [de-​reisha de-​khissufa de-​khol kissufin] arrayed and bestowed the garments of glory [levushei diqar], that balance was suspended in a place that was not, and weighed upon it were those who do not exist” (Zohar 2:176b). Regarding this text and the symbolism utilized therein, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 311, 386, 596 nn. 59–​60; Ronit Meroz, “The Archaeology of the Zohar: Sifra Ditseni‘uta as a Sample Text,” Da‘at 82 (2016): lxxii-​ lxxv. For a different rendering, see Pinchas Giller, Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 96, 159. On the symbol of the matqela, see Yehuda Liebes, Sections of the Zohar Lexicon (Jerusalem: Akkademon, 1976), pp. 329–​330 (Hebrew); idem, Studies in the Zohar, translated by Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 68. On the phallic connotation of this image, see Wolfson, Circle, pp. 63–​66, 181 n. 126, 182 n. 128, 182–​183 n. 129; idem, Language, pp. 176, 510 n. 249, 528 n. 219. Compare Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 10: “In contrast to this more conventional standpoint, the temporal presupposition buttressing my hermeneutic embraces the prospect of a reversible timeline—​what I have called the timeswerve of linear circularity—​ such that the present is as much the cause of the past as the past is the cause of the present; the past persists in the present as the trace that is reconfigured anew each moment through the agency of anamnesis. In sync with Benjamin and Heidegger, I view scholarly reconstruction as a type of futural remembering, or a remembering expectation, an act of recollecting that has the capacity to redeem the past, not by describing how the past really was but by imputing to it meaning that it never had except as the potential to become what it is not. The radical possibility of time as future—​a perspective shared by kabbalists and Heidegger—​implies that the past itself is only past insofar as it is the reiteration of what is always yet to come” (emphasis in original). See ibid., p. 45: “What is actual about the moment is the inversion of this rectilinearity to the extent that it promotes the memory of what will be and the expectancy of what was. Accordingly, the mandate to remember, which legitimately can be called a central pillar of Jewish ritual and self-​understanding, comprises not the nostalgic reclamation of a past sealed in its factical obstinacy, but an auspicious proclamation of a future foreseen in its evental unforseeability.” And see ibid. pp. 58–​59 n. 131 (discussion of Lacan’s interpretation of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit), 279, and 355–​356. Daniel Martini Tybjerg, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, kindly drew my attention to the study of Stanley B. Klein, “The Temporal Orientation of Memory: It’s Time for a Change of Direction,” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 2 (2013): 222–​234, which argues that memory is not primarily about reliving the past but it is rather a mechanism of natural

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The idea that I will extract from Eliashiv does not presume, as does Plato’s celebrated depiction of time as the moving image of eternity, a fissure separating the temporal and the eternal. The conception that informed Eliashiv’s thinking—​ with roots in older texts—​is to be distinguished from the Platonic timeless eternity, an ideal traceable to Parmenides and reinforced in Neoplatonic sources;25 the kabbalistic understanding rests on the more paradoxical assumption that eternity is paradigmatically timelike.26 Time, accordingly, is the kinesis of timelessness, which is to say, timelessness is itself an intonation of time. To my mind, the kabbalistic orientation is reminiscent of the position elaborated by Muḥyīddīn Ibn al-​‘Arabī: God is the everlasting time (dahr), the eternity that is beginningless (azal) and endless (abad). The enlightened one, who is the “son of the moment” (ibn waqtihī),27 has the capacity to implement this state of temporal eternity, which is a reflection (maẓhar) of God’s eternal temporality concretized in the moment (waqt) that takes shape within the imagination. The temporal (zamān), consequently, is most fully realized in the human momentariness that is an instantiation of divine everlastingness.28 In contrast

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selection to help humans develop strategies for future contingencies. In some measure, this insight coheres with the insight of Henri Bergson that bodily memory—​as opposed to the cerebral storing of memory-​images—​is not simply the repetition of past movements but rather a recollection that is geared toward possible action in the future and therefore forward-​directed and progressive. See Heath Massey, The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 180–​181. Peter Manchester, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 107–​108. Ibid., p. 108. On the contrast between “scholars of the outward” and the “children of the moments,” see Muḥyīddīn Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, Books 1 & 2, translated by Eric Winkel (New York: Pir Press, 2018), p. 190. See Gerhard Böwering, “Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Concept of Time,” in Gott is schön und Er liebt die Schönheit: Festschrift für Annemarie Schimmel zum 7. April 1992 dargebracht von Schülern, Freunden und Kollegen, edited by Alma Giese and J. Christoph Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 71–​91. See also Wolfson, Alef, pp. 71, 102–​103, 214 n. 93, 215 nn. 97–​98 (in this volume, pp. 129-​131, 192-​193). Compare the passage from the Futūḥāt al-​makkiyya translated in William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-​‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 151: “In each moment (waqt) every servant must be the possessor of nearness to one divine name and the possessor of distance from another name which, at that moment, has no ruling property over him.” See ibid., p. 243: “We live with the present moment (waqt). With reason we deny what reason denies, since then our present moment is reason, but we do not deny it by unveiling or by reason. As for unveiling, it denies nothing. … He whose present moment is unveiling will be denied, but he will deny no one. He whose present moment is reason

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Chapter 7 will deny and be denied, and he whose present moment is the Law will deny and be denied.” And ibid, p. 369: “So this gnostic friend serves God in accordance with the name which determines his property in his present moment (waqt).” On time as one of the names of God according to a ḥadīth and its reverberations in other Islamic literature, see ibid., p. 395 n. 7; Alexander D. Knysh, Ibn ‘Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 341 n. 95. See also Salman H. Bashier, Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Barzakh: The Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 95–​96: “The present state is the Limit between the past time, which is nonexistent, and the future time, which is also nonexistent. Likewise, God as the Limit is between the world, which is nonexistent in itself, and the Essence of the Real, which also cannot enter (entirely) in existence. However, the nonexistence in question is not the simple negation of existence, but the nonexistence that transcends existence, and includes it as a transcended moment, exactly as the moment of the present is present in the past moment and includes it as a transcendent moment. … The Real’s Existence, like Time’s existence, is characterized by nonexistence, not the simple negation of existence but something that signifies a ‘thingness’ that transcends both existence and its negation. … The reality of the nonexistence that transcends existence is the reality of the Third Thing (al-​shay’ al-​thālith), which stands as a Supreme Barzakh between the Real as the Manifest (the world) and the Real as the Nonmanifest (the Essence).” See below, nn. 100 and 127. On the distinction between al-​dahr and al-​zamān, see William C. Chittick, “Two Chapters from the Futûhât al-​Makkiyya,” in Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi: A Commemorative Volume, edited by Stephen Hirtenstein and Michael Tiernan (Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1993), p. 114. Compare Dāwūd Ibn Maḥmūd al-​Qayṣarī’s prolegomena to his commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-​ḥikam, in Foundations of Islamic Mysticism: Qayṣarī’s Introduction to Ibn ‘Arabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-​ḥikam, translation and commentary by Mukhtar H. Ali, foreword by Hamid Algar (Milton Keynes: Spiritual Alchemy Press, 2012), p. 64: “There are those whose properties exert governance eternally and whose effects are infinite, pre-​eternally and post-​eternally, such as the names governing the holy spirits, the angelic souls, and everything which, although originated, is not governed by time (zamān), even if it is governed by eternal time (dahr).” And ibid., p. 172: “It was not possible for that reality to manifest its perfections in a single instance, so it appeared in specific forms, each [appearing] at a level suitable to the people of that moment and time, according to the display of perfection necessitated by the name, Time (al-​dahr). These are the forms of the prophets—​ peace be upon them.” The eternal temporality (dahr) of the nonmanifest necessitates that each manifestation in historical time (zamān) will be different because the same and the same because different. See Ali’s remark, ibid., p. 260 n. 124: “Dahr is the conceptual extension of “time” due to the subsistence of the Singular Essence.” On the never-​repeating nature of the self-​disclosure of the eternal in time, compare Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 103: “Ibn al-​‘Arabī quotes Abū Ṭālib al-​Makkī (d. 386/​996), author of the famous Ṣūfi manual Qūt al-​qulūb, as saying, ‘God never discloses Himself in a single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice.’ Abū Ṭālib’s saying may have been the source for the more laconic expression of the same idea which later gains the quality of a Ṣūfi axiom: Lā takrār fi’l-​tajallī—​‘There is no repetition in self-​disclosure,’ or, ‘Self-​disclosure never repeats itself.’ The reason for this is the Divine Vastness and the infinity of the possible things. The immutable entities represent every possible form and modality that existence can assume, and these are infinite; hence, in disclosing Itself in each, Being never repeats itself.” It seems to me that the full force of applying the word dahr to the eternal is that the repetitiveness of being is its changeability. Consider the collapse of the

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to the portrayal of the moment as the nunc stans, the steadfast now of the eternal reality wherein the distinction between the three temporal tenses falls away,29 the idea promulgated by Ibn al-​‘Arabī, which resonates with what may

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distinction between the present and the past with respect to the temporal eternality of the divine in the Risālat al-​aḥadiyya, attributed either to Ibn al-​‘Arabī or to Awḥad al-​dīn Balyānī, published in English as Know Yourself: An Explanation of the Oneness of Being, translation and introduction by Cecilia Twinch (Cheltenham: Beshara Publications, 2011), pp. 34–​35: “There is no difference in His oneness between the new and the eternal: the new requires His manifestation and the eternal requires His remaining hidden. His exterior is identical to His interior and His interior is identical to His exterior; His first is the same as His last and His last is the same as His first and all is one and the one is all. He was described as every day in a different configuration when there was no ‘thing’ other than Him. And He is now as He has always been, since in reality what is other than Him has no being. Just as in eternity-​without-​beginning and timelessness, He was every day in a different configuration when no thing existed, so He is now as He has always been, although there is no thing or day, just as there has been from all eternity no thing or day” (emphasis in original). It is beyond the confines of this note to discuss the relationship of the line and the circle underlying the Ṣūfi notion of time developed by Ibn al-​‘Arabī. See the pertinent discussion of the circular cosmology and its impact on the cyclical conception of both sacred history and the psychological-​spiritual path to perfection in Michael Ebstein, “The Circular Vision of Existence: From Ismā‘īlī Writings to the Works of Ibn al-​‘Arabī,” Shii Studies Review 2 (2018): 159–​192, esp. 166–​168, 172–​182. See the passage from al-​Futūḥāt cited on p. 175: “This is why He placed the name ‘the hidden’ (al-​bāṭin) at the end, after ‘the first and the last, the manifest [al-​ẓāhir; Qur’ān 57:3]’ … This is because the Divine command/​affair (al-​amr al-​ilāhi) is more complete and perfect in that which follows (al-​tālī) than in that which precedes (al-​matluww) and comes before, given that it has what the first one has and more. This is how the Divine words of existence … are: the ‘last’ contains the ‘first,’ ‘the manifest’ contains what is in ‘the last’ and ‘the first’, and ‘the hidden’ contains what is in ‘the manifest’, ‘the last’, and ‘the first’.” See also Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, translated by Ralph Manheim and James W. Morris (London: Kegan Paul International, 1983), pp. 1–​58; Farhad Daftary, “Cyclical Time and Sacred History in Medieval Ismaili Thought,” in Continuity and Change in the Realms of Islam: Studies in Honour of Professor Urbain Vermeulen, edited by Kristof D’Hulster and Jo Van Steenbergen (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), pp. 151–​158; Ehud Krinis, “Cyclical Time in the Ismā‘īlī Circle of Ikhwān al-​ṣafā’ (Tenth century) and in Early Jewish Kabbalists Circles (Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries),” Studia Islamica 111 (2016): 20–​108. A classical formulation of the nunc stans is found in the description of the Intellect by Plotinus, The Enneads, 5.1.4, pp. 537–​538: “For at the level of Soul, thoughts are always changing … whereas Intellect just is everything. It has, then, all Beings stable in it, and it alone is, and the ‘is’ is always, and the future is nothing to it—​for it ‘is’ then, too—​ nor is there a past for it—​for nothing in the intelligible world has passed away—​but all Beings are set within it always inasmuch as they are identical and in a way pleased to be in this condition.” The depiction of eternity as the omnipresent present that has no past or future is developed at greater length in Plotinus, The Enneads, 3.7.3, pp. 336–​337. The Plotinian passages are based on Plato, Timaeus 37e4-​38a1, which is itself an elaboration of the account of being in Parmenides. See Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the

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be mined from the kabbalists, is that the only time that is real is the infinite temporal interval that abides in its nonabiding and flows in the permanence of its impermanence. Rather than viewing the now as the stationary present that has no past or future, the Ṣūfi and kabbalistic conception posits an interim of time in which there is a compresence of past, present, and future—​what was, what is, and what will be are all occurring at once without the sequentiality or extendedness that is associated with the linear model of time. The moment, therefore, does not entail the eradication of the three tenses but rather their aggregation.30 Moreover, on account of this concurrence, which is ascribed by kabbalists, following a much older tradition, to the Tetragrammaton, the moment bears the phenomenological texture of dreamtime.31 Prima facie, it might seem that the threefold unity of yhwh suggests that the divine being is not subject to the contingencies of time—​an argument that is in fact attested in some sources32—​but other kabbalists insist that the eternality implied by this concomitance signifies the full presence of time and not its absence, a presence that can be present only in the expurgation of being present, ever Pre-​Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 43: “Being has no coming-​into-​being and no destruction … And it never Was, nor Will Be, because it Is now, a Whole all together, One, continuous.” For the Greek text and alternate English rendering, see Allan H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary, revised and expanded edition, edited with new translations by Richard McKiraham and a new preface by Malcolm Schofield (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2009), pp. 64–​67. 30 On the moment as an increment of time and space, see Lawrence W. Fagg, The Becoming of Time: Integrating Physical and Religious Time (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), pp. 161–​179. 31 The insight is substantiated by a numerology affirmed in the concluding section in Ḥayyim Viṭal, Mavo She‘arim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2016), p. 447: the numerical value of the letters of the Aramaic term for dream, ḥelma (8 + 30 + 40 + 1), equal 79, which is the same sum as the words hayah (5 + 10 + 5 = 20), we-​howeh (6 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 22), and we-​yihyeh (6 + 10 + 5 + 10 + 5 = 36), plus the additional one for the word itself (im ha-​kolel). The numerology anchors the idea that the time of the dream is like the moment in which there is a convergence of the three temporal ecstasies of what was, what is, and what will be. From that standpoint, the dreamtime emulates the eternal temporality implied by the Tetragrammaton. For a more extensive discussion of undoing time and the syntax of the dream interlude, see Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 219–​274, esp. 245–​255. 32 Ergas, Shomer Emunim, 2:17, pp. 107–​108. Ergas unequivocally denies the attribution of time to Ein Sof prior to creation, and he even argues that the sefirotic emanations are above time (zeman) and the temporal order (seder zemannim), but he does speak of a duration (meshekh) that is like the eternal present that has no past or future.

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changing in its changelessness, motionless in its constant motion.33 Time is thus the disclosive space of the in-​between, the metaxy, in which eternal being fluctuates temporally and temporal becoming persists eternally.34 Significantly, the temporal nature of infinity is endorsed in what is considered to be one of the few texts genuinely authored by Luria, a commentary on the zoharic homily be-​reish hurmenuta de-​malka, a passage placed at the beginning of the Zohar (in both the Mantua and Cremona editions, which served as the prototype for most subsequent printings) because it seeks to explain the opening verse of Genesis as a symbolic reference to the issuing forth of the enumerated sefirot from the innumerable infinity. The key sentence worthy of our attention, “Prior to the emanation he and his name alone were and he filled the space of all the worlds,”35 is based on the oft-​cited statement from Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, “Before the world was created he and his name alone were.”36 Needless to say, the spatial element added by Luria, the description of Ein Sof 33 34

35 36

I have here reiterated my argument in Wolfson, Alef, p. 166. See Manchester, The Syntax of Time, p. 71. Commenting on the Neoplatonic idea of the present, especially in Iamblichus, Manchester writes, “For presence is just as much a feature of the time-​metaxy, the ‘in-​between’ in its timelikeness and not in suspension thereof, as it is of the singular Now. As disclosure space, time is the ‘metaxy’ in which being has its becoming and becoming its being.” As the author notes, he is influenced by the idea of metaxy developed by Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, translated by M. J. Hanak, based on the abbreviated version translated by Gerhart Niemeyer, edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). The “experience of being,” writes Voegelin, “does not occur in world time from whose perspective the experience of eternity is hard to comprehend; instead it is allowed to take place where it is experienced, in the ‘in-​between,’ the metaxy of Plato, which is neither time nor eternity. The tension of being itself, its genesis, exegesis, and interpretation, its ordering effect, its disintegration, and so on, are in fact experienced as a process. But this process occurs in the metaxy … To this end let us recall once more that, in the philosophical experience of the tensions between the poles of time and eternity, neither does eternal being become an object in time, nor is temporal becoming transposed into eternity. We remain in the ‘in-​between,’ in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present. This flow cannot be dissected into a past, a present, and a future of world-​time, for at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time. The concept most suitable to express the presence of eternal being in the temporal flow is flowing presence” (p. 329, emphasis in original). The view of Voegelin is close to what I have drawn from kabbalistic sources, but there is a crucial difference: in the in-​between affirmed by kabbalists, the eternal being becomes a temporal object and the temporal object is eternalized. The tension between the poles of eternity and time is thus resolved in the juxtaposition of opposites that are identical in their opposition. Gershom Scholem, Lurianic Kabbalah: Collected Studies, edited by Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2008), p. 256 (Hebrew). Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 3, 5b.

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filling all worlds, cannot be understood literally, since before the emanation, there are no worlds of which to speak. I surmise, therefore, that the expression “he filled the space of all the worlds” should be taken as a metaphor to convey its very opposite; that is, the omni-​expanisveness of infinity subverts the very possibility of topographical allocation to a particular place. To fill all worlds, in other words, means there are no worlds to be filled; the origin consists of nothing but the utter darkness of the unalloyed resplendence beyond the polarity of light and dark, the absolute abundance of the translucent nullity beyond the binary of existence and nonexistence. The filling of all worlds means, therefore, as Israel Saruq expressed it, that within the infinite there is “the place wherein it was appropriate for all the worlds to be created.”37 This place cannot be interpreted as a tangible space with computable proportions; it is rather the potentiality for the materialization of the immaterial divine light, the quality of delimitation that is an aspect of the limitlessness of the infinite. With respect to the temporal element, there is no comparable disavowal; to the contrary, time is attributed concretely to the infinite of which it is said that time is not attributable. The paradox is implicit in the reference to the coeternity of the ineffable name with the namelessness of infinity prior to creation. Understood kabbalistically, the midrashic statement inculcates the ultimate metaphysical coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of the limit of limitlessness and the limitlessness of limit. The declamation of the nameless as the name denotes the propensity of the infinite to become finite, which of necessity is a feature of its infinitivity.38

37

Israel Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut (Munkács: Blayer and Kohn, 1897), 3a. Compare the version in Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah (Basel, 1629), 77b, and the introduction to the commentary on Sifra di-​Ṣeni‘uta in Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 34c-​d. 38 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 149. According to the analogy used by Eliashiv, just as the soul has no disclosure or name in the world of discriminate beings except through the body, so the infinite has no disclosure or name except through the Tetragrammaton by which the light is garbed in and united with the sefirotic emanations. The term ein sof is not considered to be a proper name; it is an apophatic adjective (to’ar be-​derekh shelilah) that calls attention to that which has no boundary or measure. The same can be said about the term ma’aṣil, which is also not a name that imparts information about the essence of the emanator; it is signpost that points to the activity of emanating. See also Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 157–​159. For a comprehensive exposition of the coincidentia oppositorum and the mystical paradox from the perspectives of Hegelian philosophy, Jungian psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and quantum physics, see Sanford L. Drob, Archetype of the Absolute: The Unity of Opposites in Mysticism, Philosophy, and Psychology (Santa Barbara: Fielding University Press, 2017). Especially concordant with my own approach is Drob’s discussion of linguistic constructivism and the overcoming of the distinction between sign and signified (pp. 322–​333).

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To appreciate the innovation of Luria’s interpretation of the passage from Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, it is worth recalling the explication offered by Moses Cordovero: either the third person pronoun is decoded as a reference to Ein Sof and the name to Keter,39 or the third person pronoun refers to Keter and the name to Ḥokhmah.40 Preference is given to the second possibility, but in either case, Cordovero explicitly rejects the explanation of the dictum that would imply that Keter preceded the emanation and was unified with the emanator as its garment.41 For Luria and his disciples, this is precisely what is implied by the midrashic statement: the name demarcates the potential for boundary that inheres within the boundless, the aspect of Ein Sof designated as the “kingship within kingship” (malkhut she-​be-​malkhut),42 and in Sarugian kabbalah43 and later Sabbatian sources44 as the “kingship of the infinite” (malkhut de-​ein sof), the aspect of the feminine contained in a world that is entirely masculine, the inner point (nequddah penimit) of the pointless—​an ideational point (nequddah maḥashavit) rather than a physical point like the nucleus of a circle (nequddat ha-​merkaz)—​wherein the contraction (ṣimṣum) of the light of Ein Sof transpires.45 As Moses ben Menaḥem Graf of Prague put it in his discussion of how the concealed letters of the Tetragrammaton became manifest: 39

Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2000), 3:1, p. 25. See ibid., 4:8, pp. 52–​53. Interpreting the “name” mentioned in the dictum of Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer (see above, n. 36) as a reference to Keter is found in earlier kabbalistic sources. For instance, see Tiqqunei Zohar, § 19, 40b. 40 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 5:4, p. 64. 41 Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 3:1, p. 25. The interpretation rejected by Cordovero is affirmed in Moses ben Jacob of Kiev, Shoshan Sodot, edited with commentary by Yosef ben Yiṣḥaq ha-​Kohen (Jerusalem: Birkat Yiṣḥaq, 2012), § 440, p. 306; Meir Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2004), 1:2, p. 2. 42 Ḥayyim Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2013), 42:1, 89b-​c. Two gradations are attributed to the aspect designated as malkhut she-​be-​malkhut, the lower one that receives everything from above in the manner of Malkhut and the higher one that overflows to that which is below in the manner of Keter, the intermediary between the infinite and the emanations. Compare Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 24a-​b. On occasion, Eliashiv uses the expression malkhut de-​malkhut in his description of the inner point of malkhut de-​ein sof. See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 128–​129. 43 Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Novelot Ḥokhmah (Basel, 1631), 151b. 44 Yehuda Liebes, On Sabbateanism and Its Kabbalah: Collected Essays (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1995), pp. 308–​309 n. 71 (Hebrew). 45 Yiṣḥaq Eizik Ḥaver Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1964), 4a. See, however, Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, edited by Ḥayyim Friedlander (Benei Beraq: Sifrayyati, 1992), ch. 26, pp. 68–​69: “The disclosure that remains after the withdrawal—​everything is called like the kingship of the infinite, blessed be he [kemo malkhut ein sof barukh hu]. … Therefore, this revealed light is called malkhut, and it is said that it is like the final part of all that has been withdrawn … and thus it is called the

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Every point and aspect makes for itself a palace in which to hide, and there came to be from the yod the secret of three points of the waw, and from the first he the final he. And to this the rabbis, blessed be their memory, alluded in the midrash, “R. [Eliezer] said before the blessed holy One created the world, he and his name alone were.” That is, the name, mentioned above, was produced from the secret of the measure and the engraving [shi‘ur we-​ha-​gelifu], which is the attribute of the Torah. And if not for the engraving, which is the Torah, there would have been no possibility for the world to have been created, but by means of the measurement that he measured in himself, as it were, there emerged the engraving, which is the Torah, and afterward in that place the worlds were created … and since all the worlds stood within Malkhut that is in the essence of the infinite [she-​be-​aṣmut ein sof], may he be blessed, which is the secret of the Torah, the Torah says “Through me kings reign” (Proverbs 8:15), and since the Torah emerged from the secret of the arousal [hit‘orerut], which is the secret of the movement [ha-​tenu‘ah], that is, the bemusement [ha-​ sha‘ashu‘a], as it were, the Torah said “I will be a source of delight every day” [wa-​ehyeh sha‘ashu‘im yom yom] (ibid., 8:30).46 By a series of identifications, largely derived from the Saruqian version of the Lurianic myth of the beginning that obfuscates the origin with which it begins, the name is the Torah, which is the aspect of kingship embedded within the essence of Ein Sof, and the place wherein all the worlds come forth through the act of noetic eros in the manifest concealedness of their concealed manifestation.47 Naturally, there were precedents for this approach, as we see, for example, in Meir Ibn Gabbai’s explanation of the aforecited statement from Pirqei Rabbi trace [reshimu] of all that has been withdrawn. … And this is the limited way [derekh ha-​ mugbal] that was contained within the infinite, blessed be he.” In this respect, the trace is identified as the “place for all that exists” and as the vacuum (ḥalal) that is devoid of the light of the infinite (p. 66). On the question of the authorship of Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, see Jonathan Garb, “The Authentic Kabbalistic Writings of R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 25 (2011): 188–​199 (Hebrew); idem, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm: R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2014), pp. 39 n. 45, 79, 162 n. 70, 176 n. 9, 178–​180, 330 (Hebrew). 46 Moshe ben Menaḥem Graf, Wayaqhel Moshe (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​ Sefarim, 2005), pp. 38–​39. 47 On the theme of sha‘ashu‘a in kabbalistic literature, see Wolfson, Circle, pp. 70–​71, and reference to primary and secondary sources cited on pp. 190–​192 nn. 175–​180; idem, Language, pp. 182–​183, 273–​277, 281–​282, 285, and, most recently, idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 98–​104, 124–​125 n. 39, 126 n. 48.

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Eliezer, “And the secret of the matter, as the masters of worship [ba‘alei ha-​ avodah] received orally [ish mi-​pi ish], is that before the concealed emanation emanated, the unique Lord [adon yaḥid], the root of all roots, called by the sages of truth Ein Sof, was alone with his name. The import of ‘his name’ is the supreme gradation [rom ma‘alah] that is called the primordial ether [awir ha-​qadmon], for it is primordial like his primordiality, since the name is not separated from the essence.”48 The intent of the aggadic statement is that Ein Sof and Keter were coterminous, and hence the name should not be considered independent of the essence that is nameless. Similarly, David ben Solomon Ibn Zimra, one of Luria’s teachers in Egypt, noted that the Tetragrammaton, which was before the creation of the worlds, was comprised in the divine essence (kalul be-​aṣmuto).49 That the nameless can encompass the name implies, as I previously intimated, that finitude is an integral constituent of infinity, that the indeterminate contains the determinate as an indispensable part of its indeterminacy. 3

Kingship of the Infinite and the Demarcation of the Not-​Other as Other

The conceptual implications of malkhut de-​ein sof pertaining to the matter of alterity and the construction of gender are articulated concisely in the Ma’amar Yiḥud ha-​Yir’ah, a composition spuriously attributed to Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto: Thus, I said that the essence of the master of the will is not revealed at all, but rather the disclosure of the will is what is revealed. … Insofar as the Ein Sof, blessed be he, is revealed in order to reign, all the sefirot and their matters will revert to being considered only as the kingship of the infinite [le-​malkhut ein sof], since the infinite reigns. And this is what is intended in the secret of the Shekhinah, in the secret of the fear that dwells upon you, and she reigns profusely on account of the unity that is disclosed

48

49

Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh, 1:2, p. 2. The same explanation is offered in idem, Derekh Emunah (Jerusalem: Shevilei Orḥot ha-​Ḥayyim, 2006), pp. 23–​24, but in that context, Ibn Gabbai adds that all of the emanation was comprised in potentiality within the name that is Keter or the primordial ether. Compare Ibn Gabbai, Avodat ha-​Qodesh, 1:4, p. 8; 1:14, p. 37 (in that context, too, the name symbolizes the entirety of the emanation hidden in the concealment of the infinite). David ben Solomon Ibn Zimra, Magen David (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2007), p. 54.

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in her, until all the gradations ascend to be considered only as the kingship of the infinite, blessed be he. … In truth, however, everything is only Malkhut. And when the unity is revealed in her, she is aggrandized and exalted to her source until she restores all the worlds to this aspect—​to be considered as only the kingship of the infinite, blessed be he, and then is the time of the great and perfect rectification [zeman ha-​tiqqun ha-​ gadol we-​ha-​shalem].50 The endtime—​the time of the final rectification—​is simultaneously the last link of the temporal chain of history and that which is outside that chain, the end, that is, that cannot end, the end that is a retrieval of the beginning that is the negation of the beginning.51 Cast in gender terms, just as everything was contained in malkhut de-​ein sof at the beginning, so in the end, all particularities will be subsumed within this attribute that is the quintessential potential for femininity in a world that in actuality is purely masculine. The implications of the gender transposition are lamentably lost to those who would see a privileging of the feminine in the symbolism of malkhut de-​ein sof and the eschatological ascent of the last of the sefirot to the position of the crown atop the head of the first.52 To be sure, these texts do reveal 50 Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto, Adir ba-​Marom, second part, edited by Joseph Spinner (Jerusalem: Sifrayyati, 1988), p. 160. 51 For a more detailed discussion of the paradox of the beginning that cannot begin and the end that cannot end, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory,” in Jews at the End of Theory, edited by Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and Jonathan Boyarin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 293–​311. 52 The kabbalistic inversion of the first and the tenth has an intriguing parallel in the following passage about the flash of disclosure or the unveiling of the veil in Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, p. 276: “Learn that the matters—​according to us, from the door of kashf—​when some of them come out from being, whatever comes out, the first is more panoramic than the second; and it is this way for each subsequent one until the halfway mark. Halfway there is comparative disparity—​for example, the first until the last. The last and the first are the most panoramic that come out. Then the two are comparatively disparate, according to what the two are set down for, and according to the syntax. So the most panoramic always precedes in the panoramic site. This clarifies that the 15th night in quality is at the level of the 13th night, and in this way up to the night of the new Moon during the first of the month and his setting during the end of the month. The waning Moon night is then equal to the full Moon night—​so understand” (emphasis in original). An allusion to this enigmatic matter seems to be underlying another passage in Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, pp. 385–​386, a “guarded pointing” on the second lām of the name Allāh: “As she was intended, chosen, cleared away from intermediaries, how would she be connected with an alif of i-​ness as a pure connection, such that her being would start to be articulated, pointing to the alif with an authentic pointing? Even if the dhát were hidden, in fact your phrasing the

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an empowering of the female. Seemingly, the overturning of the patriarchal hierarchy is exemplified in the conjunctive expression keter malkhut, which syntactically conveys that the masculine crown modifies the feminine kingship. The potency of the crown, therefore, issues from the quality of kingship. And yet, the very image of subversion—​confabulated as well as the corona of the covenant (aṭeret berit) or as the crown of the husband (aṭeret ba‘lah)—​is still theorized from an androcentric vantage point inasmuch as the mandate of kingship is sanctioned on account of the king and not the queen.53 Even

53

lām is an affirmation of a connection and would point you to her. … Do you see the neck embrace of the lām-​alif, and how the lām comes out in pronunciation before the alif? By this the attention is roused in the one who perceives. This Malakūt lām is cast from the alif of i-​ness without mediation, and she takes him to the Jabarūt portion (the Middle Book), to lead him to the lām of the seen and the Mulk. In this way the matter goes, as long as composition and the veil are there. Thus when the First and the Last and the Outward and the Inward are reached, He intends—​as the alif is transcendent beyond connection from every perspective to the letters—​He intends that the end be made an equal match to the beginning” (emphasis in original). I cannot here offer an adequate exposition of this passage but I call attention to the poem lām-​alif translated and analyzed in Denis E. McAuley, Ibn ‘Arabī’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 177–​178. On the use of lām and alif respectively as symbols for the human lover and the divine beloved, see Husayn ibn Mansur al-​Hallaj, Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr, translated by Carl W. Ernst (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), p. 128: “Love is in primordial eternity eternally, /​in Him, by Him, from Him; it begins in Him. /​… When the beginning began, his love began as an attribute /​in that which began—​and in him gleamed a shining! /​For the L was affectionate with the inclined A—​/​and both were one, which means in the beginning. /​But in separation they are two; when they are together /​separately, one’s the devotee, and one’s the Lord.” The resemblance of Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s worldview to the kabbalistic symbolism is conspicuous in Dāwūd al-​Qayṣarī’s comment translated in Foundations of Islamic Mysticism, p. 120: “The world of Kingdom [al-​mulk] is a manifestation of the Dominion [al-​malakūt], which is the Absolute Imaginal World [al-​mithāl], which in turn is a manifestation of the world of Invincibility [al-​jabarūt], that is, the realm of immaterial beings, and it is a manifestation of the Immutable Archetypes, which is a manifestation of the world of divine names and the plane of Unity, which is a manifestation of the plane of the Singularity.” A proper analysis of the texts cited in this note would require a lengthy discussion of gender in Ibn ‘Arabī’s thought. On this topic, see Sa‘diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and compare especially the assessment of the religious anthropology of divine names and the hermeneutics of mercy on pp. 75–​81, and the treatment of the ontologies of gender and the androgynous nature of Adam and Eve on pp. 150–​168. This point is missed in Idel’s effort to undermine my work in The Privileged Divine Feminine, pp. 77–​102, by focusing on the symbol of keter malkhut or on the elevation of the tenth of the emanations to the first. See the summary of his criticism on p. 201: “The androcentric model that emphasizes the acquisitive approach did not take in consideration the recurrent imaginaire concerning Her origin and Her return to the highest

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Chapter 7 levels of the divine world; it thus reduces and simplifies the complexity of the Female’s metamorphoses and Her diverse functions in many forms of theosophical Kabbalah.” In lieu of offering an extensive rejoinder, which is beyond the limits of this note, let me state that Idel’s critiques are based on the erroneous supposition that delineating textual sources where reference is made to the female or to the feminine is sufficient to challenge the claim to phallomorphism or androcentrism. The occasional references to gender theorists offered by Idel—​all in the wake of my own scholarship, incidentally, although this is never acknowledged—​do not indicate that he has grasped the conceptual consequence of the material. The proffering of the symbol of the mother as a counter to my position is a case in point. Utilizing various thinkers who have focused on the philosophical significance of gender construction—​not all by any means but also not an insignificant number—​it is possible to argue that in some cultural contexts there is evidence for a phallocentric coopting of maternal symbology, including anatomical phenomena that are overtly and distinctly female such as giving birth and breast feeding. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Patriarchy and Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Licht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), pp. 1058–​1059 n. 30. Idel’s hermeneutical fallacy is epitomized in his insistence that my “exclusivist theory” leads me to overlook texts, even a passage from a treatise edited in a dissertation completed under my supervision or another passage from a manuscript that I myself edited (p. 198). The implication that I have deliberately ignored texts that do not support my theory is appalling, but I will not honor this level of personal insult by responding in more detail. I will leave it to future readers to decide if this kind of vitriol is beneficial to the field of kabbalah scholarship. Let me state the obvious: the main issue worthy of scrutiny is not what text a scholar excludes but how he or she interprets the text that is included. And when it comes to the matter of assessing the role of gender in the complex and variegated universe of kabbalistic thought, it is incumbent on the scholar to bear in mind that we are dealing with an imaginary architectonic forged entirely by men, and hence we must evaluate the portrayal of women from within the contours of a dominantly masculine discourse. Feminist criticism itself is not a singular phenomenon, but one thing that seems undeniable—​indeed, perhaps we can call it our hermeneutical baseline—​is that the signification of the feminine must be assessed from the vantage point of the actual presence or absence of women in the social context that fostered the literary production of the kabbalistic texts we study as well as the oral traditions we presume that we can extract from the written documents. No text proffered by my detractors casts doubt on this historical fact. Idel refers to the terminology I have used as “no more than shell games if they are not applied to addressing the entire spectrum of different views” (p. 207). His appeal to polyvalency notwithstanding, Idel is apparently not capable of entertaining the possibility that I have a divergent understanding of multivalency grounded in the assumption that conceptual fluidity is facilitated by structural stability, and that diversity of perspectives is possible without positing ambiguity or ambivalence. See the further description above, n. 15, of the circular linearity underlying my hermeneutical assumption that the truth already spoken is always yet to be spoken. Unfortunately, the only shell game that is being perpetrated is the notion that Idel has offered a serious intellectual challenge to the painstaking exegesis of gender symbolism I have undertaken for over three decades. The piling up of texts does not amount to an argument.

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more pertinent to our analysis, the archetypical feminine, signified by malkhut de-​ein sof, is depicted as the space within which the limitless potency of the infinite is delimited, where the light of beneficence, gendered as masculine, is constricted and withdrawn by the feminine attribute of judgment to create the void in which the trace of that light is paradoxically present by being absent and absent by being present. Eliashiv thus writes about the secret of the place that comes to be as a consequence of the withdrawal of the light of the infinite from itself to itself (me-​aṣmo el aṣmo): And it is the inner force [koaḥ ha-​penimi] of all reality, for on account of this he, blessed be his name, is called the place of the world [meqomo shel olam] as is known.54 … Indeed, the entire aspect of place of which we have spoken is not disclosed except in the aspect of the kingship of the kingship [ha-​malkhut de-​malkhut] because that kingship, which is the disclosure of the will that was mentioned, is comprised of ten. … And the secret of place is not disclosed but in the aspect of the tenth that is within her, which is the kingship of kingship, the inner central point [ha-​ nequddah ha-​emṣa‘it ha-​penimit] that is within her, and there he, blessed be his name, was revealed as the secret of the place of the totality of all the worlds [we-​sham nitgalleh hu yitbarakh shemo le-​sod ha-​maqom le-​ khol ha-​olamot kullam], to be the king of the king of kings, the blessed holy One.55 Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me emphasize that I acknowledge that malkhut de-​ein sof accords agency to the feminine in the execution of governance, a property that intrinsically demands the being of the other, an idea often expressed by kabbalists invoking the dictum ein melekh be-​lo am, “there is no king without a nation.”56 Alternatively expressed in the vocabulary that permeates kabbalistic literature, the vessel that receives is not merely a negative-​passive quality; it is the provision that makes possible the overflow of the infinite luminosity, the constraining judgment that confers boundary 54 Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 68:9, p. 777. 55 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 128–​129. The kabbalistic depiction of malkhut de-​ein sof in spatial terms follows the long-​standing androcentric association of the feminine and place. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–​55. 56 This saying is used widely in medieval rabbinic sources and from there found its way into kabbalistic and later Ḥasidic texts. In what appears to be one of the earlier formulations of this idea, see Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 3, 6b.

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on the distending of the boundless benevolence. A succinct articulation of the principle is offered by Shalom Dovber Schneersohn: “For in the light there is the will to shine in the vessel, and this is because the root of the vessel precedes the light and there is in it a higher power. Hence, since the root and the source of the vessel is detected in the light, it aspired to overflow to the vessel.”57 Insofar as the masculine will to bestow is actuated by the feminine capacity to receive, it is acceptable to ascribe precedence to the latter over the former. We might even go so far as to say that in revealing the root and the source of the vessel in the light—​the feminine potency for the other comprised within the masculine in relation to which there is no other—​the vessel itself is apprehended as an aspect of the light.58 Examination of the relevant texts, however, unencumbered by ideological prejudice—​whether to avoid facing theoretically unsavory and morally questionable assumptions of the past or to promote a foundation for pragmatic changes in the social landscape of the present and the future—​suggests that the quality of dominion related to the vessel is still a trait of the masculine, the willfulness that galvanizes the indiscriminate effluence to materialize in discriminate beings. The point is made explicitly in the following passage of Eliashiv where he explains the paradox of the infinite light in the world of emanation assuming the aspect of what is outside itself (beḥinat ḥuṣ mimmennu) in the worlds of creation, formation, and doing. On the one hand, a sharp distinction is made between the first world and the other three worlds, and hence the word “divinity” (elohut) technically applies only to the former. On the other hand, the existence and sustenance of the lower worlds are totally dependent on the efflux of the infinite light, and thus God, who is the soul of the soul of all these realms of being, is called the “life of the worlds” (ḥei ha-​olamim) or the “place of the world” (meqomo shel olam). Ostensibly, there are two distinct forms of disclosure, one in the activity that is unified with the infinite and the other in an activity that is extrinsic to the infinite.59 The distinction, however, is subverted to the extent that the activity 57 Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, 3vols., revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2011), pp. 1022–​1023. 58 Ibid., p. 1282. For a more detailed discussion of the theme of engendering the same other and the image of the light and the vessel, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 211–​220. 59 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 31. The exact language used in this context is the distinction between pe‘ulah she-​ḥuṣ mimmennu and pe‘ulah she-​hi eṣlo u-​meyuḥad immo. On the use of the expression hamshakhat pe‘ulah le-​ḥuṣ mimmennu to describe the act of ṣimṣum, see Luzzatto, Qelaḥ Pitḥei Ḥokhmah, ch. 24, pp. 58–​59. Ḥayyim Viṭal, Sha‘ar ha-​Haqdamot, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2018), p. 38, describes the totality of creation in terms of the dyad of Ein Sof, which

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exterior to the infinite is a facet of its interiority. Expressed geometrically, the externalizing of the internal is concurrently an internalization of the external such that in the curvature of infinity absolute convexity is interchangeable with absolute concavity. Eliashiv locates the mystery of ṣimṣum—​the clearing of the space wherein the not-​other assumes the form of the other—​in the last of the divine gradations: And thus the root of this disclosure is in the Malkhut of the emanation for through it is revealed the emanator, the Ein Sof, blessed be his name, to constrict [leṣamṣem] from now the light of his divinity [or elohuto] and to go out from and beneath him in an action that is external to him [bi-​ fe‘ulah she-​ḥuṣ mimmennu]. Therefore, it is called Malkhut because the light of this disclosure is in the aspect of the king [melekh] together with his nation who are outside of him, and he is king and lord over them, and hence he is called there also by the name Adonai. And thus the root of this disclosure of Malkhut is way above [lema‘lah lema‘lah] and it is in the disclosure of the first universal [ha-​kelali ha-​ri’shon] … for this is the light of Ein Sof … and the matter of the five disclosures is that it descends in them from gradation to gradation in order to be revealed below. And the order of the descent from everything that is above to what is below was by means of the aspect of contraction that takes place in everything that is above. Thus, the first contraction [ha-​ṣimṣum ha-​ri’shon] in Ein Sof was so that he60 would go out from the gradation of the infinite [mi-​madregat ein sof] to be disclosed in the aspect of divinity [bi-​veḥinat elohut] in all of the emanations entirely, for they are all the disclosures of him, may his name be blessed, in the aspect of boundary and measure [bi-​veḥinat

60

is an incomposite light (or pashuṭ), and the worlds that emanate from it, which consist of the essence of the lights (aṣmut orot) hidden in the vessels (kelim). Ontologically, however, a case can be made that the vessels themselves are constituted by the light, and thus the dyadic division is merely epistemological or semantic. Grammatically, it is possible to render the pronoun in a gender-​neutral way as it, but the context, in my judgment, warrants rendering it as the third person masculine, thereby conveying that the infinite is privileged as male. Even though we find statements to the effect that the infinite is neither male nor female, the pronounced quality of the infinite to overflow implies that it should be gendered as masculine inasmuch as fecundity is a feature of compassion and compassion is aligned with the male potency to bestow. I do not think this is a contradiction because kabbalists subscribed to a logic according to which the claim that something transcends the gender binary implies not that there is no gender but that there is one gender that comprehends the other in itself, the underlying structure of what I have called the male androgyne.

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gevul u-​middah]. The first contraction was also in the aspect of the kingship of the infinite [ha-​malkhut de-​ein sof], for he was contracted and went out from his incomposite essence [me-​aṣmuto ha-​peshuṭah] to be disclosed in the aspect of boundary and measure. Therefore, he is also called there in the name malkhut on account of the fact that from now he goes out from his essential incompositeness [mi-​peshiṭuto ha-​aṣmutit] and he is disclosed from there and below in the disclosures that are not according to his incompositeness. Hence, all of his disclosures from there and below were also in the aspect of what is external to him [bi-​veḥinat ḥuṣ mimmennu], for they were not in accord with his essential incompositeness. Therefore, that place wherein he was contracted was called by the name malkhut de-​ein sof. Indeed, that disclosure and the place of Malkhut comes to be only by means of the contraction itself, for in virtue of his being contracted, he was disclosed there in the aspect of Malkhut, but before he was contracted the appearance of Malkhut was not appropriate at all, for his essential incompositeness was equal [shaweh] in every place and there was no place at all that was external to him. Therefore, the aspect of Malkhut was not appropriate at all since there was not yet any disclosure apart from his essential incompositeness alone in every place. And thus it was also called by the name malkhut de-​ein sof to indicate that even though all the disclosures that were disclosed by means of the contraction were disclosures in the aspect of boundary and measure, nevertheless they are all governed only through the power of the light of the infinite.61 I have translated this passage in full because of its extreme importance and relevance for understanding the gender implications of the symbol of malkhut de-​ein sof and the ontological repercussions about ṣimṣum and the phenomenological nature of space and time that ensue therefrom. Only by heeding the exact language can one stand on secure philological grounds. Eliashiv begins with the lowest of the sefirotic gradations, the kingship of the emanation (malkhut de-​aṣilut), in which Ein Sof has constricted the light of his divinity to be manifest in the lower worlds. The androcentric bias here is underscored by the explanation that the name Malkhut denotes that the light of divinity assumes the form of the king vis-​à-​vis the nation that is extrinsic to him. Note that the name of the tenth sefirah—​often touted by scholars as the quintessential female—​is linked to the masculine king (melekh) and not to the feminine 61 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 91–​92.

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queen (malkah), even though the latter symbolism could have readily been invoked by Eliashiv if he had wanted to accentuate the womanly quality of this potency.62 The nature of kingship is related to the disclosure of the divine in that which is purportedly external to itself—​although it is not clear how there can be anything that is ontologically external to the all-​encompassing oneness of the infinite. There is thus perfect symmetry between the constriction of malkhut de-​ein sof at the beginning and the constriction of malkhut de-​aṣilut at the end: Therefore, it is called by the name malkhut de-​ein sof to show that all that is revealed from there and below are dependent only on that Malkhut, for they are forever governed by it. And thus from that malkhut de-​ein sof there is revealed afterward in the malkhut de-​aṣilut, and it is constricted there in the light of divinity to bring forth from there and below the activity of the separate beings. … And thus it follows that the root of the kingship and emanation is in the kingship of the light of the infinite, for there was the constriction in the light of the infinite, and here was the constriction in the light of divinity.63

62

Compare Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, 130a: “Just as it is above in the secret of the supernal kingship of the infinite [malkhut ila’ah de-​ein sof], so it is at the end of the emanation in the foundation of the feminine [bi-​yesod de-​nuqba] as well, there came to be there a space and the contraction [na‘aseh sham ḥalal we-​ṣimṣum] to bring forth the lower beings in the concealment of the unity [be-​he‘lem ha-​yiḥud].” To understand this passage, we must bear in mind that the yesod of the female refers to the vaginal opening. See Viṭal, Sha‘ar ha-​Haqdamot, p. 26: “If Malkhut is in a masculine configuration [parṣuf ha-​zakhar], for example, Abba or Ze‘eir Anpin, the Malkhut that is within him is the aspect of the corona [ha-​aṭarah] that is in the orifice of the penis [gid ha-​ammah], which is called Yesod, in the secret of ‘And blessings for the head of the righteous’ (Proverbs 10:6). … However, the aspect of Malkhut that is in the configuration that is called feminine [parṣuf ha-​niqra neqevah], for example, Imma or Nuqba de-​Ze‘eir Anpin, then Malkhut that is within her is the aspect of the corona of the foundation [aṭeret yesod] within her, for the foundation itself is the uterus [reḥem], the place of pregnancy, and the aspect of the flesh of the protuberance [ha-​basar ha-​tapuaḥ] above it [that is, the glans of the clitoris], protruding from the outside, is called the corona, and it is called in the language of our rabbis, blessed be their memory, the bottom of the bowels [shippulei me‘ayim], as is mentioned with respect to the signs of an aylonit [a woman who does not develop at puberty and is thus infertile].” See parallel in Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:5, 14c, and compare 31:3, 33d. On the identification of yesod of the female genitalia as the vagina, see Shalom Sharabi, Reḥovot ha-​Nahar, introduction to Nahar Shalom, printed as the third part in Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 40b: “The foundation of the feminine is the opening [ha-​yesod shel nuqba hu petaḥ].” 63 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 92.

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Just as the constriction that is located in the malkhut de-​ein sof represents the potential for difference within the indifference of infinity, which can be gendered as the capacity for feminine otherness in a realm of masculine sameness, so the female persona of the tenth emanation relates to her potential to receive the inundation of light from above, a potency that is facilitated by the condensation of the light, which thereby accords boundary and measure to the boundless and immeasurable; in overflowing to what is beneath the world of emanation, she assumes the comportment of the male, as the linkage of the name Malkhut to the word melekh signals philologically. Moreover, and here we come to the crucial point for our analysis, the root of the quality of the not-​other to assume the form of the other can be pinpointed above in the light of Ein Sof, which Eliashiv designates as the first universal (ha-​ kelali ha-​ri’shon).64 Elsewhere, Eliashiv refers to the light of Ein Sof in slightly different terminology as the “first universal disclosure” (ha-​gilluy ha-​ri’shon ha-​kelali). Insofar as this disclosure is beyond the ṣimṣum, there is in fact no disclosure there, not even the tittle (qoṣ) of the yod, which is usually associated with Keter or the divine nothing (ayin). In that primal disclosure, the worlds were not yet differentiated at all and they were concealed in absolute concealment (ne‘lam be-​takhlit ha-​he‘lem). Quite astonishingly, Eliashiv adds, had Adam and Eve not sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, all the worlds would have ascended to the supernal light of Ein Sof, and “there would have been a disclosure of the worlds from the light of Ein Sof that is above the contraction.”65 Eliashiv’s exegesis bewilderingly embraces the paradox that the first universal disclosure is the disclosure that is no disclosure inasmuch as there is nothing that is disclosed in that disclosure, not even nothing if the nothing is conceived in the continuum of reality grounded in the binary distinction between being and nonbeing. 4

Sha‘ashu‘a and the Autoerotic Differentiating Indifference

The five disclosures by which the infinite light descends from gradation to gradation to be revealed below are delineated by Eliashiv as follows: the first is called Ein Sof, also designated as the supernal emanator (ma’aṣil elyon) and the cause of all causes (illat al kol ha-​illot); the second is identified as the contraction (ṣimṣum) and the line (qaw), denominated as well as the supernal luster

64 65

Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 70.

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(ṭehiru ila’ah) or the primordial ether (awir qadmon); the third is the primal human (adam qadmon), branded as the supernal crown that is hidden and concealed (keter elyon satim we-​ṭamir); the fourth is yhwh, the essential name (shem ha-​eṣem) in which the infinite emanator is revealed; the fifth is the name Elohim, the manifestation of divinity in the worlds of creation, formation, and doing.66 What is important to emphasize is that the common denominator for all five of these disclosures is that the order of descent is through the act of ṣimṣum. Insofar as the first contraction is the means through which the incomposite essence of the unmanifest is manifest in the aspect of divinity through the sefirotic emanations, it is labeled malkhut de-​ein sof. Obviously, it is correct to characterize this kingship as feminine—​indeed, it may be considered the template for successive iterations of female prowess—​but this characterization is further evidence of the phallogocentric framework since the female signifies the desire for alterity on the part of the male infinite, what Eliashiv calls, following older sources, “this will for the delights” (ha-​raṣon ha-​zeh le-​ha-​ sha‘ashu‘im), that is, the craving “to be revealed in his beauty and his splendor to that which is other to him” (lehitgalleh be-​no‘amo we-​ziwwo le-​zulato). The notional point is moored in the semantic assumption that malkhut denotes the getting of counsel (hamlakhah) and advice (eṣah), “for there is revealed in him the aspect of seeking counsel and taking advice [nimlakh we-​nitya‘eṣ] to bring forth the worlds … and therefore he is called by the name malkhut whose connotation is to rule over what is other than him [limlokh al zulato], for there is no king without a nation [ki ein melekh be-​lo am].67 He is a king over them, for they are governed by means of him through his kingship and his guidance, and they constantly receive the yoke of his kingship.”68 The kingship of the 66 Ibid, p. 33. 67 On expression “there is no king without a nation” (ki ein melekh be-​lo am), see above, n. 56. 68 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 128. Let me state definitively that I am not denying in this study, nor have I ever denied, that kabbalistic material is replete with gender transformations such that the male becomes female as readily as the female becomes male. Furthermore, I acknowledge unreservedly that on occasion the hierarchy is inverted and the female occupies a position that is higher than the male. I have most often discussed this reversal in terms of the gender transformation of the endtime exemplified in the kabbalistic interpretation of neqevah tesovev gaver (Jeremiah 31:21). See, for instance, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 327–​332, and idem, Open Secret, pp. 200–​223. Sometimes the matter is independent of the eschatological inversion occasioned by the ascent of the lowest to the highest, as we find, for example, in the transposal of the status of female souls vis-​à-​vis male souls enunciated by Naftali Bachrach, Emeq ha-​Melekh, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2003), 17:11, p. 1000. See also the passage from Menaḥem Azariah da Fano cited and

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Chapter 7 discussed in Wolfson, Language, pp. 186–​187. It is nevertheless the case that a phallomorphic predilection undergirds the kabbalistic presumption that the feminine quality of kingship is the attribute of judgment that propels the masculine grace of the infinite to overflow. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 101. A clear articulation of this theme is found in Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5679 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2015), pp. 63–​64: Malkhut is distinguished from all the other attributes (middot) insofar as they are not dependent on the other (zulat) to the same extent that she is based on the maxim “there is no king without a nation.” Thus, for example, with respect to the attribute of lovingkindness (ḥesed), we can say that the actualization of the attribute is dependent on the existence of the other (pe‘ulat ha-​middah shayyekhah dawqa ke-​she-​yesh zulat), but the essence and the arousal of the attribute are not dependent on the other (eṣem ha-​ middah we-​ha-​hit‘orerut ha-​middah shayyakh gam ken be-​lo zulat). By contrast, the need for the other is essential to the very constitution of Malkhut, for in the absence of the other, no sense of being can be conferred upon the attribute of kingship or dominion. The RaShaB concludes that all the other attributes are powers of the soul in a state of concealment apposite to disclosure (be-​he‘lem ha-​shayyakh el ha-​gilluy), but the attribute of kingship (middat ha-​melukhah) is an attribute of exaltation (middat ha-​hitnasse’ut) that is not possible without the existence of the other. We have evidence of this phenomenon from the case of an individual whose greatness cannot be manifest, for example, when he is in a barren desert or amongst animals and beasts. The RaShaB adds that a great exertion on the part of the nation is required to stimulate the quality of exaltation of the king, an abnegation (biṭṭul) of the will, and thus it can be said of the quality of kingship that it is in a state of concealment that has no existence (be-​he‘lem she-​eino bi-​meṣi’ut) and not in the aspect of concealment apposite to disclosure as is the case with the other attributes. The matter is reiterated and expanded in Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5682 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), pp. 95–​97, and idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5699–​5700 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1986), pt. 1, pp. 14–​16, and pt. 2, pp. 22–​23. In the latter context, it is stated (p. 23) that the “power of kingship, which is the power of exaltation, is in a greater inner concealment” (be-​he‘lem penimi yoter), thereby forging the paradox that the attribute that triggers the externalization of the light of infinity is characterized as the most inward. Based on the distinction between the concealed power (koaḥ ne‘lam) and the power as it is when it is in concealment (koaḥ kemo she-​hu be-​he‘lem), the RaYYaTz argues that with respect to the power of kingship, which is in concealment prior to disclosure, it can be said that it is like the other attributes, but with respect to the concealment itself (ha-​he‘lem be-​aṣmo), it is a concealment that is not in existence (he‘lem she-​eino bi-​ meṣi’ut) as opposed to a concealment that is in existence (he‘lem she-​yeshno bi-​meṣi’ut). An interesting variation on this theme is found in Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5739 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2019), pp. 7–​8. Building on his predecessors, Schneerson distinguishes between the source of the attributes and the source of kingship—​the former is in the state of concealment that is apposite to disclosure (be-​he‘lem ha-​shayyakh el ha-​gilluy) and the latter is in the state of concealment that is not apposite to disclosure (be-​he‘lem she-​eino shayyakh el ha-​gilluy) and hence the disclosure is wholly dependent on the abrogation of the willfulness of the other that draws forth and arouses the will of divine governance from its source. This is the mystical intent of the construction of kingship (binyan ha-​malkhut) on Ro’sh ha-​Shanah, which entails the elongation of the point, the crown of kingship (keter malkhut), to the full configuration of the kingship (parṣuf ha-​malkhut). For a more extensive discussion, see Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5717 (Brooklyn: Vaad

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Hanochos BLahak, 2006), pp. 5–​6. The aspect of keter malkhut is delineated there as “the will for kingship” (ha-​raṣon li-​melukhah), which entails “the disclosure of the essential exaltation” (ha-​gilluy de-​hitnasse’ut aṣmi), materialized as “the will to exaltation in relation to the nation” (ha-​raṣon le-​hitnasse’ut al am). The essential exaltation comes to disclosure through the aspect of keter malkhut, but initially it was “in a concealment that was not apposite to disclosure” (be-​he‘lem she-​eino shayyakh le-​gilluy), a concealment that is not demarcated in relation to the other (we-​ein ha-​kawwanah le-​he‘lem mi-​ṣad eizeh davar me-​ha-​ḥuṣ) but rather an inherent concealment (she-​hu be-​he‘lem mi-​ṣad aṣmo) of which it is possible to say that it might never be disclosed (we-​efshar she-​lo yavo le‘olam le-​gilluy), the “concealment that is not in existence” (he‘lem she-​eino bi-​meṣi’ut). Confirmation of my thesis that in its origin the feminine is comprised within the masculine may be elicited from the symbolic valence of keter malkhut—​even though grammatically the image of the crown is subordinate to the quality of kingship, as the point incorporated within infinity, the kingship is subsidiary to and derives its power from the crown. I surmise that this is the intent of the claim that the interiority of Malkhut comports “a greater depth and concealment” than the other potencies that are in concealment only relative to their eventual disclosure (Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5682, p. 97). Compare Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwa‘aduyyot 5746, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1990), pp. 806–​807, where the depiction of that which is above disclosure is linked more specifically to the “aspect of the infinite interiority and essentiality” (beḥinat penimit we-​aṣmit ein sof), which is above both the aspect of “that which fills all worlds” (memalle kol almin), that is, the aspect of divinity that radiates openly (be-​gilluy), and the aspect of “that which encompasses all worlds” (sovev kol almin), that is, the aspect of concealment that is apposite to disclosure (he‘lem ha-​shayyakh el ha-​gilluy). The aspect of concealment that is not relative to disclosure sheds light on the status of Israel and the Torah giving testimony (edut) to the divine. Because the root of Israel is in the infinite essence that is above wisdom, that is, the “aspect of the essential concealment that is not apposite to disclosure” (beḥinat he‘lem ha-​aṣmi she-​eino shayyakh le-​gilluy), they are capable of forging new interpretations of the Torah. See Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwa‘aduyyot 5752, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1994), p. 244. On the nexus between testimony and that which is hidden and concealed from sight, see Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Liqquṭei Torah, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1996), Pequdei, 4a-​b; Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5699–​5700, pt. 2, pp. 51–​52; Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Liqquṭei Siḥot, vol. 19 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2000), p. 190. On the distinction between the concealment that is in existence and the concealment that is not in existence, see Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5657 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2018), p. 209; idem, Yom Ṭov shel Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 5666, revised edition (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2010), pp. 107–​108; idem, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5679, p. 325; Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn, Sefer ha-​Ma’amarim 5692–​5693 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2004), p. 343; Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Sefer ha-​ Ma’amarim Meluqaṭ, 4 vols. (Brooklyn: Vaad Hanochos BLahak, 2002), 1: 33, and 3: 320–​ 321. The new Torah, which will be revealed in the messianic future by God and not by a human being—​according to the rabbinic paraphrase of Isaiah 51:4 as torah ḥadashah me-​ itti teṣe (see Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 364 n. 44)—​is hidden in scripture in the form of the concealment that has no existence and thus is not apposite to disclosure. See Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwa‘aduyyot 5751, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1993), p. 280. On the dual nature of the light that is before the ṣimṣum as the dissemination of the light or the light that is apposite for disclosure and the light contained in the essence or the light that is not apposite for disclosure, see Menaḥem Mendel

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infinite is the object of the jouissance that characterizes the primal theopoiesis of Ein Sof, the yearning of the boundless will to expand, a yearning that cannot be effectuated without a spatial boundary in which the bestowal can be contained. In the absence of an autonomous female that is truly other to the male, the erotic arousal—​typically provoked by the stimulation of the female waters from below—​comes about through self-​contemplation impelled by the urge to procreate by inseminating the other. The narcissistic underpinning of this imaginal configuration is corroborated by Eliashiv’s quip, paraphrasing the depiction of ṣimṣum in Shabbetai Shefṭel Horowitz,69 “the movement [ha-​tenu‘ah] that is in the jouissance [be-​ sha‘ashu‘a] is the aspect of the constriction from himself to himself [bi-​veḥinat ṣimṣum me-​aṣmo el aṣmo].”70 The narcissistic implication of the locution me-​aṣmo el aṣmo is made more explicit in the following passage: “Therefore, the inclination of everyone is to have pleasure from what is one’s own, and a person is close to himself, for there is no greater unity than from himself to himself.”71 It is reasonable to propose that, for Eliashiv, the psychological assessment is the other side of the theosophic coin, and hence the pleasure associated with Ein Sof must be understood analogously as the love of self. The contours of selfhood with respect to infinity, of course, should not be understood in the conventional sense of egological subjectivity. With respect to the nothingness of Ein Sof, the individuation of self can be described as the compression of the totality in the infinitesimal point that displays no punctiform extensionality, the point that integrates everything within itself amorphously and in relation to which absolute contraction and absolute expansion are equivalent. Through the self-​ reflection of the jouissance of infinitivity, language assumes the form of the garment (malbush) of the name yhwh and the being Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwa‘aduyyot 5713, vol. 3 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 1998), p. 7. See also Schneersohn, Be-​Sha‘ah she-​Hiqdimu 5672, pp. 1023–​ 1024, 1282–​ 1283; Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, Torat Menaḥem: Hitwa‘aduyyot 5729, vol. 2 (Brooklyn: Lahak Hanochos, 2014), pp. 175–​176. 69 Shabbetai Shefṭel Horowitz, Shefa Ṭal (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​Sefarim, 2005), 3:5, p. 180, writes about the infinite “constricting himself in the midst of his essence, as it were, from himself to himself” (ṣimṣem aṣmo be-​tokh aṣmuto kivyakhol me-​aṣmo el aṣmo). See ibid, 3:5, pp. 184, 185; 3:7, p. 201; 3:8, p. 206; 6:1, pp. 281, 282, 283, 284; 6:6, p. 316. Compare the detailed analysis of this motif in Bracha Sack, Shomer ha-​Pardes: The Kabbalist Rabbi Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz of Prague (Beer-​Sheva: Ben-​Gurion University Press, 2002), pp. 119-​136 (Hebrew). 70 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 126. See ibid., pp. 128, 129, 130. 71 Ibid., p. 54.

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of nothing is incarnate in the nothing of being.72 The garment is given the name Orphaniel—​both have the numeric value of 378—​because it is made from the light of the face of the divine (or penei el) and hence gazing on the garment is akin to looking at an image that mirrors the face—​indeed, the other vis-​à-​vis the one in relation to which there can be no other is here construed as a mirror that mirrors the mirror of the mirror of what cannot be mirrored.73 From a gender perspective, the feminine element of malkhut de-​ein sof is not differentiated from the completely masculine infinite. Interestingly, Eliashiv applies this principle of narcissism to God’s creation of the human with free will to choose between good and evil,74 and even more remarkably, he utilizes the same idea to describe the striving on the part of all creation—​particularly the human being whose ideal status is embodied in the ontic facticity of the Jewish people—​to be unified with the incomposite essence and oneness of Ein Sof. His own words are worthy of citation: It is natural that everyone will love and have pleasure with what is essentially his own, for what is his own self is more endearing to him since everyone is close to oneself [de-​khol eḥad qarov eṣel aṣmo]. It is also the case that only on account of the force of unity [koaḥ ha-​aḥdut] that is innate in creation that everyone is drawn after its very essence, for there is no greater unity (in the force of unity innate in created beings other than) from himself to himself. Hence, it is not possible to arrive at the limit of 72 73

Ibid., pp. 160–​161. Ibid., p. 163. The numerical equivalence of ḥashmal and Orphaniel is found in older sources. See The Commentaries to Ezekiel’s Chariot of R. Eleazar of Worms and of R. Jacob ben Jacob ha-​Kohen, edited and introduced by Asi Farber-​Ginat and Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), p. 58 (Hebrew). Elsewhere we find the numerological equivalence of malbush and ḥashmal. See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 173–​179. It is noteworthy that Eliashiv ends this discussion with a citation from a manuscript of Eleazar of Worms reporting the experience of Judah the Pious commenting on the splendor of the ḥashmal and the radiance caused by the sunlight hitting the plate filled with water and oil. The reference is to a passage from Eleazar’s Perush ha-​Merkavah, translated and analyzed in Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 266–​267. The text is published in The Commentaries to Ezekiel’s Chariot of R. Eleazar of Worms, p. 80. On the numerical equivalence of Orphaniel, malbush, and ḥashmal, see Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 11a; Natan Shapira, Maḥberet ha-​Qodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-​ Sefarim, 2005), Sha‘ar Ro’sh Ḥodesh, p. 102; and Tiqqunei Shabbat, included in Bachrach, Emeq ha-​Melekh, p. 1098. On the identification of Orphaniel and ḥashmal, see Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 24:2, p. 397; Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 28c; Bachrach, Emeq ha-​Melekh, 14:152, p. 750; 17:11, p. 1008. 74 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 214.

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the pleasure of the goodness of the unity if it is not from his power itself, and he will draw forth and come close from himself to himself until the root of the inner point [shoresh ha-​nequddah ha-​penimit] that is in him, which is from the kingship of emanation [malkhut de-​aṣilut]. So it is all the way above [lema‘lah lema‘lah] until the incomposite essence, which is his incomposite oneness, blessed be his name, and understand all this well.75 Unio mystica is explicable experientially on the basis of the meontological presumption of the hidden oneness (aḥdut ha-​ne‘elamah) that is the source of all being. A person’s wish to be incorporated in the incomposite essence of infinity stems from the longing (teshuqah) to appropriate what is discernible as part of himself—​“there is no greater unity than from himself to himself” (ein aḥdut yoter me-​aṣmo el aṣmo).76 In some sense, this is evocative of the Freudian view—​informed by his dialogue with Romain Rolland—​of the oceanic feeling of unitive mysticism as a regression to primary narcissism.77 Rather than viewing the self egoistically, however, it would be better construed as the inner point hankering to be integrated in the polyontological indifference of the hidden oneness of the root of existence (shoresh ha-​meṣi’ut).78 The mystical goal—​formulated in terms of the macrocosm-​microcosm isomorphism spawned by the Delphic maxim as it evolved in medieval Islamic and Jewish sources, to know oneself is to know the Lord or the oneness of being79—​emulates the status of the infinite inasmuch as it is a narcissism devoid of egocentricity; abnegation of self is the mark of self-​affirmation, 75 76 77

Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 47–​48. Ibid., pt. 2, p. 207. William P. Parsons, “The Oceanic Feeling Revisited,” Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 501–​ 523; idem, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 35–​73; Dan Merkur, Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 1–​30. See also Wolfson, Language, p. 550 n. 72. 78 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, pp. 145–​146. 79 Binyamin Abrahamov, Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-​Ḥikam: An Annotated Translation of ‘The Bezels of Wisdom’ (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 37: “For this reason, the Prophet connected knowledge of the Real with knowledge of the self (or soul) saying: ‘Whoever knows himself (or his soul) knows his Lord’ (man ‘arafa nafsahu ‘arafa rabbahu). And God said: ‘We shall show them Our signs on the horizons,’ meaning the outside world, ‘and in themselves (or in their souls),’ meaning the inside world, ‘until it becomes evident to them,’ meaning to the observer, ‘that He is the Real’ (Qur’ān 41:53), in that you are His form, and He is your spirit. You relate to Him, as your bodily form relates to you, and He relates to you as the spirit that governs the form of your body.” Compare Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, p. 385: “Whoever recognizes one’s self, recognizes one’s

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the nondual self that is divested of self is the self with which the self wants to merge, and thus it has little to do with the pursuit of gratification of one’s own personal needs or desires. The self of mystical union is attained by ascetic renunciation, the shedding of self-​indulgence and self-​satisfaction.80 When it

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Lord. Whoever recognizes [in the word Allāh] the second lām recognizes the alif. He made your self a pointer to and proof of yourself, and then He made your being a pointer to you as a pointer to Him, with regard to you who are distant. The creature recognizing itself is prior to its recognizing its Lord. Then after that, you disappear from your ma‘rifah of yourself, as the intent was that you recognize your Lord” (emphasis in original). On this ḥadīth qudsi, the sacred tradition attributed to the prophet, see Ibn al-​‘Arabī, Know Yourself. Especially noteworthy is the professed criticism on pp. 21–​24 of the Ṣūfi ideal of passing away (fanā’) and the passing away of passing away (fanā’ al-​fanā’) as “an error and misconception,” which is redolent with the idea of biṭṭul ha-​yesh in later Ḥasidism, an annihilation of existence that likewise is meant to affirm that there is no self that is other than the divine: “The knowledge of God does not require the passing away of existence or the passing away of that passing away because things have no existence and what does not exist cannot pass away. Passing away implies the prior existence of the thing that passes away. If you know yourself without existing or passing away, then you know God, and if not, then not. … Because whoever accepts that there could be any being other than Him, yet subsisting through Him and in Him, then passing away in successive stages of passing away and passing away of passing away—​which is polytheism upon polytheism and not knowledge of the self at all—​is a polytheist [who believes in many gods] and does not know God or themselves.” And ibid., pp. 26–​27: “When this secret is revealed to you, you will know that you are not other than God but that you yourself are the object of your quest. You do not need to get rid of your self. You have not ceased, nor will you cease, to exist, without time and without moments. … You will see His attributes as your attributes, your exterior as His exterior, your interior as His interior, your first as His first and your last as His last, without any doubt or uncertainty. You will see your attributes to be His attributes and your essence to be His essence, without you becoming Him and without Him becoming you in the least degree.” Compare the poetic account of mystical union, ibid., p. 51: “I knew the Lord through the Lord without doubt or uncertainty. /​My essence is really His essence with lack or imperfection. /​There is no otherness between them and my self is the place where the invisible appears. /​Since I have known myself without mixture or blemish, I have reached union with my beloved without distance or closeness. /​I received a gift overflowing without any giving or intermingling. /​My self did not vanish in Him nor does the one who vanished remain.” See William C. Chittick, “Die Seele als Spiegelbild Gottes,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 3, 2002. For a more detailed study of this motif, see “The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism” in Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 1–​40. On the narcissistic implications of the kabbalistic myth of sha‘ashu‘a, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 272–​288. Compare the description of Heinz Kohut’s cosmic narcissism in Parsons, The Enigma, pp. 163–​164: “Kohut agreed that the mother-​child relation genetically predetermined cosmic narcissism. However, he insisted that the latter was much more than the preservation of the pre-​Oedipal feeling of unity. It signified the denouement of an existential process that consisted in a gradual decathexis of the individual self to participation in ‘supraindividual ideals and the world with which one identifies.’ One

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comes to the matter of gender, however, the traditional kabbalistic texts do not exhibit a conflict between the patriarchy of narcissism and the mysticism of the feminine.81 On the contrary, the phallocentric hegemony is preserved in the mythical doctrines of sha‘ashu’a and ṣimṣum. The withdrawal of the light enables the creation of a place for the worlds that are supposedly other in relation to the infinite.82 Insofar as the incitement to bestow comes from himself to himself,83 we can say in a Lacanian fashion—​at least in accord with one way to interpret his thought—​that the other is naught but a projection of the self, an outwardization of the inward impulse to extend phallically into a vessel that is fitting to receive the seminal

lived sub specie aeternitas without elation or anxiety, bathed in a continual communion with a contentless and supraordinate Self. … Through mystical experience, introspection, renunciation, and what Rolland called the ‘blows of life,’ one gradually decathects the self, displacing the locus of identity from self to a Self conceived of as supraordinate but contentless.” On Kohut’s cosmic narcissism, see also John Fiscalini, “Interpersonal Relations and the Problem of Narcissism,” in Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self, edited by John Fiscalini and Alan L. Grey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 53–​87, and in the same volume, idem, “The Psychoanalysis of Narcissism: An Interpersonal View,” pp. 318–​348; Merkur, Explorations, pp. 189–​203. 81 As we find, for example, in Kathleen Lyons, Mysticism and Narcissism: A Personal Reflection on Changes in Theology during My Life as a Cenacle Nun (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Lyons argues that Christian life has been marked by a tension between the narcissism of patriarchy and the mysticism of the feminine. The reclaiming of the latter provides the basis for a relational theology that is a corrective to the phallocentric refusal or inability to relate to the other. In the kabbalistic material, I have not ascertained such an opposition. The overturning of the gender hierarchy, such that the feminine capacity to receive is accorded a higher status than the masculine potency to bestow, is still framed within the phallocentric worldview. On mysticism and narcissism, compare Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the love of man and the love of God in Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 123–​134, and see the comments regarding feminine versus masculine narcissism, ibid., p. 320 n. 57. Also pertinent is the study by Jean-​Jacques Hamm, “Egotism and Narcissism: Avatars of the Masculine Imagery in Nineteenth-​Century French Literature,” in Echoes of Narcissus, edited by Lieve Spaas, associate editor Trista Selous (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 77–​86. For a different approach to the relation of the mystical and the narcissistic, see David A. Salomon, “Forging a New Identity: Narcissism and Imagination in the Mysticism of Ignatius Loyola,” Christianity and Literature 47 (1998): 195–​212. 82 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 130, 134. 83 Based on the language of the Shefa Ṭal cited above in n. 69, Shmuel Toledano, Sefer Mavo le-​Limmud ha-​Qabbalah, pt. 2, 1:1, p. 2, coined the expression it‘aruta me-​aṣmo le-​aṣmo. The autoerotic nature of sha‘ashu‘a is accentuated in the language of Toledano, op. cit., p. 1, “he took delight, as it were, from himself to himself” (hishta‘ashe‘a kivyakhol me-​aṣmo el aṣmo).

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discharge.84 The gynocentric potency, on this score, is an element of the androcentric narrative: the will to govern or to rule the other is hidden like a point in the pointlessness of the all-​inclusive infinite, or in the notorious language in the beginning of the zoharic explication of the first verse of Genesis, be-​reish hurmenuta de-​malka.85 The identification of malkhut de-​ein sof as the will of the melekh portends the ontologically subservient status of the feminine as the element that incarnates the mystery of the not-​other willing its own other, the 84

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I will not restate here the correspondence between kabbalistic speculation and the Lacanian interpretation of the other, specifically as it relates to his notion of feminine jouissance. For previous discussion of this subject, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Phallic Jewissance and the Pleasure of No Pleasure,” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-​Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, Moulie Vidas, in collaboration with James Adam Redfield (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 295, 325–​332. Lacan’s relationship to kabbalah is explored in the study of Gérard Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan: A Preliminary Study,” Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 201–​216, esp. 203–​204. Lacan’s attitude to Judaism is also discussed in idem, Lacan et le judaïsme précédé de Les Sources talmudiques de la psychanalyse, 3e edition (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer,, 1996), pp. 283–​304. Both of Haddad’s works were previously mentioned in Wolfson, “Phallic Jewissance,” p. 325 n. 118. On the utilization of the Lacanian symbol of the phallus as that which must be veiled and the idea of jouissance of la femme to illumine the phallomorphic import of the ascetic eroticism of kabbalistic esotericism, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 128–​136, 269, 278–​279, and especially the text of Lacan cited on p. 482 n. 119. Affinities between Lacan and kabbalah—​ related specifically to the theorizing about the unconscious element of consciousness, the development of the ego, desire, the pre-​linguistic notion of the real and language—​ have been noted by Sanford L. Drob, Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought (Northvale: J. Aronson, 2000), pp. 238, 274-​277; idem, Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialogue (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 96–​98, 100, 115, 245; idem, Archetype, pp. 328, 349–​350. And see, more recently, Agata Bielik-​Robson, “‘Solid Hatred Addressed to Being’: Lacan’s Gnostic Uses of Judaism,” in Esoteric Lacan, edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), pp. 15–​46, esp. 27–​31, and in the same volume the study by Bruce Rosenstock, “Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion, and the Inverted Kabbalah,” pp. 77–​96. My work on Lacan is cited by Rosenstock but it was apparently unknown to Bielik-​Robson. The scholarly literature on Lacan’s psychoanalytic speculation on the other is enormous and thus I will mention here only a small sample of pertinent studies: Paul-​Laurent Assoun, “The Subject and the Other in Levinas and Lacan,” in Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, edited by Sarah Harasym (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 79–​101; Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2007); Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); idem, Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Regarding the Lacanian principles and the study of mysticism, see the critical assessment of Lacan in Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 146–​170. Zohar 1:15a.

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aspect of what is external to that of which there can be nothing external, the absolute convexity of the absolute concavity to which I previously referred, the place that arises from the withdrawal of the essential incompositeness from itself to itself in order to create the trace (reshimu) of light in the plenitudinal void (ḥalal) depleted of its light. It may be useful to cast the matter in terms of Hegel’s discussion of the whole in relation to the many with which it is not connected: if the absolute is “equal to what it negates from itself,” then it “is in truth non-​excluding.”86 Put differently, the negative is excluded from the positive in which it is included as the other included in the self-​subsisting being from which it is excluded. The following Hegelian depiction of the principle of the ground seems quite germane to depict the differentiation of the indifferent as it pertains to malkhut de-​ein sof: “The determinate is, then, simply the other of itself, or one with its contrary; and this unity alone is its in-​itself or its ground: as much that into which it returns as that from which it departs; that is, that wherein it sublates itself, and that which it is, as a self-​equivalent determinacy. … As this self-​equivalent determinacy it becomes its contrary.”87 Insofar as the determinacy and its opposite are both begotten out of the identical ground, we must infer that “the ground confronts itself, makes itself into one side and stands opposite itself as its own contrary. Determinacy as indifferent is called ‘ground’—​ground of itself, insofar as it appears in the differentiation. And again it is the ground as this unity of the determinacy posited differentially—​[as this unity of] it as that against which it is differentiated, or as the opposite of itself; hence it is that in which it sublates itself.”88 Through his dialectical logic, Hegel attempts to salvage the sense of alterity by speaking of the determinacy being posited differentially—​the sublation of indifference that yields the differentiation of one thing and its opposite—​but in the final analysis, the otherness of the other is severely compromised by the fact that the selfsame ground produces the other by confronting itself. Indeed, it does not seem feasible to argue that something that issues from the ground can stand opposite the ground if what is contrary to the ground is in fact an aspect of the ground. Can we speak of a

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Jena System, 1804–​5: Logic and Metaphysics, translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni, introduction and explanatory notes by H. S. Harris (Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1986), p. 17. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 141. For a more extensive discussion of Hegel and Lurianic kabbalah, see Drob, Kabbalistic Metaphors, pp. 185–​240, and consider especially the discussion on the significance of negation on pp. 202–​206. See also the exploration of the Hegelian dialectic in Drob, Archetype, pp. 124–​181, 374–​378.

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not-​I that is not comprised within the absolute I of consciousness, an unknowing of the other that is not implied in the self-​knowing of the same?89 Luria and his followers were caught in this very dilemma, related to what is perhaps the consummate paradox of kabbalistic theosophy, the positioning of the demarcating point in the infinitude that defies all demarcation.90 This point—​identified by a plethora of other images, as we have seen, including the name, the Torah, the garment, and the kingship of the infinite—​is the quality of judgment (din) or severity (gevurah) by which the limitlessly expanding light is delimited.91 On the exoteric plane, the contraction/​withdrawal of the

89

Schelling struggled with the same speculative problem, and in some sense, his positing of indifference in the nonground of the Godhead may demonstrate even more affinity with the kabbalistic approach, especially since he embraced the idea of the primal contraction as the beginning of everything, an idea that resonates with the myth of ṣimṣum. See the numerous comments on Schelling’s views, which includes references in the accompanying notes to other scholars, in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 8, 18–​19 n. 40, 21 n. 85, 26–​27 n. 118,104–​105, 167–​168, 170–​172, 190 n. 249, 193–​194 n. 279, 203–​211, 213–​214, 220–​221, 237 nn. 71 and 73, 238 n. 84, 239 nn. 105 and 106, 239–​240 n. 109, 240 n. 114, 241–​243 n. 133, 251–​252 n. 188, 252 n. 190, 282, 297–​298 n. 227. With regard to this dimension of Schelling’s thought, we may also assume the impact of the theosophy of Jacob Böhme, which may have independently been influenced by kabbalistic ideas. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Holy Cabala of Changes: Jacob Böhme and Jewish Esotericism,” Aries—​Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 18 (2018): 21–​53, esp. 35–​47; Gerald Necker, “‘Out of Himself, to Himself’: The Kabbalah of Jacob Böhme,” in Jacob Böhme and His World, edited by Bo Andersson, Lucinda Martin, Leigh T.I. Penman, Andrew Weeks (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 197–​220, esp. 202–​212. 90 For a philosophical elaboration of the correlativity of the self-​same, and particularly as it relates to the theme of gender, see Wolfson, “Phallic Jewissance,” pp. 295–​313. 91 Graf, Wayaqhel Moshe, p. 40. A perceptive summation of the kabbalistic teaching was offered by Erich Neumann, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, vol. 2: Hasidism, edited by Ann Conrad Lammers, translated by Mark Kyburz and Ann Conrad Lammers (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 29–​31: “Here emerges the deeper meaning of the fact that the tzimtzum is also associated with the characteristics of Din (judgment). Being negatively limiting, it thus stands in opposition to the limitless, spreading inflow and outflow of Hesed, grace. For this saying also holds true for the tzimtzum: determinatio est negatio. … The attribute Din (judgment), as a characteristic of God and of the structure of the world, means intensity and the feminine, in contrast with Hesed, an extensional, ‘masculine’ characteristic. Through this character of Din, negativity becomes visible as a world-​constituting quality. The existence of the ‘vessel,’ the ‘measure,’ that is, creation in the light of the tzimtzum, must also be understood in its negativity, and for that reason limitation, as the setting of boundaries and the confining of overflow, is associated in principle with Din, judgment.” On the possibility that the dictum omnis determinatio est negatio, attributed to Spinoza by Hegel, was a response to the Lurianic doctrine of the self-​limitation of the infinite, see Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’: Determination, Negation, and Self-​Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel,”

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light of Ein Sof is to create an idealized space for the formation of the worlds that are allegedly independent of the all-​encompassing infinite. In Eliashiv’s formulation: The Ein Sof, which is simple in ultimate simplicity [pashuṭ be-​takhlit ha-​ peshiṭut], in the simple unity [be-​aḥdut ha-​peshuṭah] without boundary in Spinoza and German Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 193 n. 61. For an extensive analysis of the axiom, see Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, translated by Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp. 113–​213; Russel Newstadt, “Omnis Determinatio est Negatio: A Genealogy and Defense of the Hegelian Conception of Negation,” PhD dissertation, Loyola University 2015; and see the brief remarks in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 237 n. 71. The related expression determinatio negatio est is used by Spinoza in a letter to Jarig Jelles, written on June 2, 1674. See The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University of Press, 1985–​2016), 2:406–​407 (letter 50): “As for the shape being a negation, and not something positive, it’s manifest that matter as a whole, considered without limitation, can have no shape, and that shape pertains only to finite and determinate bodies. For whoever says that he conceives a shape indicates nothing by this except that he conceives a determinate thing, and how it is determinate. So this determination does not pertain to the thing according to its being, but on the contrary, it is its non-​being. Therefore, because the shape is nothing but a determination, and a determination is a negation, as they say, it can’t be anything but a negation.” The text is cited in Miquel Beltrán, “Impronta del acosmismo luriánico en la Ethica de Spinoza,” Revista de Filosofia 40 no. 2 (2015): 64 n. 6; idem, The Influence, p. 372 n. 51. Beltrán, “Impronta,” pp. 65–​71, discusses the doctrine of ṣimṣum in Abraham Cohen de Herrera and Spinoza, a topic elaborated in idem, The Influence, pp. 170–​182, 217–​218, 328–​330, 331–​349, 372–​375, 389–​390. See also Johan Aanen, “The Kabbalistic Sources of Spinoza,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 24 (2016): 297–​ 298. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Spinoza and the Kabbalah: From the Gate of Heaven to the Field of Holy Apples,” to appear in Early Modern Philosophy and the Kabbalah, edited by Cristina Ciucu, argues that a critique of the Lurianic doctrine of ṣimṣum is discernible in the sixth axiom in what is known as the First Appendix to the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-​Being (Korte Verhanedling van God, de Mensch, en deszelvs Welstandn), in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 1:151: “What is a cause of itself could not possibly have limited itself.” Commenting on this passage, Melamed writes, “Arguably the particular target of axiom 6 is the Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum, or divine self-​limitation. According to this doctrine, the Ein-​Sof (the Infinite) limited itself before creation in order to make it possible for something that is not Ein-​Sof to exist. … I suspect, though at this stage I cannot prove, that the sixth axiom of KV-​A1 was Spinoza’s own contribution to the then ongoing debate on the proper interpretation of the doctrine of the zimzum, i.e., that Spinoza—​just like Herrera—​rejected the notion of divine contraction or self-​limitation.” On the possible residual of kabbalistic motifs in Spinoza, see also Warren Montag, “‘That Hebrew Word’: Spinoza and the Concept of the Shekhinah,” in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 131–​144; Yitzhak Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 25 n. 73, 40 n. 123, 64.

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or end, has no name at all, for every name instructs about the aspect of boundary and measure that is circumscribed by this name, but the simple unity has no beginning and no end, and it is without time, no commencement and no termination. Thus, it is impossible to envision it or to constrict it in any name or word, and it is hidden in the ultimate hiddenness. In order to reveal some disclosure of the light of his holiness, blessed be his name—​for just as he has no limit, he also has a force that is limited [koaḥ bi-​gevul], as the sublimity of the level of Ein Sof is such that no matter is too wondrous for him92—​he constricted his light [ṣimṣem et oro] and made a place [maqom], which is the force of possibility [koaḥ efsharut], to bring forth many worlds and to be revealed in them.93 Utilizing Azriel of Gerona’s depiction of the sefirot as the “limited force that is unlimited” (koaḥ bi-​gevul mi-​beli gevul),94 Eliashiv maintains that the force that is limited is a quality of the limitlessness of Ein Sof. As he puts it in another context, “the boundary that is without boundary [ha-​gevul mi-​bilti gevul] is merely the emanation from concealment to disclosure, and it is evident that the concealment and disclosure are not antinomies, but they are in one subject.”95 According to the conventional logic of the excluded middle and the principle of noncontradiction, concealment and disclosure would indeed be antinomical; however, the kabbalistic doctrine of the sefirotic emanations defies this logic, and this is so whether the sefirot are viewed as identical to the essence (aṣmut) of the infinite or as vessels/​instruments (kelim) through which the light of the infinite is diffused.96 In either case, we cannot escape the paradox of the limitless assuming the form of the limited, a paradox that was likely bolstered by the description of the sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, “their measure is ten without end” (middatan eser she-​ein lahen sof)97—​whatever the original intent of this statement, medieval kabbalists understood it as insinuating that the sefirot are simultaneously limited and unlimited. Pursuant to the paradox of two antinomies existing in one subject (shenei hafakhim be-​nose eḥad), the 92 Based on Jeremiah 32:17. 93 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 222. 94 Azriel of Gerona, Be’ur Eser Sefirot, in Ma‘yan Moshe, edited by Moshe Schatz (Jerusalem, 2011), p. 85. See the discussion of Azriel’s language in Eliashiv’s letter in Ma‘yan Moshe, p. 264. Compare as well Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 217. 95 From a letter of Eliashiv printed in Ma‘yan Moshe, p. 238. 96 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 141–​144. 97 A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation and Text-​ Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 76, § 7, and see the comments of Hayman, p. 71 n. 3.

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opposition of hidden and revealed is neutralized, since the hidden cannot be revealed unless it is revealed as hidden, or in the language utilized by a number of sixteenth-​century Safedian kabbalists, concealment is the cause of disclosure and disclosure the cause of concealment.98 Echoing this older idea, Eliashiv notes that concealment relates to the nameless light of Ein Sof and disclosure to the light of the potencies comprised in the Tetragrammaton, but the latter, which is the ineffable name that names the nameless, can manifest that light only to the extent that it remains unmanifest.99 The protraction, therefore, is concomitantly a retraction as there is no seeing the dim light but through the luminal darkness. Expressed phenomenologically, every showing is a nonshowing, every veiling an unveiling, every truth an uncovering of the untruth.100 98

Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 110–​117. See also Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 293; Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-​Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 111 and 273 n. 11. Idel conflates my view with that of Scholem, but there is a crucial difference that he overlooks. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 4, 17–​18 n. 37. 99 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 88. Compare Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 158. 100 In the course of several decades, I have repeatedly emphasized the dialetheic paradox of concealing and revealing as a defining aspect of kabbalistic esotericism. For the most recent analysis, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 3–​6, 157–​158, 304–​306. The position I assign to the kabbalists bears a strong resemblance to Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s view that every theophany of the unseen—​the self-​disclosure (tajallī) of the hidden essence in the manifold beings of the cosmos—​is concomitantly an occlusion. For example, see Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Meccan Revelations: Selected Texts of al-​Futûhât al-​Makkiya, under the direction of Michel Chodkiewicz, in collaboration with William C. Chittick and James W. Morris, vol. 1 (New York: Pir Press, 2002), p. 74. Interpreting the scriptural claim that God sometimes speaks “from behind a veil” (Qur’ān 42:51), Ibn al-​‘Arabī writes, “that is a divine address delivered to the [person’s] hearing and not to the heart, so that the person to whom it is delivered perceives it and then understands from that what was intended by the One Who caused him to hear it. Sometimes that happens through the forms of theophany, in which case that [particular] divine form addresses the person, and that form itself is the veil. Then [the person having this condition of spiritual insight] understands from that divine address the knowledge of what it indicates, and he knows that [this theophanic form] is a veil and that the Speaker [i.e., God] is behind that veil. Of course, not everyone who perceives a form of the divine theophany realizes that that form is God. For the person possessing this state [of spiritual insight] is only distinguished from other men by the fact that he recognizes that that form, although it is a ‘veil,’ is itself precisely God’s theophany for him.” See Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, pp. 230–​ 231; idem, The Self-​Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-​‘Arabi’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 104–​108, 120–​163; idem, “The Paradox of the Veil

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Ṣimṣum and the Literalization of the Figurative in the Figuralization of the Literal

On the more esoteric plane, the doctrine of ṣimṣum is portrayed as a catharsis of impure forces from the divine economy,101 but this, too, is based on the

in Sufism,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 1999), pp. 59–​85, esp. 71–​82. Compare the formulation of the paradoxical depiction of God in Know Yourself, pp. 18–​19: “He is the first without firstness and the last without lastness. He is the apparent without appearance and the hidden without hiddenness. I mean that He is the very existence of the letters of the names the first and the last, the apparent and the hidden. There is no first or last, apparent or hidden except Him, without the letters which form these divine names becoming Him and without Him becoming these letters. Understand this so as not to make the mistake of those who believe in incarnation. … His veil is His oneness since nothing veils Him other than Him. His own being veils Him. His being is concealed by His oneness without any condition.” The passage bears striking affinity to some of the main themes promulgated by kabbalists at the time this text was likely composed: the divine is revealed in the letters of the names through which the divine is concealed; the veil of the divine is the oneness of the being through which the divine is unveiled. The multiplicity of beings constitutes the mask by which the face of the one true being is revealed and hence the eternal assumes the form of time. See ibid., pp. 28–​30: “His veil is nothing other than His oneness and His singularity. That is why the person who has reached the essential truth is allowed to say, I am the truth or Glory to me. No one has truly reached Him, unless they see their attributes to be the attributes of God and their essence to be the essence of God, without their essence or their attributes ever entering into God or coming out of Him and without passing away in relation to God or remaining in God. They see that their self has never been their own, not that it was and then passed away. Because there is no self except His self, and there is no being except His being. This is what the Prophet was alluding to when he said, Do not curse time, because God is time, and God, who is blessed and exalted, is unblemished by any associate or equal or like. … You do not see God as having ever created anything but as being every day in a different configuration which sometimes reveals Him and sometimes conceals Him, without any condition, since He is the first and the last, the apparent and the hidden and He has knowledge of everything. He manifests Himself in His oneness and hides Himself in His singularity” (emphasis in original). For my own discussion of Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s use of the image of the veil to convey the paradox of the manifestation of the nonmanifest in the nonmanifestation of the manifest, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 231–​233. See below, n. 120. 101 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), pp. 254, 263, 411 n. 55; Isaiah Tishby, The Doctrine of Evil and the ‘Kelippah’ in Lurianic Kabbalism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), pp. 22. 24–​27, 57–​58 (Hebrew). For an attempt to narrow the gap between the purported exoteric explanation of Viṭal and the esoteric explanation of Ibn Ṭabul, see Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” pp. 120–​135. The Lurianic emphasis on the catharsis of impurity from the infinite builds on earlier sources that boldly posited evil within the godhead. See Moshe Idel, “The Evil Thought of the Deity,” Tarbiz 49 (1980): 356–​364 (Hebrew); Asi Farber, “‘The Shell Precedes the Fruit’—​On the Question

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presumption that the diminution of light comes about as a result of the stimulation of the feminine judgment lodged in the masculine mercifulness of infinity. The point is made demonstrably and straightforwardly by Ḥayyim Viṭal: It follows that from the time of the beginning of the contraction of Ein Sof to make the vacant place, as was mentioned, the root of judgment began to be revealed a little, even though it is forbidden to mention the aspect of judgment except from the [world of] emanation and below, since the vessels began there to be revealed, and the essence of the contraction and the delimitation was by means of the vessels. However, with regard to the aspect of judgment that we mentioned here, it is the root of judgment, in complete concealment vis-​à-​vis infinity, wherein there is incomposite mercy. … And this is the matter concerning what [the rabbis], blessed be their memory, said that initially God, blessed be he, created the world by means of the attribute of judgment, and afterward he combined the attribute of mercy with it.102 The intention is that at the time of the making of the place by means of the contraction, it was through the attribute of judgment, and after the worlds emanated within that place, and the light of Ein Sof was garbed within them … then it was the attribute of mercy. Inasmuch as the contraction was judgment, it is referred to as damaging in order to rectify [meqalqel al menat letaqqen], for it was necessary to reveal the root of judgment primarily, since all of the intent of the emanation of the worlds was to purify the worlds … and that was the first contraction of the emanation of all the worlds.103 The gender implications are not explicitly identified by Viṭal, but it is reasonable to fill them in based on standard kabbalistic symbolism, which is quite uniform and not in the least ambivalent: the mercifulness of Ein Sof should be gendered as masculine, but that masculinity contains the potential for its opposite, the attribute of judgment. We cannot, however, speak of the aspect of judgment in relation to Ein Sof but only the root of judgment (shoresh ha-​din) through which the contraction (ṣimṣum) and delimitation (hagbalah) occurs. So overpowering is the incomposite mercy (raḥamim peshuṭim) of Ein Sof that we can merely say of this root of judgment—​the feminine enclosed within the

of the Origin of Metaphysical Evil in Early Kabbalistic Thought,” in Myth and Judaism, edited by Ḥaviva Pedaya (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1996), pp. 118–​142 (Hebrew). 102 Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 12:15, pp. 112–​113. 103 Viṭal, Mavo She‘arim, pp. 6–​7.

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male—​that it is in complete concealment vis-​à-​vis infinity (be-​he‘lem gamur be-​erekh ein sof). In the nomenclature used by Eliashiv, malkhut de-​ein sof represents the actualization of the potential for determination within the indeterminable,104 the enactment of the place of contraction (maqom ha-​ṣimṣum),105 the clearing of the self-​concealing revealing positioned in the center of the unlimited expanse of nothingness, the openness that gives shape to the shapeless and boundary to the boundless.106 Support for my conjecture may be drawn from the following comment of Eliashiv:

104 Compare Joseph Ibn Ṭabul, Derush Ḥefṣi Bah, in Masoud Elḥadad, Simḥat Kohen (Jerusalem: Makhon Or ha-​Sefer, 1978), 1a: “Know and understand that [with respect to] the supernal emanator, blessed be his name, prior to having created the lower world … he was one and his name was one [hayah hu eḥad u-​shemo eḥad]; that is, ‘he’ is his blessed self [aṣmo yitbarakh], and ‘his name’ the worlds [ha-​olamot] … and all the worlds are called ‘his name,’ for they all clothe him, the one above the other. … In the manner that his name is called the worlds, for it is garbed in them, and when the matter is contemplated, it is found that the blessed one is called his name, the Tetragrammaton, as is known, for everything is unified in relation to the name yhwh … and Malkhut, which is the garment, became the soul of all the worlds. … And all the worlds were submerged in him; that is to say, only he, blessed be he, was discernible, and his name indicated a slight disclosure [me‘aṭ gilluy], and it is the aspect of judgment, but his essence is entirely mercy, and everything was a complete unity, and everything was infinity [ha-​kol ein sof], blessed be his name.” Prior to the emanation the infinite is marked by the scriptural idiom of God and his name being one (Zechariah 14:9). From the kabbalistic perspective, the prophetic description of the eschaton is applied to the primordial state in which the name—​the Tetragrammaton—​is coiled within the nameless. Moreover, the name, which is identified as Malkhut, signifies the delimitation of the worlds subsumed in the limitlessness of infinity. Paradoxically, the aspect of Malkhut is the quality of judgment in the domain of Ein Sof that is entirely merciful. Even though it is reasonable to presume that the infinite is beyond gender dimorphism, and on occasion kabbalists explicitly articulate this view, given the ubiquitous correlation of mercy and masculinity, on the one hand, and judgment and femininity, on the other hand, we can infer from Ibn Ṭabul’s passage that Malkhut is the female potential incorporated in the male persona of Ein Sof. 105 Immanuel ben Abraham Ḥai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Ṣafed: Alei Ayin, 2010), p. 10. 106 I have deliberately characterized the kabbalistic idea of the formation of the vessel in the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the light of the infinite in Heideggerian terms, specifically, his account of the essence of truth as the openness (Offenheit) or the clearing (Lichtung) for the self-​concealing of beyng. See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​ Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 214, p. 268 (idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [ga 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), pp. 338–​339): “Openness: is that not … the emptiest of the empty? So it seems, if we try to take it, so to speak, for itself in the manner of a thing. Yet the open realm, which conceals itself at the same time that beings come to stand in it in each case (indeed not only

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Thus, the whole secret of the contraction [sod ha-​ṣimṣum] was within the light of the infinite itself [be-​tokh or ein sof aṣmo], in his middle, as is known. And the matter of his middle is, as it were, in the strength of the quality of the aspect of the infinite [be-​toqef eikhuto di-​veḥinat ein sof]. The contraction came about within his very being [hinneh bo aṣmo na‘aseh ṣimṣum], for it is his opposite, as it were, and the contraction occurred within the infinite itself and it endures within it forever, and this is, as it were, by way of two opposites in one subject. … And the force of the limit and the limitless [koaḥ ha-​gevul u-​vilti gevul] stand forever in existence together … and this is the aspect of two opposites in one subject.107 the things most proximately at hand), is in fact something like an inner recess [holhe Mitte], e.g., that of a jug. Yet it must be recognized that the inner recess is not just a haphazard emptiness which arises purely on account of the surrounding walls and which happens not to be full of ‘things.’ It is just the opposite: the inner recess itself is what determines, shapes, and bears the walling action of the walls and of their surfaces. The walls and surfaces are merely what is radiated out by that original open realm which allows its openness to come into play by summoning up, round about itself and toward itself, such-​and-​such walls (the particular form of the vessel). That is how the essential occurrence of the open realm radiates back from and in the embracing walls” (emphasis in original). Heidegger returned to the image of the jug in several lectures, most notably in “Das Ding” (1950), where based on the depiction of the jug as a vessel, he advanced a conception of thingness as the void that holds the gift of the outpouring in the twofold manner of taking and keeping—​in Buddhist terms, the suchness of the container consists of its emptiness. See Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze [ga 7] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), pp. 167–​187; idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated and introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp.165–​186. For an earlier attempt to draw parallels between this Heideggerian passage and Lurianic kabbalah, see Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” p. 154 n. 112. As I commented in that context, the vessel in Luria’s teaching is analogously characterized as the openness that encloses or the enclosure that opens, the clearing wherein the concealing is unconcealed and the unconcealing concealed. Just as Heidegger depicts the open realm as the jug whose inner core gives shape to the external boundaries within which it is circumscribed, so the vessel in kabbalistic theosophy, which is created by the withdrawal of light, is not an empty or blank nothingness but is rather the clearing that delimits the limitless and thereby provides the clearing for the concealing of the radiance of infinity that is neither resplendent nor dim. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 139. 107 Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​Kelalim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2010), pt. 1, p. 217. Eliashiv frequently returns to the paradox of shenei hafakhim be-​nose eḥad. For example, see Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​ De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 46, and Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​Kelalim, pt. 1, p. 38, where in the context of discussing the nature of the divine miracle, he asserts that the denial of the possibility of two opposites inhering in one subject on the part of the philosophers (ḥoqrim) is contradicted by the rabbis. See below, n. 122.

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The mystery of ṣimṣum underlines the paradoxical coincidence of opposites—​ limit and limitlessness—​within the one substratum that is the infinite. This is the import of the contention that the contraction takes place in the middle of the light of Ein Sof, a depiction that is patently absurd, since there can be no middle of that which has no length, width, or breadth—​the middle of that which is everywhere is nowhere. The middle, therefore, must be understood metaphorically as the khoric space—​the potency of the feminine in the world that is entirely masculine—​in which the opposites are juxtaposed in the sameness of their difference. In terms of the historical debate regarding whether ṣimṣum should be taken literally (kefshuṭo) or figuratively (derekh mashal), Eliashiv famously defended the former view against the latter, especially as it was formulated by some of the students of the Vilna Gaon, who followed the position of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto.108 This may be textually accurate, but philosophically, one must ponder what it means to speak of Ein Sof literally withdrawing or contracting its light. Assuredly, the only way to make sense of this is to discern that in the domain of the infinite, the literal cannot be anything but figurative; that is, with respect to the metaontological reality of Ein Sof—​the thusness of being that is prior to the binary partition into being and nonbeing—​something is literally true only if it is figuratively so and figuratively true only if it is literally so,109 a point that Eliashiv himself affirms on 108 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 165. On ṣimṣum in Eliashiv’s thought, see Mordechai Pachter, “The Gaon’s Kabbalah from the Perspective of Two Traditions,” in The Vilna Gaon and His Disciples, edited by Moshe Hallamish, Yosef Rivlin, and Raphael Shuchat (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2003), pp. 119–​136, esp. 124–​ 134 (Hebrew); idem, Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), pp. 136–​144; Raphael Shuchat, A World Hidden in the Dimensions of Time: The Theory of Redemption in the Writings of the Vilna Gaon Its Sources and Influence on Later Generations (Ramat Gan: Bar-​Ilan University Press, 2008), pp. 117–​ 118, and reference to other scholars cited in n. 32, 122–​123 n. 48, 123–​124, 137–​142 (Hebrew); idem, “Ṣimṣum Taken Literally—​An Investigation into the Thinking of Emanuel Ḥai Ricci and R. Solomon Eliasov,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 37 (2017), pp. 271–​301 (Hebrew); Lilach Bar-​Bettelheim, “The Concept of Zimzum in the Kabbalah of the Early Twentieth Century,” PhD dissertation, Ben-​Gurion University, 2012, pp. 97–​ 174 (Hebrew); Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm, pp. 175–​176, 183–​184, 197–​199. Concerning the Vilna’s Gaon’s interpretation of ṣimṣum and the controversy with the Ḥasidim, see Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim, pp. 11–​20; Tzvi Einfeld, The Teaching of the Gra and the Doctrine of Ḥasidism: These and Those Are the Words of the Living God (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 2010), pp. 198–​218 (Hebrew). See below, n. 115. 109 I have applied here to the debate regarding the literal versus the figurative meaning of ṣimṣum the formulation about the nontruth of truth as it pertains to language about the divine more generally in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 202, “it can be literal only as figurative and figurative only as literal, literally figurative because figuratively literal.” Regrettably,

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the basis of the following comment of the Vilna Gaon, “All that we say with respect to Adam Qadmon and [the worlds of] emanation, creation, formation, and doing, is very much in the lower worlds, for in each world there are [the worlds] of emanation, creation, formation, and doing, and all of these aspects are the backend of the backend [aḥorim de-​aḥoriyyim] and they are not glowing I inadvertently misquoted my own words in Wolfson, “Heeding,” p. 257 n. 131, in the effort to correct the reference to them in Joey Rosenfeld, “A Tribute to Rav Shlomo Elyashiv, Author of Leshem Shevo v-​Achloma: On His Ninetieth Yahrzeit,” The Seforim Blog, March 10, 2016, https://​seforimblog.com/​2016/​03/​a-​tribute-​to-​rav-​shlomo-​elyashiv-​author/​. See my discussion of the imaginal body as being positioned between the figurative and the literal in the study cited below, n. 128. For analysis of the literal versus the figurative interpretation of ṣimṣum in Ḥabad sources, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Nequddat ha-​Reshimu—​The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of the Trace: The Paradox of Ṣimṣum in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin Beit,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 30 (2013): 76–​81. The difficulty of taking literally the claim that ṣimṣum is literal is brought to light in a passage from Meir Poppers, Or Zaru‘a (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 1986), pp. 28–​ 29 (I am grateful to Jesse Barksdale for drawing my attention to this source). Commenting on the words “he constricted himself” (ṣimṣem aṣmo) used by Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:2, 11c, to describe Ein Sof, Poppers at first states that this conclusion is necessary according to reason (lefi ha-​sekhel), since there is no place outside the infinite and, therefore, we must say that the infinite created the space by withdrawing itself. However, Poppers rejects the view of the philosophers that Ein Sof is an incomposite intellect (sekhel pashuṭ) to which it would be inappropriate to attribute the acts of contracting itself and creating a place. By contrast, he is positively disposed toward the view of kabbalists that Ein Sof is a light that is limitless (or bilti ba‘al takhlit) and not an intellect as the philosophers claimed, even though we can say of this light that it is intelligible (she-​or zeh sikhli). Poppers discusses various ways to construe the materiality of the light of the infinite, including the opinion of some kabbalists that it should be compared “to the light of eye” (le-​or ha-​ayin according to ms jnul heb. 80395, fol. 34a and ms Bar-​Ilan 1164, fol. 8a, or according to ms Bar-​Ilan 1149, fol. 13b, le-​or she-​hu be-​ayin, “to the light that is in the eye,” readings that are superior to or he-​anan, the “light of the cloud,” according to the printed text), which is a “light that cannot be grasped” (or she-​eino nitpas). As Avinoam Stillman informed me, my suggestion is supported by the version of the passage preserved in the autograph of Popper’s treatise extant in MS JNUL heb. 80108, fol. 98b. What needs to be underlined is that Poppers insists on the concreteness of the light of Ein Sof, for if it is delineated as purely spiritual, then there would be no need to use parables to describe it. Hence, ṣimṣum can be understood literally (ke-​mashma‘o) only if we assume that Ein Sof is a light and not the incomposite intellect that can only be described negatively, as Maimonides taught. Despite the effort to contrast the philosophical and the kabbalistic approaches, we are left in an aporetic state not knowing how to explain the characterization of Ein Sof as light. The aporia underscores the conceptual difficulty of maintaining a sharp contrast between the literal and the figurative approaches to the myth of divine kenosis. Compare Poppers, Or Zaru‘a, p. 17: “A great principle: in every place that you find [reference to] moḥin in the words of the master, the explanation is the spirituality of the intellect [ruḥaniyyut ha-​sekhel] and not an actual brain, which is soft and spongy flesh, or the membrane or the bones of the skull.” I have slightly amended the text in accord with ms jnul heb. 80395, fol. 6a and ms Bar-​Ilan 1149, fol. 6a.

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[meṣaḥṣaḥim]. Thus, we speak by way of metaphor [derekh mashal] and there is no understanding at all.”110 There is little room for equivocation in these words: whatever we say about any of the links in the chain of being, from the primal Adam to the four worlds, is derived from our experience of the lower, dim worlds—​the posterior of the posterior—​and hence our language of necessity is parabolic in nature; we have no unmediated access to comprehend reality itself. Eliashiv’s perspective on kabbalistic theosophy conforms to the more general hermeneutic that there is no naked truth but only truth veiled in the veil of truth, which is to say, the veil of untruth.111 Commenting on the passage of the Gaon, Eliashiv takes issue with those who would interpret it as if it were promoting the idea that the language we use to discuss the divine is in any way arbitrary or inherently metaphorical, the view attributed to Luzzatto that he openly criticizes even as he admits not having studied the latter’s compositions in great detail.112 Relying on a number of other kabbalists, including Cordovero, Eliashiv insists that the sefirot are “subtle lights in the absolute spirituality [orot daqqim be-​takhlit ha-​ruḥaniyyut] that are not apprehended at all,” and thus it is incorrect to say they are merely an apparition (mar’eh) or an image (dimyon) seen through the visions of prophets (mar’ot ha-​nevi’im); they are rather “true and complete realities [meṣi’uyyot gemurim amitiyyim] that exist continually from the time the emanator, blessed be his name, emanated and brought them forth, and

110 Elijah ben Solomon, The Commentary of the Gaon Rabbi Elijah of Vilna to Sifra di-​Zeni‘uta, edited by Bezalel Naor (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 137 (Hebrew). The view that kabbalistic symbolism, including the signature doctrines of Lurianic theosophy such as ṣimṣum, is not to be taken literally but as metaphor (mashal), albeit a metaphor describing that which is ontically real, was affirmed by a number of kabbalists. Compare Ergas, Shomer Emunim, 1:25, pp. 45–​48; Ḥayyim Ickovits, Nefesh ha-​Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua Lipschitz (Jerusalem, 2016), 3:7, p. 225; Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, 3a; Isaac Kahana, Toledot Yiṣḥaq, Second part: vol. 1 (New York: Makhon HaGra, 2003), pp. 19–​21, idem, Toledot Yiṣḥaq, Second part: vol. 2 (New York: Makhon HaGra, 2009), p. 14, where the author reports having heard from his teacher, Yiṣḥaq Eizik Ḥaver Wildmann, who heard from Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov, who received from the Vilna Gaon, that all the words of Luria are in the aspect of a parable (beḥinat mashal). The comment is cited in Ḥayyim Friedlander’s introduction to Yiṣḥaq Eizik Ḥaver Wildmann, Magen we-​Ṣinnah (Benei Beraq: Neṣaḥ, 1985), p. 6. 111 Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5, 68, 305–​306, and see the passage from Eviatar Shulman concerning the mediated state of mindfulness in Buddhist meditation cited in this volume, ch. 1 n. 6. 112 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 162–​163. Eliashiv’s criticism of Luzzatto is discussed by Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm, pp. 328–​331.

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was garbed and unified in them.”113 On the one hand, Eliashiv is committed to the idea—​cited in the name of the zoharic compilation—​that there is a structural homology between the upper and lower worlds such that everything in the latter is an image of the former, and vice-​versa, but, on the other hand, he stipulates that since there is no likeness between the upper and the lower worlds, no being in the latter has the capacity to comprehend or to describe the former without the cloak of metaphoricity.114 Eliashiv admits, moreover, that there is a precipitous drop in competence from the time of Moses to the current epoch, but the symbolic terminology still imbibes the authority of an unbroken tradition. The intent of the Gaon’s remark, therefore, “is not related to speech [dibbur] and language [lashon] but exclusively to comprehension [hassagah]. All of his words are only to establish in our hearts that we do not apprehend anything, and in order to distance and to remove every thought of an image of a shape [demut to’ar] or form [ṣiyyur], God forbid. Thus, he said that whatever we grasp of these matters is only in the backend of the backend and they do not glimmer, and our comprehension in all of these words and expressions is far from their truth, for we do not understand anything to the point that according to our comprehension all of their words are only in the aspect of a metaphor.”115 Eliashiv’s motivation to contrast the qualifications of past generations and those in the present is evidently a strategy to avoid epistemological relativism and linguistic nominalism. I note, parenthetically, that this view clashes in part with his assertion that the disclosure of esoteric wisdom (ḥokhmat

113 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 163. See Erez Peleg, “More About Rabbi Shlomo Eliyashov’s Controversy Against ‘The Kabbalists in our Day’,” Da‘at 79–​80 (2015): 185–​192, and esp. 188 n. 19 (Hebrew). 114 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 161–​162. 115 Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​ Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​ Be’urim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2011), pt. 1, p. 17. For an extensive discussion of the role of metaphor in Eliashiv, as it relates in particular to the thought of Luzzatto, see Eliezer Baumgarten, “History and Historiosophy in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Elyashov,” ma thesis, Ben-​Gurion University, 2006, pp. 25–​41 (Hebrew). On the mashal and the nimshal in Luzzatto, see Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of the Storm, pp. 174–​185. See also Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 120–​122. On the figurative interpretation of Lurianic kabbalah by the Vilna Gaon and his school, compare Alan Brill, “The Mystical Path of the Vilna Gaon,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 3 (1993): 134. I concur with the observation of Brill, p. 134 n. 10, “R. Eliashiv acknowledges that even though zimzum is literal, it is impossible to grasp God’s essence, therefore it is only an analogy (mashal) for us.” See also Raphael Shuchat, “The Vilna Gaon’s Commentary to Mishnat Ḥasidim: The Mashal and the Nimshal in Lurianic Works,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 3 (1998): 265–​302, esp. 267–​274 (Hebrew).

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ha-​nistar) below is greater in the present than in the past due to an augmentation of the light of the infinite in the realm of emanation,116 an idea that is related even more specifically to the historical assertion that from the time of the sixteenth century the dissemination of kabbalistic texts has been intensified in unprecedented ways commensurate to the amplified revelation of that light in the material world stimulated theoretically by the messianic rectification (tiqqun) and practically by the technological revolution of the printing press.117 Bracketing this inconsistency, I want to focus on the implication that, for Eliashiv, there is the possibility that the masters of previous generations were capable of comprehending the divine without the use of figurative language. The task of the critical scholar is to inquire about the soundness of this effort, not simply to codify it as if it were a truth beyond reproach or scrutiny. Granted that the terms used by kabbalists are not arbitrary, but can we really say they afford us direct knowledge of the divine realities? Can speaking about the unspeakable be anything but metaphorical approximation? Is it possible for anyone—​even Moses—​to flee from the predicament that the imageless can be seen only through the veil of the image? The directive of apophatic theology may be to strip the mind of all concepts and images in approaching the incorporeal and unknowable deity, but the radical shattering of all idolatry, including icons of the aniconic, does not preclude the necessity of the formless donning the form of formlessness. This ancient wisdom—​and, in my opinion, utilizing William James’s well-​known language about the mystical experience of union, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed118—​can be detected in Pico’s statement, Nulla res spiritualis descendens inferius operatur sine indumento, “Nothing spiritual, descending below, operates without a garment.”119 1 16 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 1, p. 75. 117 Ibid., p. 76. Part of the text is cited by Garb, Modern Kabbalah, p. 65, and translated into English, op. cit., p. vii. I concur with Garb’s assessment that Eliashiv’s insistence on the qualitative as well as the quantitative proliferation of the disclosure of esoteric knowledge was accelerated by the printing revolution. I would note, however, as I have consistently argued, innovation on the part of the kabbalists is linked dialetheically to their conservatism. Thus, while I accept that it is reasonable to find an historical explanation for the augmented circulation and explication of secrets at this time, I would caution against a rigid historicism that would obscure the paradox that, in my judgment, lies at the core of the kabbalistic hermeneutic. 118 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, with a foreword by Micky James and a new introduction by Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 324. 119 Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Cabalistice Numero XLVII. Secundum Secretam Doctrinam Sapientum Hebreorum Cabalistarum, Quorum Memoria sit Semper in Bonum, 28.35, in Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional

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Read Neoplatonically, this implies that spiritual entities assume corporal shape when they descend from the intelligible realm into the sensible world. From this metaphysical principle, we can further extrapolate the cognitive axiom that human beings have no experience of the immaterial except through the vestment of the material whence it follows that truth is innately parabolic and, as such, can be apprehended only through another parable.120 Eliashiv himself comes to this very conclusion. After stating that the infinite can be described by the attributes consigned to the sefirotic emanations, including especially the anthropomorphic depictions of the Shi‘ur Qomah speculation, he observes: The emanator, blessed be his name, is annulled [meshullal] of all these matters in the utmost nullification [be-​takhlit ha-​shelilah], but all of these matters verily [mammash] exist in the [world of] emanation. However, these are only attributed to the [world of] emanation by way of analogy [erekh], for it is higher than and superior to all of the reality of [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing. And there is none in all of [the worlds of] creation, formation, and doing, who can comprehend the substance and form of the [world of] emanation as it is. There is no equivalency between the [world of] emanation and the [worlds of] creation, formation, and doing except in name alone. … For all of these matters that are in the [world of] emanation are only by way of metaphor Religious and Philosophical Systems, with text, translation, and commentary by Stephen Alan Farmer (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), pp. 358–​359. 120 One can detect an intimation to this truth in the remark of Ibn al-​‘Arabī, The Openings Revealed in Makkah, p. 215: “So it is appropriate for you to thank the cloak, because it is the means to connect you to the One who is cloaking you and to the place of Return: from the cloak and from you to the One cloaking you. All will connect from their side-​roads—​so understand well what we are saying” (emphasis in original). On donning the garment of the Real (al-​ḥaqq) as adorning oneself with the character traits (takhalluq) of the divine attributes and names, see Muḥyīddīn Ibn ‘Arabī, Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries and the Rising of the Divine Lights: Mashāhid al-​asrār al-​qudsiyya wa maṭāli‘ al-​anwār al-​ ilāhiyya, translated by Cecilia Twinch and Pablo Beneito, based on the annotated critical edition by Souad Hakim, and Pablo Beneito (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2001), p. 86: “Then He said to me, ‘This is My garment. Bring it to them. Whoever puts it on is of Me and I am of him. Whoever does not put it on is not of Me and I am not of him. Throw it into the fire. If it burns, then it is My garment and if it remains intact then it is not My garment. If it burns, it is not My garment, but if it remains intact then it is My garment. Whoever puts on My garment is not of Me, and whoever leaves it is of Me.’ Non-​existence bears witness to perplexity: ‘I am God; there is no god but I.’” On takhalluq in Ibn al-​‘Arabī, see Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, pp. 283–​286. See the passages from Ibn al-​‘Arabī cited above, nn. 52 and 100.

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[be-​derekh mashal]. The import is in accord with our apprehension of these matters, for certainly there is no analogy or likeness [erekh we-​ dimyon] at all between the true reality that is in them and our comprehension and apprehension of the matter. As we wrote above from the example of the soul that is in the body, even though the soul is actually within us, we do not comprehend its substance at all. According to our comprehension, it is merely an incomposite light, but in truth, there is in it all of the specific faculties of the body. … Hence, it is evident that all the aspects of the configurations [ha-​parṣufim], and all of their matters of which we speak in the [world of] emanation, are in relation to us … only by way of metaphor exclusively, for the entirety of the emanation in relation to us is in the aspect of naught and nothing [efes wa-​ayin]. … In all of these matters themselves, there is no metaphor at all, but rather they are truly everything that is said and repeated with respect to them, everything in actuality [ha-​kol mammash] without any figurative speech [meliṣah] or another locution [lashon], and without another intention [kawwanah].121 In the conclusion of this passage, Eliashiv returns to his admonition against interpreting the descriptions of the emanations in a purely figurative manner. Indeed, he emphasizes that even the use of grossly anthropomorphic images with reference to this realm should not be taken allegorically, if doing so means denying the ontic actuality of that to which these attributes refer. And yet, he stands unmistakably in the apophatic camp by declaring that we have no positive knowledge whatsoever of these emanations—​they are like nothing in relation to us—​and hence whatever we say about them will be a matter of metaphorical confabulation. Eliashiv goes so far as to say that it is part of the laws of creation (ḥuqqei ha-​beri’ah) that it is impossible that a created being can apprehend the Creator, and this even applies to Moses who was denied a vision of the face of God when he requested to see the glory, since such a possibility would be dependent on the finite apprehending the infinite, two opposites inhering in one subject, a truth that is attainable only as unattainable.122 The wisdom of kabbalah is called “esoteric” (nistar) because its subject 1 21 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 161–​162. 122 Ibid., p. 165. Eliashiv appeals to the logic of the excluded when he discusses the status of evil and impurity in the messianic future. Rejecting the possibility that the dark is transmuted into the light or that the forbidden itself becomes permissible, which would necessitate positing two opposites in one subject, he insists that the sinister forces will be annihilated. There seems to be something of an inconsistency insofar as Eliashiv also embraces the idea of the restoration of unholiness to holiness in order to achieve the

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matter deals with the supernal realm of the emanation (aṣilut) and the worlds of the infinite light (olamot de-​or ein sof), which are hidden and concealed from everything (ne‘lam we-​nistar me-​ha-​kol), and thus beyond our ability to comprehend.123 The nature of the secret, which is proportionate to the illumination of the light of the infinite in the world of emanation, must be disseminated secretively, that is, in such a way that the secret is preserved in the exposure of its being a secret. Taking his cue from the fictional portrayal of the zoharic fraternity, Eliashiv notes that Simeon ben Yoḥai and his colleagues safeguarded the esoteric nature of the mysteries by speaking of them emblematically (derekh ḥiddah).124 This relates, first and foremost, to the depiction of the incorporeal in corporeal terms. Applying the older aggadic motif of the theophanic images (demuyot) or the epiphanic forms (dimyonot) by which God appears—​ as a warrior at the splitting of the Reed Sea, as an elder giving the Torah on Mount Sinai, or as the enthroned Ancient of Days seen by Daniel125—​Eliashiv cultivates a conception of the imaginal body to explain how the delimiting of the limitless is situated between the literal and the figurative. The sense of embodiment that is affirmed is not a material substance but is nonetheless a concrete phenomenon and not merely a figure of speech—​perhaps we might put it, reversing the distinction that arises from Husserlian phenomenology, a body without flesh.126 The body, when envisioned from the perspective of the condition that pertained prior to the transgression. The evil will be separated from the good, and all will be rectified with the exception of the serpent, which is the quintessence of impurity and apparently indestructible, at least in potential. See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, p. 116. The intricacy of this topic demands a separate treatment and cannot be pursued here in a satisfactory way. 123 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 163. 124 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 1, p. 75. On the hermeneutic principle of kabbalistic esotericism, that the secret can be disclosed only by means of the secret in order to preserve the secretive nature of the secret, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Anonymous Chapters of the Elderly Master of Secrets: New Evidence for the Early Activity of the Zoharic Circle,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 19 (2009): 152–​153, 159–​172. 125 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 28; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​ Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, p. 480; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​Kelalim, p. 2, p. 12; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 2, p. 45. For discussion and quotation of some of the key midrashic sources, see Wolfson, Through a Speculum, pp. 8–​9, 33–​41. 126 The phenomenological question, more typically, would be is there flesh without body? See Emmanuel Falque, The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates, translated by Bradley B. Onishi and Lucas McCracken (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pp. 143–​173.

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imaginal as opposed to the carnal, is not subject to the metaphysical distinction between real and imagined; rather, it occupies an intermediate space—​ the barzakh of the imaginal world (‘ālam al-​mithāl) or the world of imagination (‘ālam al-​khayāl) according to Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s mystical cosmography127—​in which the imaginary is real and the real imaginary. Like the image in a mirror, there is no reality apart from what is imagined to be real.128 To cite one other passage that exemplifies the complicated way that Eliashiv rejected the metaphorical stance attributed to Luzzatto, and yet affirmed his own version of theosophical language that is neither and therefore both literal and figurative: Indeed, when he is garbed in the emanations and constricted by them in all of their matters, it is as it is written “and through the prophets I was imaged” [u-​ve-​yad ha-​nevi’im adammeh] (Hosea 12:11). … Thus, when the blessed holy One constricts his true simplicity to be revealed to his creatures, this is what is written “and through the prophets I was imaged.” However, my intention is not that all the matters that are said in the words of the holy Zohar and the Ari, blessed be his memory, are only by way of prophetic visions [mar’ot ha-​nevu’ah], as we find in the words of some recent kabbalists129 … for God forbid that my opinion is that 127 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, pp. 14–​15, 117–​118, 125–​143, 181–​183, 204–​205; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Imago Templi and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-​Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007): 122–​123. Compare the extended study of Bashier, Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s Barzakh. One can apply to Ibn al-​‘Arabī’s understanding of barzakh the tetralemic logic of the middle way (madhyamaka) that informed the Mahāyāna Buddhist path, a logic that claims the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle, a middle that bears the paradox that it is both A and ~A because it is neither A nor ~A. See especially the passage from the Futūḥāt al-​makkiyya translated in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 118: “The barzakh is something that separates a known from an unknown, an existent from a nonexistent, a negated from an affirmed, an intelligible from a non-​intelligible. It is called barzakh as a technical term … and in itself it is intelligible, but it is only imagination. … Imagination is neither existent nor non-​existent, neither known nor unknown, neither negated nor affirmed. For example, a person perceives his form in a mirror. He knows for certain that he has perceived his form in one respect and he knows for certain that he has not perceived his form in another respect. … Hence he is neither a truth-​teller nor a liar in his words, ‘I saw my form, I did not see my form.’” 128 I have explored this theme in many of my writings, but for a relatively recent treatment, see Wolfson, “Bifurcating,” pp. 88–​95. 129 The reference here is to kabbalists who assented to Luzzatto’s interpretation of Hosea 12:11 to explain the manifestations of the divine in the sefirot as prophetic visions (mar’ot ha-​nevu’ah) that have no corresponding external reality. See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo

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the visions of the prophets were apparitions that essentially were only through images [dimyonot], and the essence of the visions was not all in the true reality. … On the contrary, all the words of the holy Zohar and the Ari, blessed be his memory, are entirely true, and they are in existence as they are written, because by means of this he, blessed be his name, is revealed in the disclosure of the name yhwh, blessed be he, whose seal is truth.130 … All the words of the holy Zohar and the Ari, blessed be his memory, are not a metaphor and symbol [mashal we-​dimyon], God forbid. Nevertheless, they do not accord with our apprehension and our comprehension, God forbid. Relative to our apprehension in all of these matters, they are in truth only the aspect of metaphor and symbol. But relative to what is attributable to the emanation itself, which is elevated and transcends every created being in all of its minutiae, all things are there veritably as they are actually written.131 On the one hand, the divine emanations as they are in themselves—​that is, qua the incomposite unity of the infinite, the inner light of the Torah (or penimit ha-​torah), the Tetragrammaton, which is garbed and contracted within them—​are not metaphorical but actually real, albeit not a physical property (tekhunah gufani) that can be described by a form (to’ar) or an image (temunah), and therefore beyond human comprehension;132 on the other hand, the emanations of the imageless emanator, the hidden roots (shorashim ne‘lamim) of all that comes to be in the lower three worlds,133 are personified necessarily through the prism of imagination and hence they rhetorically assume the character of the metaphorical tropes by which the imaginal body—​the “stature of the configuration of the anthropos” (qomat parṣuf adam)134—​is constellated. 6

Temporalization of the Spatial: Timespace as the Fourth Dimension

We may presume that the same repudiation of the bifurcation of the literal and the figurative should be applied to the paradoxical doctrine of ṣimṣum. we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 162, 164; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​ Be’urim, pt. 2, pp. 45–​46. In contrast to the view of Luzzatto, Eliashiv maintained that the verse from Hosea, as read through rabbinic eyes, intimates that the divine is seen by way of images (demuyot) that are configured in but are independent of the imagination. 130 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 55a; Yoma 69b; Sanhedrin 64a. 131 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 2, p. 45. 132 Ibid., p. 46. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., p. 45. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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For our purposes what is most pertinent to emphasize is that the spatial metaphor describing this process needs to be complemented by the temporal, for the place that emerges as a consequence of the contraction is concurrently an unravelling of the knot of the eternity of Ein Sof. We can affectively attribute to this act of kenosis the words of Heidegger, “Time becomes space. But the originary time [ursprüngliche Zeit] becomes the fore-​space [Vor-​raum] of the duration.”135 From the kabbalistic doctrine of ṣimṣum a shared insight may be deduced regarding the codependency of time and space as well as the prioritizing of the former inasmuch as the temporal duration of the infinite magnitude—​the eternality that is not the privation of time but the profusion of time before there was time, that is, the infinitude that is the deepest inflection of finitude—​creates the forespace of the multifarious worlds in the concatenation of being. The matter is explained cogently by Eliashiv: With regard to the central point that is truly in the middle of his light: the aspect of the point is attributed to the sefirah of Malkhut, for it is the main source for each sefirah and for all of existence, and thus it is called a point, for it is the source, like the seed of the fruit in relation to the fruit. The central point that is in her is on account of the aspect of the foundation that is in her, the foundation of the kingship [ha-​yesod de-​ha-​ malkhut], for this is always called the central point; the deportment of the foundation and the inner potency within it [eikhut ha-​yesod we-​khoaḥ ha-​penimi she-​bo] are from the knowledge of the central line [me-​ha-​da‘at ha-​qaw ha-​emṣa‘i]. Therefore, the foundation of the kingship is called by the name of the central point. … And this is the import here with regard to the aspect of the kingship of the infinite [ha-​malkhut de-​ein sof], and the aspect of the foundation in her is the central point of the kingship of the infinite. Thus, for us in any case, all of the contraction was only in the kingship of the infinite and in the aspect of the foundation in her.136 The quality of judgment, the catalyst that instigated the contraction and the withdrawal of the light, is located in the nucleus described as the primal feminine, the aspect of Malkhut, the potential for boundary (gevul) and measure (middah) comprised within the illimitable and immeasurable Ein Sof. The 135 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-​VI: Black Notebooks 1931–​1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 29 (emphasis in original); idem, Überlegungen II-​VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–​1938) [ga 94] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), p. 38. 136 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 1, p. 20. Compare idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 91–​92, 128–​129. Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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phallic nature of that nucleus is apparent from the emphasis on the aspect of the foundation (yesod), which is linked to the knowledge (da‘at) of the central line (qaw ha-​emṣa‘i), a symbolic reference to the masculine potency of Tif’eret, delineated as the “source of the kingship” (shoresh ha-​malkhut).137 This text is yet another proof of the thesis I have argued for the better part of the last three decades regarding the phallomorphic bias of the gender construction in the traditional kabbalah, a bias that displays an extraordinary uniformity despite the multivalency at play as well—​indeed, as I have also argued, it is the uniformity that begets the multivalency; the setting of these in opposition is a vestige of a binarian logic that the texts themselves seriously question.138 From the context it appears, more technically, that the foundation of the kingship refers to the uterus, the place of gestation, but it is also clear that this part of the female anatomy is interpreted through a phallocentric lens.139 Be that as it may, the Lurianic doctrine, elucidated by Eliashiv, pinpoints malkhut de-​ein sof as the name that was coeternal with the nameless and hence the potency through which the enfoldment of the infinite light unfolds in the labyrinth of the four worlds. 1 37 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Ḥeleq ha-​Be’urim, pt. 1, p. 20. 138 See above, n. 15. 139 Wolfson, “Divine Suffering,” p. 156 n. 128; idem, Language, pp. 77, 458 n. 241. The phallocentric bias is evident even in passages where a more positive role is accorded women. An arresting example of this phenomenon is found in the following passage from Isaac of Acre, Oṣar Ḥayyim, edited by Yehudah Ohad Turjeman (Jerusalem: Makhon Ḥakhmei Yerushalayim we-​ha-​Ma‘arav, 2020), p. 420: “With respect to two things that are to be performed by the seed of Jacob, who are the children of Israel, one for the males and the second for the females. The Shekhinah will dwell upon their souls, for the males by circumcision [milah] and for the females by ritual immersion [ṭevilah] and the one that mediates between these two is the Shekhinah. ‫ מילה מל י״ה טבילה טבל י״ה שכינה שכן י״ה‬. The man who is circumcised, Yah will come and dwell in his soul; the woman who immerses herself, Yah will come and dwell in her soul. The verse ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens’ [‫( ]מי יעלה לנו השמימה‬Deuteronomy 30:12) alludes to this, the first consonants [spell] ‫ מילה‬and the last consonants [spell] ‫יהו״ה‬. This indicates to us that the covenant of circumcision should have priority and afterward the Shekhinah will come, and the covenant is the blessing etc. All this alludes to the Diadem [ ‘‫ ]לע‬for the words covenant, blessing, and [the demonstrative pronoun] this [‫ ] ברית וברכה וזאת‬all refer to the Diadem. ‘This [‫ ]זאת‬has been my lot, for I have observed your precepts’ (Psalms 119:56). And the Diadem is the secret of the saying [‫]אימרא‬, the word [‫]אמירה‬, ‘for they observed your words [‫ ]אמרתך‬and they kept your covenant [‫( ’]בריתך‬Deuteronomy 33:9). She is the word and she is the covenant, and the covenant was given through the word. ‘God said to Abraham, [As for you, you and your offspring to come throughout the ages shall keep my covenant]’ (Genesis 17:9). The Shekhinah is not in the place of the foreskin; the Shekhinah is in the place of the circumcision. ‘I rejoice over your word [‫( ’]אמרתך‬Psalms 119:162), over the commandment of the covenant of circumcision.”

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Most notably for our analysis, this symbol suggests that the origin of time is to be sought in the place of contraction. From this emplacement we may deduce that temporality in its originary modulation is a circle that arises as an effect—​although it may also be viewed inversely as the cause—​of the withdrawal of the infinite light that occasions the augmentation of the line so that the formless dissembles in the semblance of the form and the nameless dons the garment of the name. However, Eliashiv argues that in each and every moment (rega), new purifications (berurim ḥadashim) emerge to rectify the original fissure and to restore some of the light to its source.140 The pulse of time is gauged, therefore, from the event of the present moment that wavers incessantly between the poles of showing and nonshowing, coming to be in passing, and passing in coming to be. Writ large, the arc of the temporal duration of the existence of the world (meshekh zeman de-​qiyyum ha-​olam) extends from the contraction that prompts the beginning (hatḥalah) and inception (re’shit) of the line to the final rectification at the end (sof) and terminus (takhlit) of the line when all of the sparks of light return to the secret of the perfect unity (sod ha-​aḥdut ha-​sheleimah) in the infinite.141 Time is thus a circle calibrated as the line that extends from and reverts back to malkhut de-​ein sof,142 from the fragmented unity of the ṣimṣum at

1 40 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, p. 109. 141 Ibid., p. 46. 142 As is well known, the convergence of the line and the circle is critical to Lurianic kabbalah. For example, consider the elaborate description in Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim, 1:2, 11d-​12b, of how the straight line (qaw yashar), which issues from the circular light (or ha-​iggul) of the infinite, assumes the form of the sefirot as concentric circles (iggulim zeh tokh zeh) in the space (ḥalal) from which the light has been withdrawn. Compare Ḥayyim Viṭal, Oṣerot Ḥayyim, edited by Meir Yoḥanan Elkoubi (Jerusalem: Sha‘arei Yiṣḥaq, 2018) pp. 3–​4; idem, Mavo She‘arim, pp. 10–​11. The use of the two geometric shapes to describe the divine—​the concentric circles or the linear hierarchic order—​can be traced to the beginnings of kabbalistic literature, but what is noteworthy about the account of Viṭal is that the line itself becomes the circle. I suggest that lurking behind this image is the assumption about the nature of time as the linear circle or the circular line. For a thorough study of the use of the circle and the line to depict the two aspects of the sefirot, see Pachter, Roots of Faith, pp. 131–​184. Finally, it is worth noting here the first two theorems in C. H. Josten, “A Translation of John Dee’s ‘Monas Hieroglyphica’ (Antwerp, 1564), With an Introduction and Annotations,” Ambix 12 (1964): 155: “The first and most simple manifestation and representation of things, non-​existent as well as latent in the fold of Nature, happened by means of straight line and circle. Yet the circle cannot be artificially produced without the straight line, or the straight line without the point. Hence, things first began to be by way of a point, and a monad. All things related to the periphery … can in no way exist without the aid of the central point.” In Dee’s epistolic preface to the king, op. cit., pp. 134–​135, he contrasts the “real cabbala or [the cabbala] of that which is” (realem nominaui cabalam, sive τοῦ

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Chapter 7 ὄντος) and the “other and vulgar” kabbalah, which he names the “cabbalistic grammar or [the cabbala of] that which is said” (Cabalisticam nomino grammaticam sive τοῦ λεγομένου). The real kabbalah deals with the nature of being and thus assumes the status of the “holy language,” which is in fact no particular language (including Hebrew) but the law of creation, or the “alphabet of nature,” whereas the vulgar kabbalah is based on letters that are written by human beings. Regarding this passage, see Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 83–​84, 86–​ 87; James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1: Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 200–​201; Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 87; Klaus Reichert, “Von der Wissenschaft zur Magie: John Dee,” in Späthumanismus: Studien über das Ende einer kulturhistorischen Epoche, herausgegeben von Notker Hammerstein und Gerrit Walther (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000), pp. 255–​256. The expression “our kabbalah of being” (Cabala nostra τοῦ ὄντος) is used by Dee in a marginal gloss on Synesius’s statement that “everything is signified by everything, since all things in the one great animal of the world are related, and these are like letters of every shape, signed in the universe as in a book, some Phoenician, some Egyptian, some Assyrian. The wise man reads them.” The text is translated by Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 171–​172, and the original is reproduced on p. 250 n. 72. On the delineation of Dee as a Christian kabbalist, see Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 55–​66, esp. p. 60: “John Dee by no means applied the whole of the original cabbalistic system in his Monas Hieroglyphica and its theological implications are largely absent from his own design. Dee was more concerned with the specifics of the alchemical process and he used the cabbalah to weave an elegant demonstration of his more limited pantheism concerning the relation of microcosm to macrocosm. The cabbalah also served to display his own intellectual prowess, as well as his claim to superior rank as a magus of the highest order. … It has to be recognized that Dee’s cabbalistic system is based on a variety of models and that his use of the original Hebrew texts may have been limited.” Szulakowska mentions Reuchlin, Paracelsus, Postel, and Pico della Mirandola as the likely sources for Dee’s knowledge of kabbalah, to which we might add Agrippa. On the influence of kabbalah on Dee, see also Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 148–​150; idem, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 88–​89, 92–​110; Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), pp. 60–​63. For a varied perspective regarding the appropriateness of the taxonomy “Christian kabbalist” applied to Dee, see Nicholas Goodrick-​Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 66–​67: “Dee believed that communication with the spirit world was essential for an understanding of nature because the created world was organized in a complex intermediary system whereby God revealed himself through spirits and angels who vouchsafed the secrets of a quasi-​mathematical order of letters and numbers underlying nature. To this extent, Dee’s cosmology possessed a Kabbalistic derivation. Although Dee’s and Kelley’s knowledge of Cabala was limited, the emphasis on a mathematical ordering of an emanated cosmos in the angelic conversations suggests a worldview more cabalistic than Neoplatonic.” The emphasis on Dee’s appropriation of the numerological aspect of the kabbalah accords with the position taken by Karen De León-​Jones, “John Dee and the Kabbalah,” in John Dee: Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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the beginning to the unified fragmentation of the tiqqun at the end, which culminates in the tenth millennium.143 From the perspective of the “general Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought, edited by Stephen Clucas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 143–​158, and especially the summary on p. 149: “What sets Dee apart from his contemporaries is the extent to which he ‘mathematicizes’ his peculiar version of the Kabbalah, essentially eliminating from it the usual cosmological, exegetical, mystical and prophetic aspects that fascinated Humanists. … Dee never brings in the sefirot, even though they are also known as the divine numerations, and we shall see that Dee is interested in the mathematical basis of the Kabbalah. What Dee retains of the Kabbalah in the Monas are the three hermeneutic techniques, based on the manipulation of letters, that result in numerical calculation: gematria, notarikon, and temurah.” Confirmation of this conclusion can be found in Dee’s remark in Josten, “A Translation,” p. 133: “And now I come to the Hebrew cabbalist who, when he will see that (the three principal keys to his art, called) Gematria, Notariacon, and Tzyruph, are used outside the confines of the language called holy, and that, moreover, the signs and characters of that mystical tradition (which was received from God) [sc. the cabbala] are brought together from whencesoever ([and are derived] from certain obvious visible and invisible things), then (compelled by Truth, if he may understand) he will call this art holy, too; and he will own that, without regard to person, the same most benevolent God is not only [the God] of the Jews, but of all peoples, nations, and languages.” Significantly, Dee universalizes these three techniques by extending them beyond the confines of Hebrew and the Jewish people, even though he utilized Hebrew in some of his works, specifically in transmitting the magical potency of divine and angelic names. See Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 92–​95; Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations, pp. 84–​88; John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic, edited by Joseph H. Peterson (Boston: Weiser Books, 2003), pp. 9, 13; Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God from the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 418–​419. Relatedly, departing from the traditional kabbalistic view, Dee maintained that the angels did not speak Hebrew but an even more sacred dialect. See Anthony Grafton, “Jüdische Ursprünge der Christlichen Magie? Von Reuchlin zu John Dee,” in Christliche Kabbala, herausgegeben von Wilhelm Schmidt-​Biggemann (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2003), p. 122. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that in the Monas Hieroglyphica, Dee himself does give voice to the more standard kabbalistic view regarding the privileged status of Hebrew as the matrix language. See Josten, “A Translation,” pp. 127–​129: “By the same process we discover clearly enough that the first humans could not have established out of such mystical principles the very stupendous fabric of the Hebrew letters and the Nekudoth had not the afflation of the divine power been most [effectively] present. Even though these [primary elements of writing] be the least of the subjects weighed by the judgements of vulgar grammarians, whereas the wise consider properly how, and by what wonderful artifice, they lend themselves to the generation of all letters and of the Nekudoth, these mysteries do indeed teach the wise very many, very great things (by a most absolute anagogy).” Be that as it may, it strikes me that Dee’s use of the images of the circle, the point, and the line in the first two theorems suggests the influence of kabbalistic speculation on the divine emanations, a point enhanced by the further assumption that the graphology of letters in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are generated from these geometric shapes. 143 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 121. I hope to write a separate study on Eliashiv’s conception of time and the historical epochs, but let me state Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

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boundary and measure” (gevul u-​middah kelalit), there is “one general stature [qomah kelalit aḥat] that comprises all of the duration of that time entirely [ha-​kolel kol meshekh otto ha-​zeman kullo] from the moment of the beginning of the time of constriction until the moment of the rectification [me-​et hatḥalat zeman ha-​ṣimṣum ad et ha-​tiqqun].”144 The linear circle can be viewed as well from the perspective of the now (attah) molded by the predication of interminable details that cannot be probed (bi-​feraṭot uvi-​peraṭei peraṭot ad peraṭim ein ḥeqer): That general light [ha-​or ha-​kelali] itself by which Ein Sof, blessed be his name, is revealed to illumine the way from the beginning of the time of the contraction and the line until the time of the final rectification, is divided, as it were, into multiple details [li-​feraṭim rabbim] to the point that in each and every moment [rega wa-​rega] from that aforementioned general time [ha-​zeman ha-​kelali] there radiates from it a distinctive illumination [me’ir be-​he’arah meyuḥedet mimmennu]. For as it radiates in one moment, it does not radiate in another moment, but rather each and every moment with an illumination that is distinctive to it, and there is bestowed upon it the measure of the lights [shi‘ur ha-​me’orot] in accord with the measure of the moments of time of the entire duration of the general time [shi‘ur rig‘ei ha-​zeman de-​khol meshekh zeman ha-​kelali] that was mentioned, and it receives the illumination of Ein Sof, blessed be his name, in each and every moment by way of a different luminescence [ma’or aḥer]. And with the consummation of the measure of all the lights in it, then there shall be the end and terminus of the whole general stature [ha-​qomah ha-​kelali].145 With characteristic lucidity, Eliashiv articulates the kabbalistic understanding of the metrics of time as the extensionality of the disclosure of the infinite light in the different configurations of the divine aligned with their corresponding historical briefly that, following the rabbinic tradition, the current world order consists of six millennia to be followed by the seventh, the day that is entirely Sabbath or the messianic era, and then the world to come, which comprises the eighth to the tenth millennia. Compare Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, pp. 179–​180, 199. The tenth millennium is the culmination of the apocatastasis, which is described as the return of all things to the kingship of the infinite (malkhut de-​ein sof) or to the encompassing light of the infinite (or ein sof ha-​maqqif). See Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 141–​142. 144 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 2, p. 46. 145 Ibid.

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epochs. The virtually open-​ended splintering of that concealed light—​the details and the details of the details (ha-​peraṭim we-​ha-​peraṭei peraṭim)—​structurally reflects the potentially unlimited mirroring that proceeds from the fact that each configuration is composed monadically of all the other configurations, each of which is itself composed of all of them, and so on ad infinitum.146 In postmodern terms, the universal time of Ein Sof coalesces in the fathomless array and fracturing of the cumulative manifestations of the multitude unfolding from the infinitivity enfolded in the one that is more and therefore less than one. Against this background we can turn to the kabbalistic notion of a fourth dimension arising from the consolidation of the three tenses in the moment wherein the temporal is eternalized and the eternal temporalized. The kabbalists understand the future—​signified by the scriptural name Ehyeh—​as the surplus of no more that is always not yet, the capability for rejuvenation, which, in the most profound sense, is the restitution to the nondifferentiated nothingness of infinity wherein the distinction between time and timelessness is no longer operative, not because time is subsumed in the timeless, but because timelessness is the measure of the fourth dimension that precedes the triadic division of time.147 Momentarily, I shall return to the matter of futurity.

1 46 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 121. 147 The more standard understanding of timelessness, which I am opposing, is presented by Fagg, The Becoming of Time, pp. 181–​190. For a helpful analysis of the philosophical-​ scientific implications of time as the fourth dimension, see Raymond Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2017), pp. 29–​97. A previous attempt to compare and contrast the notion of futurity in Heidegger and the biblical conception based on the epiphany of the divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3 is offered by Gabriel Motzkin, “‘Ehyeh’ and the Future: ‘God’ and Heidegger’s Concept of ‘Becoming’ Compared,” in Occur Desire: Sehnsucht des Auges, edited by Aharon R. E. Agus and Jan Assmann (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), pp. 173–​182. By comparing Heidegger’s conception of the future to the biblical text, Motzkin sets out to highlight the simplicity of the former, although he admits that the complexity of the latter is revealed through the temporal categories and distinctions elaborated in Sein und Zeit (p. 174). In my judgment, the doubling of absence and presence that the author detects in the scriptural narrative with respect to a future that is spoken of but has not yet taken place can be applied in some measure to Heidegger’s idea of the future as well (p. 175). I concur with Motzkin’s conclusion about the biblical text: “God in this passage in Exodus is also only transcendent within a world, but this transcendence is not marked, as it is for Cohen, by solipsism, or for Heidegger, by finitude. God’s transcendence is not out of the world, but in the world, because God is the transcendent principle of becoming and therefore His future is always a future-​with rather than an act of individuation. For our Greco-​Western tradition, becoming has been viewed as the principle of immanence, and transcendence as signifying a transcendent eternity or being. Here in this text, however, the reverse is true. The principle of becoming is transcendent, and the state of being is immanent within

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Suffice it here to say that the future is not determined by the imperishability of our perishability but by the power of regeneration, which is epitomized in the proclivity of repentance—​the halakhic foundation for the mystical ideal of restitutio—​to break the karmic chain of causality so that the fate of an individual is not irrevocably determined by past events.148 The compresence of past, present, and future—​symbolized by the Tetragrammaton—​fosters the timespace as the open enclosure of all being, the self-​revealing concealment of the self-​concealing revelation of the site of the moment.149 The ten emanations, the garments of the infinite light, are contained in the four letters of the ineffable name (shem ha-​meforash), which is also referred to as the essential name (shem ha-​eṣem), the name of the essence, forging the paradox of the name that names the nameless, and in so doing, preserves that transcendence. Hence the principle of becoming is in productive tension with time as projection” (p. 182). However, I am not convinced that Heidegger integrated projection and generation in a way that is at odds with the perspective implied in the theophany to Moses. Leaving that aside, Motzkin’s focus is exclusively on the scriptural text, whereas I am concerned with the kabbalistic interpretations thereof, which reverberate more deeply with Heidegger’s thinking. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 274–​275. For an attempt to connect the kabbalistic interpretation of the name ehyeh asher ehyeh and Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of identity A = A, see Michael T. Miller, The Name of God in Jewish Thought: A Philosophical Analysis of Mystical Traditions from Apocalyptic to Kabbalah (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 108–​109. 148 Wolfson, A Dream, p. 242. The inherent connection between repentance and the present—​ a connection predicated on the assumption that the one who repents is born anew in the moment that is not causally linked to or bound by the events of the past—​is established by the midrashic gloss on the verse “and now lest he stretch out his hand,” we-​attah pen yishlaḥ yado (Genesis 3:22), in Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 21:6, p. 201: “R. Abba bar Kahana said, this teaches that the blessed holy One opened up for him an opening for repentance. And now—​[the connotation of the word] we-​attah is naught but repentance, as it says ‘And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God [demand of you]’ (Deuteronomy 10:12).” See Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 38:9, p. 359; Midrash Tehillim, edited by Salomon Buber (Vilna: Romm, 1891), 100:2, 212b; Mekhilta de-​Rabbi Ishmael, edited by Ḥayyim S. Horovitz and Israel A. Rabin (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970), Massekhta de-​Shirah, 5, p. 133; Pesiqta Rabbati: A Synoptic Edition of Pesiqta Rabbati Based upon All Extant Manuscripts and the Editio Princeps, edited by Rivka Ulmer, 2 vols. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997–​1999), 7:2, p. 90; Midrash Tanḥuma, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Eshkol, 1972), Beshallaḥ 15, p. 294; Midrash Bemidbar Rabbah, 13:3, in Midrash Rabbah im Kol ha-​Mefarshim, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Vagshal, 2001), p. 299. Compare Nathan Neṭa Shapira, Megalleh Amuqot al ha-​Torah (Benei Beraq, 2001), p. 85. The midrashic exegesis is repeated often in kabbalistic and ḥasidic texts. 149 Michael Fagenblat, “The Thing That Scares Me Most: Heidegger’s Anti-​Semitism and the Return to Zion,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 14 (2014): 23, noted the nexus between the Jewish tradition concerning the compresence of the three temporal tenses in the Tetragrammaton and the Heideggerian notion of the equiprimordiality of the three ecstases of time.

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its namelessness. Etymologically, the Tetragrammaton is from the root hwh, which connotes the sense of isness, and as we have seen, it signals the equiprimordiality of the three temporal ecstasies, what was, is, and will be. Insofar as yhwh is a name that cannot be taken nominally, it does not demarcate the existence of a being, but rather functions like a gerund that signposts the event of beingness that is the center of the encircling nothingness. This sense of ipseity is astoundingly proximate to Heidegger’s emphasis on Ereignis in relation to Seyn; beyng is not a thing that can be objectified but an appropriating happening (Geschehnis) that, as yhwh vis-​à-​vis Ein Sof, concurrently reveals and conceals the true and hidden essence of the mystery of the being of nonbeing in the nonbeing of being.150 Moreover, just as the extension of space is a consequence of what Heidegger called the fourth dimension of time, which is determined by the interplay of the tripartite bestowal that corresponds to the three tenses, so for Eliashiv, as for other kabbalists, the space created by the withdrawal of light serves as the fourth dimension in which the temporal modes intermingle.151 The convergence associated with the Tetragrammaton is applied to Ehyeh as well on account of the triple repetition of this name in Exodus 3:14. An allusion to this is found in Tiqqunei Zohar: “Ehyeh is atop yhwh, and this vapor of the heart guides152 the voice of yhwh; it is the Cause of all Causes, hidden and concealed and not revealed, and it governs and rules over everything. Ehyeh illustrates that the Cause of Causes was, is, and will be, and it is the vapor that rises infinitely [ad ein sof], and by means of it the Cause of all the Causes governs.”153 In part, the kabbalistic exegesis is based on the talmudic interpretation on the name ehyeh asher ehyeh, “The blessed holy One said to Moses, Go and tell Israel: I was with you in this servitude and I will be with you in the servitude of the kingdoms.”154 In the zoharic context, the rabbinic gloss is expanded to include past, present, and future, inspired no doubt by the occurrence of the name Ehyeh three times 1 50 See the texts cited and analyzed in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 144 and 146. 151 Ibid., p. 275. 152 Literally, “rides,” rakhiv. I have rendered the term in accord with its figurative meaning, which is based on the discussion of Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated with an introduction and notes by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:70, p. 171. According to Maimonides, the word rakhov “is used figuratively to designate domination over a thing, for a rider dominates over and rules that which he rides.” This holds the key for understanding his interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot (merkavah), that is, it provides in poetic form the metaphysical principles that explain divine governance in the natural world. 153 Tiqqunei Zohar, § 70, 122b. 154 Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 9b.

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in the scriptural context. Theosophically, this name, the first person singular imperfect, signifies that the infinite—​designated by the philosophical taxonomy illat ha-​illot or illat kol ha-​illot—​embodies the nondifferentiated unity and synchronicity of the three temporal modes.155 The view proclaimed by the author of the zoharic passage is based on the attribution of the name Ehyeh to the first of the sefirotic emanations in some of the earliest thirteenth-​century kabbalistic texts,156 a symbolic attribution that signifies the determinate indeterminacy of the infinite nothingness, the pure contingency of the absolute necessity of the alef, the origin whence all beings emerge and whither they return.157 As the Vilna Gaon explained in his commentary on Tiqqunei Zohar, “Ehyeh is the language of existence [meṣi’ut], and as the commentators explain with regard to ehyeh asher ehyeh … it instructs about what was, is, and will be; that is to say, it says Ehyeh there three times, as they said ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I was with you etc. and I will be with you etc.,’ this is the past and the future, and afterward it says ‘Go and say ehyeh,’ which relates to the redemption in the present.”158 155 For description of Ehyeh as signifying the nondifferentiated unity of all things, see Zohar 3:65a. 156 Roland Goetschel, “‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh’ in the Works of the Gerona Kabbalists,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, nos. 3–​4 (1987): 287–​298 (Hebrew). For other relevant sources, see Na‘ama Ben-​Shachar and Tzahi Weiss, “An Anonymous Geronese Kabbalistic Commentary on the Ten Sefirot,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 38 (2017): 166 n. 46 (Hebrew). 157 Compare the text, presumably composed by Azriel of Gerona, in Gershom Scholem, “The Traditions of R. Jacob and R. Isaac ben Jacob ha-​Kohen,” Madda‘ei ha-​Yahadut 2 (1927): 231 (Hebrew). Exegetically interpreting Moses’s question to God at the epiphany of the burning bush, “And when they will say to me, what is his name [mah shemo] what will I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13), the author writes: “He requested to know the essence [mahuto] of the name, for he saw that Pharaoh denied the divinity [kofer ba-​elohut] and said ‘I did not know the Lord’ (Exodus 5:2). The meaning of ‘I did not know’ [lo yada‘ti] is I knew that there is no comprehension of him except by way of negation [al derekh lo], that is, the nothing [ayin] and the nullity [afisah], which cannot be scrutinized. Thus, Moses said, ‘I must know in order to respond to Pharaoh and to Israel with a clear answer to their question, for if I do not know the essence of the name, I do not have the power to bring them back.’ The blessed holy One answered, ‘I shall be as I shall be [ehyeh asher ehyeh],’ he signaled to him that everything comes from one root, and a sign for this is that the alef is a single letter, and from its vocalization it produces the he, and the he produces through the power of its vocalization the yod, and in the concealment of the vocalization of the yod there is the waw, and in the concealment of the vocalization of the waw there is the letter he.” The letters ahw”y, which are described as emerging from the letter alef, were referred to in medieval sources as the vowel letters, but since their numerical sum is twenty-​two, they also represent the Tetragrammaton, which comprises the twenty-​two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. 158 Elijah ben Solomon, Tiqqunei Zohar im Be’ur ha-​Gra, 141b.

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Although three tenses are differentiated in demarcating the efficacy of divine providence, they can all be assimilated in the future inasmuch as they are derived from the three occurrences of Ehyeh. The tensiveness of time to be unearthed from this name, or the gradation of Keter to which it is attached—​ the apex of the pleromatic void, the emptiness that is neither empty nor nonempty, the emptiness that must be empty of its emptiness to be empty—​is the quality of the primeval futurity. The latter, however, is indicative of the paradox that the radically novel is the most ancient, that origin succeeds from the future, that the eternality of time and the temporality of eternity converge in the attribute that symbolizes the primordiality and fecundity of the infinite. Opposites meet in the divine nothingness: the never-​beginning future intersects with the never-​ending past, and the never-​beginning past with the never-​ ending future. The esoteric meaning accorded the name Ehyeh is thus that in each instant, the nothing becomes something that forever is not what it has become—​it shall be what it shall be but what it shall be must always not be what it is.159 The future becomes the in-​between of the now—​messianically, the tomorrow that is today because today is tomorrow—​that opens the fixity of the past to the fluidity of the present. Ehyeh, and the sefirah of Keter to which it is affixed, are indexical of the divine nihility that is the potentiality that is fully actual as the actuality that is fully potential in being nothing. In temporal terms, we can say that Ehyeh symbolizes the future recurrently rejuvenated in the breach of the beginning within the origin whence time is engendered from the infinite past constantly renewed in the present, the again that is altogether otherwise.160 Time, then, is the absolute giving, the giving that is without intention to give or to be received as gift, the given of the ungiven, an unreserved graciousness that withholds nothing but the grace of reciprocity, the impossible possible, possible because of the impossibility of its ownmost possibility. According to one zoharic passage, we read that Ehyeh signifies the “totality of everything” (kelala de-​kholla), 1 59 For a more extended discussion, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 244–​255. 160 My language is indebted to the insight of Heidegger, Contributions, § 33, p. 58 (idem, Beiträge, p. 73), that the wish to navigate the course of the question of being (Seinsfrage), in the hope of recuperating the lineage of antiquity, can be fulfilled if one comprehends that the matter of repetition means “to let the same, the uniqueness of being, become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. ‘Again’ means here precisely ‘altogether otherwise’ [‘Wieder’ besagt hier gerade: ganz anders]” (emphasis in original). For previous discussion of this aphorism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 243–​244; idem, “Retroactive Not Yet,” pp. 33–​34 (in this volume, p. 357); and the more extended discussion in idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 35–​40.

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a state in which “everything was hidden and not revealed” (kolla satim we-​lo itgalya), the “generality with no particularity” (kelala be-​lo peraṭa);161 that is, all differentiation is comprised in one place in a nondifferentiated way. From the concealment of Keter, there emerges the beginning, Ḥokhmah—​the dimensionless point within which the infinite expansiveness of the pointless is compressed—​whence there issues forth the seed that impregnates the river, Binah, and as a result, it disseminates everything, thereby stimulating the impetus of the infinite will to be summoned to emanate and to produce everything (zammin le’amshakha u-​le’olada kolla).162 This process is encrypted in the words asher ehyeh, which complete the name.163 The gesture of beckoning, zammin, bespeaks the true nature of time, zeman, the indeterminacy of the coming to be of what has already been determined, a paradox that is habitually expressed in kabbalistic literature by the term hitḥaddeshut, the renewal of what is yet to be—​the unfathomable mystery expressed by the fact that alef comprises both the general (kelal) and the particular (peraṭ); that is, the manifold particulars are symbolized by elef, which stands metonymically for the one thousand generations164 comprised indiscriminately in the 161 Zohar 3:65b. I have followed the alternative reading preserved in both of the first editions of the Zohar, Mantua (1558–​1560) and Cremona (1559–​1560): kelala be-​lo peraṭa. In the Margaliot text, as in many other editions, the reading is kelala de-​khol peraṭa, the “generality of every particularity.” 162 Compare Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim, 20:2, p. 231. 163 Zohar 3:65b. See my previous discussion of this passage in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 245. 164 The reference is to the mythologoumenon preserved in several rabbinic sources, including Babylonian Talmud, Ḥagigah 13b-​14a, to the effect that God envisaged creating 1,000 generations of human beings before the giving of the Torah (based on Psalms 105:8), but because of their wickedness, 974 generations were not created (deduced exegetically from Job 22:16) and the Torah was revealed 26 generations after Adam. Even though it is stated that the generations were not created, the continuation of the talmudic text identifies them with the insolent implanted in each generation. Compare Midrash Bere’shit Rabba, 28:4, pp. 262–​263; Midrash Tehillim, 90:13, 196b; The Book Bahir, § 135, p. 219; Tiqqunei Zohar, § 69, 103a; Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 183; idem, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 5, and pt. 2, pp. 29 and 207. Some kabbalists linked the secret meaning of these generations to the primal forces of evil or the worlds created and destroyed, identified in the Lurianic sources as the shattered vessels. See Ṭodros ben Joseph Abulafia, Sha‘ar ha-​Razim, edited from the manuscripts with introduction and annotations by Michal Kushnir-​Oron (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1989), pp. 59–​60; idem, Oṣar ha-​Kavod (Satu Mare: M. L. Hirsch, 1926), 40a; Ma‘arekhet ha-​Elohut (Jerusalem: J. Becker, 2003), ch. 8, p. 206; Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 16a-​c; Bachrach, Emeq ha-​Melekh, 8:30, pp. 207–​208; Yiṣḥaq Eizik Ḥaver Wildmann, Afiqei Yam (Jerusalem: Makhon Sha‘arei Ziw, 1994), pp. 17–​18. According to other sources, these generations are identified as the souls that emerged from the world of chaos. See Elijah ben Solomon, The Commentary of the Gaon Rabbi Elijah of Vilna to Sifra di-​Zeni‘uta, p. 26;

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alef.165 In the midrashic gloss on the name Ehyeh in another zoharic text in which the ten divine names, corresponding to the sefirot, are delineated, we read: The first one is Ehyeh, the supernal concealed one [setima illa’ah], like one who says “I am what I am” [ana ma’n da-​ana],166 but it is not known who it is [we-​lo ityyeda ma’n hu]. Afterward, asher ehyeh, I am summoned to be revealed [ana de-​zammin le’itgalya] in those crowns. At first, it was concealed and then it began to be revealed, until it reached the disclosure of the holy name. Thus, it is written by Moses, ehyeh—​initially, the concealment of everything [setimu de-​kholla]. I am what I am [ana hu ma’n da-​ana]. Afterward, asher ehyeh—​I am summoned to be revealed [ana zammin le’itgalya].167

Jonathan Eibeschütz, Tif’eret Yehonatan (Yozifov, 1873), 145d (ad Deuteronomy 32:4); Wildmann, Pitḥei She‘arim, pt. 2, 63a; idem, Beit Olamim (Warsaw: Meir Yeḥiel Halter, 1889), 97a; Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, pp. 221–​222. 165 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 5. See ibid., p. 30, where Eliashiv identifies the primordial Edomite kings as the source of all the existents that will come to be in their specificity in all of the different worlds (kol ha-​meṣi’uyyot kullam bi-​feraṭot uvi-​peraṭei peraṭot asher be-​khol ha-​olamot kullam). The paradox of the novel reiteration of time is embraced explicitly: all that was in the future will be in the course of the temporal duration of the being of the world (kol mah she-​hayah attid lihyot be-​khol meshekh zeman de-​khol qiyyum ha-​olam). The link between the particulars and the Edomite kings is based on the fact that the act of differentiation is a quality of the attribute of judgment, which is connected to these primal forces. See the continuation of Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Sefer ha-​De‘ah, pt. 1, p. 30: “Since when it was the will of the [infinite], blessed be his name, to create only the roots of all the existence entirely, he emanated only the sovereignties [malkhuyyot]. However, each and every king of the seven kings is comprised of many lights, that is, from ten to ten, and from ten to ten, ad infinitum, and everything is only from the aspect of the sovereignties … and their dimension was in accord with the measure of all the particular existents [shi‘ur kol peraṭei ha-​meṣi’uyyot] in the temporal duration of the existence of the world in its entirety.” Finally, I note that the mathematical formula underlying Eliashiv’s comments can be traced to kabbalistic sources from as early as the thirteenth century: the first emanation, Keter, which is symbolized by alef, contains all ten emanations, and each of the ten comprises all ten, which equals one hundred, and each of those one hundred comprises all ten, and hence we arrive at one thousand, elef, a word that contains the same consonants as alef. From this we can deduce the principle regarding the identity of alef and elef, which respectively signify generality (kelalut) and particularity (peraṭut). 166 Regarding this expression, see my comments in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 449 n. 118. 167 Zohar 3:11a.

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The full name transmitted to Moses conveys the confluence of determinacy and indeterminacy. All the emanations were comprised within the supernal crown, “the principle and concealment of the origin” (kelala u-​setima de-​ qadmita), the “head of all heads” (reisha de-​khol reishin), the “concealed name that is not revealed” (shemeih satim we-​lo itgalya),168 but the name attached to that gradation indicates that the destiny of the divine volition is that it will be what it will be, a name that does not denote a fixed entity but only the void that is the unbounded openness of the future—​the time of the undoing of time—​ in the same way that one says “I am that I am,” but no one knows the nature of that being, since its status is determinedly what is still to be determined. As Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov astutely quipped on the zoharic expression, “Ehyeh instructs about the greatness of his concealment, ‘I am summoned to be revealed,’ but not now.”169 The disclosure of the will of the infinite is always in the future, the now that is perpetually not now. In slightly more technical terms, Eliashiv makes the same point: “Therefore, Arikh Anpin is called by the name Ehyeh, for it instructs about the future, I will be summoned to be revealed … and this refers to what will be revealed afterward in the four configurations of Abba, Imma, Ze‘eir, and Nuqba, which are the four letters of the name yhwh, blessed be he, but it itself is only in the aspect of Ehyeh, for it has no disclosure in the name yhwh, blessed be he, except in the tittle of the yod.”170 To the extent that time (zeman) is essentially linked to this quality of summoning (zammin), we can transpose this into Heideggerian parlance and say that what is yet to come withholds its presencing, not as a presence that refuses to come to presence and is thus presently absent, but as the presence that can only be present as nonpresent. The ontological condition of this being is its becoming. With respect to this hidden name, therefore, absolute necessity is indistinguishable from pure possibility. In the emptiness of the divine nonemptiness, there is no antithesis between what is foreordained and what is indefinite. Therein lies the essence of temporality in its most originary constitution: time is encapsulated in the name that comprises all the names in their generality and their particularity, the 1 68 Ibid. 169 Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov, Kitvei ha-​Ga’on Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 2001), 1:150. The phallocentric nature of this symbolism is made explicit in the continuation of the passage: “And this is the secret of the creation of the world [beri’at olam], and the alef of the creation of the world is hidden in the safeguarding of the sign of the covenant, and this is the eternal covenant [berit olam], for the sign of the covenant is not revealed except by means of the Torah that comes and is revealed from the Tree of Life, and by means of this the name Ehyeh instructs that ‘I am summoned to be revealed.’” 170 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-​Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-​She‘arim, p. 71.

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names that, to quote Eliashiv again, are “constantly interchanging in their disclosure in accord with the condition of the world and their merit, according to the moment [ha-​et] and the time [ha-​zeman]. One day is not like the other, nor one hour like the other, but all are contained in all, one is concealed and the other disclosed.”171 Time in its primordiality relates to the paradox of the ephemerality that endures as the endurance that is ephemeral, the moment that is always the same because always different.172 The depiction of the 1 71 Ibid., p. 34. 172 My language is indebted to the characterization of the present as simultaneously toujours neuf and toujours la même in Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 267; idem, Le visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail, texte établi par Claude Lefort accompagné d’un avertissement et d’une postface (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 315. For citation of the passage and reference to other pertinent scholarly discussions, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Suffering Time: Maharal’s Influence on Ḥasidic Perspectives on Temporality,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 44 (2019): 15–​16 n. 27 (reprinted in this volume, p. 385 n. 27). On the absoluteness of the present moment and its relation to the ideal of actualized messianism in Ḥasidism, see Neumann, The Roots, p. 103 (the passage is previsouly cited and analyzed in this volume, pp. 396-397): “When a human being is put to the test, it always concerns his specific situation. For this reason, each person is always contained in the unconditionality and newness of the present moment. This is a radical reversal of the doctrine of the helpful merits of the fathers. Not even one’s own merits from yesterday are helpful, for the new situation demands an absolute, not a historical, commitment. This antihistorical concept represents a revolution against the merits of the fathers, against tradition, and against relying on the past for security. Taken together with what we have called actualized messianism, it constitutes a basic teaching of Hasidism. Neither the past nor the future has priority over the present, which is fulfilled by the secret, divine light. Actualization places the individual at the center of destiny, for the world and also for God. All that matters is this individual and his existence in the here and now. The Christian doctrine of redemption, according to which the Messiah has already come, and the doctrine of the pre-​Hasidic Judaism, according to which he has yet to come, are both abolished here. Individual life actualizes messianism, and the messianic stage of the individual actualizes the work to be fulfilled.” I would resist the characterization of Ḥasidic messianism as antihistorical, but there is an affinity between Neumann and my own position, which similarly accentuates the significance of the present as the moment in which the eternal is temporalized and the temporal eternalized through a transformed state of mindfulness. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah: Some Sabbatian and Hasidic Affinities,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, edited by Glenn Dynner, foreword by Moshe Rosman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), pp. 188–​202; idem, Open Secret, pp. 277-​20, 395 n. 92, 396 n. 60. See also idem, “Suffering Time,” pp. 36–​60 (in this volume, pp. 407-431). The soteriological implication of the Ḥasidic understanding of the moment is summarized on p. 51 (in this volume, p. 421): “Time is overcome, therefore, not in the obliteration of time but in the enowning of the ubiquity of time expended kenotically as that which lingers in the lapsing of lingering and lapses in the lingering of lapsing.”

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moment as the recurrence of the identical that is continuously disparate, the perpetuation of the similar as uniquely dissimilar, accentuates that eternity is the inexhaustible fullness of time. This is the implication of the eternality of Ein Sof expressed in the nondenumerable and durationless moment—​the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,173 the distension of space in time that has no beginning or end and therefore must be entirely present174—​wherein all three temporal modes are contemporaneously entwined in a copresence that disrupts their specificity as discrete and successive intervals on the timeline. 173 According to the formulation of Nicholas of Cusa in De docta ignorantia. See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 2: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, text established by Luce Giard, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 42. What I have elicited from kabbalistic material differs from the conclusion drawn by de Certeau, p. 45, from Cusa’s idea of the gaze on the icon of God: “Here the journey is practiced as proof that it changes nothing, and that its time, far from creating points of no return, always returns to the same since each point repeats the same unthinkable, and whether to the east or the west, in one direction or another, it’s the same. Beneath the look, time is annulled and movement itself becomes unreal.” I would contend, by contrast, that the linear circularity of infinity implies that return to the same is always different, that repetition is the replication of difference, that the unthinkable is constantly thought in a disparate way, and hence the eternality of the iconic similitude of that which has no image upholds the movement of time as the only thing that is real. On the depiction of Ein Sof as the “great circle,” see Horowitz, Shefa Ṭal, p. 191, note 74. 174 Wildmann, Beit Olamim, 97b: “The concealed brain [moḥa setima’ah] is the beginning of faith, and the concealed brain entirely is the secret of the ring, which is the perimeter of the providence of the world [heqqef hanhagat ha-​olam], as they spoke of ‘a sphere that rotates in the world’ [Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 151b], and there is no beginning or end at all because in the concealed brain everything is in the aspect of the present.”

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Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking

Where the future is concerned: Expectation is directed toward the future; it is merely anticipatory, and like all anticipation, it can be deceptive. But life is living on, and the law of time also attributes an apodictic content to expectation. edmund husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic

∵ The theme of this chapter intimates both profound risk and uncertainty, ensuing, as it does, from the ominous realization that to speak of the end one must venture to the limits of both language and temporality.* Phenomenologically, we experience all sorts of endings—​indeed, as philosophers have long noted, we are constantly beleaguered with the menacing sense that ephemerality is the enduring aspect of time, that the only true permanence is impermanence—​but I trust that most would concur that the ending par excellence, the end of endings, as it were, is death. It is for this reason that I will commence my reflections on the discourse of the end with an analysis of death as the futural anterior, the event of the nonevent. We may not want to go so far as the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and define the singularity of human existence as being-​toward-​death (Sein zum Tode), that is, the anticipatory resoluteness of the end that compels one to confront the “nonrelational ownmost potentiality” (eigenste, unbezügliche Möglichkeit), which is labeled as “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit).1 It would be difficult, * “Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End and the End of Speaking,” was originally published in Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking. Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers, edited by Hava Tirosh-​Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 127–​193. 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), § 50, p. 241; Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), p. 250. The

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however, to deny Blanchot’s insight regarding dying as the “never-​ending ending,” in the Levinasian formulation,2 the impossibility of possibility, which constantly informs the path of our being as “a presence in the depth of absence,” the possibility that secures our “greatest hope” of being human because it reminds us that “the future of a finished world is still there for us.”3 Contrary to what commonsense might dictate, the finality of death does not abrogate but rather engenders hope.4 Alternatively expressed, instead of viewing the stasis of death as an “eternal present,” the nunc stans that is without any future, as Merleau-​Ponty opined,5 an intrinsic nexus is forged between death and futurity. To cite Blanchot again: “Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world—​man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. … As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.”6

bibliography on the subject of death in Heidegger’s thought is enormous, and thus I will offer a modest sampling of the relevant studies: James M. Demske, Being, Man, and Death: A Key to Heidegger (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1970); Paul Edwards, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Evaluation (La Salle: Hegeler Institute, 1979); Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, translated by John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996); Carol J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, edited by Mark Ralkowski, foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005); Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy, translated by Michael J. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 72–​80; George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Cristian Ciocan, Heidegger et le problème de la mort: existentialité, authenticité, temporalité (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 132. See also text cited below at n. 10. 3 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, preface by Geoffrey Hartman, translated by Lydia Davis, edited by P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981), p. 55. 4 For a wide-​ranging discussion of the more commonplace theme of death as the enemy of hope, see Bernard N. Schumacher, A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope, translated by D. C. Schindler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp. 153–​202. 5 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 348: “A present without a future, or an eternal present, is precisely the definition of death, the living present is torn between a past that it takes up and a future that it projects.” 6 Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 55.

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Death and the Surplus of Not Yet

What terrifies us about death is not that it is, as Heidegger surmised, the coming-​to-​an-​end (Zu-​Ende-​kommen), the “mode of being in which each and every actual Dasein simply cannot be represented by someone else.”7 The angst surrounding death lies rather in the prospect of confronting the fact that without contemplating the contingency of dying there is no more excess of lack but only the lack of excess, no more pondering the possibility of there being nothing more to ponder. Death does not signify the compulsory extinction that we must each endure in our existential-​ontological aloneness—​in Heidegger’s memorable articulation, dying “is essentially and irreplaceably mine,”8 or in the equally arresting expression of Reiner Schürmann, death is the singular object of monstration, which always arrives unexpectedly in the form of a “this” that cannot be subsumed under the general morphology of the species9—​but rather the perpetual deferment of that obliteration, the postponement of a termination that can be present only by being absent. Not the certitude of death but the impossibility of dying, in Blanchot’s provocative locution, is the source of our greatest consternation, since the hopefulness of being alive is inseparably entwined with the possibility of dying. Levinas alludes to this matter when he writes in his notebooks in 1942 that death is distinguished from all other aspects of human experience because it epitomizes the “extreme possibility” that is the “promise of transcendence.”10 The transcendence to which he refers 7 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 48, p. 233; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 242. Compare Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by Ingo Farin with Alex Skinner (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 38–​39: “We would be ill-​advised to base our investigation on the Dasein of others that has come to an end and is present as a finished whole. First of all, it is central to this Dasein that it too is no longer ‘there’ [‘da’] as itself. But above all, the particular Dasein of others can never be substituted for the being of Dasein, as long as we wish to maintain that Dasein is in each case one’s own [jeweilig das meinige]. I can never be the Dasein of others, although I may be together with them” (emphasis in original). This text, which was written in 1924 for the journal Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte but only published posthumously in 2004 as volume 64 of the Gesamtausgabe, is considered the first draft of Sein und Zeit. 8 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 51, p. 243; idem, Sein und Zeit, 253. See Schumacher, Death and Mortality, pp. 71–​72. For a critique of this Heideggerian assumption and a challenge to the very possibility that death is ever in our grasp as a phenomenological possibility, see Lilian Alweiss, “Heidegger and ‘the Concept of Time,’” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 117–​132. 9 Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 17–​18. 10 Emmanuel Levinas, Oeuvres 1: Carnets de captivité suivi de Écrtis sur la captivité et Notes philosophiques diverses, établissement du texte, annotation matérielle, avertissement par

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is the relentless becoming of the future that signals the end that never ends in virtue of its being the consummate end. Death, we might say, is not the deficiency of no more but the surplus of not yet.11 Following this logic led Levinas in the third of the four lectures entitled “Le temps et l’autre,” delivered in 1946–​1947, to differentiate his view sharply from that of Heidegger: Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. … This is why death is never a present. … The ancient adage designed to dissipate the fear of death—​“If you are, it is not; if it is, you are not”—​without doubt misunderstands the entire paradox of death, for it effaces our relationship with death, which is a unique relationship with the future.12

11

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Rodolphe Calin, préface et notes explicatives par Rodolphe Calin et Catherine Chalier, préface générale de Jean-​Luc Marion (Paris: Éditions Grasset and Fasquelle, 2009), p. 61: “Toutefois la mort n’est pas un fait de l’existence comme un autre. Elle promet quelque chose d’exceptionnel. C’est tout de même une possibilité extrême, une promesse de transcendance.” See, however, ibid., p. 68, where Levinas writes about the “impossibility of dying” (l’impossibilité de mourir), and p. 184, where he similarly uses the expression the “impossibility of death” (l’impossibilité de la mort). This sentiment is expressed movingly in a passage from Zohar 1:223b, the compilation of kabbalistic lore published in the sixteenth century after a long period of gestation that began in earnest with the circulation of manuscript fragments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: “It has been taught: R. Eleazar said, ‘Even if a person lives for a thousand years, on the day that he departs from the world it seems to him as if he has lived but one day.’” The anonymous kabbalist well captured the manner in which death attests not only to the fleetingness of our mortal lives but also to the hope we steadfastly bear that there shall be more time before the coming of the end that heralds the end of becoming. It is of interest to compare the sentiment expressed in this zoharic text with the analysis of death as that which cannot be experienced as a lived event and the constitution of the meaning of the temporality of human existence in James Dodd, “Death and Time in Husserl’s C-​ Manuscripts,” in On Time—​New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Ichiro Yamaguchi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 51–​70. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 70–​71. Many have weighed in on the difference between the views of time and death promulgated by Heidegger and Levinas. For four representative studies, see Robert John Sheffler Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), pp. 59–​87; Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 154–​162; Eric Severson, Levinas’s Philosophy of Time: Gift, Responsibility, Diachrony, Hope (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013), pp. 93–​99; Emilia Angelova, “Time’s Disquiet and Unrest: The Affinity between Heidegger and Levinas,” in Between Levinas and Heidegger, edited by

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I would be remiss if I failed to note that Heidegger, too, wrote of the not-​yet (Noch-​nicht) as marking the constant “lack of wholeness” (Unganzheit) or the quality of being “outstanding” (Ausstand) that belongs essentially to Dasein. This sense of “being-​ahead-​of-​itself-​in-​already-​being-​in” (Sich-​vorweg-​sein-​im-​ schon-​sein-​in) is identified as the structure of care (Sorge), the anxiety about the future,13 which is not the psychological sense of distress to which human beings seem routinely vulnerable on the level of ontic anthropology but rather the ontological structure that designates “the being of a possible being-​in-​the-​ world” (des Seins eines möglichen In-​der-​Welt-​seins).14 Ontologically, “being toward one’s ownmost potentiality-​for-​being [Sein zum eigensten Seinkönnen] means that Dasein is always already ahead of itself in its being [das Dasein ist ihm selbst in seinem Sein je schon vorweg]. Dasein is always already ‘beyond itself’ [‘über sich hinaus’], not as a way of behaving toward beings which it is not, but as being toward the potentiality-​for-​being which it itself is. This structure of being of the essential ‘being concerned about’ we formulate as the being-​ahead-​of-​itself [Sich-​vorweg-​sein] of Dasein.”15 From Heidegger’s perspective, human existence is overshadowed by the gnawing sense that “what belongs together is not yet together” (Nochnichtbeisammensein des Zusammengehörigen),16 that Dasein’s being “remains forever on its way to something [unterwegs zu].”17 The problem here is not the existentiell-​ontical dilemma of not being able to apprehend “the not-​yet of the character of Dasein,” as we find, for example, in the case of perceiving the moon that is not yet full, but rather detecting the existential-​ ontological structure of “the possible being or nonbeing of this not-​yet [Noch-​ nicht]. Dasein, as itself, has to become, that is, be, what it is not yet.”18 Heidegger insists, therefore, that “Dasein never becomes accessible at all as something objectively present [Vorhandenes], because being possible belongs in its own way to its kind of being.”19 This comportment, however, “finds its end in death,”20 and hence the acceptance of one’s mortality represents the “eminent John E. Drabinski and Eric S. Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), pp. 85–​107. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 41, p. 189; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 196. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 12, p. 57; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 57. 15 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 41, p. 185 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, pp. 191–​192. 16 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 48, p. 233; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 242. 17 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by Ingo Farin with Alex Skinner, p. 38 (emphasis in original). 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 48, p. 234 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 243. 19 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 49, p. 239; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 248. 20 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 48, p. 233; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 242.

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possibility of Dasein” (ausgezeichnete Möglichkeit),21 that is, the “most extreme not-​yet” (äußerste Noch-​nicht) to which Dasein relates itself as the end that is “imminent” rather than as “something not yet objectively present.”22 The “structural factor of care”—​Dasein’s being-​ahead-​of-​itself (Sich-​vorweg)—​finds its “most primordial concretion” (ursprünglichste Konkretion) in “being-​toward-​ death” (Sein zum Tode) that is divulged as “being-​toward-​the-​end” (Sein zum Ende).23 Ironically, humankind’s “ownmost potentiality-​of-​being” (eigensten Seinkönnen)—​its being-​there (Da-​sein)—​is discerned from the “possibility of no-​longer-​being-​able-​to-​be-​there” (die Möglichkeit des Nicht-​mehr-​dasein-​ könnens).24 The incompleteness of the not-​yet terminates in the future that annuls the openness appropriate to a bona fide sense of futurity. “In death, Dasein is neither fulfilled nor does it simply disappear … Rather, just as Dasein constantly already is its not-​yet as long as it is, it also always already is its end.” The act of dying, consequently, “does not signify a being-​at-​an-​end [Zu-​Ende-​ sein] of Dasein, but rather a being toward the end [Sein zum Ende] of this being. Death is a way to be that Dasein takes over as soon as it is.”25 In that respect, the being-​toward-​the-​end does not connote an ultimate ending but rather the end that is always also a beginning, the mortality that is the benchmark of our immortality, not in the promise of a postmortem life but in taking hold of the collapse of the difference between life and death in comprehending that the persistence of time consists in its passing, that time is insofar as it constantly is not.26 Thus, commenting on the verse of Hölderlin, “Life is death, and death is also a life [Leben ist Tod, und Tod is auch ein Leben],” Heidegger writes, “Insofar 21 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 49, p. 239; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 248. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 50, p. 240; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 250. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 50, p. 241; Sein und Zeit, p. 251. On being-​toward-​the-​end and being-​at-​the-​end in Heidegger’s early thought, see White, Time and Death, pp. 75–​80. 24 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 50, p. 241 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 250. 25 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 48, p. 236 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 245. 26 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, with an introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 99: “And what is the temporal? … We are unmistakably reminded of what it is when we are told that someone’s ‘time was up.’ The temporal is what must pass away. And time is the passing away of what must pass away … Time causes the passing away of what must pass away, and does so by passing away itself; yet it itself can pass away only if it persists throughout all the passing away. Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not.” Heidegger considered this “representational idea of time” as an essential supposition of the “metaphysics of the West.” The metaphysical conception is determined by the notion of being as presence and hence what is thought to be in time is that which is present: “Only the ‘now’ is of the present time at each given moment. The future is the ‘not yet now’; the past is the ‘no longer now.’ The future is what is still absent, the past is what is already absent” (p. 101, emphasis in original).

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as death comes, it vanishes. The mortals die the death in life. In death the mortals become im-​mortal [un-​sterblich].”27 In “Der Begriff der Zeit,” a lecture Heidegger delivered to the Marburg Theological Society in July 1924, he offered the following paradoxical account of temporal reversibility that buttresses the centrality accorded to the future in the phenomenological ontology of his earlier work: Dasein, as always specifically mine in each case, knows of its death and does so even when it wants to know nothing of it. What is it to have one’s own death in each case? It is Dasein’s running ahead to its past, to an extreme possibility of itself that stands before it in certainty and utter indeterminacy. Dasein as human life is primarily being possible, the Being of the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past. …This past, to which I can run ahead as mine, is not some ‘what’, but the ‘how’ of my Dasein pure and simple. … This running ahead is nothing other than the authentic and singular future of one’s own Dasein. In running ahead Dasein is its future, in such a way that in this being futural [Zukünftigsein] it comes back to its past and present. Dasein, conceived in its most extreme possibility of Being, is time itself, not in time. … Being futural gives time [Zukünftigsein gibt Zeit], cultivates the present and allows the past to be repeated in how it is lived. With regard to time, this means that the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future (das Grundphänomen der Zeit ist die Zukunft).28 To know one’s own death, which is not just to know that inevitably one must die but to know in such a way that one possesses one’s death—​seemingly a phenomenological impossibility—​in the quality of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) or specificity (Jeweiligkeit) that is distinctive to Dasein’s being, gives rise to the paradox of temporal reversibility: the running ahead (Vorlaufen) to one’s past through which one confronts the extreme possibility (äußersten Möglichkeit) that stands before oneself in irrefutable certainty (Gewißheit) and utter indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit). Obviously, we would have expected Heidegger to speak of running back to the past or running ahead to the future. What does he mean by running ahead to one’s past and how is it the authentic and singular

27 28

Martin Heidegger, Elucidation of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), pp. 189–​190 (emphasis in original); idem, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [ga 4] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), p. 165. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 11–​14 (emphasis in original).

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future of one’s own Dasein (die eigentliche und einzige Zukunft des eigenen Daseins)? We can respond to these queries if we listen carefully to what is hinted at in the statement “Being futural gives time, cultivates the present and allows the past to be repeated in how it is lived.” Rather than thinking of the temporalization of time as the indeterminate future determined by the actuality of the past—​the rectilinear conception of time as a sequence of irreversible and homogenized now-​points in which everything that occurs in the present “rolls out of an infinite future into an irretrievable past”29—​Heidegger posits the indeterminate past determined by the possibility of the future. Hence, the past to which one runs ahead is not a fait accompli but an open occurrence subject to constant reformulation. “The past—​experienced as authentic historicity—​is anything but what is past. It is something to which I can return again and again.”30 Conceived from the vantage point of the “extreme possibility of Being” (äußersten Seinsmöglichkeit)—​so extreme that the past itself is only past to the extent that it can be replicated as that which is yet to come—​ the primary mode of temporality for Dasein is the future, and inasmuch as the fundamental phenomenon of time is the future, Dasein is identified as time itself.31 Dasein, therefore, is its own possibility to the extent that it runs ahead to its past, and in this running ahead one is authentically time.32 As in Sein und Zeit, so too in this lecture, Heidegger relates the future orientation of Dasein to the quality of care: “Everything that is encountered in the world is encountered by Dasein as residing in the now; thus it encounters the time itself that Dasein in each case is, but is as present. Concern as absorption in the present is, as care [Sorge], nonetheless alongside a not-​yet [Noch-​nicht] that is first to be attended to in taking care of it. Even in the present of its concern, Dasein is the whole of time, in such a way that it does not get rid of the future. The future is now that to which care clings.”33 The true import of identifying Dasein’s ownmost possibility of being as being-​toward-​death is that Dasein comports the sense of futurity that is the elemental nature of time and thus we should not speak of having time or being 29 30 31

32 33

Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 20: “Summing up, we may say: time is Dasein, Dasein is my specificity, and this can be specificity in what is futural by running ahead to the certain yet indeterminate past. Dasein always is in a manner of its possible temporal being. Dasein is time, time is temporal. Dasein is not time, but temporality [Das Dasein ist nicht die Zeit, sondern die Zeitlichkeit].” Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 16.

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in time but rather that we are in time inasmuch as time is our being.34 The hermeneutical foundation of the ontology of time is brought to light in the section of Sein und Zeit where Heidegger describes temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as the being of Dasein which understands being (Sein des seinverstehenden Daseins); that is, time is the horizon of the understanding of being (Horizont des Seinverständnisses) whence “Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all.”35 Indeed, it is in virtue of this dimension of Dasein’s being that we can utter the “fundamental assertion” (Grundaussage) that time is temporal (die Zeit ist zeitlich). At first glance, it would appear that this is nothing but a tautology. Heidegger insists, however, that this is not so; the statement imparts that time assumes meaning—​becomes temporal—​as a consequence of each individual human being running ahead to its past.36 Time is thus the principium individuationis, and the paramount facet of that temporalizing principle of individuation (Individuationsprinzip) is the future of the past that we are destined to live in the present. “In being futural in running ahead, the Dasein that on average is becomes itself; in running ahead it becomes visible as this one singular uniqueness of its singular fate in the possibility of its singular past.”37 In the time of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit)—​what Heidegger also refers to as the “astronomical and calendrical time-​reckoning” (astronomische und kalendarische Zeitrechnung)38—​the now of the present is the metrics by which we chronoscopically measure past and future: the past is the irretrievable no-​longer-​present (Nicht-​mehr-​Gegenwart) and the future the indeterminate not-​yet-​present (Noch-​nicht-​Gegenwart).39 The everyday standpoint presumes, therefore, both the irreversibility (Nicht-​Umkehrbarkeit) of time and its assimilation into space expressed as the homogenization into now-​points (Homogenisierung auf Jetzpunkte).40 Authentic time, by contrast, is lived from the futural retrieval of the past in the present, an act that constitutes the nature of Dasein as historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), that is, the enigma of history that unravels in our being historical. For Heidegger, this is the first principle of all hermeneutics: “The possibility of access to history [Zugangsmöglichkeit zur Geschichte] is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present

34 Ibid., p. 21. 35 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 5, p. 17 (emphasis in original); Sein und Zeit, p. 17. 36 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill, pp. 20–​21. 37 Ibid., p. 21. 38 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 80, p. 392 (emphasis in original); Sein und Zeit, p. 411. 39 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill, p. 17. 40 Ibid., p. 18.

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understands how to be futural [zukünftig].”41 In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger argued that the “being of Dasein finds its meaning in temporality,” which is defined more specifically as “the condition of the possibility of historicity [Möglichkeit von Geschichtlichkeit] as a temporal mode of being [zeitlichen Seinsart] of Dasein itself.” As the determination of the constitution of the being of Dasein, historicity is prior to the world-​historical occurrences (weltgeschichtliches Geschehen), which we call history. On the face of it, the historical propensity of the human being may be grounded in the fact that in its factical being (faktischen Sein) Dasein always is how and what it already was, that it possesses the past as a property that is still objectively present. However, the appropriation and narration of the past is possible only because Dasein is “its past in the manner of its being which, roughly expressed, on each occasion ‘occurs’ out of its future. In its manner of existing at any given time, and thus also with the understanding of being that belongs to it, Dasein grows into a customary interpretation of itself and grows up on that interpretation. … Its own past—​and that always means that of its ‘generation’—​does not follow after Dasein but rather always already goes ahead of it.”42 The formulation here anticipates the anti-​Hegelian emphasis in Heidegger’s later thought on the historical destiny of the unthought of being as the “it gives” (es gibt), which comes into language in the words of essential thinkers: Therefore the thinking that thinks into the truth of being is, as thinking, historical [geschichtlich]. There is not a “systematic” thinking and next to it an illustrative history of past opinions. … Thought in a more primordial way, there is the history of being [Geschichte des Seins] to which thinking belongs as recollection [Andenken] of this history, propriated [ereignet] by it. Such recollective thought differs essentially from the subsequent presentation of history in the sense of an evanescent past. History does not take place primarily as a happening [Geschehen]. And its happening is not evanescence [Vergehen]. The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of being and from it [Das Geschehen der Geschichte west als das Geschick der Wahrheit des Seins aus diesem]. …

41 Ibid., p. 20 (emphasis in original). 42 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 6, p. 19 (emphasis in original); idem, Sein und Zeit, pp. 19–​20. See Jean Greisch, Ontologie et Temporalité: Esquisse d’une interprétation intégrale de Sein und Zeit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 352–​382; Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1998), pp. 38–​51; Ann O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 15–​45.

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Being comes to its destiny in that It, being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: It gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously [Es gibt sich und versagt sich zumal].43 In light of this passage, and many others that could have been cited, I would take issue with the observation of Žižek that “the true Kehre from Sein und Zeit to the late Heidegger is the shift from ahistorical formal-​transcendental analysis to radical historicity. … Heideggerian historicity is the historicity of transcendental horizons themselves, of the different modes of the disclosure of being, with no agent regulating the process—​historicity happens as an es gibt (il y a), the radically contingent abyss of a world-​game.”44 I concur with the characterization of the es gibt as the world-​game in which the real is disclosed—​and here I would add the word “concealed,” insofar as every disclosure is perforce a concealment, every bequeathing is a refusal to bequeath—​as “a given without givenness,” as that which is “just given, with no possibility of accounting for its being given by any agency of giving.”45 Indeed, this is the crux of my reading of Heidegger offered in Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and the Overcoming of Theomania, a reading that invokes the ungifting of the gift, that is, the realization that there is naught but the giving that gives with no will to give and no desire to be given.46 However, I would challenge Žižek’s following the scholarly convention by temporalizing Heidegger’s thinking. The notion of historicity elicited from Heidegger after the so-​called turn is in evidence even in the early work. Be that as it may, Adorno astutely criticized Heidegger on the grounds that his notion of Dasein’s temporal transiency implies that it “is both absolutized and transfigured as eternal by the existential-​ontological drafts. The concept of existence as the essentiality of transience, the temporality of temporal things, keeps existence away by naming it [hält Existenz fern durch ihre Nennung]. … This is the latest type of philosophical solace, the type of mythical euphemism—​a falsely resurrected faith that one might break the spell of nature by soothingly copying it.”47 Similarly, from Levinas’s perspective, the 43 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 255; idem, Wegmarken [ga 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), p. 335. 44 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 890. 45 Ibid., p. 890 n. 44 (emphasis in original). 46 Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 227–​260, esp. 236–​246. 47 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 131; idem, Negative Dialektik [gs 6] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966),

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break with ontology turns on grasping death as the openness that foretells a future that can never be present except as what is to come, and thus the relativization of the temporal is not subject to the absolutization of being, even if the latter is conceived as the past that is eternally in the process of becoming, the reverberation of the same difference. When viewed this way we can appreciate the need to reverse the relationship between transience and temporality that emerges from Heidegger’s ruminations on death as the authentic “having-​ come-​to-​an-​end” (Zuendegekommensein).48 Apparently, pushing back against Heidegger, Levinas writes, “What we have attempted to do is to think of time independently of the death to which the passive synthesis of aging leads us, to describe time independently of death or the nothingness of the end that death signifies. We have attempted to think death as a function of time, without seeing in death the very project of time.”49 It seems to me entirely apt to p. 136. Compare Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 88–​ 89. For the contrast between Adorno and Heidegger on the matter of death, temporality, and the finitude of human existence, see Fred Dallmayr, Life-​world, Modernity and Critique: Paths between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 51–​52. See also Alexander García Düttmann, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno, translated by Nicholas Walker (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 52. 48 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 47, p. 230; idem, Sein und Zeit, p. 239. 49 Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 113. This is not the place to evaluate the accuracy and impartiality of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s position, but it does seem to me that Heidegger anticipates some of this criticism in his assessment of the theme of being-​toward-​death in Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-​Neu Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), § 161, pp. 222–​223; idem, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [ga 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), pp. 283–​284. After asserting that the consideration of being-​toward-​death in Being and Time was “thought only within ‘fundamental ontology’ and never conceived anthropologically or in terms of a ‘worldview,’” Heidegger recasts the earlier discussion in light of his current thinking about Ereignis as the truth of beyng (Seyn): “The uniqueness [Einzigkeit] of death in human Da-​sein belongs to the most original determination of Da-​sein, namely, to be ap-​propriated [er-​eignet] by beyng itself in order to ground this latter in its truth (openness of self-​concealing). In the unusualness and uniqueness of death, what opens up is the most unusual amid all beings, beyng itself, which essentially occurs as estrangement [Befremdung]. Yet in order to surmise anything at all of this most original nexus … what had to be made visible first … is the relation of Da-​sein to death itself, i.e., the connection between resoluteness (openness) and death, i.e., the running-​ahead [Vor-​laufen]. Yet this running ahead toward death is not to be made visible for the sake of attaining mere ‘nothingness” [Nichts], but just the opposite, so that openness for beyng might be disclosed—​fully and out of what is most extreme. … The essential context for the projection of death is the original futurity [ursprünglichen Zukünftigkeit] of Dasein within its very essence (as that essence is understood in

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ascribe to death Levinas’s description of the tragic as the “infinity of existence that is consumed in an instant, the fatality in which its freedom is congealed as in a winter landscape where frozen beings are captives of themselves. Time, far from constituting the tragic, shall perhaps be able to deliver us from it.”50 Reiterating the theme with a slightly different nuance in Totalité et Infini, Levinas writes: To be temporal is both to be for death and to still have time, to be against death. … It is a relation with an instant whose exceptional character is due not to the fact that it is at the threshold of nothingness or of a rebirth, but to the fact that, in life, it is the impossibility of every possibility, the stroke of a total passivity alongside of which the passivity of the sensibility, which moves into activity, is but a distant imitation. Thus the fear for my being which is my relation with death is not the fear of nothingness, but the fear of violence—​and thus it extends into fear of the Other, of the absolutely unforeseeable.51

50 51

fundamental ontology). In the framework of the task of Being and Time, this primarily means that death is connected to ‘time,’ which in turn is established as the domain for the projection of the truth of beyng itself. This already shows, clearly enough for anyone who wants to participate in the questioning, that there the question of death stands in an essential relation to the truth of beyng [Wahrheit des Seyns] and stands only in that relation. Accordingly, death is not taken there, and is never taken, as the denial of beyng [Verneinung des Seyns] or even, qua ‘nothingness,’ as the essence of beyng [Wesen des Seyns]. Instead, the exact opposite is the case: death is the highest and ultimate attestation of beyng [der Tod das höchste und äußerste Zeugnis des Seyns]” (emphasis in original). As this passage indicates, and the succeeding section makes even more clear, Heidegger was responding to critics who understood his analysis of being-​toward-​death as promoting a worldview (Weltanschauung) that led to nihilism. On the contrary, the intent of the analysis of being-​toward-​death was to enact the “ultimate measuring out [Ausmessung] of temporality [Zeitlichkeit] and thereby the move into the space of the truth of beyng, the indication of time-​space [die Anzeige des Zeit-​Raumes]: thus not in order to deny ‘beyng,’ but rather in order to establish the ground of its complete and essential affirmability [Bejahbarkeit]” (emphasis in original). The “carrying out” (Vollzug) of being-​toward-​death is open to “every essential human being” (wesentliche Mensch), but it is incumbent “only on thinkers of the other beginning.” With palpable irritation and a smidgen of sarcasm, Heidegger observes, “Being-​toward-​death would not be touched in its essentiality if it did not give scholars in philosophy an occasion for tasteless scoffing and journalists the right to know everything better” (Contributions, § 162, pp. 223–​224; Beiträge, pp. 284–​285). Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis, foreword by Robert Bernasconi (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), p. 78. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1969), p. 235; Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sue l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 212.

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In contrast to Heidegger’s understanding of death as the existential-​ ontological structure of Dasein’s ownmost and nonrelational possibility, Levinas depicts death as the relation with the instant whose exceptionality exhibits the impossibility of every possibility, the passivity of the subject overcome by the unpredictability of the other. Borrowing the jargon used by Walter Benjamin to distinguish classical tragedy from the Trauerspiel, we can say that, for Levinas, death is not an “individual destiny” but the “form of a communal fate.”52 I would propose, moreover, that to comprehend Levinas’s reference to the instant of death, we must avail ourselves of his earlier conception of the instant as the hypostasis that constitutes the “pretemporal sensibility,” in the language of Tina Chanter, the “time that is not yet time.”53 Levinas insisted that one cannot understand the instant unless one is attuned to the problem of origin, a topic that escapes philosophical analysis because the law of contradiction does not apply to what is prior to the event of the beginning, the moment of which we must say that A is concurrently non-​A. The “paradoxical duality” is rendered as follows: What begins to be does not exist before having begun, and yet it is what does not exist that must through its beginning give birth to itself, come to itself, without coming from anywhere. Such is the paradoxical character of beginning which is constitutive of an instant. … A beginning does not start out of the instant that precedes the beginning; its point of departure is contained in its point of arrival, like a rebound movement. It is out of this withdrawal in the very heart of the present that the present is effected, and an instant taken up.54 The instant of death is the mirror image of the instant of the beginning and thus we can say of it that its point of departure is contained in its point of arrival, and much like the beginning, the end is a withdrawal in the very heart of the present. But unlike the beginning, which is the giving birth to oneself, death is letting go of oneself to give birth to another. Death incarnates the temporality

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Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne, with an introduction by George Steiner (London: Verso, 1998), p. 136. The passage is cited below in n. 193. 53 Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine, p. 151. The author suggests that the idea of the instant may be viewed as “the germ of the notion that Levinas will later call the trace. As such, it also anticipates the structural tension and ambiguity that he will explore under the heading of the saying and the said.” 54 Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 75.

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that is expressive of the alterity that undergirds the infinite responsibility that one must assume in proximity to the other.55 That is, just as the temporal invariably bears the inchoateness of the not yet, so the other ceaselessly eludes categorization, since it is always on the way to becoming what it is not and therefore cannot be apperceived as that which is the same. Expressed in the more technical terms adopted by Levinas, the diachrony of time signifies the “noncoincidence” and “inadequation” of the “absolutely other,” the “In-​ visible” that cannot be “assimilated by experience,” the something more that is the “always of the relationship, an aspiration and an awaiting.”56 As a matter of phenomenological exactitude, death cannot be treated under the taxon of temporal facticity; it is more suitably demarcated as that which transpires in time in relation to which time has expired. Death falls outside the parameter of phenomenality—​at least when construed from the vantage point of a genetic as opposed to a generative phenomenology. Applying the words that Blanchot relegates to the phenomenon of the disaster, we can say of death that it is not a fact or an event because there is no “I” to undergo the experience, and since this is so, we are led to the paradox that death can take place only after having taken place.57 The time of death, accordingly, is the future anterior; that is, concerning death we can only say post factum that it will have been the event that it was to become.58 55 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 104. 56 Ibid., p. 32 (emphasis in original). 57 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 28. 58 My thinking reflects the approach to the event more generally affirmed by Claude Romano, “Awaiting,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, edited by Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), p. 46: “This metamorphosis of the possible (and of the world such as it articulates the possible) is not effectuated all at once; it seems even impossible that it would happen like this. It is only after the fact that an event becomes the event that it was. An event is not; it will have been an event. Its time is the future anterior” (emphasis in original). See also Françoise Dastur, “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,” Hypatia 15 (2000): 178–​189, esp. 182–​ 183: “But what is an event, in fact? At first, we can only define it as what was not expected, what arrives unexpectedly and comes to us by surprise, what descends upon us, the accident. … The event in the strong sense of the word is therefore always a surprise, something which takes possession of us in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us towards an unanticipated future. The eventum, which arises in the becoming, constitutes something which is irremediably excessive in comparison to the usual representation of time as flow. It appears as something that dislocates time and gives a new form to it, something that puts the flow of time out of joint and changes its direction. … The event constitutes the critical moment of temporality—​a critical moment which nevertheless allows the continuity of time. … Against all expectation, even if it has been partially expected and anticipated, such is in fact the ‘essence’ of the event. Based on this

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There is, as Françoise Dastur wrote, an impasse shared by the phenomenology of eventuality and the phenomenology of mortality: “Death, as an event, is also that which always happens against all expectation, always too early, something impossible that nevertheless happens. It comes to us without coming from us. It takes place in the impersonal manner of this event that happens also to others and it is the most universal event for living beings. One could say that death is the event par excellence, except that it is never present, it never presently happens.”59 Husserl already recognized the problem in wrestling with what he considered to be the inconceivability of imagining that everything that is presently immanent—​that is, all beings constituted noetically in the enduring present of consciousness—​would come to a halt such that there would then be nothing: As soon as one conceives of the “then-​not-​being,” one presupposes a “then-​being,” which conflicts with the non-​being. One imputes the possible cessation of every conceivable particular being to a putative cessation of the stream of life. The cessation itself as the cessation of the object presupposes a non-​cessation, namely, consciousness to which the cessation is given.60 we could say without paradox that it is an ‘impossible possible.’ The event, in its internal contradiction, is the impossible which happens, in spite of everything, in a terrifying or marvelous manner.” The passage of Dastur is cited and analyzed in the first chapter of this volume, pp. 10-​11. 59 Dastur, “Phenomenology,” p. 183. See idem, How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Robert Vallier, foreword by David Farrell Krell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 38–​39: “If the researcher did not already have this awareness of death, no objective event arising in the world could ever be able to put him or her in relation to it. For what essentially characterizes human being is the relation to its own death, which can never become an event in the world, since it constitutes the end of the world for the human being. The end can appear to the human being in the figure of a mundane or worldly event—​which we might call a passing-​away or a demise—​only from the moment that he or she views it from the outside, as if it were a question of the death of another. … Wanting to prepare oneself for death is thus possible only to the extent that one has already made death into an event and identified dying with mere demise. … What we lie about to and hide from ourselves on a daily basis is the imminence of death, the fact that it is possible at any moment and that the indetermination of the moment of death is not separable from the certainty of death. In the end, only this inauthentic postponement of death allows death to be confused with demise, with mundane event that happens only to others” (emphasis in original). 60 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, translated by Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 467. Husserl’s position is discussed by Saulius Geniusas, “On Nietzsche’s Genealogy and Husserl’s Genetic Phenomenology: The Case of Suffering,”

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Merleau-​Ponty extends the point to birth as well: “Neither my birth nor my death can appear to me as my personal experiences, since if I conceive of them in this way, I must imagine myself as preexisting or as surviving myself in order to be able to experience them, and thus I could not genuinely conceive of my birth or my death. Thus, I can only grasp myself as ‘already born’ and as ‘still living,’—​I can only grasp my birth and my death as pre-​personal horizons: I know that one is born and that one dies, but I cannot know my birth or my death.”61 Simply put, none of us can experience our own birth or our own death even as we know categorically that one is indisputable and the other inescapable. By this yardstick, death is quintessentially the nonevent of the terminus delimited as the limit always to be delimited, the limit beyond which there is no limit, and hence the limit of what cannot be delimited, the threshold that may be crossed only by not-​crossing. Death signifies a radical experience of time as the erasure written from the abiding evanescence of the end that stops being an end once it is attained, the future that can never arrive because, as future, it is always still arriving. Prima facie, the inability to reach the end, which temporalizes our existence in a distinctive manner, can be expressed as an apophasis of language. The point was well captured by Schürmann: “The singularizing withdrawal that death exerts on life would reduce language to zero if it were possible for us to see it in all its clarity. A radical Aufklärung on the subject of fantasms would deprive us of the common space where the give and take of speech proves to us that we are not dead.”62 This seems reasonable enough—​all things being equal, the possibility of dialogue with another is a tell-​tale sign that one is still walking amongst the living. The silence of not speaking may thus be correlated with death. Probing the matter from an even more paradoxical perspective, however, we can say that human time-​keeping is such that death is the signpost that illumines the way to the end that is still spoken, albeit spoken as unspoken. But how does one speak of what cannot be spoken? How does one discourse about death without traversing the coming of one’s time—​as in our saying “one’s time has come”? Death—​the unexpected, but yet altogether anticipated, end that comes unendingly as the end to come intermittently—​opens consciousness to the moment that escapes objectification and thematization, a moment that may be rendered poetically as the confrontation with the face most visible when it can be seen no more. In this encounter—​the effacement in Nietzsche and Phenomenology: Power, Life, Subjectivity, edited by Élodie Boublil and Christine Daigle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 50. 61 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 223. 62 Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, p. 18.

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at the intersection wherein existence and nonexistence are indistinguishable, or, as Levinas put it, the “interval of discretion,” the “dead time” (temps mort) that is the “third notion between being and nothingness”63—​truth is disclosed in the concealment of its disclosure. The sign of the end, accordingly, would signify the end of the sign, but it is a sign nonetheless, indeed the ultimate sign inasmuch as it signifies that which cannot be signified, a semiosis of the end that is inherently endless. 2

Waiting for the End of Waiting

Beyond the complexities of delineating death as an abstract homogenization that would lead paradoxically to the positing of a singularity that does not allow for singularity, we must be cognizant of the fact that any thinking that attempts to grapple with the endtime more generally in an age inundated by severe fragmentation, heterogeneity, and disjointedness needs to engage the problem of the viability of system and the incommensurability of truth as the exception to exceptionality, the trace of transcendence that defies incorporation into totality. As Joanna Hodge summarized the situation in the twentieth century, which can easily be extended to the twenty-​first century, “In place of completed systems or delimited position statements, philosophy has tended to be written under the sign of incompleteness, and thus has the open-​ended form of a practice which requires the active participation of its inheritors.”64 Thinking in the footsteps of Rosenzweig,65 I would proffer that system does not denote an architectural structure, which is formed by assembling individual 63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 58; idem, Totalité et Infini, p. 29. 64 Joanna Hodge, “Poietic Epistemology: Reading Husserl Through Adorno and Heidegger,” in Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, edited by Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 66. 65 I am here restating the argument in Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 88–​89, and compare Elliot R. Wolfson, “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition,” in Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and Mihaela Frunză (Cluj-​Napoca: Provo Press, 2008), pp. 179–​182. Rosenzweig’s notion of system has been explored by various scholars. See, for instance, Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, foreword by Emmanuel Lévinas, translated by Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and the essays in Die Denkfigur des Systems im Ausgang von Franz Rosenzweigs “Stern der Erlösung”, herausgegeben von Hartwig Wiedebach (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2013).

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stones whose meaning is validated by the sense of the whole, but rather the striving on the part of individual entities for correlationality; the merit of a system is dependent, therefore, on postulating a unity incessantly in the making, a cohesiveness that displays an impulse for order that must be realized continually through negotiating the chaos. The idea of the open system is captured aptly by Hodge’s expression “poietic epistemology,” which she deploys to convey the idea that phenomenology is a practice of thinking that is always in the process of formation.66 Rosenzweig elucidated his view by noting that, in the Hegelian system, each individual is anchored temporally in the whole and thus every present is an interval related exclusively to two others, the one that immediately precedes it as past and the one that immediately succeeds it as future, but in his notion of systematicity, the genuine novelty of each moment is not to be confirmed spatially by its occupying a median position sequentially between what came before and what comes after. To the extent that the moment is authentically novel—​an event of presence that is always in excess of being present—​it is experienced as the constant resumption of what is yet to be, the return of what has never been, the vertical intervention that opens the horizontal timeline to the spherical redundancy of eternity. In this manner, Deleuze famously cast Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence as the repetition that consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different; that is, what is the same is the reiteration of difference,67 and hence, as Heidegger pithily portrayed the paradox of temporal tensiveness, every “already” (wieder) is an “altogether otherwise” (ganz anders). Repetition, therefore, means “to let the same, the uniqueness of beyng, become plight again and thereby out of a more original truth.”68 66 67

Hodge, “Poietic Epistemology,” p. 65. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 41; Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 48. For discussion of the Deleuzian perspective and the passage of Heidegger cited in the following note, see Wolfson, Giving, p. 243. 68 Heidegger, Contributions, § 33, p. 58 (emphasis in original); idem, Beiträge, p. 73. It follows that, for Heidegger, the inceptuality of the beginning (die Anfängnis des Anfangs)—​the event (Ereignis)—​is a reiteration (Wiederanfangen) of what has already been that which is to come, the thinking of the first that is always a rethinking of the second, a point exploited by the anarchic drift of Derridean deconstruction. See Heidegger, Contributions, § 23, p. 46; idem, Beiträge, p. 57. And compare Martin Heidegger, The Event, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), §§ 252–​253, pp. 195–​197 (idem, Das Ereignis [ga 71] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), pp. 227–​ 229): “The beginning is not inceptually in the inceptuality; the beginning commences in what has not begun, inasmuch as the beginning disentangles itself from that in order to emerge. The disentangling is what is concealed of the unconcealedness. … The other beginning is the beginning otherwise than the first—​the first is still otherwise than the

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For Rosenzweig, the paradox of the again that is altogether otherwise suggests that the renunciation of totality and the consequent turn to individuality are not an unmitigated toppling of system but a reorientation based on a notion of system according to which universality is revamped continuously in light of the entanglement of the general in the web of particularity. This notion of systematicity, as I have suggested elsewhere,69 offers something of a corrective to the postmodern dismissal of essentialism, insofar as it entails a conception of integration and a mode of discursive coherence that provide the relatively stable framework through and in which the changing constellations evolve, dissolve, and revolve, without assuming that all tensions, inconsistencies, and contradictions are reconciled in a unified structure akin to a Hegelian ideal of sublation. What may be elicited from Rosenzweig is not conceptually far-​off from Benjamin’s idea that the expressionless points to the absolute, which is not a substance that can be reified ontotheologically but rather the infinitude (Unendlichkeit) of language that prevents the setting of definite limits and thus serves as the principle of falsification that shatters the whole into fragments—​corresponding linguistically to the translatability of the Ursprache into the multiple languages of humankind70—​“reducing it to the smallest totality of semblance, a totality that is a great fragment taken from the true world, the fragment of a symbol.”71 Moving beyond the rhetoric of Rosenzweig and Benjamin, employing the strategies of more recent semiotic theory, enhanced by contemporary physics and mathematics, I would say that the complexity of any given system requires that each one of the interacting semantic signs is implicated in the production

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other [der erste ist anders noch als der andere]. … Beginning [Anfang] does not mean commencement [Beginn], and afortiori never means the commencement of beings. … In order to think the beginning, we must already in advance be appropriated in the experience of being [Erfahrung des Seins], appropriated by being to this experience” (emphasis in original). See also Martin Heidegger, Schwarze Hefte 1931–​1938 [ga 94] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), pp. 100 and 243; idem, Ponderings II-​ IV: Black Notebooks 1931–​1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 76 and 178. On the distinction between Ursprung and Anfang in Rosenzweig, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 119–​120. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Revealing and Re/​veiling: Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Secret,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 52. Andrew Benjamin, “The Absolute as Translatability: Working Through Walter Benjamin on Language,” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 109–​122. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–​1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 225.

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of the very system that produces it, a network of patterns that express the dynamical properties fashioned by an ever-​changing interconnectivity; this ensemble of irreducible and yet mutually interdependent clusters, however, does not form a homogeneous and symmetrical whole devoid of ambiguity and incoherence.72 Following Badiou, we may wish to adopt the notion of universal singularity—​epitomized by Paul in his appeal to the “evental truth” that casts the universal messianically with reference to the singular and subjective occurrence of the resurrection, that is, the human becoming the ultimate subject by relinquishing integration into the totality (Greek wisdom) and abdicating the mastery of a literal tradition that triggers the deciphering of signs (Jewish ritualism and prophetism)73—​in an effort to affirm the construction of imaginary identities that are shared but not subsumed under an axiomatic homogeny. In Lacanian terms, the world is “an interplay of the symbolic and the imaginary in response to the collapse of the real.”74 However, as Badiou himself acknowledges, this collapse “eliminates the event, and so fidelity to the event, which is the subjective essence of the truth. The world is then hostile to the process of truth insofar as it resists the universal of identity through homogeny or the adhesion to constructed identities.”75

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Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 44–​45, 94–​95. See also David Bohm, Thought as a System (London: Routledge, 1994). Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 14, 42. For a sustained critique of Badiou’s approach to Paul, see Stephen Fowl, “A Very Particular Universalism: Badiou and Paul,” in Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others, edited by Douglas Harink (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2010), pp. 119–​134. Alain Badiou, “St. Paul, Founder of the Universal Subject,” in St. Paul among the Philosophers, edited by John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 28. Badiou’s indebtedness to Lacan is well-​documented in the conversations recorded in Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue, translated by Jason E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). On the truth as universal singularity and Paul, see also Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 9–​14, esp. 11: “For if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is immediately universalizable. Universalizable singularity necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity.” On the thesis that every universal is a singularity, see Alain Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Philosophy in the Present, edited by Peter Engelmann, translated by Peter Thomas and Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 29–​31. See also Frederiek Depoortere, “Badiou’s Paul: Founder of Universalism and Theoretician of the Militant,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers: The Apostle and Contemporary Continental Philosophy, edited by Peter Frick (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), pp. 143–​164. Badiou, “St. Paul,” p. 28.

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The relevance of this claim to the topic at hand should be obvious. The repudiation of homogeneity and symmetry calls into question the rigidity of positing a clearly marked beginning or end. For our purposes I will concentrate on the latter, although I readily admit that the correlativity of the two precludes their partition. In contemplating the end, we enter into the thicket of eschatology—​literally, the discourse or thinking about the end—​for there is no end that has commanded as much attention in Jewish theorizing about the end as the eschaton. Here, too, it is prudent to note the messianic paradigm embraced by Rosenzweig, which is to be contrasted with a conception of the climactic fulfillment of history as we find in some forms of Christian soteriology, Enlightenment utilitarianism, and Hegelian idealism. The teleological notion is upended by the possibility of the future diremptively breaking into the present at any moment, an incursion that disturbs the chronometric flow of time and undercuts the supposition that there is a progressive march towards an attainable goal. Messianic hope hinges on preparing for the onset of what takes place as the purely present future, that is, the future that is already present as the present that is always future, the tomorrow that is now because it is now tomorrow.76 “Eternity is not a very long time,” wrote Rosenzweig, “but a tomorrow that just as well could be today. Eternity is a future, which, without ceasing to be future, is nevertheless present. Eternity is a today that would be conscious of being more than today.”77 It is specifically through adherence to Jewish law in the course of the annual liturgical cycle that one is “permitted to implore eternity into time.”78 The Jews are the eternal people because they ritually embody this sense of fulfilled time: “For it its temporality, this fact that the years recur, is considered only as a waiting, perhaps as a wandering, but not as a growing. … For eternity is precisely this, that between the present moment and the completion time may no longer claim a place, but as early as in the today every future is graspable.”79 Rather than viewing the nomadic quality of the Jew as a detriment, Rosenzweig interprets the stereotype of wandering as the spatial analogue to the temporal exploit of waiting for the end. The position taken by Rosenzweig 76

Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 286; idem, “Open Secret in the Rearview Mirror,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 35 (2011): 417–​418. 77 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by Barbara Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 241; idem, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften II. Der Stern der Erlösung (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 250. 78 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 347; idem, Der Stern, p. 364. 79 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 348; idem, Der Stern, pp. 364–​365.

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is put into sharp relief when compared to Heidegger, who viewed both Jewish messianic faith and the nomadic status of the Jew prejudicially: the directive to wait for redemption as an incident in history that has not yet occurred is the temporal equivalent of spatial dislocation and the diasporic desire to return to the homeland.80 Needless to say, the distinction that Heidegger draws in 80

For a more extensive comparison of the views of Heidegger and Rosenzweig on the nomadic nature of the Jews, see Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 70–​77. Concerning Heidegger’s view on Jewish messianism, see the passage from the Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens cited and discussed in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 232–​233. On the disparaging depiction of the itinerant status of the Jewish exile, see especially the comment in Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State 1933–​1934, translated and edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 55–​ 56: “History teaches us that nomads have not only been made nomadic by the desolation of wastelands and steppes, but they have also often wastelands behind them where they found fruitful and cultivated land—​and that human beings who are rooted in the soil have known how to make a home for themselves even in the wilderness. Relatedness to space, that is, the mastering of space and becoming marked by space, belong together with essence and the kind of Being of a people … From the specific knowledge of a people about the nature of its space, we first experience how nature is revealed in this people. For a Slavic people, the nature of our German space would definitely be revealed differently from the way it is revealed to us; to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all.” See the analysis of this text in Peter E. Gordon, “Heidegger in Purgatory,” in Heidegger, Nature, History, State, pp. 85–​107, esp. 96–​98. As Gordon rightly notes, Heidegger’s deleterious comment has to be evaluated against his overall thinking regarding the themes of enrootedness, dwelling, homelessness, and homecoming, as they relate to the destiny of the human being in the world. See Wolfson, The Duplicity, pp. 42–​43. On the political issues surrounding the topological-​geographical elements of Heidegger’s thinking in light of his affiliation with Nazism, see Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), pp. 17–​27, 283–​285; and idem, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2012), pp. 137–​157. The matter is too complicated to deal with adequately in this note, but I would say briefly that Heidegger’s sense of homecoming or enrootedness in place cannot be separated from his sensitivity to the matter of homelessness, and both are to be gauged from the vantage point of the proximity to or the distance from being, which is determinative of the fundamental character of human ek-​istence (Ek-​sistenz), that is, the ecstatic inherence as the “there” (das “Da”) that is the “clearing of being” (Lichtung des Seins). See the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946) in Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 248; idem, Wegmarken, p. 325. For Heidegger, these are not polar opposites, as the logic of noncontradiction and the principle of the excluded middle might prescribe, for what is nearby is concomitantly faraway, what is disclosed is concomitantly concealed. See Wolfson, Giving, p. 104 and references to other scholars cited on p. 366 n. 110, to which one could add Richard Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, foreword by William J. Richardson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 52–​69. Most importantly, after resigning from the rectorship in 1934, Heidegger seems to have shifted from a purely political sense of “the homeland” (die Heimat) and of “the German” (das Deutsche) to a theologico-​poetic sense, in

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the 1920–​1921 lecture course, “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion,” between the historical time of Jewish messianism and the kairetic time of Christian eschatology is too simplistic. One can discover in some versions of Jewish messianism the chiastic paradox that Heidegger associates with the structure of hope and the temporality of the enactment of life (Vollzug des Lebens) ritualized sacramentally by the Christian parousia: the future is already present as the present that is always future.81 This form of hope is not expressed by waiting for something to take place in the ordinary procession of time but as an expectation of the unexpected, the renewal of what has already transpired.82 Heidegger distinguishes Jesus’s proclamation (Verkündigung) of Lacoue-​Labarthe’s turn of phrase, which shares affinity with Benjamin’s signature expression “theological-​political.” See Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, “Poetry’s Courage,” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, pp. 163–​179. This is not to say that the geopolitical sense is completely obliterated in Heidegger, but only that it is somewhat attenuated. Consider, for instance, the following exposition of these lines from Hölderlin, “A sign is needed, /​Nothing else, plain and simple” (Ein Zeichen braucht es, /​ Nichts anderes, schlecht und recht), in Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 153 (idem, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” [ga 53] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), p. 191): “This alone is the singular need of journeying into the locality of what for the Germans is their ownmost [der Wanderschaft in die Ortschaft des Eigensten der Deutschen]: ‘A sign’ (a poet, ‘Nothing else, plain and simple’—​there is need of this unconditional founding of what remains.” And see especially Heidegger’s admonition, ad loc., n. 2: “There is no need for the affected extravagance, the loud gestures and bewildering din, or the immense monuments characteristic of the un-​German monumental of the Romans and Americans. And such things are not needed if the sign remains plain, that is, oriented directly toward that which is to be said, and if has nothing to do with all those other things that are adverse and detrimental to one’s own.” That these words were written in 1942 is not insignificant. On the diasporic nature of Heidegger’s “thinking poetics,” see Alejandro A. Vallega, Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Aubrey L. Glazer, A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking: Critical Theory After Adorno as Applied to Jewish Thought (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 31. 81 Wolfson, Open Secret, pp. 280–​281; Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), p. 254. 82 Wolfson, Giving, pp. 101–​102, 231–​232. I will not repeat here the other scholarly analyses of Heidegger’s exegesis of Paul and Christian eschatology that I cited in that study, but I do want to take the opportunity to draw the reader’s attention to some additional references: Thomas J. Sheehan, “Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’ 1920–​21,” The Personalist 55 (1979–​1980): 312–​324, reprinted in A Companion to Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” edited by Joseph Kockelmans (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 40–​62; Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 33–​34; Joachim L. Oberst, Heidegger on Language and Death: The Intrinsic Connection in Human Existence (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 17–​47, esp. 28–​36; Glazer, A New Physiognomy, pp. 34–​35; Sylvain Camilleri, Phénoménologie de la religion

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the coming of the kingdom of God in the synoptic gospels and Paul’s notion of enactment, which in turn is based on the factical life experience (Faktische Lebenserfahrung) whose object is Jesus, the Messiah that has already come. The factical life experience for the Christian “is historically determined by its emergence with the proclamation that hits people in a moment, and then is unceasingly also alive in the enactment of life.”83 The enactment of life, therefore, entails the ability for one to relive the historical moment—​the Christ-​event of the crucifixion—​which from its inception bears the retroactive not yet. In this regard, the messianic annunciation is not simply a “thankful memory” but rather the “having-​become” (Gewordensein) that engenders the possibility of a “new becoming” that “always remains co-​present.”84 Commenting et herméneutique théologique dans la pensée du jeune Heidegger: Commentaire analytique des Fondements philosophiques de la mystique médiévale (1916–​1919) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 457–​464; Justin D. Klassen, “Heidegger’s Paul and Radical Orthodoxy on the Structure of Christian Hope,” in Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision, pp. 64–​ 89; Simon Critchley, “You Are Not Your Own: On the Nature of Faith,” in Paul and the Philosophers, edited by Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 224–​255; Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 61–​65; Benjamin Crowe, “Heidegger and the Apostle Paul,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers, pp. 39–​56. Also relevant here is the discussion in Düttmann, The Memory of Thought, pp. 258–​263, of Heidegger’s “Dionysian mysticism,” which rests upon a “forgetting of the Messianism of Jewish mysticism.” The catalyst for Düttmann’s comments is the contrast between Heidegger and Derrida made by Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1987), p. 167: “Derrida passes beyond Heidegger’s inverted foundationalism, but remains in its path. As a result, the temporalized Ursprungsphilosophie takes on clearer contours. The remembrance of the messianism of Jewish mysticism and of the abandoned but well-​ circumscribed place once assumed by the God of the Old Testament preserves Derrida, so to speak, from the political-​moral insensitivity and the aesthetic tastelessness of a New Paganism spiced up with Hölderlin.” It is beyond the confines of this note to evaluate Habermas’s remark but Düttmann is correct to derive from it a portrait of a Heideggerian messianism devoid of any influence of Jewish eschatology. 83 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-​Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) p. 83; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens [ga 60] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), pp. 116–​117. See Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 169–​170. 84 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, p. 84; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, p. 117. Travis Kroeker, “Living ‘As If Not’: Messianic Becoming or the Practice of Nihilism?” in Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision, p. 40 n. 8, commented on the affinity between Heidegger’s interpretation of Paul’s notion of “having become” and Badiou’s emphasis on becoming a subject. I would add that another similarity relates to the primacy accorded the now of the singularity of the event, or as Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 59, puts it, “every truth is marked by an indestructible youthfulness” (emphasis in

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on Paul’s observation that the appointed time has grown short or contracted itself, ho kairos synestalmenos estin (1 Corinthians 7:29), Heidegger writes in a conspicuously Kierkegaardian spirit85 that the primordial Christian religiosity (urchristlichen Religiosität) demands that one live incessantly in the distress of the only-​yet (Nur-​Noch), a “compressed temporality” (zusammengedrängte Zeitlichkeit) instantiated in the moment of vision (Augenblick), in which there is no time for postponement.86 The true believer ascertains that salvation partakes of the factical life experience that converts the temporal into the eternal. “The obstinate waiting,” writes Heidegger, “does not wait for the significances of a future content, but for God. The meaning of temporality determines itself out of the fundamental relationship to God—​however, in such a way that only those who live temporality in the manner of enactment understand eternity.”87 Utilizing Ricoeur’s discussion of Augustine’s notion of time and eternity as it pertains to the psychological experience of distentio animi,88 we can hypothesize that even at this early stage, Heidegger—​in a manner that is consonant with Rosenzweig89—​does not embrace a metaphysical conception of eternity original). I read Badiou’s idea of the evental truth as a further secularization of Heidegger’s interpretation of Pauline eschatology and the hope engendered by waiting for the second coming. Consider the following summary given in an interview with Fabien Tarby in Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, translated by Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 12: “In every situation, there are processes faithful to an event that has previously taken place. It’s not a matter, then, of desperately awaiting a miraculous event but, rather of following through to the very end, to the utmost degree, what you’ve been able to extract from the previous event and of being as prepared as possible, therefore, to take in subjectively what will inevitably come about. For me, truth is an undertaking; it is a process made possible by the event. The event is only there as a source of possibilities.” 85 Compare the analyses of Kierkegaard and Heidegger in Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th-​and 20th-​Century Western Philosophy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–​33, 97–​124. 86 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 85; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 119. 87 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, pp. 83–​84; idem, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, p. 117. For a critical assessment of Heidegger’s view, see Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 82–​83, 88, 134. Various scholars have explored the relation between time and eternity in Heidegger. Here I mention two studies worthy of attention: Gerd Haeffner, “Heidegger über Zeit und Ewigkeit,” Theologie und Philosophie 64 (1989): 481–​517; Jean Greisch, “The Eschatology of Being and the God of Time in Heidegger,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1996): 17–​42. 88 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University Press, 1984), p. 26. My discussion here is indebted to Greisch, “The Eschatology of Being,” p. 20. 89 Wolfson, Alef, pp. 176–​177: “The disavowal of time does not imply an abrogation or even a dialectical surpassing of temporality, but rather its radical deepening, an eradication of

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that is the ontological negation of time, but rather eternity is to be construed as the limiting idea that determines the horizon of and intensifies our experience of time. The intensification of the experience of time is the phenomenological content of the enactment of life identified by Heidegger as the primordial Christian religiosity. In “Der Begriff der Zeit,” a lecture delivered a few years later, Heidegger defines Christian faith (Glaube) as that which “is in itself supposed to stand in relation to something that happened in time—​at a time, we are told, of which it is said: I was the time ‘when time was fulfilled.’”90 Heidegger distinguishes between the theologian’s concern to understand time in relation to eternity (Ewigkeit), which is a matter of faith, and the philosopher’s quest to understand time through time (die Zeit aus der Zeit) or in terms of that which exists perpetually (aei), which appears to be eternal but is actually a derivative of being temporal.91 The dichotomy seems decisive: the theologian comprehends time from the standpoint of eternity and the philosopher, eternity from the standpoint of time. And yet, Heidegger is clear that faith dictates that the believer experiences eternity in relation to what has occurred at a given moment in time, an eternity that should be understood neither as sempiternitas, “the ongoing continuation of time” (das fortgesetzte Weitergehen der Zeit), nor as aeternitas, the “ever-​enduring presence” (immerwährende Gegenwart) of the “standing now” (nunc stans), the two explanations of eternity offered by Heidegger in the lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn Germanien delivered in the winter semester 1934–​1935 at the University of Freiburg.92 Heidegger’s reading of Pauline eschatology and his interpretation of Christianity based thereon rest upon a third possibility that presumes the eternalization of the temporal without appeal to the two conceptions of eternity (Ewigkeitsbegriffe)—​the incessant flow of time, a “never-​ending sequence of ‘nows,’” and the motionless and everlasting present, “an encompassing ‘now’ time by rooting oneself more deeply in the ground of time. Eternity, accordingly, is not the metaphysical overcoming of or existential escape from time but rather the merging of the three-​dimensional structure of lived temporality through eternalization of the present in the continuous becoming of the being that has always been what is yet to come.” See ch. 2 in this volume, pp. 105-​106. 90 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill, p. 1. The scriptural citation is from Galatians 4:4. It is of interest that Heidegger copied this introduction in the article with the same name “Der Begriff der Zeit,” also written in 1924 (see above, n. 7). See Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by Ingo Farin with Alex Skinner, p. 37. 91 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, translated by William McNeill, pp. 1–​2. 92 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 52; idem, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” [ga 39] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), pp. 54–​55.

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that remains standing ahead of time”—​that spring from the experience of time as a “pure sequential passing of ‘nows’” (reinen Vergehens des Jetzt im Nacheinander). Insofar as this notion of time “does not grasp the essence of time”—​the view already espoused in Sein und Zeit—​it follows that the concepts of eternity dependent upon it also will not “reach the essence of eternity.”93 In addition to these perspectives, Heidegger proposes a third notion of eternity that is tagged as “the time that is essentially long” (die wesenhaft lange Zeit). Utilizing the following lines from the second version of Hölderlin’s poem Mnemosyne as a springboard, “Long is /​The time, yet what is true /​Comes to pass” (Lang ist /​Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber /​Das Wahre), Heidegger distinguishes the ascription of the quality of length to “everyday time” (alltägliche Zeit) and to “time of the peaks” (die Zeit der Gipfel), an expression derived from the poem Patmos. In the case of the former, the feeling that time is long is a sign of boredom, whereas in the case of the latter, it signifies that at the height of sublimity there “reigns a persistent waiting for and awaiting the event [Ereignis] … There is no passing or even killing of time there, but a struggle for the duration and fullness of time that is preserved in awaiting.”94 In this context, Heidegger has unquestionably departed from the theistic mind-​set operative in his exegesis of Paul. Nevertheless, there is thread that ties together that discussion and his analysis of Hölderlin. Both instances demonstrate that Heidegger did not think of eternity as atemporal or supratemporal but rather as the elongation of time experienced in the adamant waiting for the event that is the “becoming manifest of beyng” (das Offenbarwerden des Seyns),95 the repeatedly renewed conferral of the origin that is forever concealed in the unconcealedness of the beginning and consequently remains permanently still to come. Along similar lines, Agamben argued that Paul’s technical term for the messianic event is ho nyn kairos, the time of the now, which is not the end of time that will happen in the future but the time of the end that is experienced as the interminable waiting in the present.96 Messianic time is thus defined as “the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time. This is not the line of chronological time … nor the instant of its end … nor is it a segment cut from chronological time; rather, it is operational time pressing within the 93 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns, p. 52 (emphasis in original); idem, Hölderlins Hymnen, 55. 94 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns, p. 53 (emphasis in original); idem, Hölderlins Hymnen, pp. 55–​56. 95 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns, p. 53; idem, Hölderlins Hymnen, p. 56. 96 Agamben, The Time That Remains, pp. 61–​62.

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chronological time, working and transforming it from within; it is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us.”97 The seventh day emblematizes messianic time because the Sabbath “is not another day, homogenous to others; rather, it is that innermost disjointedness within time through which one may—​by a hairsbreadth—​grasp time and accomplish it.”98 The anticipation of the end, therefore, reveals a complex interplay between foresight and reminiscence, between the experience of absence and the nonexperience of presence, between the nongivenness of an event and the givenness of the nonevent, between the disappearance that has appeared and the appearance that will disappear.99 Rosenzweig himself attests to the fact that the messianic tenet of Judaism, in a manner congruent to, even though not identical with, Christian faith, betokens a tension between the absent presence of the past and the present absence of the future. That is to say, redemption is always of the future but a future that retrieves the past and ruptures the present, thereby bending the timeline such that not-​yet is already-​there insofar as already-​there is not-​yet.100 The eternal people live an eternal life in time, constantly anticipating the end and thereby transposing it into the beginning. This reversal “denies time as resolutely as possible and places itself outside of it.” To live in time means to live between beginning and end, but to live outside time—​which is the necessary condition for one who lives eternally—​this between must be spurned. From Rosenzweig’s standpoint, the individual who adheres to Jewish ritual “experiences precisely the reversal of the between” (die Umkehrung des Zwisc hen), and thus “disavows the omnipotence of the between and denies time.”101 Redemptive time, therefore, is concomitantly overflowing with and depleted 97 98

Ibid., pp. 67–​68 (emphasis in original). Ibid., p. 72. See Eleanor Kaufman, “The Saturday of Messianic Time: Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul,” in Paul and the Philosophers, pp. 297–​309; Ryan L. Hansen, “Messianic or Apocalyptic? Engaging Agamben on Paul and Politics,” in Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision, pp. 198–​223; Alain Gignac, “Agamben’s Paul: Thinker of the Messianic,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers, pp. 165–​192. 99 My approach can be fruitfully compared to the discussion of the parousia in Jean-​Yves Lacoste, “The Phenomenality of Anticipation,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology, pp. 15–​33. 100 Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, translated by Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 56–​57. See Stéphane Mosès, “Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig,” The Philosophical Forum 15 (1983–​ 1984): 188–​205, esp. 200–​202. See also Pierre Bouretz, Witness for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism, translated by Michael Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 138–​147. 101 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 443; idem, Der Stern, p. 467.

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of quotidian time, a novel iteration that can disrupt the temporal flux at any and every moment. Instead of circumscribing the future as being-​toward-​ death, Rosenzweig characterizes the future as the fecundity of the distension that bears the paradox of the linear circularity of time, the restoration of what is to come.102 This view resonates with Schwarzschild’s observation that there is an “anticipation of the end-​time within time, or, more properly perhaps, this vestige of the primaeval time within time.”103 Redemption is not the consequence of historical development, the effect of a causal chain that links the retention of the past and the protention of the future, but rather the corollary of an expectation that is realized as the expectation of what cannot be realized. “That which is future calls for being predicted. The future is experienced only in the waiting. Here the last must be the first in thought.”104 The allure of the future, accordingly, is not to be assessed from the standpoint of an achievable goal but from the standpoint of the activity that the waiting for that goal incites. To utilize again the language of Schwarzschild: on the one hand, Judaism shows evidence of an “actionable Messianism,” that is, the anticipation of the endtime affects behavior in the life of the present,105 but, on the other hand, the duty conferred on the devout Jew is to believe in a savior who is always in the process of coming and not in one that has already come.106 The expectation for the nonexpected transposes the temporal order 102 See analysis in Beniamino Fortis, “Thinking the Future: Death and Redemption—​ Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 3 (2010): 249–​256. 103 Steven S. Schwarzschild, “An Introduction to the Thought of R. Isaac Hutner,” Modern Judaism 5 (1985): 245. In that context, the author is discussing the eschatological thought of Levinas and Hutner. See below, n. 106. 104 Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 235; idem, Der Stern, p. 244. 105 Steven S. Schwarzschild, The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, edited by Menachem Kellner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 219, and see p. 363 n. 72, where the author notes this theme in thinkers as disparate as Martin Buber, Isaac Hutner, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin. For a more detailed discussion of Hutner’s messianic view, especially in conversation with Cohen and Levinas, see Schwarzschild, “An Introduction,” pp. 238–​256. 106 Schwarzschild, The Pursuit of the Ideal, pp. 209–​211, cited in Wolfson, Giving, p. 116. The Cohenian influence of Schwarzschild has been noted by scholars. See Kenneth Seeskin, “The Rational Theology of Steven S. Schwarzschild,” Modern Judaism 12 (1992): 284; Menachem Kellner, “Introduction,” in Schwarzschild, The Pursuit of the Ideal, pp. 10–​11. A related but somewhat different issue is the question of a personal redeemer versus the ideal of redemption, a topic discussed by Schwarzschild in a 1956 essay, reprinted in The Pursuit of the Ideal, pp. 15–​28. In his later thought, Schwarzschild unequivocally renounced the belief in a personal messiah and sided with Cohen in affirming an asymptotic approach that conceives of the end as the ethical goal towards which we strive but which we can never attain. See also Schwarzschild, “An Introduction,” p. 244. Commenting on Hutner’s teaching concerning the ultimate actualization of the good and

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by inverting the causal succession—​what determines the present is not the past but the future. This transposition is communicated by Rosenzweig in language—​“the last must be first in thought” (Das Letzte muβ hier in Gedanken das Erste sein)—​that calls to mind the dictum in the hymn Lekhah Dodi, composed by the sixteenth-​century kabbalist Solomon Alqabeṣ, sof ma‘aseh be-​ maḥashavah teḥillah, “the end of action is first in thought.”107 Echoing Rosenzweig’s view, Levinas noted that because Judaism does not identify salvation as the denouement of history, it remains possible at every moment.108 This is the messianic mystery alluded to in the disquieting expression “awaiting without an awaited.” To wait without an awaited implies that there can be no end to the waiting, the very condition that underscores the essential feature of time as the promise of a future.109 Levinas thus explicitly identifies waiting for the Messiah as the “actual duration of time.” The waiting attests to the procrastination that is germane to the relation with the infinite, which can never enter fully into the present, in contrast to the absence of God attested in Beckett’s waiting for Godot.110 The continual deferral, the not-​yet that is resolutely yet not at hand, is what eternalizes the temporal and temporalizes the eternal in a now that is persistently not now, the momentary present in which the future is made present as the withdrawal of being present. The tomorrow that is today is nevertheless still tomorrow. If the guarantee of there always being another tomorrow ignites a sense of hopefulness, it is a the disclosure of God’s truth in the endtime, which is compared to Cohen’s idea of noumenal knowledge as the rational formulation of the regulative ideal and to Rosenzweig’s notion of messianic speech, Schwarzschild writes, “The eschatological future, in which evil has ceased, is, however, actually a restoration of Edenic existence, before sin entered the world in the first place. In short, it is not really future but outside of (historical) time, i.e., eternity.” 107 Regarding this dictum and its earlier philosophical sources, see Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 371 n. 160. 108 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 84. See Bettina Bergo, “Levinas’s Weak Messianism in Time and Flesh, or the Insistence of Messiah Ben David,” in The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, edited by Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 45–​68, esp. 50–​52; Wolfson, Giving, pp. 117–​118, and references on pp. 380–​381 n. 214 to a host of other scholars who have written on Levinas and messianism. 109 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 32; idem, God, Death, and Time, p. 139. On futurity in the thought of Levinas and the centrality of the notion of awaiting, see Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 69-​85. 110 Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, translated by Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 143.

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hopefulness that cannot be extricated from an insurmountable hopelessness. To paraphrase the comment of Kafka transmitted by Max Brod and recorded by Benjamin,111 from the fact that there is plenty of hope, indeed an infinite amount of hope, we may infer that at any given moment the hope can never be spoken of in relation to us. One can be hopeful only in the recognition that the fulfillment of the hope one bears will never come to pass except as the hope for fulfillment. As Schwarzschild correctly discerned, “The certainty of the expectation of the end-​time contains a fundamental aporia.”112 Analogously, although in slightly different terminology, Scholem noted that the messianic idea in Judaism is “anti-​existenialist,” since it has “compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.” The presumably unending need to impede the coming of the end is both the “greatness” and the “constitutional weakness” of Jewish messianism.113 Eliciting a similar conclusion from the messianic speculation attributed to the Ḥasidic master Naḥman of Bratslav, Marc-​Alain Ouaknin observed: The messianic era is not the time when the Messiah is here. On the contrary: it is the time during which the Messiah is awaited. To exaggerate a little: the Messiah is made for not coming … and yet, he is awaited. The Messiah allows time to be continually deferred, to generate time. … Messianic man (the one who is waiting) constantly projects himself into the “yet to come” (à-​venir) of the future; he produces a difference, a suspense. … In this suspension of meaning, time is forever projected toward the yet-​to-​come by an act of anticipation. But this anticipation does not

111 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–​1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 798. The comments of Kafka were first reported in Max Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” Die neue Rundschau 11 (1921): 1213. See Ansgar Martins, The Migration of Metaphysics into the Realm of the Profane, translated by Lars Fischer (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 91–​92. 112 Schwarzschild, “An Introduction,” p. 243. 113 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 35. The bibliography on Scholem’s messianism is immense, and here I mention one study that provides a good historical background to understand his ambivalence and reluctance to affirm a teleological understanding: Michael Löwy, “Messianism in the Early Work of Gershom Scholem,” New German Critique 83 (2001): 177–​191. Also pertinent to the theme of this essay is the analysis in Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 52–​81.

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foresee anything; there is no fulfillment at the end of the road. It is the anticipation of an anti-​anticipation.114 The Messiah is the one that comes by not-​coming, the one that is present by being absent. Waiting for the end is the adjournment of time that occasions the fostering of time. Drawing out the implications of this coming of a beyond coming, Werner Hamacher writes: If the future is to be thought in its pure movement, if it is to be thought as itself, and thus as mere coming without the arrival (Ankunft) of any sort of present, and thus thought without any determination through this present, then it must be thought as come-​able—​as the mere possibility of coming or as the possibility that is itself nothing other than coming, the coming of the coming without term or determination. If, however, the coming itself is merely coming, then it is in no sense already there; it is not an actual, in some way empirical or sensory coming, nor does it accord with a transcendental schema that would constitute its coming-​ to-​be. It rather voids the sense of its every being present and dissolves the structure that grants the actuality of its being coming; indeed, it can never—​so long as it, as coming, is referred to as coming—​and at no time (namely, in no coming), be a coming. It is not we who wait; the coming itself waits for the coming. It is the already-​there of the still-​never-​having-​ been-​there and of the never-​ever-​being-​there.115 The hope imparted by the messianic belief revitalizes itself periodically as the hope deferred continuously. The pure futurity of awaiting the end would be compromised if the future were ever to abandon its status as that which is present only by being absent and absent only by being present. Hope can be envisioned as the unremitting projection of an elementally calculated retrospection, to foretell what has been in the recollection of what is to come. Every undertaking, on this score, entails a relapse of what never was, divulging thereby the cadence of time as the recurrence of the indifferently different that is differently indifferent, the loop of the double negative that yields the

114

Marc-​Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud, translated by Llewellyn Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 302. 115 Werner Hamacher, “Messianic Not,” in Messianic Thought Outside Theology, edited by Anna Glazova and Paul North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 224–​225 (emphasis in original).

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positivity of our becoming the being we are not, a tendency well understood through the centuries by mystic visionaries. 3

Messianic Time, Futural Remembering, and Historical Disjointedness

Writ large we can say that the delay of the end’s historical concretization is what secures the potential of its constant implementation. In this respect, there is close affinity to Benjamin’s notion of the historian’s conception of the present described in a passage from an earlier draft of “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”—​a text composed in the early part of 1940, several months before Benjamin’s suicide in September of that year116—​as “now-​time [Jetztzeit] shot through with splinters of messianic time.”117 The import of this statement is made clear from the opening of the fourteenth thesis: “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-​time [Jetztzeit].”118 But there is no question that is from Jewish messianic speculation that Benjamin drew inspiration for his notion of historical remembrance as a restorative gesticulation and the copiousness of the now-​time: We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted the future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway [kleine Pforte] in time through which the Messiah might enter.119 116 For a comprehensive discussion and close reading of this text, see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005). The author uses the expression “talmudic analysis” to characterize his approach (p. 17). 117 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–​1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and others, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 397; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 704. 118 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 395; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 701. 119 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol., 4, p. 397; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 704. See Wolfson, Giving, pp. 115–​116; Howard Eiland, “Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness,” in

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Benjamin perspicaciously notes the disenchantment with the future that emerges from the reluctance in the Jewish tradition to speculate on the coming of the Messiah. The future, however, is not an empty time; it is rather transposed into the present, the portal through which the Messiah might enter. The command to remember the past is the act that empowers the Jew to transform the future into a now that is never quite now because it is always the future that is now. The historian, in particular, is entrusted with the responsibility of bearing witness to the soteriological potential in the now-​time that ensues from attending to the unrealized possibilities of the past. The narrative recapitulating affords one the opportunity to blast the past out of the continuum of history [Kontinuum der Geschichte] in the explosive and subversive manner120 that Benjamin describes Robespierre’s relationship to ancient Rome.121 In the culminating sentence of the eighteenth and last thesis, Benjamin elaborates: “Now-​time, which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe.”122 The present, as Michael Löwy put it, is likened to a “messianic monad,” for in every instant the entirety of history is reflected just as Leibniz had argued that each monad

Walter Benjamin and Theology, edited by Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 113–​143. 120 Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 88, calls our attention to a variant of thesis fourteen where “Jetztzeit is defined as an explosive [Explosivstoff] to which historical materialism adds the fuse. The aim is to explode the continuum of history with the aid of a conception of historical time that perceives it as ‘full,’ as charged with ‘present,’ explosive, subversive moments.” For the original text, see Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 1249. 121 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 395; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 701. See text cited below at n. 165. Compare Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 107–​137; Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” in Walter Benjamin and History, edited by Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 38–​68, esp. 40–​41; Löwy, Fire Alarm, pp. 87–​89; Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 192–​195. Agamben, The Time That Remains, pp. 143–​144, suggests that Benjamin’s Jetztzeit parallels Paul’s technical designation of messianic time as ho nyn kairos and that his view that the now-​time is an abridgement of the totality of history corresponds to Paul’s anakephalaiōsasthai, that is, the gathering together of all things in Christ in the fullness of time (Ephesians 1:10). See Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 100, and the criticism of Agamben, p. 134 n. 161. Compare Roland Boer, “Agamben, Benjamin and the Puppet Player,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers, pp. 57–​68, esp. 63–​65. 122 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 396; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 703.

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reflects the universe from its own perspective.123 The redemptive power of the Jetztzeit, therefore, is a consequence of the historian’s ability to alter the course of the future by eliciting from the moment the whole of the past that is abbreviated or condensed in the present. This is the gist of Benjamin’s remark in the second thesis that the “past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.” The “secret index” (heimlichen Index) relates to the human aptitude for the futural remembering that redeems the past.124 Benjamin also alludes to this potential as the “secret agreement” (geheime Verabredung) between past generations and the present, an agreement that turns both on the redemptive potential of chronicling and narrating the past such that nothing is lost to history and also on the fact that since there can never be a total amelioration of past inequities, there is always unfinished business that will have to be addressed in some future time. Each generation, therefore, is “endowed with a weak messianic power [eine schwachen messianische Kraft], a power on which the past has a claim.”125 What has not been actualized in the past lingers as a “secretly insistent appeal” to us in the present.126 In the fifth of the historical theses, Benjamin relates this idea to Gottfried Keller’s statement “The truth will not run away from us.” The image of history promoted by historicism—​the image “pierced by historical materialism”—​is “an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.”127 The historian must believe that the present is intended in the image of the past, and yet, as Benjamin argues in the sixth thesis, in language that parallels the Heideggerian idea of historicity mentioned above128—​and this in spite of 123 Löwy, Fire Alarm, pp. 99–​100. Compare Paula Schwebel, “Monad and Time: Reading Leibniz with Heidegger and Benjamin,” in Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 123–​144. 124 With regard to this temporal reversal Benjamin’s thinking can be compared profitably to the analysis of Bloch’s reflections on memory and utopia examined in Vincent Geoghegan, “Remembering the Future,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, edited by Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 15–​32, and the essay in the same volume by David Kaufmann, “Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Philosophy of History,” pp. 33–​52. 125 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 390 (emphasis in original); idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, pp. 693–​694. 126 Michael G. Levine, A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 2–​3. 127 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, pp. 390–​391; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 695. 128 See text cited above at n. 43, and compare Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and

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his explicit rejection of Heidegger’s attempt “to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity’ [Geschichtlichkeit]”129—​to portray the past Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), pp. 212–​245, reprinted in Sparks Will Fly, pp. 145–​174. 129 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 462; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 577. See the translator’s comment in The Arcades Project, p. 983 n. 4: “Benjamin, like Heidegger, plays on the archaic verb wesen (‘to be’) embedded in the Gewesenen (‘what has been’); he cites the being in what has been.” On the respective views of Benjamin and Heidegger on history, see David S. Ferris, “Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, edited by David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–​26, esp. 3–​10. See also Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 118–​122. The author discusses Benjamin’s criticism in a letter to Scholem from November 11, 1916 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–​1940, edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], p. 82) of Heidegger’s analysis of historical time and mechanical time of the physical sciences in the essay based on his inaugural lecture delivered on July 27, 1915, “Das Problem der historischen Zeit,” even though he also acknowledges the shared lines of inquiry and terms of expression, which can be explained, in part, by the fact that Heidegger and Benjamin both participated in Heinrich Rickert’s seminar on Bergson. For Benjamin’s criticism of Heidegger’s idea of historicity, see also Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 91; Jacob Taubes, “Seminar Notes on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, pp. 190–​191, 194–​195. See the comment of Benjamin in a letter to Scholem from January 20, 1930, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–​1940, pp. 359–​360: “It now seems a certainty that, for this book [Paris Arcades] as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction that discusses epistemology is necessary—​especially for this book, a discussion of the theory of historical knowledge. This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history.” For Benjamin’s disparaging assessment of Heidegger’s book on Don Scotus, see the letter to Scholem from December 1, 1920, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–​1940, p. 168, but see his somewhat more conciliatory assessment in the letter to Scholem from January 1921, op. cit., p. 172. Compare Benjamin’s comment in the letter to Scholem from April 25, 1930, op. cit., p. 365, “We were planning to annihilate Heidegger in the summer in the context of a very close-​knit critical circle of readers led by Brecht and me.” On Benjamin’s own reporting that he was considered a “follower of Heidegger,” see his letter to Gretel Adorno from July 20, 1938, op. cit., p. 571. My own view is close to the assessment of Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), p. 201: “Without realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger’s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-​changed into pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their context in interpreting them with ‘the deadly impact’ of new thoughts, than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends.” For a criticism of Arendt,

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historically does not mean to verify the way it really was, according to Leopold von Ranke’s definition of the historian’s task. To recount the past “means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger.”130 As Benjamin

see Löwy, Fire Alarm, pp. 3–​4. The author refers to the passages noted in this text wherein Benjamin was unequivocally dismissive of Heidegger’s thought and wherein he explicitly rejects the comparison of his thought to Heidegger. Löwy admits that there are affinities between the two thinkers concerning the theme of eschatology, the conception of authentic temporality, and the openness to the past, but he insists nonetheless that it would be incorrect to call Benjamin a “follower” of Heidegger, especially since his critical conception of time took shape before the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. Löwy’s objection is not persuasive inasmuch as Arendt spoke of affinities between Benjamin and Heidegger and did not refer to the former as a follower of the latter. Consider the fuller observation of Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 201-​202: “This amazing revival, particularly of classical culture … was initiated by those who were most aware of the irreparability of the break in tradition—​thus in Germany, and not only there, first and foremost by Martin Heidegger, whose extraordinary, and extraordinarily early, success in the twenties was essentially due to a ‘listening to the tradition that does not give itself up to the past but thinks of the present’ [Martin Heidegger, Kants These über das Sein (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1962), p. 8]. Without realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger’s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-​changed into pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their content in interpreting them with ‘the deadly impact’ of new thoughts, than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends. For just as the above-​cited closing sentence from the Goethe essay sounds as though Kafka had written it, the following words from a letter to Hofmannsthal dated 1924 makes one think of some of Heidegger’s essays written in the forties and fifties: ‘The conviction which guides me in my literary attempts … [is] that each truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language, that this palace was built with the oldest logoi, and that to a truth thus founded the insights of the sciences will remain inferior for as long as they make do here and there in the area of language like nomads, as it were, in the conviction of the sign character of langage which produces the irresponsible arbitrariness of their terminology (Briefe i, 329).” Arendt’s comment is challenged by Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s Image of Interpretation,” New German Critique 17 (1979): 74 n. 6: “These lines [of Benjamin] remind Hannah Arendt of Heidegger. … But a Heidegger-​inspired deconstruction of their intent would point to ‘phallogocentrism’: the vindication of an originary logos in the name of sedentary nobility, genealogy, foundation, responsibility and erection defines the nomadic enemy in a telltale metaphor (aufprägen) that combines writing, violence and reproduction. Such errance it would proceed to transvalue.” On possible affinities between Heidegger and Benjamin, see Wolfson, Language, pp. 407 n. 89 and 416 n. 189, and the more recent analyses in Peter Fenves, “Entanglement—​Of Benjamin and Heidegger,” in Sparks Will Fly, pp. 3–​26, and in the same volume, Ilit Ferber, “Stimmung: Heidegger and Benjamin,” pp. 67–​93. See below, n. 168. 130 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 391; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 695.

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writes in Das Passagen-​Werk, “history is not simply a science [Wissenschaft] but also and not least a form of remembrance [eine Form des Eingedenkens ist]. What science has ‘determined,’ remembrance can modify.”131 Historical reflection is not neutral or value-​free, or what Benjamin calls “atheological.” On the contrary, the historian’s occupation is fundamentally theological insofar as it necessitates cultivating a remembrance that “can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete.”132 Benjamin’s method, exemplified in another aphorism in Das Passagen-​Werk, is predicated on resolutely refusing the concept of a “timeless truth,” on the one hand, but also resisting the Marxist dogma that truth is “a merely contingent function of knowing,” on the other hand. Staking the middle ground between these options, Benjamin conjectures that truth “is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.” The task of the historian, therefore, is to liberate “the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the ‘once upon a time’ of classical historiography. The history that showed things ‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century.”133 Parenthetically, this dynamic holds the key to understanding Benjamin’s extolling the virtue of quotation as the bridge that links past and present in the dialectical fabrication of historical experience. Explicating Goethe’s insight that “classical works do not really allow for their criticism,” Benjamin proclaimed that “the exegesis, the ideas, the admiration and enthusiasm of past generations have become indissolubly part of the works themselves, have completely internalized them and turned them into the mirror-​images [Spiegel-​ galerien] of later generations. … And here, at this highest stage of investigation, it is vital to develop the theory of the quotation.”134 The resonance of 131 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 589. See Alison Ross, Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 102–​134. 132 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 589. In the same context, Benjamin offers an intriguing explanation of his paradoxical relationship to the theological: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.” From this we may deduce that Benjamin construed his thinking as being synchronously replete with and empty of theology. 133 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 463; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 578. On the impact of Benjamin’s idea of truth’s temporal nucleus on Horkheimer and Adorno, see Martins, The Migration, pp. 68–​69. 134 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 372; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 6, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 170.

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Benjamin’s perspective with traditional Jewish learning and the practice of citation should be obvious.135 Just as the rabbinic perspective on history, which is the basis for the textual reasoning that has spanned many centuries, rests on a contemporaneity of past, present, and future, so Benjamin’s view, as opposed to the historicist notion of history, is one in which the past is a function of the present and the present a function of the future.136 Significantly, in Das Passagen-​Werk, the remark concerning the “dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history … through the awakening of a not-​yet-​conscious knowledge of what has been [eines noch nicht bewußten Wissens vom Gewesnen]” is immediately followed by the aphorism, “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks [ohne Anführungszeichen zu zitieren]. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.”137 The threading together of different citations produces a “literary montage” (literarische Montage),138 which is comparable to the intertwining of images in a photomontage. The ostensibly troublesome turn of phrase citing without quotation marks is not meant to justify plagiarism but rather to highlight the fact that the citation of the words of previous authors releases them from the discarded rubble of the past and resuscitates them into contemporary forms (heutige Formen). The “lost forms” (verlorenen Formen) of an epoch are retrieved in the guise of novel creations, and hence it is not necessary—​ indeed, it would be misleading—​for the citations to be transmitted with quotation marks.139 What was previously said has not yet been spoken. Benjamin thus described his own undertaking: “I needn’t say anything. Merely show [Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen].” Through the art of citation the thought-​images (Denkbilder), excavated from the arcades of history, manifest themselves in narratological figurations of thought (Denkfiguren) that were never before written. “I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no 135 The rabbinic mindset is embodied in the dictum in M. Avot 6:6 that whoever says something in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world (kol ha-​omer davar be-​shem omro mevi ge’ullah la-​olam). 136 Bram Mertens, Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 42–​51. 137 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 458; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 571–​572. My discussion has benefited from the analysis in Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, translated by Laimdota Mazzarins (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), pp. 53–​54. On the notion of montage and Das Passagen-​Werk, see Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, p. 288. 138 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 460 and 860; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 574 and Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 1030. 139 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 458; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 472.

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ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—​these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”140 Benjamin refers to this process as Verfremdung, the alienation that results by quoting out of context in order to devise a new context. The practice of quotation, therefore, preserves the continuity of tradition through its discontinuity.141 The historian, in the words of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet who published Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge (1924–​1925), is commended to “read what was never written,”142 or in the language of Friedrich Schlegel, paraphrased and interpreted by Benjamin, “the historian is a prophet facing backward.”143 Benjamin offers two explanations of Schlegel’s aphorism. The first one is the conventional sense that “the historian, transplanting himself into a remote past, prophesies what was regarded as the future at that time but meanwhile has become the past.” The second, and more daring, explanation, and the one that conveys Benjamin’s own thought, implies that “the historian turns his back on his own time, and his seer’s gaze is kindled by the peaks of earlier generations as they sink further and further into the past. Indeed, the historian’s own time is far more distinctly present to this visionary gaze than it is to the contemporaries who ‘keep step with it.’… It is precisely this concept of the present which underlies the actuality of genuine historiography. … Someone who pokes about in the past as if rummaging in a storeroom of examples and analogies still has no inkling of how much in a given moment depends on its being made present [ihre Vergegenwärtigung].”144 The vision of the historian must be fixed on the present, but every present is determined by “the now of a particular recognizability” (das Jetzt einer bestimmten Erkennbarkeit), which “is charged to the bursting point of time. … The image that is read—​which is to say, the image in the now of its 140 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 460 (emphasis in original) and see the slightly altered version on p. 860; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 574 and Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2, p. 1030. On Benjamin’s notion of the thought-​image, see Sigrid Weigel, Body-​and Image-​ Space: Re-​reading Walter Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 49–​60. 141 Bolz and van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, p. 54: “In this way, quotation envisions the continued existence of tradition as discontinuity; it salvages the elements of tradition through seemingly brutal blows. Benjamin’s hermeneutic practice of explication is actually a process of beating something out of its original context; for this reason, all interpretations have something violent about them.” On citation and the dialectics of awakening, see also Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, pp. 290–​291. 142 The remark is cited in Gerhard Richter, Thought-​Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 50. 143 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 405; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, p. 1237. 144 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 405; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, p. 1237.

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recognizability—​bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.”145 Not surprisingly, Benjamin turns to the act of reading to convey his idea of the dialectic image of the disjunctive present that blasts the continuum of historical succession.146 Indeed, the synchronic and monadological now of historical time is the antithesis to idea of a temporal continuum. Benjamin illustrates the paradox of the time of the “genuine historical experience” as the present that is always the same in virtue of never being the same by the image of an eternal lamp rendered in distinctively hermeneutical terms: “It cites what has been—​the flame that once was kindled—​in perpetuum, giving it ever new sustenance. … The seer’s gaze is kindled by the rapidly receding past. That is to say, the prophet has turned away from the future: he perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him into the night of times. … To grasp the eternity of historical events is really to appreciate the eternity of their transience.”147 The dialectical image, which “emerges suddenly, in a flash,” is perceived through “the prophetic gaze [Seherblick] that catches fire from the summits of the past”148 and thereby rescues what was in the “now of its recognizability … solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost.”149 The durability of what disintegrates is the key to understanding the choice of the image of arcades (Passagen) on Benjamin’s part to convey the dialectic of time to which the historian is beholden, to take hold of the moment of passing in which no more (nicht mehr) is transmogrified into not yet (noch nicht): Being past, being no more, is passionately at work in things. To this the historian trusts for his subject matter. He depends on this force, and knows things as they are at the moment of their ceasing to be. Arcades are such monuments of being-​no-​more. And the energy that works in them is dialectics. The dialectic takes its way through the arcades, ransacking them, revolutionizing them, turns them upside them and inside

1 45 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 463; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 578. 146 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 475; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 594. 147 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 407; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, p. 1245. 148 Compare Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 360, where Carl Gustav Jochmann is described as turning “his back on the future (which he speaks of in prophetic tones), which his seer’s gaze is kindled by the vanishing peaks of earlier heroic generations and their poetry, as they sink further and further into the past.” 149 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 473; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 591–​592.

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out, converting them, since they no longer remain what they are. … And nothing of them lasts except the name: passages.150 This method of temporal interruption, which coerces authorial voices “to appear before the tribunal of history,”151 involves, in Bloch’s expression mentioned by Benjamin, the “turn of remembrance” (Wendung des Eingedenkens), that is, a “dialectical reversal” of past and present compared to the experience (Erfahrung) of awakening from a dream: “Accordingly, we present the new, the dialectical method of doing history: with the intensity of a dream, to pass through what has been, in order to experience the present as the waking world to which the dream refers!”152 That the present is experienced as the dream to which the waking world refers does not mean, as Heidegger prosaically argued in his notes recording a conversation with Medard Boss on March 2, 1972,153 150 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 833; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2, p. 1001. Compare Annika Thiem, “Benjamin’s Messianic Metaphysics of Transience,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, pp. 21–​55. 151 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 363; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 459. 152 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 838; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2, p. 1006. 153 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—​Conversations—​Letters, edited by Medard Boss, translated and with notes and afterwords by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 230. Heidegger’s implicit critique of the psychoanalytic approach to dreams appears in a letter to Boss from August 2, 1952, in Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, p. 245: “Dreams are not symptoms and consequences of something lying hidden behind [them], but they themselves are in what they show and only this. Only with this does their emerging essence [Wesen] become worthy of questioning” (emphasis in original). See also Heidegger’s criticism of Freud in the notes from the conversation with Boss on September 7, 1963, in Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, pp. 182–​ 183: “Concealment is not the antithesis of consciousness but rather concealment belongs to the clearing. Freud simply did not see this clearing. … In Freud’s repression we are dealing with hiding [Verstecken] a representation [Vorstellung]. In withdrawal [Entzug] we are dealing with the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon withdraws itself from the domain of the clearing and is inaccessible—​so inaccessible that this inaccessibility as such cannot be experienced anymore. What conceals itself remains what it is, otherwise I could no longer come back to it. Clearing is never mere clearing, but always the clearing of concealment [Sich-​Verbergen]. In the proper sense the clearing of concealment [Lichtung des Sich-​Verbergens] means that the inaccessible shows and manifests itself as such—​as the inaccessible. … What manifests itself as the inaccessible is the mystery [Geheimnis]” (emphasis in original). For the utilization of Heidegger’s stance to provide an alternative to Freud’s interpretation of the oneiric phenomenon, see Medard Boss, “I Dreamt Last Night …”, translated by Stephen Conway, introduction by Paul J. Stern (New York: Gardner Press, 1977), pp. 46, 182–​183, 185–​187. Boss draws on Heidegger’s insights to articulate the view that dreaming and waking share in a concept of reality that is brought into openness (Unverborgenheit) from an originary hiddenness (Verborgenheit), two states that are “mutual determinants of each other” (p. 182). The common matrix of the two is the

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that the dreamworld belongs to waking life as a manner of being-​in-​the-​world, inasmuch as one speaks about dreams while awake but not about being awake while dreaming; the intent, rather, is the far bolder claim that the present can be calibrated as the real world only vis-​à-​vis the past, which is like a dream. We awaken to the present that is the realization of the dream that is the past. Recollecting the past in the present is not merely the replication of the past; it is an act of consciousness that seeks a “teleological moment” by bestowing new reality on the past, the “moment of waiting” that is akin to the dream that “waits secretly for the awakening.”154 notion of Dasein, the human way of being-​in-​the-​world, the standing-​out (ek-​sistence) or the ecstasy (ekstasis) disclosed in the opening-​sheltering of the clearance (p. 185). On Heidegger’s attitude to dreams, see as well the anecdotal comments of Medard Boss, “Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 16 (1978–​1979): 12–​13. Heidegger’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis is assessed by Richard Askay, “Heidegger’s Philosophy and Its Implications for Psychology, Freud, and Existential Psychoanalysis,” in Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, pp. 308–​312. See also Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Daseinanalysis and Freud’s Unconscious,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 16 (1978–​1979): 21–​42; Richard Askay, “A Philosophical Dialogue between Heidegger and Freud,” Journal of Philosophical Research 24 (1999): 415–​443; Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 190–​ 229; Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Of Philosophers and Madmen: A Disclosure of Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, and Sigmund Freud (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 113–​ 118. And see my own contribution in the section “Metaphor, Dream, and the Parabolic Bridging of Difference” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 114–​118. On Heidegger and psychotherapy more generally, see the discussion in Dallmayr, Life-​world, pp. 210–​ 237, and reference to other scholarly analyses cited on p. 234 n. 2. Noteworthy is the impact of Heidegger and Freud on Medard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis, translated by Ludwig B. Lefebre (New York: Basic Books, 1963), but this is a matter that cannot be explored here. For an introduction to this topic, see F. Alec Jenner, “Medard Boss’ Phenomenologically Based Psychopathology,” in Phenomenology and Psychological Science: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Peter D. Ashworth and Man Cheung Chung (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 147–​168. See also Ludwig Binswanger, Being-​in-​the-​World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger, edited by Joseph Needleman (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 206–​221. 154 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 390; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 492. On the link between the dream, illusion, and madness in the internal journey of the individual sleeper and the passage through the arcades for the dreaming collective, see Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 389; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 491–​492. Compare Walter Benjamin, Early Writings 1910–​1917, translated by Howard Eiland and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 220: “Imagination is also the soul of the dreamworld. The dream is pure reception [Aufnehmen] of appearance in the pure sense.” Piercing through this prism, we discern the unsettling truth that the oneiric image—​appearance in the pure sense, the appearance of appearance—​is true to the degree that it is false and false to the degree that it is true. To be sure, many cultures uphold the distinction

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Benjamin identifies this inversion of past and present—​the waking from the dream that one is waking from the dream—​as the Copernican revolution between true and false dreams, or between real and imagined dreams, but within the dream there is no epistemological measure to distinguish truth and falsehood. To say a dream is either true or false is a retroactive value judgment that we apply respectively to what we consider to be real or unreal based on a complex lattice of beliefs—​theological, cosmological, anthropological, cultural, sociological or psychological—​that are extraneous to the dream and therefore irrelevant with regard to the immediacy of the irreality as such, which is the basic stuff whence dreams are made. We may assume that there is a breach between what is imagined to be real and what is really imagined—​indeed this may be necessary to preserve our sanity—​but nothing in the narrative yarn of the dream validates unraveling the threads of veracity from mendacity. Within the contours of the dream, the truth of the image consists veritably of its being false. The dream, on this score, exemplifies the oxymoron fictional truth, a truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. In a Platonic reversal, we can speak of the dream as the semblance of the simulacrum par excellence wherein truth is not opposed epistemically to error, since the appearance of truthfulness cannot be determined independently of the truthfulness of appearance. I have taken the liberty to repeat here my argument in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 16. On madness and the blurring of the line between the dream and reality, see Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes, edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, afterword by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, translated by Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 58: “These events seemed so vivid to me that I found it hard to decide whether I had really experienced them. That is precisely the pattern that operates when one is gripped by madness.” Compare Benjamin, Early Writings 1910–​ 1917, p. 271: “The language of dream lies not in words but under them. Words in a dream are random products of meaning, which resides in the wordless continuity of a flow. In the dream language, meaning is hidden in the same way that a figure is hidden in a picture puzzle. It is even possible that the origin of picture puzzles is to be sought in this direction, that is to say, as dream stenograph.” On the dream in Benjamin’s thought, see Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 326–​327 n. 99, and reference to other scholarly analyses mentioned there, as well as additional references cited on p. 433 n. 8. Many more sources could have been cited including Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 46–​51; Tyrus Miller, “From City-​Dreams to the Dreaming Collective: Walter Benjamin’s Political Dream Interpretation,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1996): 87–​111; Susan Buck-​Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1989), pp. 253–​286; Michael Taussig, “Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening,” Critical Inquiry 46 (2020): 421–​435. See also Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, pp. 90–​111, esp. 94–​95: “We should not understand waiting in terms of an objective, external determination of time … but rather in relation to the process of transformation internal to the dream’s space of meaning, through which awakening can occur. However, this does not mean that all there is to waiting is patience, as though killing time until that transformation occurs. Waiting must be understood as holding to two distinct and opposed moments. On the one hand, waiting is the gathering of forces or of potential; on the other, waiting is the seeking of an opportunity to realize that potential. … Waiting is the dialectical overcoming of the opposition between gathering energy and actively seeking ‘experiences’ that stimulate or awaken.”

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in historical perception [geschichtlichen Anschauung], which he elaborates as follows: Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in “what has been,” and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal [dialektischen Umschlag]—​the flash of awakened consciousness [Einfall des erwachten Bewußtseins]. Politics attains primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory. Indeed, awakening is the great exemplar of memory. … There is a not-​yet-​conscious knowledge of what has been [Noch-​nicht-​bewußtes-​Wissen vom Gewesenen]: its advancement has the structure of awakening. … The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world [die Gegenwart als Wachwelt zu erfahren], a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream [Traumerinnerung]!—​ Therefore: remembering [Erinnerung] and awaking [Erwachen] are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance [die dialektischen, kopernikanische Wendung des Eingedenkens].155 Constructing a materialist historiography is facilitated by the act of remembrance that unsettles the monolithically irreversible causal sequence between past and future, the repetition of singularity and the singularity of repetition, and is thus comparable to the narrative space of the dreamtime (Zeit-​traum) in which origin is the goal (Ursprung ist das Ziel), according to the phrase from Karl Kraus cited by Benjamin as the motto for the fourteenth thesis on the concept of history.156 As in the remembering of the dream, so in the historian’s 155 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 388–​389 (emphasis in original); idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 490–​491. On the dialectic of memory and forgetfulness in Benjamin, see Orietta Ombrosi, The Twilight of Reason: Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Levinas Tested by the Catastrophe, translated by Victoria Aris (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), pp. 81–​92. See also Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, p. 289. 156 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 395; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 701. See Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, translated by Harvey Mendelsohn, foreword by Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 157–​ 158. Szondi illumines Benjamin’s dialectic of the messianic future and the historical past by citing the following passage about the origin (Ursprung) from Benjamin, The Origin of

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retelling, we find neither the irreversibility nor the repeatability of events but rather the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous,” the prognosis of the future rooted in and hence already existent in—​even though not yet having occurred—​the past that is reshaped in the present.157 In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial.” As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch—​ namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation [Traumdeutung]. … The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian.158 The exigency of the dialectical motion—​the “leap in the open air of history”159—​ enjoins the mission of brushing history against the grain (die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu bürsten),160 the expectation of what was once

German Tragic Drama, pp. 45–​46: “The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. … That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. … Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development. The principles of philosophical contemplation are recorded in the dialectic which is inherent in origin. This dialectic shows singularity and repetition to be conditioned by one another in all essentials.” For previous citation and analysis of this passage, see Wolfson, Alef, pp. 120–​ 121. See also Mosès, The Angel of History, pp. 75–​76. 157 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 95. 158 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 464; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 580. 159 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 395; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 701. 160 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 392; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 697. See Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 407 (idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, p. 1241): “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. The historical materialist keeps his distance from all of this. He has to brush history against the grain—​even if he needs a barge pole to do it.” Compare Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 843 (idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2, p. 1011): “All true insight forms an eddy. To swim in time against the direction of the swirling stream. Just as in art, the decisive thing is: to brush nature against the grain.”

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upon a time and the commemoration of what is yet to come.161 For Benjamin, the past does not cast its light on the present nor does the present cast its light on the past. The two modes of time converge in the image “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill [Dialektik im Stillstand]. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-​has-​been to the now is dialectical: it is not progression [Verlauf] but image [Bild], suddenly emergent [sprunghaft].—​Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. Awakening.”162 The dialectic image, as opposed to a mimetic image, does not merely mirror the past; the present is thus marked by a “temporal rupture in which time and space are out of joint. This out-​of-​ jointness is the Sprunghaftigkeit, possessing the qualities of leaps and cracks that characterize our relation to the past, the present, and the future, a relation that perpetually is at odds with itself.”163 161 This dimension of Benjamin’s thinking is attested in Scholem’s poem “Paraphrase aus der Prosa des ‘Tagebuchs’,” written on May 12, 1918, and inspired by reading “Metaphysik der Jugend.” See Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems, translated by Richard Sieburth, introduced and annotated by Steven M. Wasserstrom (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003), pp. 52–​53: “Even as you die, Youth, you establish History … The future was. The past shall be [Die Zukunft war. Vergangenheit wird sein] /​The present will disunite us before God [Die Gegenwart wird uns vor Gott entzwein] /​In this estrangement we shall be free [In der Entfremdung werden wir befreit].” The reversal of time that is affirmed here—​the future already past and the past yet to come—​is indicative of an anti-​utopian spirit and a resignation to the fact that history is not redemptive and that liberation can only be found in alienation. 162 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 462; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, pp. 576–​577. 163 Richter, Thought-​Images, p. 62. Compare the assessment in “Lehre vom Ähnlichen” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 205–​206, translated into English in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 695: “It must be borne in mind that neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects have remained unchanged over time; and that, in the course of centuries, the mimetic power, and with it the gift of mimetic perception, have disappeared from certain fields—​perhaps in order to flow into others. The supposition may not be too bold that, on the whole, a unified direction is perceptible in the historical development of this mimetic faculty. The direction could, at first sight, lie solely in the increasing fragility of this mimetic faculty. For clearly the perceptual world [Merkwelt] of modern human beings seems to contain far fewer of those magical correspondences than did that of the ancients or even of primitive peoples. The question is simply: Are we dealing with a dying out of the mimetic faculty, or rather perhaps with a transformation that has taken place within it? Of the direction in which the latter might lie, some indications could be derived, even if indirectly, from astrology. As researchers into old traditions, we must take account of the possibility that sensuous shape-​giving

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The writing of history proceeds from this out-​of-​jointness, the leap that bridges past and present and thereby brings together what remains at a distance, the constellated moment wherein time is, paradoxically, most fluid and most sedentary—​dialectics at a standstill.164 Accentuating the same point in the sixteenth of the theses on the concept of history, Benjamin writes: “The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history. … He remains in control of his powers—​man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”165 It follows, as I previously noted, that the “concept of historical time forms an antithesis to the idea of a temporal continuum. The eternal lamp is an image of genuine historical existence. It cites what has been—​the flame that once was kindled—​in perpetuum, giving it ever new sustenance.”166 The past, consequently, is not the irrevocable cause of the present; it is the trace that is reconfigured anew in each moment through the agency of anamnesis in the manner of the dream that is remembered upon waking. The remembering itself blurs the boundary between dream and wakefulness, since in recalling the dream, the dreamer is no longer certain if s/​he is dreaming of being awake or evoking the dream once s/​he has awoken. To be awakened, on this score, consists of waking to and not from the dream, that is, waking to the realization that what we call reality is a component of the dream from which we imagine that we awake,167 a realization that sufficiently narrows, if not eviscerates, the distinction between interior and exterior—​“the external world that the active man encounters can also in principle be reduced, to any took place—​meaning that objects had a mimetic character—​where we are today no longer capable even of suspecting it. For example, in the constellation of the stars.” 164 Theodor Adorno, “Progress,” The Philosophical Forum 15 (1983–​1984): 69: “What Benjamin called dialectic at a standstill is certainly less a platonizing regression than an attempt to raise such a paradox to a philosophical consciousness. Dialectical images: these are the historical-​objective archetypes of that antagonistic unity of standstill and movement definitive for the most bourgeois concept of progress.” 165 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 396; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 702. Regarding the historian’s task of writing, it is of interest to consider Benjamin’s description of redemption in “Neue Thesen K,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3, p. 1235, translated in idem, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 404: “The messianic world is the world of universal and integral actuality. Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist. Not as written history, but as festively enacted history. This festival is purified of all celebration. There are no festive songs. Its language us liberated prose—​prose which has burst the fetters of Script [Schrift].” 166 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 407. 167 Wolfson, A Dream, pp. 101, 255–​274.

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desired degree, to his inner world, and his inner world similarly to his outer world, indeed regarded in principle as one and the same thing.”168 Noteworthy is Benjamin’s utilization of Bloch’s expression “darkness of the lived moment” (Dunkel des gelebten Augenblicks) to illustrate the knowledge that is “secured on the level of the historical, and collectively.”169 Let me cite Bloch’s words verbatim so that we get a better sense of the fuller context: Thus, once again, the unconstruable, the absolute question certainly also runs towards the moment, into its darkness. Not as a clearing, but as an unmistakable allusion to the immediate darkness of the Now, in so far as its central latency in terms of content nevertheless depicts itself in such astonished questioning, such questioning astonishment. If the content of what is driving in the Now, what is touched in the Here, were extracted positively … then conceived hope, hoped-​for world would have reached their goal. Once more: darkness of the lived moment; Carpe diem … Even the feeling of internal and external stimuli, at the point where these plunge into the Now, participates in the latter’s darkness. … Together with its content, the lived moment itself remains essentially invisible, and in fact all the more securely, the more energetically attention is directed towards it: at this root, in the lived In-​itself, in punctual immediacy, all world is still dark.170 With these penetrating and poignant words of Bloch in mind, we can circle back to Benjamin’s description of the Jetztzeit as the present shot through with splinters of messianic time. The redemptive potential is connected to the present or, more specifically, to the recollection of the past in the present, the commemorative act that transforms the former by the latter and the latter 168 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 202. This passage from Benjamin’s 1919 essay “Schicksal und Charakter” is discussed by Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, pp. 70–​71, in support of his contention that Benjamin, like Heidegger, rejected the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, which presumed the naturalness of the natural attitude, since for both thinkers, “the reduction of the ‘natural’ attitude has already taken place in everyday activity. … Far from positing a world of things that affect consciousness and to which it reacts in return, there is only the ‘working’ situation, and the distinction between interior and exterior is purely functional, not substantial.” The breakdown of the distinction between inside and outside corresponds to my claim regarding the inability to distinguish dream and reality. 169 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 389; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 491. 170 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1986), pp. 290–​291 (emphasis in original). See the passage from The Spirit of Utopia cited below at n. 257.

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by the former. And yet, the present in its punctual immediacy is essentially invisible, not in the manner of some past experience that is lost in the fog of oblivion, but as the memory that haunts the present like a ghostly figure that “constantly reappears” in the “opening in the passage of time,” as Benjamin described the character of fate in his study on the origins of German tragic drama (Trauerspiel).171 The past is a phantom that can be manifest only to the extent that it remains occluded, and like all manifestations of the imagination, according to Benjamin, the apparition is a “deformation [Entstaltung] of what has been formed. It is a characteristic of all imagination that it plays a game of dissolution with its forms.”172 The imagination (Phantasie), as Benjamin speculates in another fragment, “merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it. Things change and trade places; nothing remains and nothing disappears.”173 The imagination is the veil that unveils through its veiling 171 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 135, and see analysis in Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 108–​109. 172 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 280. The passage is from a fragment on the imagination written in 1920–​1921. 173 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 664; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 4.1, herausgegeben von Tillman Rexroth (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 419–​420. Intriguingly, Benjamin illustrates the role of imagination by relating a Ḥasidic saying about the world to come: “Everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here—​only a little bit different.” I previously commented on this passage in Wolfson, Language, p. 476 n. 55. Compare Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 811; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 432. In the essay on Kafka written on the tenth anniversary of his death, Benjamin reports in the name of a “great rabbi” that the Messiah “will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment to it.” Similar language is used by Adorno and Bloch. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 298–​299 (idem, Negative Dialektik, pp. 293–​294): “Like freedom, the intelligible character as a subjective possibility is a thing that comes to be, not a thing that is. It would be a betrayal to incorporate it in existence by description, even by the most cautious description. In the right condition, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, all things would differ only a little from the way they are; but not even the least can be conceived now as it would be then” (emphasis in original). Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 112: “To a child returning from a holiday, home seems new, fresh, festive. Yet nothing has changed there since he left. Only because duty has now been forgotten, of which each piece of furniture, window, lamp, was otherwise a reminder, is the house given back this sabbath peace, and for minutes one is at home in a never-​returning world of rooms, nooks and corridors in a way that makes the rest of life there a lie. No differently will the world one day appear,

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the paradox that everything is the same as it is and yet everything changes, nichts bleibt und nichts verschwindet, nothing remains but nothing disappears, words that well capture the timeless infinity of temporal finitude. Relatedly, in a third fragment, building on Nietzsche’s definition of semblance in Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Romantic notion of the symbol, Benjamin proposes that semblance (Schein) allows the non­apparent to appear (erscheinen): The semblance in which nothing appears is the most potent one, the authentic one. … For the expressionless destroys whatever legacy of chaos still survives in the beautiful semblance: the false, the mendacious, the aberrant—​in short, the absolute. It is this that completes the work by shattering it into fragments, reducing it to the smallest totality of substance, a totality that is a great fragment taken from the true world, the fragment of a symbol.174 almost unchanged, in its constant feast-​day light, when it stands no longer under the law of labour, and when for home-​comers duty has the lightness of holiday play.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, translated with introduction by Robert Hullot-​Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 138: “If Schopenhauer’s thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order but changed in the slightest degree.” See Ernst Bloch, Traces, translated by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 158: “Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little. Because this ‘a little’ is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find, humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying, spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of the lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.” Scholem commented on Bloch’s passage in a letter to Benjamin from July 9, 1934. See The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–​1940, edited by Gershom Scholem, translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere, with an introduction by Anson Rabinbach (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 123: “The great rabbi with the profound dictum on the messianic kingdom who appears in Bloch is none other than I myself; what a way to achieve fame! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah” (emphasis in original). In n. 5, ad locum, Scholem gives the references to the use of his saying by Bloch and Benjamin delineated above, and concludes “I learned from this what honors one can garner for oneself with an apocryphal sentence.” Concerning these sources, see Martins, The Migration, pp. 42–​43. 174 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, pp. 223–​225 (emphasis in original). The passage is from a fragment on the nature of semblance written in 1919–​1920. Needless to say, Benjamin’s surmise that the highest semblance is that in which nothing appears draws upon the paradox of envisioning the invisible generated by the aniconism of the Jewish tradition. See James R. Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory

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Three things are noteworthy from this extraordinary text. First, the semblance in which nothing appears is the most authentic appearance; second, the symbolic is understood as the true world; third, the disfiguration of the shattering into fragments constitutes the configuration of the totality. It is through memory that the imagination realizes its potential to allow the nonapparent to appear, to materialize the virtual as real, and to render the fragmentary as whole. Remembering proceeds from the blind spot that is the darkness of the lived moment, the not-​yet that is necessary for the possibility of there being something rather than nothing, the negation that impels the indeterminate emptiness that is the fullness of becoming.175 To seize the moment—​Carpe diem—​is to take hold of this darkness, for one can see the light only by gazing from within the darkness and not by dispelling it. Benjamin’s assertion that each moment betrays the splintering of messianic time is indicative of the fact that he was incapable of ascribing to history as a whole the capacity for fulfillment. This crucial point is missed by many interpreters of Benjamin’s utopianism. The more conventional approach is attested in the explication of Benjamin’s idea of redemption and recollection offered by Stéphane Mosès: It is this break of historical temporality, this appearance of the unpredictable, that Benjamin called Redemption. But this is not located anywhere at the end of time; on the contrary, it happens (or it can happen) at any moment, precisely as each moment of time—​grasped as absolutely unique—​brings a new state of the world into being. The qualitative difference of each of the fragments of time always brings a new possibility of an unforeseen change, a brand-​new arrangement of the order of things. In contrast to the Marxist idea of the “end of history,” based on a quantitative and cumulative vision of historical time, what is drawn here is the idea, borrowed from Jewish messianism, of a utopia appearing in the very heart of the present, of a hope lived in the mode of today. … It is thus that the Benjaminian notion of “recollection” (Eingedenken) continues the Jewish category of “re-​remembering” (Zekher), which does not denote the preservation in memory of events of the past but their reactualization in the present experience. … As for the messianic hope, it must not be conceived as aiming for a utopia destined to be realized at (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), and idem, The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 175 On Bloch’s ontology of becoming and the demarcation of being in the mode of not-​yet, see Schumacher, Death and Mortality, pp. 81–​82 n. 68.

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the end of time but as an extreme vigilance, a capacity to detect what at each moment shows the “revolutionary energy” of the new.176 There is much about this statement with which I am in agreement but it does obfuscate the fact that even after having espoused a leftist agenda with its professed belief in political insurgency as a harbinger of socioeconomic reform, Benjamin was consigned to a deep-​seated skepticism—​one might even say Saturnine distrust177—​about the redemptive potential of history not only as the utopian future but also as it pertains to the potential of each present to serve as a stimulus for upheaval.178 When Benjamin writes that the “concept of 176 Mosès, The Angel of History, pp. 108–​109 (emphasis in original). The expression “revolutionary energy” appears in a passage from Henri Focillon, Vie des formes, cited by Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 488 (idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 611): “I have elsewhere pointed out the dangers of ‘evolution’: its deceptive orderliness, its single-​minded directness, its use, in those problematic cases … of the expedient of ‘transitions,’ its inability to make room for the revolutionary energy of inventors.” See Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, translated by Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 47. A proper attunement to Focillon’s words confirms the interpretation of Benjamin that I have presented in this essay. 177 Compare the important comment regarding the angelic form of Klee’s Angelus Novus in the first version of the autobiographical fragment “Agesilaus Santander” (1933), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 713 (idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 6, p. 521): “By turning to his advantage the fact that I was born under the sign of Saturn—​the planet of slow revolution, the star of hesitation and delay—​he sent his feminine aspect after the masculine one reproduced in the picture, and did so by the most circuitous, most fatal detour, even though the two had been such close neighbors.” The text is cited as well in Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, edited by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 207, and see his analysis, pp. 219–​220. Regarding this passage, see also Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 13–​14; Mosès, The Angel of History, pp. 79–​80; Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 91–​94, 168 n. 26. On the theme of melancholia and Saturn, see Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 149–​151, and analysis in Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, pp. 102–​105. The classical study of this motif is Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), pp. 127–​214. For other discussions of melancholia in Benjamin’s oeuvre, see Scholem, On Jews and Judaism, pp. 174 and 202; Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics; Wolfgang Bock, Walter Benjamin—​Die Rettung der Nacht. Sterne, Melancholie und Messianismus (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000); Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy. For the larger intellectual and cultural milieu to assess Benjamin’s depressive tendencies, see the discussion on “Melancholy Germans” in Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 138–​184. 178 Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 110. See, however, Löwy, Fire Alarm, pp. 101–​102. The author interprets Benjamin’s image of the Jetztzeit being shot through with splinters of messianic

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progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe,” he does not only mean that the status quo has the “ever-​present possibility” of being calamitous, but rather that the cataclysmic is “what in each case is given,” and hence “hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”179 In a revealing comment in his essay on Kafka, published in December 1934 on the tenth anniversary of his death, Benjamin elaborates on Kafka’s aphorism “Don’t forget the best!”, “But forgetting always involves the best, for it involves the possibility of redemption.”180 One would have reasonably expected Benjamin to affirm a connection between memory and redemption, and yet, he inverts Kafka’s advice and substitutes forgetfulness for memory. The instruction was not to forget the best but Benjamin insists that through forgetfulness alone one can access the best, since forgetfulness involves the possibility of redemption. At most, we should attribute to Benjamin the redolent title of one of Scholem’s poems “Traurige Erlösung,” composed in 1926, three years after his arrival in Jerusalem, which already expresses disillusion with the possibility of the “untarnished ray” of the light of Zion attaining the “world’s inmost core” (Innere der Welt).181 In another poem composed in 1933 on the occasion of the wedding of Kitty Marx and Karl Steinschneider, “Mit einem Exemplar von Walter Benjamins ‘Einbahnstraβe’,” Scholem reiterated the primacy accorded to melancholia in the religious outlook of Benjamin and in his own worldview: “In days of old all roads somehow led /​to God and to his name. /​We are not devout. Our domain is the profane, /​and where ‘God’ once stood, Melancholy time as a reference to “moments of revolt,” and hence it conveys the “imminent or potential presence of the messianic era in history.” Löwy reinforces his argument with a citation from Scholem’s unpublished notebooks of 1917 where he reports that Benjamin once said, “The messianic kingdom is always there.” Commenting on this passage, Löwy writes: “We are, here, in the rupture between messianic redemption and the ideology of progress, at the heart of the constellation formed by the conceptions of history of Benjamin, Scholem, and Franz Rosenzweig, who draw on the Jewish religious tradition to contest the model of thought that is common to Christian theodicy, the Enlightenment and the Hegelian philosophy of history. By abandoning the Western teleological model, we pass from a time of necessity to a time of possibilities, a random time, open at any moment to the unforeseeable irruption of the new.” The influence of Rosenzweig’s idea that the future can erupt at any moment is repeated, ibid., p. 104, and see pp. 8, 122 n. 18. As Löwy explicitly acknowledges, p. 134 n. 165, his argument is indebted to Mosès. 179 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 473; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1, p. 593. 180 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 813; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2, p. 434. 181 Scholem, The Fullness of Time, pp. 68–​69. The influence of Benjamin’s preoccupation with mourning (Trauer) in Scholem’s poem is duly noted by Wasserstrom, The Fullness of Time, p. 146. See also the emotive beginning of the poem “W.B.” in the same volume, pp. 62–​ 63: “Mournful one, near to me yet always in hiding [Trauernder, nah mir und doch stets verborgen].”

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takes his place [und wo einst ‘Gott’ stand, steht Melancholie].”182 Scholem, like Benjamin, came to perceive reality as the “abyss of nothingness in which the world appears” (der Abgrund des Nichts, in dem die Welt erscheint).183 At the conclusion of the Theologisch-​Politisches Fragment, Benjamin asserts that the “task of world politics” (Aufgabe der Weltpolitik) is to strive for the “eternal and total passing away” (ewigen und totalen Vergängnis) that is characteristic of “the rhythm of messianic nature” (der Rhythmus der messianischen Natur) and hence the method befitting this “eternally transient worldly existence” is nihilism.184 I thus assent to Gillian Rose’s educing from this passage—​which 182 Scholem, The Fullness of Time, pp. 98–​99. Idel, Saturn’s Jews, p. 91, perceptively notes that this “radical statement about melancholy as a form of hypostasis is, at the same time, a melancholic statement in itself.” 183 Scholem, The Fullness of Time, pp. 96–​97. One should here recall Scholem’s expression “nothingness of revelation” (Nichts der Offenbarung) mentioned in the letter of Benjamin to Scholem from August 11, 1934, and in Scholem’s response to Benjamin from September 20, 1934, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–​1940, pp. 135 and 142. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 233, and reference to other scholars cited in n. 166, to which one might add David Kaufmann, “Imageless Refuge for all Images: Scholem in the Wake of Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 20 (2000): 154–​155; Ilit Ferber, “A Language of the Border: On Scholem’s Theory of Lament,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 21 (2013): 169–​170. 184 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–​1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 306; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1, p. 204. For an analysis of this text as the framework within which to evaluate Benjamin’s early thinking on history and redemption, see Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, pp. 19–​51. See also the attempt of Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann in conjunction with Horst Folkers, Wolf-​Daniel Hartwich, and Christoph Schulte, translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 72–​ 74, to read Benjamin’s insistence on world politics as nihilism in light of the use of the expression hōs mē (“as not”) by Paul in his description of the kairós in 1 Corinthians 7:29. On Heidegger’s explication of this locution, which he translates as als ob nicht, “as if not,” see Agamben, The Time That Remains, pp. 33–​34, whose reading has much affinity to my interpretation in Giving, pp. 231–​232, of Heidegger’s rendering of the expression ouk edexanto, “they received not,” in 2 Thessalonians 2:10, as an “enactmental not” (vollzugsmäßige Nicht). For discussion of Agamben and the structure of messianic time, and Paul’s exhortation for the community to love hōs mē, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, “The Philosophers’ Paul in the Frame of the Global: Some Reflections,” in Paul and the Philosophers, pp. 151–​153. On hōs mē and Paul’s meontology according to Heidegger, see also Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, pp. 177–​183; idem, “You Are Not Your Own,” pp. 236–​240. On Taubes’s reading of Paul as an expression of his conflictual relationship to Judaism and Christianity, see Larry L. Welborn, “Jacob Taubes—​Paulinist, Messianist,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers, pp. 69–​90. See also Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 22–​51.

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basically accords with the reading proffered by Jacob Taubes—​that the political agenda envisaged by Benjamin “presupposes the inner man in isolation, able to bear a suffering that promises neither realization nor redemption. E contrario, it implies misfortune which is unable to bear this suffering, a thirst for the realization of entreated redemption, for the politics of the world, and total perdition.”185 The depth of Benjamin’s dark luminosity—​or what we may call his utopian pessimism186—​is driven home in the ninth of his theses on the concept of history, which is offered as a midrashic exegesis of the fifth stanza of the poem on Klee’s Angelus Novus, “Gruß vom Angelus,” which Scholem composed in honor of Benjamin’s twenty-​ninth birthday, July, 25, 1921: “My wing is ready for flight, /​ I would like to turn back. /​If I stayed everliving time, /​I’d still have little luck.”187 The first thing to note is that in the use of these words as the epigraph to his own text, Benjamin italicized the second line of this verse, I would like to turn back, a point of emphasis lacking in the original German “ich kehrte gern zurück.” This may seem to be nothing more than a stylistic triviality, but, in fact, it speaks very loudly as it underlines the redemptive potency of looking backward, the stance that is essential to historical writing. In Benjamin’s own terms: This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 185 Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 189. See also Rebecca Comay, “Benjamin’s Endgame,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, pp. 246–​285. 186 The expression is derived from David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). Compare Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—​A Modern Marcionite? Scholem’s Benjamin Interpretation Reexamined,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, pp. 164–​178. 187 I am following the translation in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 392. The German original appears in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 697. A different translation of the entire poem appears in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–​1940, pp. 184–​185. For a third translation of the poem and the original, see The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–​1940, pp. 79–​81. Scholem included this poem together with some others in a letter written to Benjamin on September 19, 1933. A fourth translation with the German text appears in Scholem, The Fullness of Time, pp. 64–​67. Concerning this poem, see also Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, translated by Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 102; Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 113–​115; Weigel, Body-​and Image-​ Space, pp. 56–​57.

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his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm [Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm].188 From the vantage point of the angel of history—​which we can assume is a symbolic configuration of the faculty of memory—​what appears as a concatenation of discrete events is but one single catastrophe constituted by the conglomeration of wreckage piled upon wreckage. The angel desires to tarry in the past to revive the dead and to repair what has been shattered but the storm blowing in from Paradise drives him into the future as the mound of trash, which is the past, continues to expand heavenward. With searing cynicism, Benjamin notes that this storm is what we call progress. Adorno well understood what should be adduced from the labyrinth of Benjamin’s messianic-​utopian thought: The traces always come from the past, and our hopes come from their counterpart, from that which was or is doomed; such an interpretation may very well fit the last line of Benjamin’s text on Elective Affinities: “For the sake of the hopeless only are we given hope” [‘Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben’].189 And yet it is tempting to look for the sense, not in life at large, but in the fulfilled moments—​in the moments of present existence that make up for its refusal to tolerate anything outside it.190 188 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 392 (emphasis in original); idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, pp. 697–​698. See Rolf Tiedemann, “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, edited by Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 175–​209, esp. 177–​181; Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future, pp. 212–​ 223; Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, p. 661. 189 The reference is to the concluding line in Benjamin’s essay “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” written in 1919–​1922 and published in Neue Deutsche Beiträge, 1924–​1925. An English translation, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” is found in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, pp. 297–​360. The crucial line appears on p. 356: “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.” 190 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 378; idem, Negative Dialektik, pp. 370–​371. Compare Adorno, “Progress,” pp. 56–​57: “But the dependence of progress on totality is a thorn on its side. Consciousness of this dependence inspires Benjamin’s polemic in his theses on the concept of history against the coupling of progress and humanity … in the direction

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Any hope we can muster to breathe is knotted with the suffocation of hopelessness. This is the intent of Benjamin’s pronouncement that we have been given hope for the sake of the hopeless; that is, the hopelessness can never be eradicated by hope, for if hopelessness was truly eliminated, we would not be capable of exuding hopefulness. It is safe to assume that Benjamin’s sense of the hopeless hope underlies Adorno’s classification of his own thinking as “melancholy science,” which he further identifies as the “true field of philosophy.” To know the “truth about life in its immediacy,” one “must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. … Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.”191 Here it is relevant to recall as well the fragment entitled “Idee eines Mysterium” that Benjamin attached to a letter to Scholem sent in November 1927. Benjamin wrote of representing “history as a trial in which man, as an advocate of dumb nature, brings charges against all Creation and cites the failure of the promised Messiah to appear. The court, however, decides to hear witnesses for the future. Then appear the poet, who senses the future; the artist, who sees it; the musician, who hears it; and the philosopher, who knows it. Hence, their evidence conflicts, even though they all testify that the future is

which one might crudely call politically progressive … The concentration of progress on the survival of the species is thereby confirmed: no progress should be supposed in such a way as to imply there already is such a thing as humanity which therefore simply could progress. Rather, progress would produce humanity itself, the perspective for which is opened in the face of extinction. It follows that the concept of universal history cannot be saved, as Benjamin further teaches; the concept is illuminating only as long as the illusion of an already existing humanity, harmonious and ascending to unity, remains credible. If humanity remains entrapped by its own self-​made totality, then, as Kafka wrote, no progress has really yet occurred, while reference to totality alone allows it to be thought.” But see ibid., p. 65: “The progress of domination of nature which, according to Benjamin’s parable, proceeds in contradiction to that true progress with its telos in redemption, is still not without all hope. The two concepts of progress communicate with each other not just in fending off the final calamity, but much more in each actual form of the mitigation of persistent suffering.” 191 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 15. The summation by Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 148, is worth citing: “The melancholy science is not resigned, quiescent or pessimistic. It reasons that theory, just like philosophy it was designed to replace, tends to overreach itself, with dubious political consequences. The social reality of the advanced capitalist society is more intractable than such theory is willing to concede, and Adorno had a fine dialectical sense for its paradoxes.” The attentiveness to suffering and pain in Adorno’s utopian speculations is appreciated as well by Ombrosi, The Twilight of Reason, pp. 119–​147.

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coming.”192 In the continuation, Benjamin notes that the court could not “make up its mind” and thus it was necessary for “new grievances” to be introduced and for new witnesses to come forth, to the point that there was “torture and martyrdom,” terms that seem inappropriate to the setting of a trial. Moreover, we are told that the jury did not trust the prosecutor or the witnesses, and by the end, fearing that they might be expelled from their places, the jurors fled and “only the prosecutor and witnesses remain.”193 It is interesting to cogitate about what inferences may be drawn from the juxtaposition of the specific vocations listed on Benjamin’s list of witnesses. A full exposition of this matter lies beyond the main concern of this essay, but I will offer two brief observations. First, the list obliges us to consider the intricate bond between poet and philosopher, since they are distinguished from the artist and the musician, inasmuch as the medium for witnessing that they share is language. To be sure, Benjamin sets them apart by speaking of the poet who feels (es fühlt) as opposed to the philosopher who knows (es weiß), whence we can assume that the linguistic truths expressed by the former well forth from an experience of immediacy, whereas those of the latter are a matter of ratiocination.194 Even so, Benjamin’s celebrated notion of the linguistic 192 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 68; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.3, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 1153. 193 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 68; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.3, pp. 1153–​1154. It is of interest to recall in this context the following passage from Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 136: “Death, as the form of tragic life, is an individual destiny; in the Trauerspiel it frequently takes the form of a communal fate, as if summoning all the participants before the highest court.” And compare the distinction between the heavenly and the earthly court in ibid., p. 234: “And while, in the earthly court, the uncertain subjectivity of judgment is firmly anchored in reality, with punishments, in the heavenly court the illusion of evil comes entirely into its own. Here the unconcealed subjectivity triumphs over every deceptive objectivity of justice, and is incorporated into divine omnipotence as a ‘work of supreme wisdom and primal love’, as hell.” 194 On the meaning of poetic existence in Benjamin, informed by Hölderlin, see Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, pp. 18–​43, esp. 35–​38. With respect to this matter, there is fruitful ground for a comparison of Benjamin and Heidegger, as Adorno already noted in a letter to Scholem, dated April 17, 1963, where he commented on “certain astounding, mostly linguistic, similarities between Benjamin and Heidegger” with respect to their interpretation of Hölderlin, and Heidegger’s notion of “the poetized” (das Gedichtete). See Gershom Scholem, Briefe II, 1948–​1970, herausgegeben von Thomas Sparr (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), p. 269; idem, A Life in Letters, 1914–​1982, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 392. Adorno informed Scholem that in a lecture on Hölderlin, which he was preparing to deliver at the annual conference of the Hölderlin-​Gesellschaft in Berlin on June 7, 1963, he planned to develop his critique of Heidegger “precisely out of the differences pertaining to things so similar. As will be

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nature of all being (das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge) and the depiction of the world as symbolic of a fallen state in relation to an inexpressible Ursprache195 insinuate a more proximate relation between poet and philosopher.196 Second, Benjamin speaks of history as a trial in which the human being serves as an advocate for “mute nature” (stummen Natur) by bringing a complaint against all creation in general and against the redeemer’s nonappearance in particular. The prosecutor, the witnesses, and the members of the jury are all imagined to be present, but the defendant standing trial is the one persona on the scene that is absent. Indeed, the absence of the defendant is precisely immediately evident to you, this involves the concept of the mythical. Heidegger holds that the mythical has the last word with Hölderlin; Benjamin shows that for Hölderlin it’s the dialectical that counts. Not incidentally, I present certain of Benjamin’s categories as having indisputable priority, though I’d like to leave the question open whether Heidegger knew Benjamin’s work (which seems unlikely to me). I would be grateful if you could send me a quick comment.” The revised version of Adorno’s lecture, “Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins,” was first published in Die Neue Rundschau 75 (1964), and reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zu Literatur, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann unter Mitwirkung von Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-​Morss und Klaus Schultz [gs 11] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 447–​491; English translation in idem, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 109–​149. In his response (dated April 22, 1963), Scholem clarifies that the date of composition of Benjamin’s essay on Hölderlin was either 1914 or 1915, and concludes that he has no reason to assume that Heidegger either received a copy of that essay or even knew of it secondhand. He acknowledges, however, that the similarity of Heidegger’s concept of “the poeticized” to Benjamin’s analysis did occur to him as well (Scholem, Briefe II, p. 93; idem, A Life in Letters, pp. 392–​393). On the respective interpretations of Hölderlin on the part of Benjamin and Heidegger, see, more recently, Antonia Egel, “Who Was Friedrich Hölderlin? Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and the Poet,” in Sparks Will Fly, pp. 177–​188, and in the same volume, Joanna Hodge, “Sobriety, Intoxication, Hyperbology: Benjamin and Heidegger Reading Hölderlin,” pp. 189–​215. For a critical assessment of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin on this point, see Adorno, Noten zu Literatur, p. 456; idem, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 117. See Josh Robinson, Adorno’s Poetics of Form (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), pp. 28–​33. 195 Irving Wohlfarth, “On Some Jewish Motifs in Benjamin,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, edited by Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 157–​215; Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, pp. 88–​90. The question of Benjamin’s theory of language and the Jewish mystical tradition, particularly as it was interpreted through the lens of Scholem, has been discussed by a number of scholars. For an extensive analysis, see Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, pp. 85–​153, and see the comments in Wolfson, Language, pp. 11–​12, 405–​406 n. 78. 1 96 Noteworthy are the comments of Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 166: “What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language. Linguistic ‘transference’ enables us to give material form to the invisible … and thus to render it capable of being experienced” (emphasis in original).

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what is being judged. I take this to mean that any investigation into messianic speculation must interrogate the deferment of the promise. Benjamin remarks that all of the witnesses testify to the Messiah’s coming, but in truth, they accomplish this by testifying to his not having come. Scholem suggested that the aforecited arcanum “constitutes the first evidence of the influence on Benjamin of Kafka’s novel The Trial. … This was the beginning of his meditations on Kafka, which were intended as preliminary studies for an essay on The Trial.”197 I would add that Benjamin’s comment regarding the absence of the promised Messiah (das Ausbleiben des verheißnen Messias) is reminiscent of Kafka’s parabolic aphorism that the Messiah will come on the day after he has arrived, not the last day but on the very last day,198 that is, the day after the last, a day that cannot come forth in the ebb and flow of time any more or less than the very first day, the first that would have to come before the first to be first and therefore already second.199 In a similar spirit, Benjamin upheld the notion of an end that can never be achieved insofar as it is the end, and thus he wryly noted that the drawing near of surrealism to communism arouses the need for “pessimism all along the line.”200 The failure to arrive at the end has been appropriated by various postmodern thinkers—​in no small measure due to the influence of Derrida’s notion of messianicity and the emphasis he placed on the future (l’avenir) as the dawning of what is to come (à-​venir) and consequently impervious to a thematics of time201—​as an indicator of limitless hope. Typical of this stance is Derrida’s insistence that the apocalyptic tone—​the unveiling of the truth of the end that reveals itself as the advent of the end of truth—​rests on the assumption that the end is beginning, that the end is imminent, a point

197 Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 145. Scholem’s surmise is elaborated in Wohlfarth, “On Some Jewish Motifs,” pp. 188–​205. 198 Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 81. Compare Martel, Textual Conspiracies, pp. 62–​87. 199 Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, p. 143, cited in Wolfson, A Dream, p. 452 n. 157. The comment of Kafka (referred to in the previous note) and the explication of Blanchot were noted by Comay, “Benjamin’s Endgame,” p. 269. 200 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 216. 201 Wolfson, Giving, pp. 160–​161, and references to other scholarly discussions cited on p. 406 n. 31. To the sources mentioned there, see now the analysis of Colby Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 43–​114. On the privileging of the future in the Derridean conception of temporality, see Joanna Hodge, Derrida on Time (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 91–​112. See also DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology, pp. 115-​139.

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corroborated by the fact that we are all going to die.202 Nevertheless, the discourse of the end echoes the diction of John’s apocalyptic prediction, “you will not know at what hour I shall come upon you” (Revelation 3:3), which is glossed by Derrida, “I shall come: the coming is always to come. The Adôn named as the aleph and the tav, the alpha and the omega, is the one who has been, who is, and who comes, not who shall be, but who comes, which is the present of to-​come [à-​venir]. I am coming means: I am going to come, I am to come in the imminence of an ‘I am going to come,’ ‘I am in the process of coming,’ ‘I am on the point of going to come.’”203 Even though Derrida states clearly that the “apocalyptic desire” for elucidation or enlightenment consists of the critique that demystifies or deconstructs apocalyptic discourse itself and with it all speculation on vision of the end204—​ indeed the dismissal of a transcendental signifier leaves us with an horizon of temporality in which there is neither arche nor telos, neither foundational beginning nor eschatological ending—​his emphasis on the inability of the future to come, its state of always coming, seemingly begets an unbounded optimism, since the future is, in Derrida’s own terms, the “monstrous arrivant;” that is, inasmuch as the future is unpredictable, incalculable, and nonprogrammable, it is like a monster that is not recognized the first time it appears. Hence, we can welcome the future only as that for which we cannot prepare in the manner that we “accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange.”205 This “waiting for the never enough of time,” as one scholar artfully called it,206 matches the “experience of the impossible” that Derrida assigns to the “deconstructive operation.” Performatively, awaiting the future that can never arrive is “the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention. … Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules—​other conventions—​for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition 202 Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, edited by Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 151–​152. 203 Ibid., p. 153 (emphasis in original). 204 Ibid., p. 148. 205 Jacques Derrida, Points …: Interviews, 1974–​1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 386–​387. See Marko Zlomislic, Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 237. 206 Zlomislic, Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics, pp. 233–​239.

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between performative and constative. Its process [démarche] involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming—​the venire—​in event, advent, invention. But it can only do so by deconstructing a conceptual and institutional structure of invention that neutralizes by putting the stamp of reason on some aspect of invention, of inventive power; as if it were necessary, over and beyond a certain traditional status of invention, to reinvent the future.”207 Of course, for Derrida, the matter is more complex because the future is precisely what never comes except as what cannot be foreseen, and thus in some sense, it is always coming. Still, there is an indefatigable hopefulness implicit in the description of deconstruction as a means to reinvent the future. Benjamin and the thinkers of the Frankfurt school saw the matter differently, perceiving that the inability for closure also breeds pessimism and despair, a “mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals.”208 We cannot reinvent the future; at best, we can rewrite the story of the past so that we can manage to survive in the present. In the conclusion of the sixth historical thesis, Benjamin observed, “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”209 Utilizing the traditional language of Christian soteriology, Benjamin expresses this in the image of the messianic redeemer subjugating the Antichrist. For Benjamin, however, this is a conquest that will necessarily not reach its fruition—​the enemy never has and never will cease to be victorious. If the efficacy of the Antichrist were to be subdued, this would beckon the extermination of Christ.210 207 Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 15 and 23 (emphasis in original). 208 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 217. See Paul Mendes-​Flohr, “‘To Brush History against the Grain’: The Eschatology of the Frankfurt School and Ernst Bloch,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 631–​650. 209 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 391 (emphasis in original); idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, p. 695. 210 To my ear, Benjamin’s view is reminiscent of the Jungian perspective regarding the antinomy in God’s nature between good and evil and the alchemical interpretation of the incarnation of the divine in the human as the means to achieve the coniunctio oppositorum. See Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, translated by Richard F. C. Hull, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 451, and, in more detail, Carl G. Jung, Antwort auf Hiob, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, translated by R. F. C. Hull, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 453–​459. See also Jung’s letter to Father Victor White, written on April 10, 1954, in Carl G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2: 1951–​ 1961, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, translation

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Perhaps even more pertinent is Benjamin’s aside in the Theologisch-​ Politisches Fragment: “Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal [Ziel]. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende].”211 Departing from Cohen’s asymptotic conception of progress towards an end that is endlessly approached but never finally achieved, and the consequent distinction he proposes between eschatology and messianism,212 Benjamin maintained that history is not advancing towards some goal; the messianic is the terminus that cannot be realized either in the course of a future that is at an infinite distance from the present or even in the intervention of any

by R. F C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). p.166: “But how can absolute evil be connected and identified with absolute good? … If the moral opposites could be united at all, they would be suspended altogether and there could be no morality at all. That is certainly not what synthesis aims at. In such a case of irreconcilability the opposites are united by a neutral or ambivalent bridge, a symbol expressing either side in such a way that they can function together. This symbol is the cross as interpreted of old, viz. as the tree of life or simply as the tree to which Christ is inescapably affixed. This particular feature points to the compensatory significance of the tree: the tree symbolizes that entity from which Christ has been separated and with which he ought to be connected again to make his life or his being complete. In other words, the Crucifixus is the symbol uniting the absolute moral opposites. Christ represents the light; the tree, the darkness; he the son, it the mother. Both are androgynous (tree = phallus)” (emphasis in original). Compare John R. Dourley, Jung and His Mystics: In the End It All Comes to Nothing (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 180–​ 181; Gord Barentsen, Romantic Metasubjectivity through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 241–​248. The relationship between Jung and Benjamin on the subject of good and evil is a matter that deserves a separate treatment. 211 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, p. 305; idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1, p. 203. In the continuation of the passage, Benjamin remarks that the “cardinal merit of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia” was to have “repudiated with utmost vehemence the political significance of theocracy.” For discussion of this text in light of the two strands of messianic speculation in Jewish sources—​one that posits the Messiah as the sole agency of redemption and the other that assumes the Messiah is the consummation of a redemptive process set into motion by human initiative—​see Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane, pp. 24–​31. 212 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, translated with an introduction by Simon Kaplan, introductory essay by Leo Strauss, introductory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), p. 49: “An important moment already comes to the fore, which lays down the bridge between the root of monotheism and its peak formed by Messianism: the distinction between eschatology and Messianism” (emphasis in original). See ibid., p. 290.

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particular moment at hand. The now is splintered with shards of light but the liberation of these shards can never dissipate the darkness. As Eli Friedlander succinctly summarized Benjamin’s view, messianic temporality is “a scheme of actualization” that “does not involve the projection of a utopian end in a more or less distant future but rather the urgent revolution of the present by way of the recognition of its bond with the suffering of the past. The present transformed, what Benjamin calls the Now, rather than any dreams of the future, is the focal point of the messianic passion. This is why Benjamin opposes messianism as he understands it to all utopian or prophetic thinking.”213 Reaching a similar conclusion, Löwy offers the following somewhat sanguine assessment: Walter Benjamin was far from being a “utopian” thinker. Unlike his friend Ernst Bloch, he was preoccupied less with the “principle of hope” and more with the urgent necessity of organizing pessimism; interested less in the “radiant future” and more in the imminent dangers looming over humanity. He is not far from a tragic world-​view … the deep sense of an unbridgeable abyss between the authentic values one believes in and empirical reality. However … a fragile utopian dimension—​because it is entirely shot through with romantic melancholy and the tragic sense of defeat—​is present in his work. Against the dominant tendency in the historic Left, which has often reduced socialism to economic objectives of concern to the industrial working class—​itself reduced to its male, white, “national,” stably employed fraction—​Benjamin’s thinking enables us to conceive a revolutionary project with a general mission to emancipate.214 I would add that Benjamin does not guarantee that the revolution of the present will ever succeed to overpower societal inequality once and for all. Rebellion is not a remedy for the despondency endemic to being human. There is no way out of the abyss but through being ensconced in the abyss, no ascent but through descent, no memory of forgetfulness but through the forgetfulness of memory, no recuperation from alienation but through the alienation from alienation.215

2 13 Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, p. 193. 214 Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 112. 215 Wohlfarth, “On Some Jewish Motifs,” p. 165.

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The implications of the dark utopianism were drawn overtly by Adorno, whose decidedly secular politics and aesthetics were rooted in what has been called the Jewish passion for the impossible,216 a fidelity to the ideal of redemption that assumes the form of its refusal—​in the traditional idiom, the Messiah can be present only in the absence of being present. In the first section of the introduction to Negative Dialektik, Adorno put his finger on the conceptual quandary and pragmatic ineptitude that envisaging a perpetually deferred future inescapably entails: “Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against self-​satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require.”217 An analysis of Adorno’s critical theory is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will focus briefly on one crucial aspect of his thinking, which likely bears the influence of Cohen’s Neokantianism, the conjunction between the motif of messianic yearning and the apophatic injunction against images (Bilderverbot):218 just as the latter translates philosophically into “an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith,”219 an atheistic contention dogmatically expressed as the “one who believes in God cannot believe in God [Wer an Gott glaubt, kann deshalb an ihn nicht glauben]”220—​any positive representation 216 Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 33. Compare Lambert Zuidervaart, “Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, edited by Donald A. Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael K. Palamarek, and Jonathan Short (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 133–​162. 217 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 3; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 15. 218 Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 291–​318, and the review of previous scholars who discuss negative theology and the ban of images in Adorno on pp. 291–​292 n. 2. The negative redemption implied by the Bilderverbot is explored by Glazer, A New Physiognomy, pp. 60–​63. See also Düttmann, The Memory of Thought, pp. 58–​61, 70–​87; Christopher Craig Brittain, Adorno and Theology (London: T & T Clark International, 2010), pp. 83–​113; Martins, The Migration, pp. 48–​49, 82–​83, 97. On the critical theory of the Frankfurt school as a form of Jewish negative theology, see additional sources cited in Wolfson, Giving, p. 264 n. 29. 219 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated and with a preface by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 142. See also Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 17. 220 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 401; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 394.

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of God, consequently, capitulates to conceptual idolatry, the absolutization of the finite as infinite and the invocation of truth as falsehood221—​so the valid redemptive response involves turning away from redemption. Musing about the Augustinian ideas of progress, redemption, and the immanent course of history, Adorno makes the following observation that, in my judgment, can be applied more generally to any teleological conception of the historical justified by appeal to transcendence whether sacralized or secularized: “If progress is equated with redemption as simple transcendent intervention, it surrenders any comprehensive meaning with the dimension of time, and evaporates into ahistorical theology. But the mediation with history threatens to make it an idol, and with the absurdity, both in reflection on the concept and in reality, that—​what inhibits progress—​is what counts as progress. Auxiliary constructions of an immanent-​transcendent concept of progress condemn themselves through their very nomenclature.”222 The essence of the messianic ethos lies in the fact that the God of Judaism, in contradistinction to ancient mythological deities, confronts nature as nature’s other and hence there is always the chance that the status quo of the world order might be perturbed. But this very scenario is self-​negating, since every undermining is subject to being undermined. In his critique of positive negation, Adorno insists that the negation of negation (Negation des Negativen) should not be equated with positivity—​in simple arithmetic terms, minus times minus is a plus—​a move he sees as the “quintessence of identification,” which obscures the nonidentical (Nichtidentische) that arises from the “negation of particularities,” the negation of the negated that remains negative.223 The function of the negative dialectic is to alter the direction of conceptuality by giving “it a turn toward nonidentity [sie dem Nichtidentischen zuzukehren],” the “hinge of negative dialectics,” which is to say, to ascertain “the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept [den konstitutiven Charakter das Nichtbegrifflichen im Begriff].”224 221 Düttmann, The Memory of Thought, pp. 56–​ 58, 96–​ 97; Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, translated by Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 601–​606, 629–​630. 222 Adorno, “Progress,” p. 58. 223 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 158; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 161. See the analysis of negativism and truth in Owen Hulatt, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 77–​104. 224 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 12; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 24. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 149 (idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 152): “Nonidentity [Nichtidentität] is the secret telos of identification. It is the part that can be salvaged; the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal. The force that shatters the appearance of identity is the force of thinking: the use of ‘it is’ undermines the form of that

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In another passage in Negative Dialektik, Adorno identifies cognitive utopia—​literally, the utopia of knowledge, die Utopie der Erkenntnis—​as the use of concepts “to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts” [das Begriffslose mit Begriffen aufzutun].225 When placed in this utopian light, the endeavor of philosophy as self-​critique is to include nonconceptuality within the purview of conceptual knowledge, to defy the dominating spirit of the identity principle of reason—​the sine qua non of philosophical thought insofar as thinking appearance, which remains inalienable just the same. Dialectically, cognition of nonidentity lies also in the fact that this very cognition identifies—​that it identifies to a greater extent, and in other ways, than identitarian thinking. This cognition seeks to say what something is, while identitarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself. … To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-​in-​itself to its concept is hubris; but the ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity.” The role of negative dialectics, then, is to turn philosophy towards the nonidentity in identity. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 154–​155; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 157. Compare Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 104 (idem, Negative Dialektik, pp. 110–​111): “Heidegger gets as far as the borderline of dialectical insight into the nonidentity in identity [die Nichtidentität in der Identität]. But he does not carry through the contradiction in the concept of Being. He suppresses it. What can somehow be conceived as Being mocks the notion of an identity between the concept and that which it means; but Heidegger treats it as an identity, as pure Being itself, devoid of its otherness. The nonidentity in absolute identity is covered up like a skeleton in the family closet.” A similar criticism is leveled against Hegel for not carrying the dialectics of nonidentity to the end. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 120; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 126. I do not concur with Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger. In my judgment, from Heidegger’s idea of the belonging together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of opposites that remain opposite in their juxtaposition, as opposed to the coincidentia oppositorum, we may infer the identity of the identity of nonidentity and the nonidentity of identity. According to this understanding, the alienation of the other is part and parcel of the identification of self, not as the dialectical identity of the nonidentity of opposites but rather as the simultaneous nonidentity of opposites juxtaposed in the sameness of their difference. See Andrew Bowie, “‘Non-​Identity’: The German Romantics, Schelling, and Adorno,” in Intersections: Nineteenth-​Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, edited by Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 243–​260; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 4, 9, 63, 230, 363. 225 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 10; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 21. On nonidentity, nonconceptuality, and the moment of negativity, see Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2004), pp. 61–​65. See also Deborah Cook, “From the Actual to the Possible: Non-​ Identity Thinking,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking, pp. 167–​180, and in the same volume, Martin Morris, “Politics beyond Speech: Communication and the Non-​identical,” pp. 218–​232.

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cannot occur without it226—​and its invariable apportioning of injustice to the nonidentical.227 “Disenchantment of the concept” may be deemed the “antidote of philosophy,”228 but there is no way to the nonconceptual except through the conceptual, no way to the nonidentity of the other but through the identity of the self. “Philosophical reflection makes sure of the nonconceptual in the concept [des Nichtbegrifflichen im Begriff]. … It must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept [über den Begriff durch den Begriff hinauszugelangen].”229 Progress, therefore, is dialectical—​not in a Hegelian sense—​inasmuch as “one moment changes into its other only by literally reflecting itself, by reason turning reason upon itself and emancipating itself, in its self-​limitation from the demon of identity.”230 The paradox at play here is expressed concisely by Adorno in an essay on the experiential content of Hegel’s philosophy, “Only through reflection can reflective thought get beyond itself.”231 Hence, the “work of philosophical self-​reflection” consists, pace Wittgenstein,232 in “uttering the unutterable,”233 or literally, in the need “to say what will not let itself be said” (was nicht sich sagen läßt),234 the nonlinguistic and nonsignifying moment of language, the imageless image,235 the “mimetic 2 26 Adorno, “Progress,” p. 67. 227 Ibid., p. 60. 228 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p.13; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 24. 229 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 12, 15; idem, Negative Dialektik, pp. 23, 27. See Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, translated by James Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 26–​27. 230 Adorno, “Progress,” p. 63. 231 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, with an introduction by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), p. 73. 232 For a comparative analysis of Adorno and Wittgenstein on the theme of saying the unsayable, see Roger Forster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 31–​56. 233 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 9. 234 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 21, translation in Forster, Adorno, p. 32. In light of this need to say what will not let itself be said, it is of interest to consider the following exposition of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron in Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, translated by Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1998), p. 230: “Aaron, the man of images and mediation, has to sing in the opera, but makes use of language without images. Moses, on the other hand, who represents the principle of the ban on images, does not sing in Schoenberg, but just speaks. The only way in which he can dramatize the Old Testament taboo is by making him communicate in a manner which is not really possible according to the biblical story.” 235 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 123: “Philosophy as a whole is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses, and here Hegel … disempowers individual concepts, uses them as though they were the imageless

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consummation” of the “true language of art,” exemplified in music, a language whose “expression is the antithesis of expressing something.”236 The sociopolitical context for Adorno’s view is spelled out in the following comment in the lecture on metaphysics delivered on July 20, 1965: “I believe that culture’s squalid and guilty suppression of nature—​a suppression which is itself a wrongly and blindly natural tendency of human beings—​is the reason why people refuse to admit that dark sphere. … If what I have tried to explain—​in extreme terms—​about the concept of culture is true, and if it is the case that philosophy’s only raison d’être today is to gain access to the unsayable, then it can be said that Auschwitz and the world of Auschwitz have made clear something which was not a surprise to those who were not positivists but had a deep, speculative turn of mind: that culture has failed to its very core.”237 In accord with this logic, we can say that the possibility of redemption is bound inescapably to the impossibility of its actualization. Adorno thus identified the prototype of the “utopian stance toward thought” with the “interpretative stance in philosophy” because the latter leads us to break through the surface of all phenomena by assuring the mind that “what exists is not the ultimate reality—​or perhaps we should say: what exists is not just what it claims to be.”238 Translated politically, just as the negative deportment of the hermeneutical condition means becoming conscious of the shortcomings and fallibility of existence, so one must harbor a basic suspicion regarding the tenability of envisioning any social change that would bring about a final resolution. Expressed in a different terminological register, Adorno wrote: The concept of progress is philosophical in that it contradicts the movement of society while at the same time articulating it. Social in origin, the images of what they mean. Hence the Goethean ‘residue of absurdity’ in the philosophy of absolute spirit. What it wants to use to get beyond the concept always drives it back beneath the concept in the details.” As Dallmayr, Life-​world, pp. 49–​50, noted, following Hermann Mörchen, the aversion to representational thinking was shared by Adorno and Heidegger. For a different and more critical approach to Adorno’s relationship to Heidegger, see O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, pp. 149–​164. 236 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 112. Compare the description of Bloch’s understanding of music in Richter, Thought-​Images, p. 77, as “the prime sphere in which we encounter the general other-​directedness of signification, an other-​directedness that music shares with other forms of signification but which it stages in music-​specific ways, that is, beyond any obvious model of referentiality and prestabilized norms of meaning.” 237 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 118. 238 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–​1965, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. 138.

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concept of progress requires critical confrontation with real society. The moment of redemption, however secularized, cannot be erased from it. The irreducibility of the concept to either facticity or the idea, suggests its own contradiction. … Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery. In this it could be said that progress only comes about at the point when it comes to an end. … All the same, a theory of progress must absorb that which is sound in the invectives against faith in progress as an antidote against the mythology which is its malaise. … It is a part of the dialect of progress that those historical setbacks instigated by the principle of progress … also provide the condition for humanity to find means to avoid them in the future. The delusion of progress supercedes itself.239 In the end, there is no way to speak of the end that would not conjure the end of speaking. Notably, in Negative Dialektik, Adorno characterizes hope as an act of transgression against the Jewish ban on images, a ban that was extended to pronouncing the ineffable name. To endorse the possibility of hope is on a par with erecting images and/​or mentioning the name, antinomian gestures that counter the indifference of the temporal world “deeply embedded” in the “metaphysical truth” that “vainly denies history.”240 Particularly influenced by Scholem’s approach to the mystical phenomenon as innately nihilistic,241 2 39 Adorno, “Progress,” pp. 59–​60, 61, 64–​65 (emphasis added). 240 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 402; idem, Negative Dialektik, p. 394. Compare Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 297–​298 (idem, Negative Dialektik, pp. 292–​293): “What would be different, the unperverted essence, is withheld from a language that bears the stigmata of existence—​there was a time when theologians would speak of the ‘mystical name.’” On the mystical name in Adorno’s Negative Dialektik, see Martins, The Migration, pp. 175–​176. It is reasonable to conjecture that this idea of the mystischen Namen betrays the influence of kabbalistic speculation. For discussion of Jewish name mysticism in Adorno, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 61–​62; Glazer, A New Physiognomy, pp. 52–​55; Martins, The Migration, p. 186. Kabbalistic motifs in Adorno’s negative dialectics and aesthetics are expounded in more detail by Martins, op. cit., pp. 112–​185. The attempt to name the name in Adorno’s thinking, related to the language of music, is discussed, op. cit., pp. 173–​176. 241 Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah,” pp. 62–​64. See also Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, pp. 244–​246; Martins, The Migration, pp. 71–​111. The influence of Scholem is also evident in Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 108, where he contests the commonplace assumption that mysticism places primary emphasis on the unmediated experience of the divine. The study of mystical texts indicates rather that the experiences are “very strongly mediated

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by education. For example, the intricate interrelationships between gnosticism, Neo-​ Platonism, the Cabbala and later Christian mysticism give rise to an area of historicity which is equal to anything in the history of dogma. And it is certainly no accident that the corpus in which the documents of Jewish mysticism are brought together more or less disconnectedly, the Cabbala, bears the title of tradition.” Adorno proffers that the emphasis in mystical sources is on topoi of religious experiences, which are often mediated by sacred texts, and not on immediate vision or pure subjectivity. Much of my scholarly work on Jewish mysticism has sought to challenge the polarization of experience and interpretation that is so endemic to Scholem’s approach. See also Adorno’s comment in a letter to Scholem cited and discussed in the following passage in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 122–​123: “As it happens, the wisdom of the kabbalists was well appreciated by Adorno, who notoriously pointed out in a letter to Scholem written on April 19, 1939, ‘the language into which the symbol is translated is itself a symbolic language, which calls to mind Kafka’s statement that all his works were symbolic, but only in the sense that they were to be interpreted by new symbols in an endless series of steps.’ Adorno correctly understood that in presuming the parabolic nature of truth, an orientation that resonates with the symbolic imaginary proffered by medieval kabbalists, Kafka closed the schism separating fact and fiction, and thereby opened the landscape of textuality to the measure of incommensurability, the limitless limit that delimits the interpretative standpoint from which a reader may summon a hermeneutical criterion of objectivity that avoids the extremes of absolute relativism and relative absolutism. Language, poetically conceived as inherently metaphorical, is always an act of translation, a joining of the divergent rather than a harnessing of the same. In the particular cultural ambiance of the kabbalah, language performs this function by expressing the inexpressible, rendering visible the invisible, making apparent the inapparent. The symbol, therefore, brings the unknown into relation with the known, but without reducing the difference that binds the two incongruities into an identity.” I cited the text of Adorno’s letter from the partial translation in Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, edited by Rolf Tiedmann, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 244–​245 n. 305. For the full letter, see Theodor W. Adorno—​Gershom Scholem: Briefwechsel 1939–​1969, herausgegeben von Asaf Angermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), # 1, pp. 9–​12. In light of my observations on Adorno, Scholem, and the kabbalah, it behooves me to comment on the judgement cast by Martins, The Migration, p. 105 n. 163. After mentioning the study of Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism,” Social Research 19 (1952): 430–​452, Martins remarks: “By contrast, Elliot Wolfson, in his Heidegger and Kabbalah, published just as this translation was being completed, in a manner infinitely more tenuous than Adorno’s appropriation of Kabbalistic motifs ever was, claims (fully in keeping with the indiscriminate approach I criticized at the beginning of this study) to show how ‘the Jewish esoteric tradition’ supposedly ‘impacted’ Heidegger, constituting a form of ‘hidden gnosis’ in his philosophy. For Wolfson, this ostensible impact offers ‘an ethical corrective’ to ‘Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language.’ … Given that Heidegger was, as one could have known all along and has now been well documented for several years, a lifelong passionate antisemite whose antisemitism bled deep into the fabric of his systematic thought and, moreover, as is equally well documented, unable to tell the difference, both in pragmatic and in philosophical terms, between the Shoah, the post-​war population transfer of Germans from Eastern Europe and modern mechanized food production, referring to him as someone who “used antisemitic language” might strike some as something of a euphemism. When Scholem, on Adorno’s account,

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Chapter 8 characterized Heidegger’s philosophy as a form of ‘Teutonizing cabbalism’ (“deutschtümelnde Kabbalistik”), he was surely nearer the mark than Wolfson (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 112).” Martins’s assessment is hardly worthy of my attention but for the record let me say a few things. First, the author refers the reader to the blurb of my book on the Indiana University website. I feel fairly confident that Martins did not read my book, and my personal communication with him has only reinforced my suspicion since he never acknowledged that he did in fact read it. To criticize a 453 page monograph (of relatively small print) by referring only to the description of the website of the press, which consists of 153 words, is surely unacceptable and inexcusable; indeed, this strikes me as a new low in academic discourse. Parenthetically, in the book that Martins did not read, I refer to Jonas on several occasions, including the aforementioned essay that is used as the ploy to criticize my work. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 25 n. 97, 89 n. 91, 143–​144, 313, 326 n. 125. Second, Martins did not even understand the description of the book properly, and had he read the book perhaps he would have had a better grasp of my argument. I indeed contend that it is possible that some themes of the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger through secondary channels such as Schelling. This claim is supported by numerous texts in my study but since Martins is basing his comment exclusively on the blurb, he does not engage my hypothesis in a serious manner. Moreover, I state clearly that my method of comparative analysis is based on Heidegger’s idea of Zusammengehörigkeit, the belonging together of the “same” (das Selbe) as opposed to the identical (das Gleiche). For Heidegger, sameness implies the preservation of difference, whereas identity entails eradication of difference. Hence, when I speak of ideas that are the same in kabbalistic material and Heideggerian works this implies that disjunction is safeguarded by conjunction, the belonging together of what is irresolutely similar in virtue of being resolutely dissimilar, a form of comparison that dialectically surpasses the dialectical subjugation of antinomies by maintaining their incongruent status in rendering them congruent, a crucial point missed by Martins because he did not read the book. See, for example, Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 4, where I write about “Heidegger’s idea of the belonging together of opposites that remain opposite in their juxtaposition as opposed to the coincidentia oppositorum from which one may infer the identity of the identity of nonidentity and the nonidentity of identity.” And compare the fuller discussion of this method in ibid., pp. 9–​13, as well as pp. 76–​77, 97, 156, 173, 197, 232–​233 n. 10, 265–​266, 305, 365–​367. Third, the precise language in the blurb is that my “entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.” The ethical corrective does not relate only to Heidegger but to him as well as to the kabbalah. Furthermore, it does not imply that I have forgiven Heidegger or that I wish to expunge the culpability of his political involvement and support of Nazism or his overly anti-​Semitic comments. It appears that not only did Martins not read Heidegger and Kabbalah, but he also is unaware of my book The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other, published in 2018. Had Martins read that book, he would not have had the nerve to state that my referring to Heidegger “as someone who ‘used antisemitic language’ might strike some as something of a euphemism.” In The Duplicity, I document in great detail Heidegger’s anti-​Semitism and make no effort to excuse or exonerate his intellectual and moral shortcomings. I must say again, lamentably, that it is a low point in academic discourse for Martins to have the audacity to criticize me without knowing my

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Adorno presumed a heretical theology common to the kabbalah and to Christian mysticism—​such as the thought of Angelus Silesius—​that espoused a doctrine “of the infinite relevance of the intra-​mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence.”242 Bracketing the accuracy of Adorno’s claim, he looks to the allegedly heretical theological underpinnings of mysticism to find within tradition a challenge to the metaphysical supposition of a separation of the intra-​mundane realm and the transcendental. But the very emphasis on turning back to the historical without recourse to metaphysical transcendence leaves the former without the possibility of ultimate perfectibility. Curiously, in its aniconism, Judaism plays work. Fourth, I admit that I missed the comment attributed to Scholem by Adorno about Heidegger’s procedure with respect to language as a form of “Teutonizing cabbalism.” This comment actually supports my hypothesis, a point that would have been obvious to Martins had he read the book. Incidentally, I should note that the remark about Heidegger transmitted by Adorno in the name of Scholem is not attested in any of the latter’s essays, books, or letters. On Scholem and Heidegger, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 17–​18 n. 37. Bracketing that question, for Martins to write that my analysis of Heidegger and kabbalah, which he did not read, is “infinitely more tenuous than Adorno’s appropriation of Kabbalistic motifs ever was” is, simply put, outrageous. With all due respect, Adorno did not possess the philological skills to study kabbalistic texts and his knowledge of this vastly complex material is based principally on Scholem. I suspect that the same can be said about Martins himself, and yet he feels confident to proclaim that my interpretation of the kabbalah, which I have studied for close to five decades by investigating printed books and manuscripts in their original languages, is more “tenuous” than Adorno, who could not read one page of a kabbalistic source. Adorno himself had the humility to acknowledge this deficiency in a letter written to Scholem on December 19, 1952, in which he mentioned that he was intensively engaged in studying the “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” first published in 1938 and then in a revised version in 1973. Adorno characterizes this work of Scholem as “an inhumanly difficult text” (ein unmenschlich schwerer Text), and confesses that he did not presume to have completely understood it, a feat, he admits, that “is probably not possible without knowing the original texts [Es ist das vermutlich doch auch ohne Kenntnis der originalen Texte gar nicht möglich].” See Theodor W. Adorno—​Gershom Scholem: Briefwechsel 1939–​1969, # 125, p. 278. In his discussions of Scholem’s ten unhistorical aphorisms in The Migration, pp. 14, 77–​78, 88–​89, 144, Martins does not refer to this critical comment of Adorno. Regarding this exchange between Adorno and Scholem, see Lars Fischer, “Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and the ‘German-​Jewish Dialogue’,” Zutot 14 (2017): 135–​136. Adorno’s remark is also noted by Daniel Abrams, “Kabbalistic Aphorisms and Other Short Literary Forms in Jewish Esotericism,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 46 (2020): 121. For a different exchange between Adorno and Scholem regarding the latter’s unhistorical aphorisms, see Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah,” pp. 65–​66. I note, finally, that in addition to not knowing my books on Heidegger, Martins also seems unacquainted with my reflections on Adorno, principally in Venturing Beyond, mentioned in the beginning of this note, and in this chapter, originally published in 2015. 242 Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 100.

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a pivotal role in the disavowal of metaphysics. Thus, in Dialektik der Aufklärung, Judaism is described as the religion in which the “idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth” and in which “the link between name and essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition of uttering the name of God.” The eschatological quality of resisting the eschaton is related to the “disenchanted world” of Judaism that “brooks no word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion.”243 The critical utopia244 imagined by Adorno is one whose possibility is impossible and therefore possible. Progress is thus not a “conclusive category. It wants to disrupt the triumph of radical evil, not to triumph in itself. … Then, progress would become transformed into resistance against the ever-​present danger of regression. Progress is precisely this resistance at all stages, not the capitulation to advancing through their course.”245 In the concluding aphorism of Minima Moralia, he writes: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. … It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-​image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed … from the scope of existence. … Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.246 Adorno’s utopianism encompasses a noneschatological eschatology or a nonteleological teleology—​the “renunciation of redemption in exchange for the

2 43 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 17. 244 The expression was coined by Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-​Political Profiles, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1983), p. 42: “The German Idealism of the Jews produces the ferment of a critical utopia.” 245 Adorno, “Progress,” pp. 69–​70. 246 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247. On messianism and political theology in Adorno, see Brittain, Adorno and Theology, pp. 114–​139.

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appearance of redemption,” according to Agamben’s gloss on Taubes’s characterizing this passage as promoting an “aestheticization” of the messianic that assumes the form of an as if construction247—​and hence he rejected any culmination in the geopolitical arena that might divert one from the ongoing critical enterprise, which brings to light the contradictions and fissures integral to conceptual thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, the only credible philosophical thinking is the mandate to contemplate reality from the standpoint of a redemption whose reality or unreality cannot be substantiated, to cultivate a knowledge that is both the simplest of things and utterly impossible, a knowledge marked by a negativity that yields the mirror image of its opposite, that is, a philosophy whose possibility is predicated on its very impossibility. The demand placed on thought is such that the impossibility must be contemplated for the sake of the possible but the possibility of the possible cannot be contemplated except from the standpoint of the impossible. One can discern in this description of the impossible possibility of the end a phenomenological recasting of the rabbinic obligation to wait temporally for a redemption that cannot take place in time. The waiting provokes the longing for the advent of the nonevent, the present that Levinas identifies as the “mastery of the existent over existing,” an occurrence that “can no longer be qualified as experience,” a phenomenon that is, technically speaking, “beyond phenomenology.”248 I have discussed the minutiae of Levinas’s messianism elsewhere and do not intend to repeat my analysis here.249 Suffice it to note my conjecture that the shift from Messiah as a distinct person to messianism as a personal vocation for all humanity is an outcome of the diachronic conception of temporal transcendence as a movement toward infinity expressed in the “ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person,”250 a course set forth by a “pluralism that does not merge into unity.”251 For Levinas, there is no presumption of an abolition of human misery and affliction. As I noted above, that there can be no climax to the historical process portends that the possibility for salvation is always real. The hope of the “temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future”252 depends on letting go of the conviction that an eschaton may be reached and a new era without

2 47 Taubes, The Political Theology, pp. 74–​75; Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 35. 248 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 54. 249 Wolfson, Giving, 113–​120. Some of that discussion is reworked here. For a list of other scholarly discussions of messianism in Levinas’s thought, see ibid., pp. 380–​381 n. 214. 250 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 33. 251 Ibid., p. 42. 252 Ibid., p. 94.

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hardship ushered in. Messianic awakening consists of being liberated from this expectation and realizing that the consummation of the end is in waiting for the end to be consummated, a truism that exposes the secret of the nature of time.253 To wait for the Messiah, in other words, is not to wait for something or someone; it is to wait for the sake of waiting, and hence it induces the patience that is the length of time, “an awaiting without anything being awaited, without the intention of awaiting. … Patience swallows its own intention; time is attested in being deferred [se réfère en se déférant]. Time is deferred, is transcended to the Infinite. And the awaiting without something awaited (time itself) is turned into responsibility for another.”254 Levinas’s view is expressed aphoristically by Blanchot, “In waiting, there is always more to await than there are things awaited. … Waiting is a wearing down that is not worn out.”255 As Levinas well understood, the Jewish messianic ambition is precisely this wearing down that does not wear out, a hope that grows stronger the more it is unfulfilled. The time of the Messiah, consequently, bespeaks the mystery of time more generally, the “not yet more remote than a future, a temporal not yet, evincing degrees in nothingness [un pas encore temporel et attestant des degrés dans le néant].”256 In the final analysis, Levinas’s diachrony is a phenomenological translation of the paradox that has impacted Jewish messianism through the centuries: the coming of the Messiah is the impossible possible, that which is possible because it is impossible—​the Messiah who has come can never be the Messiah one believed is coming. Messianic time is the moment in time that is outside of time, the moment that cannot be gauged quantitatively, no matter how refined our tools of analytic computation, and hence there is no way to think of its occurrence but as the occurrence of what cannot occur save in the nonoccurrence of its occurrence. The nonoccurrence in no way affects the belief in the possibility of the eruption of the future; on the contrary, insofar as that eruption is contingent to the time that cannot materialize in time, the nonoccurrence is, strictly speaking, what guarantees its occurrence.

253 Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, translated by Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 143. 254 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 139. 255 Maurice Blanchot Awaiting Oblivion, translated by John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 59. On the inherent sense of waiting and Jewish messianism, see also text of Blanchot referred to above, n. 199. Compare Romano, “Awaiting,” pp. 47–​51. 256 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 264 (emphasis in original); idem, Totalité et Infini, p. 242.

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Not Yet Now and the Nothingness of the Future

Let me conclude by citing the following passage from Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, written between 1915–​1916, published in 1918 and then with revisions in 1923: Yet—​and this is of decisive importance—​the future, the topos of the unknown within the future … is itself nothing but our expanded darkness, than our darkness in the issue of its own womb, in the expansion of its latency. … That means: the final, true, unknown, superdivine God, the disclosure of us all, already “lives” now, too, although he has not been “crowned” or “objectivated”; he “weeps,” as certain rabbis said of the Messiah, at the question, what is he doing, since he cannot “appear” and redeem us; he “acts” in the deepest part of all of us as the “I am that I shall be,” as “darkness: of the lived God,” as darkness before his self-​possession, before his face that will finally be uncovered, before the departure from the exile of true essence itself. So it seems, indeed it becomes certain, that this precisely is hope, where the darkness brightens. Hope is in the darkness itself, partakes of its imperceptibility, just as darkness and mystery are always related; it threatens to disappear if it looms up too nearly, too abruptly in this darkness.257 The revolutionary politics proffered by Bloch is plagued by two conflicting tendencies—​the emphasis on the Western category of the telos, the omega point at the end of history that pulls human emancipation forward—​expressed specifically as the triumph of Marxism—​and the subversive power of the utopian spirit to break into history disruptively, the radical disjunction that is the essence of the not-​yet of the future.258 Bloch’s thought is both thoroughly messianic, inasmuch as his thinking is typified by a defiant desire not to accept unjust suffering, and thoroughly gnostic, inasmuch as he accepts forlornness as the indigenous state of the human condition. The petition to overcome moral injustices is not bolstered by naïve buoyancy but is born from awareness of inexorable torment. There is no recourse to a benevolent God, no pledge of a transcendent light extinguishing darkness. The darkness is defeated by political activism that accepts the perdurance of the darkness it seeks to defeat. The 257 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, translated by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 201 (emphasis in original). 258 See Tom Moylan, “Bloch against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, pp. 96–​121, esp. 112.

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hope of which we may speak is positioned in the place “where the darkness brightens,” that is, the hope is in the darkness itself. Bloch does grant that the secret “quite precisely never stands in the dark, but rather is called to dissolve it; thus does the darkness of the lived moment awaken in the resonance of the amazement that comes over us.”259 Hope must lift itself out of the darkness of the now but the reciprocal connection between the two makes it impossible to imagine one without the other. This, I suppose, is what Bloch meant when he used the term revolutionary gnosis in the 1963 “Afterword” to Geist der Utopie to characterize his thinking. “The world is untrue,” he writes, “but it wants to return home through man and through truth.”260 From that perspective, what is not yet true is the actuality that looms in the potentiality of what has already come to be untrue; the end restores us to the beginning, in terms apposite to both the inceptual thinking of kabbalistic theosophy and the Schellingian system of transcendental idealism, the pleromatic void where absolute necessity is indistinguishable from pure possibility, the dark ground of the present that is the propulsion of the nascent past toward an inveterate future. As Habermas incisively put it, “Bloch’s basic experience is of the darkness, the open-​endedness, the longing proper to the lived moment, proper to the nothingness of the mystic that is hungering for something … In this primordial hunger, the knot of the world presses toward resolution and, as long as it is unresolved, at each moment casts life back to its beginnings.”261 With his denial of the world as God’s creation and his avowed atheism, Bloch was at odds with the fundamental theological presuppositions of Judaism. Even so, due to his indebtedness to Jewish thinkers, perhaps prompted by the kabbalistic themes of exile and redemption mediated through Schelling,262 but influenced especially by Cohen’s idea of the messianic future as an “aspiration 2 59 Bloch, The Spirit, p. 202 (emphasis in original). 260 Ibid., p. 279. 261 Habermas, Philosophical-​Political Profiles, p. 68. 262 Ibid., pp. 38–​40. Habermas speaks about Bloch’s “Marxian appropriation of Jewish mysticism” as the culmination of a process that began with Benjamin, who sought to synthesize historical materialism and kabbalistic mysticism (p. 38). Habermas suggests, moreover, that the Lurianic myth of the world arising from the divine contraction, exile, and restoration informed the fundamental axiom of Bloch’s speculative materialism: matter is in need of redemption (p. 39). Finally, it is proposed that Bloch was influenced by Schelling, who “had brought from the spirit of Romanticism the heritage of the Kabbalah into the Protestant philosophy of German Idealism,” and hence “the most Jewish elements of Bloch’s philosophy … are at the same time the authentically German ones” (p. 40). See the expanded discussion of this theme in Habermas, Philosophical-​Political Profiles, pp. 67–​ 69, and see below, n. 267.

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for infinity”263 that degrades and destroys the “present political actuality,”264 he developed his principle of hope and the epistemology of the not yet. To cite one evocative passage: The Authentic or essence is that which is not yet, which in the core of things drives towards itself, which awaits its genesis in the tendency-​latency of process; it is itself only now founded, objective-​real—​hope. … The tomorrow in today is alive, people are always asking about it. The faces which turned in the utopian direction have of course been different in every age, just like that which in each individual case they believed they saw. Whereas the direction here is always related, indeed in its still concealed goal it is the same; it appears as the only unchanging thing in history. Happiness, freedom, non-​alienation, Golden Age, Land of Milk and Honey, the Eternally-​Female, the trumpet signal in Fidelio and the Christ-​likeness of the Day of Resurrection which follows it: these are so many witnesses and images of such differing value, but all are set up around that which speaks for itself by still remaining silent.265 Like the Marburg thinkers, Bloch accords a privileged position to the future as the truest dimension of time that transmutes history from an empirical to an ideal construction.266 The future inspires hopefulness in the present as the nothingness of what is not yet formed—​indeed as future it can become actual only by never becoming actual, since the future, by definition, is what is still to be actualized—​and therefore to speak for itself it must remain silent. This is the intent of the aforementioned comment from Geist der Utopie that the Messiah cannot appear and thus he acts in the deepest part of us as the “I am that I shall be.” Bloch has creatively interpreted the name of Yahweh revealed to Moses at the theophany of the burning bush, ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exodus 3:14), the most peculiar of names insofar as it does not name any being that is actually present but only the potential for future becoming. In Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Bloch traces the consciousness of “utopia in religion” and of “religion in utopia” to this

2 63 Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 248. 264 Ibid., p. 291. 265 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp. 1373–​1375 (emphasis in original). 266 Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 249: “The ideality of the Messiah, his significance as an idea, is shown in the overcoming of the person of Messiah and in the dissolution of the personal image in the pure notion of time, in the concept of the age. Time becomes future and only future. Past and present submerge in this time of the future. This return to time is purest idealization” (emphasis in original).

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biblical narrative and the revelation of the name of the “original God of exodus,” the “God of the goal,” the Deus Spes (God of hope) as opposed to the Deus Creator (God of creation): For the Yahweh of Moses, right at the beginning, gives a definition of himself … which makes all statics futile: “God said unto Moses, I will be who I will be” .… Eh’je asher eh’je … is a name which despite its ambiguity and interpolatedness reveals Moses’ intention, does not cover it up. … Eh’je asher eh’je … places even at the threshold of the Yahweh phenomenon a god of the end of days, with futurum as an attribute of Being. This end-​and omega-​god would have been a folly at Delphi, as in every religion where god is not one of exodus. However, God as time is in tension with God as beginning or origin, with which the Egyptian-​Babylonian influenced teaching of the creation in the Bible begins. … So Deus Spes is already laid out in Moses, although the image of a last leader out of Egypt, i.e. of the Messiah, does not appear until a thousand years later; messianism is older than this religion of the Messiah.267 Commenting again on this name in Atheismus im Christentum, Bloch is explicit about his indebtedness to Cohen’s musing on hope and the openness of the messianic future: Hence, the singularly unsensual idea of God in the Bible, so foreign to the ancient concept of presence; hence too the difference between epiphany and apocalypse, and between the mere anamnesis of truth (re-​membering, circular line) which stretches from Plato to Hegel, and the eschatology of truth as of something still open within itself, open 267 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, pp. 1235–​1237. In that context, Bloch, clearly influenced by Scholem, upholds the kabbalah, which he calls a “gnostic mysticism,” as collapsing the difference between the Deus Creator and the Deus Spes, the God of the beginning and the God of the end, the alpha and the omega. The teaching of Isaac Luria, in particular, is mentioned by Bloch as an illustration of this collapse: “The world came into being as a contraction (tsimtsum) of God, is therefore a prison from its origin, is the captivity of Israel as of the spiritual sparks of all men and finally of Yahweh. Instead of the glory of the alpha or morning of creation, the wishful space of the end or day of deliverance presses forward; it allied itself to the beginning only as to a primal Egypt which must be set aside. Little though such ramifications of Mosaism accord with the solemn hymn of Genesis, they correspond precisely to the original God of exodus and the Eh’je asher eh’je, the God of the goal.” See Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future, pp. 468–​471. On a similar strategy to interpret kabbalah as a gnostic antinomianism on the part of Adorno, also betraying the influence of Scholem, see Martins, The Migration, pp. 97–​106.

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with Not-​yet-​being. The basic sense and direction of this biblical thought appears again in Hermann Cohen’s eschatology, which has its roots in and takes its power from Messianism; although he shares the attitude that will always so “reasonably” surrender the eschatological in its struggle versus antiquity, for the sake of Future-​being. “This is the great cultural riddle of Messianism: all the nations put the golden age in the primordial past; the Jews alone hope for man’s development, hope in the future” (Religion der Vernunft, 1959, p. 337).268 Bloch rightly goes on to note that the messianic ideal articulated by Cohen stems from the time of ehyeh asher ehyeh, that is, the time of the ultimatum that lies within the Novum and breaks through into the Futurum.269 Tellingly, Levinas discriminates Heidegger’s privileging the ecstasy of the future in his notion of being-​toward-​death and the nothingness of the future in the Marxist utopianism of Bloch: “The nothingness of the utopia is not the nothingness of death, and hope is not anguish. … But it is not death that, in Bloch, opens the authentic future, and it is relative to the future of utopia that death itself must be understood. The future of utopia is the hope of realizing that which is not yet.”270 In passing, I note that this is another striking example of Levinas offering a critical caricature of Heidegger based exclusively on his early work.271 Lyotard already perceptively deduced that the “moment” in Heidegger’s thought that is most contiguous with the thought of “the jews” relates to the fact that after the turn (Kehre) Heidegger would have readily admitted that the “only thought adequate to the disaster is that which remains available to the waiting for God.” Specifically in the poems of Hölderlin, Heidegger finds evidence of the “interminably deferred.” Through the “art of waiting” the poet becomes the “guardian of the memory of forgetting. Here, as in Wiesel, the only narrative that remains to be told is that of the impossibility of narrative.”272 Surely, there is a bitter irony, and no small measure of audacity, 268 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, with an introduction by Peter Thompson, translated by J. T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 44–​ 45 (emphasis in original). 269 Ibid., p. 46. 270 Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 37–​38. 271 In my chapter on Levinas in Giving, pp. 90–​153, I offer numerous other examples of this tendency. See above, n. 49. 272 Jean-​François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, foreword by David Carroll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 79.

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to speak of Heidegger and Wiesel in one breath. But we should not throw out the baby with the bath water: Lyotard has a point in seeing in Heidegger a distinctively Jewish understanding of the moment as the time of waiting for what can be fulfilled only by not being fulfilled. More importantly, Levinas neglects to emphasize that Bloch was keenly aware of the fact that the utopian hope renews itself sporadically as the hope postponed unremittingly. Gerhard Richter well expressed this overlooked point: “For Bloch, this thinking of the futurity of futurity is invested with the hope of the ‘not-​yet’ (das Noch-​nicht)—​not a naïve or childish form of wishful thinking in an administered world of reified relations in which such thinking would be utopian in the worst sense, but with an abiding intuition that the non-​self-​identity of thoughts and actions, their internal self-​differentiation, is more than a hermeneutic or administrative problem to be overcome in the name of implementing meanings and systems. The not-​yet also signals a nameless otherness that precisely by being at odds with itself and never coming fully into its own, promises an anticipatory glance, the Blochian Vorschein, of what still remains to be thought and experienced, of what has not yet been foreclosed.”273 We cannot avoid the predicament that is at the heart of this nonprogressive utopianism or nonteleological eschatology: if the end can only be imagined as the terminus that can never be terminated, the very source of hope is a source of despair. Not yet may not be enough to sustain confidence in the one who is coming or in a moment of reckoning and rectification. Neither pessimism nor optimism seems suitable to brand this bestowal of hope through its suspension. Maybe it is hopeless to imagine letting go of the inclination to hope, but then, we would do better to think of hope in Levinasian terms as an awaiting without an awaited, an awaiting with no anticipation, an awaiting wherein we can no longer sever present and future, since the future becomes present as the present that is the future that is both present and not present, present as not present, not present as present. Expectation as such can never be fulfilled but it is precisely because this is so that the expectation propels us to speak of an end that will not succumb to the end of speaking. 273 Richter, Thought-​Images, p. 76.

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Wolfson, Elliot R. “Nihilating Nonground and the Temporal Sway of Becoming.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17 (2012): 31–​45. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah.” In Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, edited by Elliot R. Wolfson, 113–​154. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 1999. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Oneiric Imagination and Mystical Annihilation in Habad Hasidism.” ARC, The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies 35 (2007): 1–​27. Wolfson, Elliot R. Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Parting of the Ways that Never Parted: Judaism and Christianity in the Work of Jacob Neusner.” In A Legacy of Learning: Essays in Honor of Jacob Neusner, edited by Alan J. Avery-​Peck, Bruce Chilton, William Scott Green, and Gary G. Porton, 299–​318. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Patriarchy and Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart.” In Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Licht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos, 1049–​1088. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Phallic Jewissance and the Pleasure of No Pleasure.” In Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte E. Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-​Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, Moulie Vidas, in collaboration with James Adam Redfield, 293–​335. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Recovering Futurity: Theorizing the End and the End of Theory.” In Jews at the End of Theory, edited by Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and Jonathan Boyarin, 293–​311. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Re/​membering the Covenant: Memory, Forgetfulness, and History in the Zohar.” In Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, David S. Myers, and John Efron, 214–​246. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality.” In Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, 15–​50. Edited by Brian Ogren. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Revealing and Re/​veiling Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Secret.” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 25–​96. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition.” In Essays in Honor of Moshe Idel, edited by Sandu Frunză and Mihaela Frunză, 159–​184. Cluj-​ Napoca: Provo Press, 2008. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Textual Flesh, Incarnation, and the Imaginal Body: Abraham Abulafia’s Polemic with Christianity.” In Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual

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750 Bibliography and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan, edited by David Engel, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Elliot R. Wolfson, 189–​226. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Wolfson, Elliot R. Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University of Press, 1994. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Tiqqun ha-​Shekhinah: Redemption and the Overcoming of Gender Dimorphism in the Messianic Kabbalah of Moses Ḥayyim Luzzatto.” History of Religions 36 (1997): 289–​332. Wolfson, Elliot R. “To Distinguish Israel and the Nations: E Pluribus Unum and Isaac Hutner’s Appropriation of Kabbalistic Anthropology.” In Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World, edited by Brian Ogren, 316–​340. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Wolfson, Elliot R. Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth-​Century Kabbalah.” Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 393–​442. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Walking as a Sacred Duty: Theological Transformation of Social Reality in Early Hasidism.” In Hasidism Reappraised, edited by Ada Rapoport-​Albert, 180–​207. Oxford: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Weeping, Death, and Spiritual Ascent in Sixteenth-​Century Jewish Mysticism.” In Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, edited by John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane, 207–​247. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Woman—​The Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah: Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne.” In The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, edited by Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, 166–​204. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Wolfson, Elliot R. “Zeitliche Entzweiung und offenes System. Die Atonalität der Kabbala und Heideggers anfängliches Denken.” In Heidegger: die Falte der Sprache, edited by Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi, 121–​167. Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2017. Wolfson, Harry A. Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Wolfson, Harry A. “Maimonides on Negative Attributes.” In Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, 411–​446. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945. Wolfson, Harry A. “Note on Crescas’s Definition of Time.” Jewish Quarterly Review 10 (1919): 1–​17. Wolfson, Harry A. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Wolfson, Harry A. Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion. Edited by Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.

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Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Wolski, Nathan. Kabbalistic Yiddish: Aaron Zeitlin’s Mystical-​Messianic Poetics. With a foreword by Yitskhok Niborski. Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2020. Wood, David. The Deconstruction of Time. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Wood, David. “Time-​shelters: An Essay in the Poetics of Time.” In Time & the Instant: Essays in the Physics and Philosophy of Time, edited by Robin Durie, 224–​241. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000. Woods, Richard J. Eckhart’s Way. Dublin: Veritas, 2009. Woolley, Benjamin. The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001. Wyschogrod, Edith. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Yalles, Ya‘aqov Ṣevi. Qehillat Ya‘aqov. Jerusalem, 1971. Yates, Frances. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Yates, Frances. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge, 2001. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayyim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Yusa, Michiko. Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Zacuto, Moses. Remez ha-​Romez. Jerusalem: Qol Biṭḥah, 2008. Zaehner, Robert C. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Second edition. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1972. Zahavi, Dan. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-​ Pragmatic Critique. Translated by Elizabeth A. Behnke. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. Zahavi, Dan. “Inner (Time-​)Consciousness.” In On Time—​New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Ichiro Yamaguchi, 319–​339. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Zahavi, Dan. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-​ Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005. Zarader, Marlène. The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir. Or ha-​Me’ir. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Frank, 1995. Zimmerman, Dean. “Presentism and the Space-​ Time Manifold.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, edited by Craig Callender, 163–​244. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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752 Bibliography Zimmerman, F. W. “The Origins of the So-​Called Theology of Aristotle.” In Pseudo-​ Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, edited by Jill Kraye, W. F. Ryan, and C. B. Schmitt, 110–​240. London: Warburg Institute, 1986. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012. Zlomislic, Marko. Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Zuidervaart, Lambert. “Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.” In Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, edited by Donald A. Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael K. Palamarek, and Jonathan Short, 133–​162. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Zohar Ḥadash. Edited by Reuven Margaliot. Jerusalem: Mosad ha-​Rav Kook, 1978.

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Index Aaron 195 Moses compared to 644n234 sons of 187–​191, 187n353, 198 Abba 176, 572 Abihu 187–​191, 197, 198 Abraham 445 circumcision of 225–​227, 481 elderliness of 481, 482n117 Abrahamov, Binyamin 536n79 Abrams, Daniel 244–​245, 251 absolute convexity and absolute concavity 527, 540 absolute intellect 389 absolute nothing 77n17, 344, 489 absolute time 151n245 Abulafia, Abraham 262n16, 294, 304n180 Active Intellect in 317–​321 Ḥayyei ha-​Nefesh 277, 281, 316–​318, 316n224, 322, 328, 334 Ḥayyei ha-​Olam ha-​Ba 263, 263n20, 266, 272, 273n53, 276, 285, 286, 286n101, 288, 288nn108–​110, 299, 301, 302n170, 307, 307n192, 309, 316n224, 325–​326, 328, 330–​331, 333 Imrei Shefer 271, 287, 287n104, 299, 304, 309n198, 318 kenotic overflow and temporal transcendence from 259, 260n13 Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah and 295–​296, 296n145 Maimonides and 263, 263n20, 269, 286, 286n100, 289, 289n116, 316, 316n224 Or ha-​Sekhel 267, 278n74, 285n98, 293n132, 305, 308, 311, 314n215, 331n276 Oṣar Eden Ganuz 265, 265n24, 276, 281, 296, 305, 317, 318n229 on other nations 265, 275, 277, 303n176 on other religions 265, 272–​273n52, 276, 278 and the parable of the pearl 272–​273n52, 278, 278–​279n74 Sefer Ge’ullah 304n181 Sefer ha-​Ḥesheq 285, 289, 301, 323, 329–​ 330, 333, 335–​338 Sefer ha-​Malmad 288, 290n120, 291, 305, 333

Sefer ha-​Meliṣ 88n49, 290n120, 303n176, 304n180 Sefer ha-​Ot 303, 304n179 Sefer Yeṣirah and 164, 267, 282, 296, 309, 309n198, 322 Sheva Netivot ha-​Torah 282, 289, 291n122 Sitrei Torah 280, 289n116, 293, 297, 301 Ṣūfism compared to 262n16, 313, 313n210 universalism and 278–​279, 279n75, 280 We-​Zo’t li-​Yehudah 277–​278, 277n71, 314, 424n150 Abulafia, Ṭodros 161, 570n164 accidents 7 action and speech 418n137 Active Imagination 352n43 Active Intellect 286–​289, 288n108, 288n113 angel as 289n116 Binah as 332 binaries of 291, 292, 292n126 cognizance of 307 conjunction related to 323 heart and 323 Ḥokhmah as 332 in Imrei Shefer 318 light of 334 Messiah related to 303n176 Metatron as 268n35, 287, 317n228 motion of 334 in Oṣar Eden Ganuz 317, 318n229 secret of time related to 329 as space or time 330, 331n278 actualized messianism 396–​397, 573n172 actual nothing (ayin mammash) 493 Adam 230, 236, 289n116 adam (man) 179n335, 186n351, 293, 435n191 Adam Qadmon 143–​144, 144n229, 176–​177, 205n399, 235, 236, 252, 253 Adorno, Theodor W. 585, 618n154, 625n173, 632, 632n190 art in the thought of 645, 645n235 on Benjamin compared to Heidegger 634, 634n194 Blanchot and 652 Bloch and 645n236, 655n262, 656n267 conception of language 644n234, 646n241

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754 Index Adorno, Theodor W. (cont.) critical theory of 641 critical utopia of 650, 650n244 divine experiences of 646, 647n241 Hegel and 643 Heidegger and 634, 634n194, 643n224, 648n241 hopelessness of 633 identitarian thinking and 642n224 identity and 642, 642n224 impossible possibility in the thought of 650–​651 Messiah and 651 metaphysics of 645 Minima Moralia 650 music and 644–​645, 644n234, 645n236 mystical name related to 646, 646n240 negation of negation of 642 Neokantianism and 641 nonidentity in the thought of 642, 642–​643n224 on progress 645, 650 on redemption 641, 645, 650 on redemption’s actualization 645 Schoenberg and 644n234 Scholem and 646, 647n241 transcendence of 642, 649 utopia of knowledge of 643 adultery 475, 475n99, 479, 497n172 adumbrations 20 Ādyakālā 138 after-​each-​other-​ness 11n34 Agamben, Giorgio 602, 630n184, 651 agenda 241 aggadic image of the righteous 211–​212, 212n414 Aion 50, 54 Albo, Joseph 111, 112n121, 135n194, 139n213 aleatory point 51 alef 163, 297, 298n156, 341, 396n71, 568, 568n157 generality related to 570–​571, 571n165 in linear circularity 346 alef, mem, shin 297, 336n290 Alef/​Mem/​Tau 101, 103n89. See also death; time; truth Alexandrov, Samuel 413n120 Ali, Mukhtar H. 514n28 Allāh 112, 522n52

al-​Makki, ‘Amr b. ‘Uthman 130n179 Alqabeṣ, Solomon 485n128, 605 Altmann, Alexander 231–​234 Amirah 141n221 analogy 552n115, 554 anamnesis 398, 512n24, 623 Ancient of Days (Attiq Yomin) 175 ancient one (Attiq) 163–​164 androcentric construction 246, 369, 369n104 androcentrism 179–​180n336, 181, 207n405, 238, 251 androgyne (sod anderoginos) 179n335 androgyneity 179n335, 248, 250, 330 androgynous nature of time 186, 186n351 androgynous phallus 186 androgyny 147, 179n335, 186, 186n351, 193n369, 207–​208, 225, 244, 507n15, 527n60 angelhood (mal’akhut) 302 angelic actions (ma‘aseh mal’akh) 305 angelomorphic transformation and monopsychic integration 307 angels 106, 198n380, 254, 272, 276, 283, 285, 286, 287–​288, 287n106, 288n109, 288n110, 289n116. See also imagination; Metatron of history 631 Maimonides on 289, 289n116 prophetic-​angelic status 404n100 aniconism 626n174, 649–​650 anointed one (mashiaḥ) 324 Antichrist 638 antiquities 98n76 antisemitism 647n241 Holocaust 651 anxiety 384n24, 579 apophatic body 220n435 apophatic discourse 259 apprehension 558 appropriation 60, 60n181 Arabic 276 Aramaic 476, 476n99 archetype 93n65, 523n52, 623n164 of the collective unconscious 93n65 of the Great Mother 253 of the negative Mother 252 of rebirth 94n66 archon of the face (sar ha-​panim) 298n155, 317n228, 323, 329

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Arendt, Hannah 379n24, 384n24, 399, 611n129 Ari 144n229 Arikh Anpin 165, 167, 176, 226, 572 arising of arising 42–​43 Aristotle 46, 90, 96, 345n15 Heidegger on 58, 59–​60 Maimonides and 111, 135 physics of 6 art 644–​645, 644n235 asceticism 167, 436, 453–​454n28 ascetic renunciation 490 Ashkenazi, Joseph ben Shalom 149n242 Assembly of Israel 162, 191, 319. See also kenesset yisra’el astronomical and calendrical time-​reckoning 583 Aṭarah 152n253, 181n337, 196n378, 197 atemporal cognition 342, 342n8 aṭeret ba‘lah 166, 211, 523 aṭeret berit 197–​198, 449, 523 aṭeret yesod 529n62 attachment 39n116, 479 Attiqa Qaddisha 175, 176, 248, 367n100 attributes 311n205, 318, 532n68, 537n79, 545n100 Augustine 1, 46, 47n143, 48n148, 600 Auschwitz 645 authenticity 619 authentic time 583 Averroës 277n68, 286 Avicenna 136–​137, 142, 286 Azazel 300 Azriel of Gerona 109n111, 117n141, 156n262, 156n272, 157, 157n275, 158n277, 159 on sefirot 159, 543 Azulai, Abraham 147n240, 247 Bachrach, Naftali 206–​207, 531n68, 535n73, 570n164 bad angel (mal’akh ra) 290 Badiou, Alain 502, 595 indebtedness to Lacan 595n74 interpretation of Paul. 595n73, 599–​600n84 Baer, Yitzhak 190 Band, Arnold 483n122, 484n124, 485 Bar Ḥiyya, Abraham 349 basho. See nothingness

755 becoming 51, 55–​56, 60, 353 as existence 26 becoming being 488n136 beginning, middle, end 363, 367, 368n101 beginningless (azal) 513 beginning of time (ro’sh et) 333 beginnings 64, 71, 375, 458, 459n51. See also first cause duplicity related to 463 reiteration of 593n68 worship related to 458, 463 being/​Being 53n161, 58, 80, 80n26, 99, 515n29 becoming and 106 of Dasein 582 distance from 597n80 Heidegger on 59, 60n180, 360 history of 584 nothing and 26, 28 otherness and 643n224 presence as 580n26 Being-​in-​the-​world 384n24 Beltrán, Miquel 509n17 Benamozegh, Elie 231 ben Asher, Baḥya 200n385, 238 ben Bezalel, Judah Loew. See Maharal ben David, Asher 155 ben Eliezer, Israel (Ba‘al Shem Ṭov) 378, 378n2. See also Beshṭ ben Isaac, Solomon 119n147 Benjamin, Walter 107–​108, 398, 512n24, 606, 609n121 Arendt on 635n196 on death 588, 634n193 on dreams 617, 619n154 on end 636 on fictional truth 619n154 on future 608 Goethe and 613 Heidegger and 617, 617n153 Heidegger compared to 610, 611n129, 624n168, 634, 634n194 history and 610, 611n129, 614 on Hölderlin 634n194 on imagination 619n154, 624, 625n173 on Jewish messianism 606 on language 594, 619 on memory 625 messianic-​utopia of 632

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756 Index Benjamin, Walter (cont.) on past 615 poetry related to 634, 635, 635n194, 636n196 on present 608, 609, 609n120, 615, 619, 624, 639 on redemption 610, 614n135, 623n165, 627, 631 Saturn related to 628, 628n177 Scholem and 611n129, 629, 630n182, 631n187, 633 trial related by 633, 634n194, 635 utopian pessimism of 631, 631n186 ben Laqish, Simeon 101, 306n186 ben Levi, Joshua 126 ben Mahalalel, Aqavya 438 ben Simḥah, Naḥman 452, 452n27 ben Solomon, Elijah 153, 186n351 ben Yehudah he-​Ḥasid, David 174, 195, 196, 196n375, 196n376, 196n378, 196n379, 197, 249 Bergson, Henri 51, 382n21, 513 Beshṭ 129n178, 205n399, 403, 437, 439n211, 453n28 beyond being. See Ehyeh beyond itself 579 beyond space (illocalis locus) 135 beyond time (intemporale tempus) 135 Biale, David 453n28 biblical literature 87 Bilderverbot 641 Binah 115n135, 155n265, 331, 488n136 as Active Intellect 331 in gender symbolism 247, 249 Ḥokhmah and 181n337, 248, 570 kings related to 166, 166n301 Malkhut and 166, 168 mother as 165 and number eight 467, 467n74 return to 165 Sabbath related to 166 Shekhinah and 246 Yom Kippur and 166 birth 179n336 death and 9, 28, 29, 29n86, 58, 77, 588, 591 memory before 487 Merleau-​Ponty on 591 moments of 299 Bishop, Paul 94n66

Blake, William 107 Blanchot, Maurice 576–​577, 589, 636n199, 652 blessing of the bridegrooms (birkat ḥatanim) 211n413 blessings 177, 195n374, 196n378, 439 blindness 484–​485, 486n128, 487, 489, 495–​ 497, 499 blink of an eye 294, 305 divine salvation in 402, 402n93, 403n96 repentance in 402, 402n94 Bloch, Ernst 617, 624, 639n211, 640 Adorno and 645n236, 656n267 on hope 654, 655n265, 656n267, 657 Levinas and 657 on not yet now 653, 655, 657 blood and ink 304, 304n179 Blumenberg, Hans 394n67 Bodhicaryāvatāra (Śāntideva) 500 bodies in motion 353, 411, 508 body 417, 432 apophatic 220n435 phallus as 450n26 ritual and 440, 441n217 souls and 123n162, 390, 555 Torah as 440 transfiguration of 124 Bohm, David 45n138, 220n435, 426, 427n160, 502, 502n8 Böhme, Jacob 175n327, 480n113, 541n89 Boss, Medard 617, 617–​618n153 boundary 415, 421 Brahman 138n208, 171n314 Brann, Eva 351–​353 breath 170, 471, 479 Brill, Alan 552n115 Brin, Gershon 83n32 Brod, Max 606 Bryant, Levi R. 51n157, 51–​52n158 Buber, Martin 349n31, 432 Buddhism 3n6, 133n188, 192n366 Chinese Chan 61n181 Mahāyāna 77n17, 221n435, 557n127 Canpanton, Judah ben Solomon 292n126, 390n49 cause and effect 29, 29n87, 92n63 cause of all causes (sibbat kol ha-​ sibbot) 150, 343n9

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Cause of Causes 170, 567 Chadwick, Henry 47n142 changeable objects succession 109n108 change of times (shinnuy ha-​ zemannim) 147, 149 Chanter, Tina 588, 588n53 chariot (merkavah) 567n152 Cheng Yi 61n181 cherubs 289n116, 299, 343n9 childbirth. See birth Chinese Chan Buddhism 61n181 Chinese concept of wujiu 133n188 Chittick, William C. 557n127 Chriqui, Mordecai 235–​236, 363n89 Christ 638, 639n210 Christian eschatology 596 Christian frustration, and the non-​occurrence of the parousia 18n57 Christian hope 17, 17n56 Christianity 190, 227, 306 Heidegger on 600, 601n90 Judaism compared to 81, 105, 106n96 narcissism and mysticism of 538n81 Christians 232 Christian soteriology 8n24 chronology 59, 92n63 Chronos 50 circle 127 circle and square 167, 167n307 circular linearity. See linear circularity circular movement 65 circumcision 186n352, 197, 282, 313, 443, 443n2. See also phallus of Abraham 225, 481 consciousness and 444, 452n27, 454–​ 455, 466, 466n71 covenant in 282, 446, 452 of heart 225, 309, 312n209, 444 imagination and 455 intellect and 454 and knowledge beyond time 466–​ 467, 482 Maimonides on 446, 446n15 memory related to 444, 445n10 n. 10–​13, 466, 480, 498 mindfulness related to 455 of mouth 309, 312 and number eight 466n72, 467, 481 purpose of 454

757 repentance and 457 rite de retour of 445, 445n9 Shekhinah related to 560n139 Yah related to 560 Ciucu, Cristina 506–​507n15 clearing-​concealing 360–​361 clock time 405n102 coexistence 41, 56n169, 103 cohabitation 451n26 Cohen, Hermann 639, 639n212, 657 Cohen, Leonard 442, 443 Cohen, Margaret 605n106 commandments 274n58, 386, 438, 447n16 bodily means to transfigure the body 432, 436n192 eternity of 403–​404 communication with the spirit world 562n142 communism 636 community unity 27n81 complentarity 243 comprehends the world (mevin ha-​olam) 331 comprehension (hassagah, havanah) 263, 342n9, 552 apprehension and 558 of reality 558 three forms of 350 concealed brain (moḥa setima’ah) 574n174 concealed in absolute concealment (ne‘lam be-​takhlit ha-​he‘lem) 530 concealedness 102n87, 215, 222n438, 360 concealed of the concealed (Attiqa Qaddisha) 176, 248 concealed power (koaḥ ne‘lam) 532n68 concealment 247, 360, 362, 376, 406n102, 419n137, 485, 532n68 disclosure of 543, 544n100, 585 of divine 408, 408n108, 442 essential 206 Freud and 617n153 in Hebrew 430 of holiness 459n51 humility as 461n55 Luzzatto on 370 of Malkhut 206, 408, 519n45 of Torah 464 confirmation (ithbāt) 129–​130, 130n181 confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) 358

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

758 Index conjoining and delimiting 36 conjunctions 259, 324n249, 325 in the thought of Luzzatto 364, 364n92 conquering of time through time 103, 103n91 consciousness 8–​9, 31, 49, 63, 220n435, 427 circumcision and 444, 452, 454–​455, 466, 466n71 experience of 13 flow of 21, 21n67 intentionality of 220n435 interweaving of 32, 33n97 knowledge of 12, 221n435 messianic 466 non-​being and 590 now-​ 36 oneiric 385n27 reception of 461 renunciation and 495 retention and 24 of righteous man 478 of sound 20 time and space of 79 transcendence of 60 unconsciousness of 539n84 conservatism 243 consonants 327 constriction. See contraction contemplation 472 continuous 6n18, 13n43, 55–​56 continuous day (yom eḥad) 175 contraction (ṣimṣum, ṣimṣem, zimzum) 204n394, 222n438, 224, 247, 505n14 of Ein Sof 201–​202, 205–​206, 206n400, 519, 520, 542n91, 546 in five disclosures 530 of God 432, 434n188 of infinite 534, 534n69 in linear circularity 561 literal compared to figurative 549, 550n109, 558 Luzzatto on 370 and malkhut de-​ein sof 203n394, 525, 527, 528n60, 547 middle related to 548 yod and 410 conversion 232 Corbin, Henry 113, 287n106, 352n43, 397–​398

Cordovero, Moses (RaMaK) 117, 117n141, 134, 153, 184n346, 501 Azulai compared to 247 on Ein Sof and sefirot 115–​116, 136, 138, 144, 145n233, 147–​148, 148n242 gender theory of 244 on God 137 Idel’s misreading of 247 on moment 138–​139 on order of time 115n135 phallomorphic construction of gender by 251 on sefirot 113, 114, 114n130, 136 on time 134 worlds of 114 cosmic narcissism 537n80 cosmoeroticism 241 cosmogony 134, 376 counting omer 463 covenant (berit) 209n408, 213n416, 282, 446, 451n26, 470. See also circumcision covenantal history 87 covenant existence 349, 349n31 covenant of circumcision 282 covenant of Esau 292n126 covenant of the tongue 239, 282, 475, 475n98 creation 94, 95n68, 343, 345n17, 374n116, 412n119, 425 from letters 504 Lurianic myth of 484n124 Maimonides on 332, 332n280 orders of 156, 156n272 Sabbath related to 86 from Tetragrammaton 345, 345n17 Crescas, Ḥasdai 108, 109, 109n108, 109n111, 115n137, 135n194 critical utopia 650, 650n244 criticism 648n241 of Idel 244, 260n13, 279n75, 315n220, 506n15, 523n53 crown, supernal 424n150 crown of kingship (keter malkhut) 185, 207n405 crown of splendor (aṭeret tif’eret) 492 crucifixion 599 tree of 187n352 cycles 149, 340n2

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Daniel 175, 213, 215n421 Dasein 58, 60, 67 being of 583 beyond itself 579 death and 579 ecstasy related to 618n153 existential-​ontological structure of 579 individuation of 583 of others 577n7 past, present, future of 581 quality of care of 582 running ahead for 581–​582, 586n49 specificity of 582n31 Dastur, Françoise 9–​10, 10n31, 106n97 on death 586, 590n59 David (king) 202, 213, 223, 229, 467n74 “David, the king of Israel, shall live everlastingly” (dawid melekh yisra’el ḥai we-​qayyam) 202, 213, 223 days 48, 325, 374n116 continuous 175 everydayness 583 masculine and feminine 405n102 sefirot as 161 days of humanity (yemei adam) 158 day that is entirely long 202 day that is entirely Sabbath (yom she-​kullo shabbat) 214n417, 225, 228 death 6n17, 57, 92n62 being-​toward-​ 4, 586n49 being-​toward-​the-​end as 580, 580n23 Benjamin on 588, 633, 634n193 birth and 9, 28, 29n86, 58, 77, 588, 591 Dasein and 579 Dastur on 589n58, 590n59 drug of 304n180 as event 590n59 existence related to 591 fear related to 587 freedom of 587 future anterior of 589, 589n58 future related to 579, 580n26, 586 Heidegger on 3, 575, 579 hope related to 576 immanence of 565n147 as the impossible possible 589–​590n58, 637 inevitability of 8, 636–​637 instant of 588, 588n53 language related to 591

759 Merleau-​Ponty on 591 Metatron related to 292 nihilism related to 587n49 nonevent of 3, 77, 575, 591 not yet and 578 nullity as 6 paradoxical duality of 588 past, present, future related to 576n5, 578, 578n12, 581 possession of 589 premature 70, 71 primordial temporality and 5 self related to 384n24 singular object of monstration as 577 transcendence related to 577 truth related to 107 uniqueness of 586n49 death of the heart (mitat ha-​lev) 495–​496 deconstruction 637 Dee, John 561–​563n142 deformities 484–​485 De León, Moses ben Shem Ṭov 155n263, 447n16, 448nn20–​21, 448n23, 450–​451n26 Deleuze, Gilles 52n160, 55n167, 57, 57n173 on Aion 50, 54 on Chronos 50 on memory 51, 53n161 on nonsense 54, 54n166 on novelty and repetition 99, 100n81, 257n9, 258, 593 on past and present 51, 53 time and hermeneutics of 101 delights (sha‘ashu‘im) 433n187, 472, 472n91 delimitation of the limitless 199 Derrida, Jacques 355, 375, 443n2, 506n15 on deconstruction 637 Heidegger compared to 597n80 Revelation 3:3 and 637 desires 439, 439n211 for eating 497n171 moments of 124, 480, 483 for money 497, 497n173 wisdom compared to 432, 435n190 despotism 507n15 details and the details of the details (ha-​ peraṭim we-​ha-​peraṭei peraṭim) 565 determination 177, 541n91 of malkhut de-​ein sof 547, 549

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

760 Index deterritorialization 54 dialectics 78n22 image and 621, 623n164 dialetheia 79, 417n136 contrasted with Hegelian dialectic 169, 417n136, 431, 504 logic of 295, 315n220 paradox of 5, 417, 544n100 diasporic 98 dibbur. See speech différance 354, 354n50, 506n15 difference 54n163, 62, 503n9, 574n173, 627n174 replication of 65, 65n203, 94, 94n66, 363 different 607 differentiation 35, 153, 233 judgment and 571n165 of malkhut de-​ein sof 540 Dillard, Peter S. 18n57 disclosure 530, 533 of concealment 543, 544, 585 malkhut de-​ein sof and 525, 527–​528, 530 of Torah 464 disclosure of secret (gilluy ha-​ sod) 280, 343n9 disequilibrium 57 dishonor 244 dispositions of the real (tasrīf al-​ḥaqq) 129, 129n179 distance 48n148, 597n80 divide, of the present moment 36 divine 408, 408n108 constricted in the commandments 432, 436 past, present, future within 106 divine experiences 647n241 divine glory (kavod) 110n111 divine intellectual love (ahavah elohit sikhlit) 308 divine ipseity 256 divine names 271 divine nothing (ayin) 530. See also efes divine providence (hashgaḥah) 491n147 divine salvation 402 divine science (ḥokhmat ha-​elohut) 288n113 divine self-​limitation 541n91 division 427, 429n169 Dodd, James 578n11

Dōgen 31n91, 99n78, 132, 132–​133n188 drawing near 458, 458n45 dreams 385n27, 419n137 anamnesis and 623 Benjamin on 617, 619n154, 621 as fictional truth 619n154 future related to 23n72 Heidegger on 617n153 historiography and 620–​621 language of 619n154 the locus of the coincidentia oppositorum 420n137 Luzzatto on 372 memory and 17 numerical equivalence of 516n31 reality and 617n153, 623 temporality of 15, 372, 385n27, 418n137, 455, 513 Tetragrammaton related to 516 Drob, Sanford L. 507n15 drug of death (sam ha-​mawet) 304, 304n180 duality 134, 424n150, 588 dual ontology 251 duplicity 463, 463n63 duration (meshekh) 56n169, 108, 108n108, 421 without 127, 135n196 from emanations 202n390 rupture of 130–​131 durationless moment 129, 133, 380, 382n21 Dylan, Bob 18n56, 77 earth 511n23 founded by wisdom 430n173 eating 440, 441n216 desire for 497, 497n171 on Sabbath 493, 495n166 Ebstein, Michael 515n28 Eckhart, Meister 269–​271, 269n38, 270n42, 271n43 Heidegger in comparison to 133n188 ecstatic unity 20n61 Eden 155–​156, 296n145 Edomite kings 571n165 efes 419n137, 430, 435n190, 455, 455n35, 555 distinguished from ayin 430n174 ego 67 egological genesis 34

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index egological subjectivity 534 Egypt 74, 120, 124, 236, 387–​388, 406–​ 407, 656 exodus of 298n153, 386, 405n102 Ehyeh (beyond being) 141–​142, 170, 171, 326, 348 alef and 568, 568n157 Arikh Anpin as 572 emptiness of 569 fourth dimension and 565, 565n147 Keter and 569 past, present, future and 567, 569n160 sefirot and 571 Vilna Gaon on 568 yhwh and 567, 572 ehyeh asher ehyeh (“I will be as I will be”) 178, 258, 655, 657 Eibeschütz, Jonathan 144n229 Eichenstein, Ṣevi Hirsch 367n100 Ein Sof (limitless) 115, 236, 263n20, 401n89, 422, 513, 516, 517n32. See also malkhut de-​ein sof beyond time 214–​215 contraction of 203n394, 519, 527, 542n91, 546 contrasted with the incomposite intellect 550n109 divine self-​limitation of 542n91 expressed in Maimonidean language 136–​137, 142 in five disclosures 530 gender of 546 individuation from 504, 504n12 judgment of 546 Keter compared to 249 kingship of 408, 409n111, 519, 519n45 light of 202, 202n392, 206, 206n400, 207n402, 208n405, 209n409, 210n410, 219, 219n430, 220, 223, 228, 229, 530, 564 in Luzzatto’s kabbalah 363, 363n88, 372, 373 Malkhut related to 202, 202n392, 204n396, 206, 207n402, 223, 224n442, 229, 519, 519n42 meaning of 536n79 mercy of 546 and multiple details of 564 name of 520, 521n48

761 nothingness of 534 particularization of 206n400 permanence of 132 prayer and 494 primordiality of 138, 139n211 revelation of 116 simplicity of 542 ṣimṣum and 202, 205n399, 208n405, 519, 526n59 Torah from 128 unity of 408, 410n116, 503, 505n14 worlds and 517 Ein Sof and sefirot  Cordovero on 115–​116, 136, 138, 144, 145n233, 147–​148, 148n242 in Tiqqunei Zohar 166, 168n307, 171n311 Viṭal on 143 Einstein, Albert 44–​45 elderliness 481, 482n117 Eleazar of Worms 535n73 Eliashiv, Solomon ben Ḥayyim 373n113, 500n1 and the figurative understanding of the literal 549 ṣimṣum in the teaching of 549 and the temporalization of the spatial 558 Elijah 343n9, 419n137 Eliot, T. S. 17n56, 90n58, 103, 103n91, 458, 466n71 elixir of life (sam ḥayyim) 304 Elohim 223n441, 291, 333 femininity related to 448n21 of Luzzatto 364, 364n92 yhwh as 235, 429 emanationism 347n26 emanations. See sefirot; truth emptiness (śūnyatā) 38, 39n117, 40n120, 572 encircling line (ḥuṭ ha-​sovev) 346, 376. See also linear circularity encompassing light (or maqqif ) 203n394 end 636 beginning, middle 363, 367, 368n101 time without 133 of truths 634 end of everything 207n401 end of time 3n7 end of waiting 592

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

762 Index engendering time and feminine indeterminacy 177 enlightened person (maskil) 305, 317 Enoch 298n154 enveloping organisms 55n167 epithet (kinnuy) 364, 364n92 Epstein, Qalonymous Qalman ha-​Levi 404 equipmentality 98 equiprimordiality 14, 17 Ergas, Joseph 140–​142, 142n226, 508, 508n16, 516n32 Esau 237–​238 covenant of 292n126 eschatological felicity 323 eschatological moment 227 eschatological universalism 237 eschatology, Christian 596 eschaton 335 esh zarah (strange fire) 190, 191n364 esoteric (nistar) 555–​556, 556n122 esotericism 243 esoteric wisdom (ḥokhmat ha-​nistar) 299, 552–​553 essence of the infinite (aṣmut ein sof ) 207 essential concealment 206 essentialism 240, 505n15 essential nullification (ha-​biṭṭul be-​eṣem) 235 essential potency (koaḥ ha-​aṣmi) 206 Esther 301, 473 et. See moment eternality (niṣḥiyyut) 347n25 bodies in motion and 411 past, present, future of 417, 418 of sefirot 144, 144n229 eternal life 104 eternal now 77, 348, 513 eternal return 257, 258 eternal spirit 127, 127n174 eternal time (dahr) 514 eternity 8, 8n24, 83n33, 92n63, 132n184, 398–​399 beyond time 7, 488n136 of commandments 403 Ecclesiastes on 95 faith and 601 God as 514n28 of Godhead 412n120

of Heidegger 600, 600n87 Jewish people related to 596 length of 602 linear circle as 405 Messiah related to 596 moment of 400 nondifferentiation in 153 “nows” related to 601 omnipresent present as 515n29 quality of 400 of repetition 229 Rosenzweig on 596 salvation and 600 silence and 202 synthesis in 154 timeless 105n94, 108 of Torah 403 Zoroastrianism and 154n260 ethnocentric theopolitics 234 ethnocentrism 234, 279n75, 467n73 ethnocentrism and particular as universal indexicality 230 Eve 272 event 10, 589–​590n58 death as 590n59 of the nonevent 575 eventality 51 everlastingness 414 everlasting time (dahr) 112, 112n124 everydayness 583 evil 235 good and 294, 305, 638n210 evil eye (ra ayin) 495, 496, 496n169, 497 evil inclination 182, 457n43 evil passions (ahavot ra‘ot) 468 excluded middle 28n84, 54n166, 299, 543, 557n127, 597n80 exclusiveness 234 exclusivity 232 existence 53n161, 518, 554n120, 650 becoming as 26 coexistence 41, 56n169, 103 death related to 591 of God 142, 219, 222n438 inherent 30 in Maimonides’s thought 264, 264n22 negation and 39, 40n120 of time 38

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index existential-​ontological structure 579 Exodus 468 13:11 118n144 14:19–​21 276 19:1 119, 124–​125 20:10 161 Maharal on 124–​125 expectation 360 experiences 324, 470n85, 647n241 binding experience 34n98 of consciousness 13 of present 13n44 extension (hitpashsheṭut) 224 eyes 451n26, 497n172, 498n175. See also blink of an eye; evil eye single 175, 175n327 Ezekiel 295, 416n131, 437n199, 567n152 Fagenblat, Michael 383n24 faith 17, 18n57 eternity and 600 prayer and 490n141 revelation of 463n59 Fano, Menaḥem Azariah da 142, 168n307, 241, 509 fear 587 female 179n335, 200n385 God as 477n104 female genitalia 529n62 “female shall encircle the male” (neqevah tesovev gaver) (Jeremiah 31:21) 179n336, 184n346, 210, 210n413, 211, 211n413, 212n413 female waters (mayyin nuqvin) 179n336, 477n103, 510, 534 feminine 178n334, 447n16. See also masculine and feminine feminine receiving (meqabbel) 210n409 Fenton, Paul B. 262n16 Fenves, Peter 611n129, 624n168 festive seasons 390n50, 406, 412n120 fictional truth 619n154 fiery ever-​turning sword (Genesis 3:24) 194n370 figurative speech (meliṣah) 555, 556. See also literal compared to figurative first cause (first beginning) 263n20, 349, 350

763 God and 347, 348n26 intellect as 314, 314n215, 317 first universal (ha-​kelali ha-​ri’shon) 530 Fishbane, Michael 446n15 five disclosures 530 five supernal mysteries of the Torah 343n9 flesh of nakedness (besar erwah) 187n353 flow 41, 84 of consciousness 21n67 flowing presence 516 Focillon, Henri 628n176 fold 52n160, 53n161, 54–​55, 55n167, 64 of infinity 376, 414 forgetfulness 447, 490n145, 491, 492n152 evil eye related to 495, 495n167, 496n169 in “The Seven Beggars” 487, 496n167 wisdom related to 459n51 for-​itself 96–​98, 220n435 form (ṣurah) 304, 345n19, 511n23, 614 of God 556, 556n126 formless matter (tohu) 511n23 “For my sake, my own sake, do I act” (lema‘ani lema‘ani e‘eseh) 510 Foucault, Michel 53n161, 92n62, 241 four noble truths 43 fourth dimension 558, 565, 566n149 fragmentation 423, 428n168 Frankfurt school 638 freedom 383n24, 442, 587 Freud, Sigmund 23, 23n73, 536, 617n153 Freudian school 186n352 Frey, Hans-​Jost 15 Friedlander, Eli 619n154, 640 Frommann, Immanuel 260n13, 440n215, 573n172 “from the mouth of texts and not from the mouth of scribes” (mi-​pi sefarim we-​lo mi-​pi soferim) 501n2 full from divinity (male me-​elohut) 470 futural remembering 398, 512n24, 610 future (attid) 6n11, 22, 69, 103n91, 354, 357, 380, 383. See also past, present, future anticipation of 604, 658 Benjamin on 608 coming of 607, 655n266 death related to 571, 598n81 dreams related to 23n73 expectation of 575

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

764 Index future (attid) (cont.) indefiniteness of 25 Jewish messianism and 606 past related to 17, 351, 351n40, 352, 452 present and 658 redemption related to 603 today as 25 future anterior 589n58 future thinking 357 Galen 351, 351n39 Gallico, Samuel 178, 179n335 Garb, Jonathan 244, 363n87, 501n2, 552n112 garment (beged) 431, 503n9. See also malbush form of 511n23 Malkhut related to 547 non-​existence related to 554n120 of Shekhinah 474 souls and 235 garment, ritual fringe (ṣiṣit) 497n172 gateway (Torweg) 127, 127n172 Gavarin, Martelle 110n111 gender 167, 168n307 of Ein Sof 546 of Malkhut 478n104 malkhut de-​ein sof related to 522, 523n52, 525, 527n60, 528n60, 528n61, 530, 535 of sefirot 195 gender identities 212n413 gender symbolism 246, 247, 251 Binah in 246, 248 Malkhut in 244 gender theory 546 of Cordovero 244 of Idel 244, 246, 506n15 gender transformation 530, 534 general (kelal) and the particular (peraṭ) 122, 411, 425, 503, 570 generality  alef related to 500, 571n165 particularity and 570, 571n165, 572 generalizations 354 generations 570, 570n164 genuine historical reflection 68 geometric shapes 561n142 geopolitical 598n80 Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom) 103, 111 Giqatilla, Joseph 179n335 giving 61

Gloria Patri 91n58 gnosis of redemption 295 gnosis of the name 282 God 142, 237, 270, 309, 322, 348, 400n82 attributes of 545n100 contraction of 428 drawing near to 458, 458n45 eternity as 513 existence of 144–​145, 219, 221n436 as female 477n104 first cause and 347, 349n29 forms of 556, 556n126 humility and 461n55 Kingdom of 81n27 last 359, 359n69 Moses and 292n126, 307n194, 555, 567n152, 655 name of 284n95, 309, 313, 318n229, 328 paradox related to 310 past, present, future of 140, 217, 333, 399, 508 permutations of 165 soul related to 269, 271n43 temporal pleasures compared to 432, 436n192 Tetragrammaton related to 201 Torah as 117n141, 401n89 veil of 544n100 the work of (mela’khto) 302, 302n170 yod related to 319 Godhead 412n120 Goethe 613 Goldberg, Sylvie Anne 74n4 González Diéguez, Guadalupe 340n2 good and evil 294, 305, 638n210 good angel (mal’akh ṭov) 290 Gordon, Peter E. 597n80 Graf, Moses ben Menaḥem 519 graffiti 244 great king (melekh rav) 207n402 greatness 494 Greek 276, 276n64 Green, Arthur 452n27, 472n92 Gross, Benjamin 382n21 Ḥabad 202–​230, 392n59, 402n94, 407–​432 and Abulafia 424n150 acosmism and 215n421, 220n434, 373n113, 413n120

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index compared to Bohm 216n424, 217n428, 220n435, 426–​427 and Eliashiv 503–​505 on Malkhut 218, 222 and Mahāyāna Buddhism 221n435 Nishida Kitarō and 410n116 and Schelling 412–​413n120 ṣimṣum in the thought of 550n109 on timelessness of moment 217, 217n428 Habermas, Jürgen 599n82, 650n244 Hacohen, Bentsion Ben Levi 249 Haddad, Gérard 539n84 halakhah 275 Halevi, Judah 264, 264n22, 327, 404n100 Hamacher, Werner 607 Haman 298n155 Ḥanukkah 407n105 Harvey, Warren Zev 285n98, 286 Ḥasidic messianism 396–​397 Ḥasidism 390n50 on world to come 625n173 Hatab, Lawrence J. 19 having-​become 599 Ḥayyat, Judah 343n10 heart 294, 303, 308, 312n209, 313n212 Active Intellect and 323 breaking of 468 circumcision of 225, 309, 312, 443 death of 495–​496 impurity of 469 Metatron related to 323 yod and 470 Hebrew 101, 233, 276, 276n64, 300–​301, 300nn165–​166, 302n170 concealment in 430 as cosmic language 102, 562n142 mystical experience related to 282n95, 283–​287, 283n86, 285n98 souls related to 283, 283n91 as source of all languages 276, 283 Tetragrammaton as 227, 268 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 26, 352 Adorno and 643n224 Lurianic kabbalah and 540n88 on whole and many 540 Heidegger, Martin 1, 7, 8n24, 9–​10, 38, 232, 383n24 Adorno and 634, 634n194, 642n224, 648n241

765 on antiquities 98n76 antisemitism of 647n241 on Aristotle 59–​60 on being 59, 60n180, 60n181, 360 on being and nothing 26–​27 Benjamin and 617, 617n153 Benjamin compared to 610, 611n129, 624n168, 634, 634n194 Blumenberg compared to 394n67 on Christianity 601, 601n90 on circular movement 65 on death 3 Derrida compared to 599n82 Dōgen and 132n188 ecstatic unity of 20n61 on equiprimordiality 14, 17 eternity of 106n97, 600, 601n89 Foucault and 53n161 Freud and 617n153 future thinking of 357 on genuine historical reflection 68, 68n215 Germans in the thought of 597n80 hermeneutics of 99 Hölderlin and 657 Husserl and 6 identity in the thought of  643n224 incalculable nature of time 47 on intransience 44 on Jewish messianism 596 jug as vessel of 548n106 Levinas compared to 578, 585, 586n49, 588, 657 memory and 444 Motzkin’s interpretation of 565n147 on novelty and repetition 99n80, 358 on past 513n24 on Paul 599, 599n84 on repetition 66, 68n215, 99n80, 357, 593, 593n68 Rosenzweig compared to 596, 597n80, 600, 600n89 tempocentrism of 15, 15n51, 80, 80n27 on temporalization of temporality 15 on timespace 559 truth of 102n87, 360 Heller, Meshullam Feibush 403 hermaphroditic being 252 hermeneutics 99, 242, 583

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

766 Index Hermetic teaching 150 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 73n3, 399 Ḥesed (lovingkindness) 183, 541n91 heteroeroticism 181, 307, 307n194 “he was, he is, and he will be” (hayah howeh we-​yihyeh) 137–​138, 256, 333–​334, 399–​400, 407, 414 Ḥezeqiah, R. 154 hidden 75n7 hiddenness 171. See also concealment hidden oneness (aḥdut ha-​ne‘elamah) 536 hidden secret (sod nistar) 343n9 Hiley, Basil 502n8 Hinduism 138 historians  dreams and 623 against the grain 621, 621n160 present of 608, 609, 609n120 prophets as 615 historical dimension 80n27 historical moment 596 historical reflection, genuine 68, 68n215 historical time 92n63 history 84, 87, 88, 397, 398n75 angels of 631 of being 584 Benjamin and 610, 611n129, 614, 615n141, 616n148 happening of 584 memory related to 610, 620 messianic world as 623n165 of past 583 present related to 465 of progress 632n190 quotations for 613, 615n141 theology and 613, 613n132 as trial 635 truth and 610 Hodge, Joanna 592 Hodgson, Shadworth H. 12–​13, 13–​ 14n44, 75–​76 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 615 Ḥokhmah 128, 424 as Active Intellect 331 Binah and 181n337, 248, 570 divine science related to 288n113 esoteric wisdom related to 552–​553 Keter in relation to 248, 570

one who acquired wisdom related to 481, 481n115 Hölderlin, Friedrich 580, 597n80, 602, 634n194, 657 holiness, concealment of 459n51 Holocaust 651 holomovement 216n424 homecoming 597, 597n80 hope 596, 641 Bloch on 654, 655n262, 656n267 Christian 17, 17n56 death related to 575 infinite related to 605 messianism related to 607 hopelessness 633 Hopkins, Burt C. 19n61 Hopstein, Israel (Maggid of Kozhenits) 378n2 Horowitz, Isaiah 508n16 Horowitz, Shabbetai Shefṭel 534 Al-​Hujwīrī, ʿAlī 131n184, 193 Hume, David 14n45, 29n87, 109n108 humility (shiflut) 461n55, 493 Hurwitz, Siegmund 391n50 Husserl, Edmund 12, 19–​20, 24, 31–​32n94, 34–​35, 49, 501, 575 Augustine and 47, 47n143 double intentionality 21–​22 Heidegger and 23, 66 Ineinander in the thought of 27n81, 32, 32n96, 33n97, 385n27 Nachträglichkeit in the thought of 24, 24n75 on time-​consciousness 14n45, 19–​20, 21n66, 22, 40–​41, 47, 63 phenomenological reduction of 12n40, 62, 624n168 Hutner, Isaac 604n105, 604–​605n106 hylomorphism 181 hypernomian 274, 274–​275n58 hypertime 387, 394–​395 hyponomian 274n58 “I and my name are one” (ana u-​shemi ḥad hu) 188, 194 Ibn al-​‘Arabī, Muḥyīddīn 112, 130n183, 513, 522n52, 536n79, 544n100, 554n120 mystical cosmography of 557, 557n127

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Ibn Ezra, Abraham 341n4 Ibn Gabbai, Meir 520, 521n48 Ibn Laṭif, Isaac 339, 340n2, 341, 344n10, 344n12, 348, 351, 351n39 Ibn Zimra, David ben Solomon 521 Ickovits, Ḥayyim 551n110 Idel, Moshe 110n111, 148n242, 153, 231, 260n13, 424n150, 435n190 anomian and nomian in the thought of 274n58 Corbin and 290n119 gender theory of 238, 246, 505n15 on multiplicity 424n150 response to criticism of 240, 260n13, 261n14, 277n74, 355n50, 505n15, 523, 524n53, 544n98 identification 35 identitarian thinking 642n224 identity 5n13, 27n81, 77, 94n67, 299, 353 Adorno and 642, 642n224 gender 211n413 Heidegger and 642n224 memory and 353 self-​ 78 singularity and 595, 595n74 idolatrous nations 235 idolatry 73n3, 192, 483n123, 498, 553, 642 and the lure of Christianity 190, 191n362 Idra Rabba 174, 177, 195, 249 Idra Zuṭa 164n297, 248, 249 illicit sexual relations (sitrei arayot) 272 illusion 223, 485, 650 present related to 465 image (dimyon) 211, 212n414, 551 dialectics and 621, 623n164 veil of 553 image of the tree (ṣiyyur ha-​ilan) 89n50 imaginal body 169, 290, 323 composed of the letters of the Torah 440 imaginal world (‘ālam al-​ mithāl) 523n52, 557 imagination 351, 353n43, 354, 372, 420n137, 557n127 Abulafia, A. on 289, 289n116 Benjamin on 618n154, 625n173 and the demonic 490 and desire 432, 480 and dreams 372, 384n27, 419n137

767 and Hosea 12:11 557n129 intellect related to 297, 297n151, 301, 323 memory and 627 in Naḥman of Bratslav 452 numerical equivalence of 289n116, 290 past and future related to 351, 351n39, 352 and time 353 imaging time and givenness of nongiven 351 Imma 176, 572 immanence, of death 590n59 immanent (memalle kol almin) 503n9 immaterial being, three levels of 393n62 immortality 94n66 Immutable Archetypes 523n52 impermanence 4, 31, 31n91, 94n66, 95n67, 111, 127, 132, 360, 384, 480, 516, 575 impossible possible 10, 569, 589–​590n58, 590, 637 imprint (roshem) 374 in-​between (metaxy) 84, 517, 517n34 incarnation 290n119, 411, 411n117 inceptual thinking 358 incomposite essence 528 incomposite intellect (sekhel pashuṭ) 550n109 incompositeness 425 individuation 583 from Ein Sof 503, 504n12 Indra 192n366 infinite 1, 2, 2n5, 7–​8, 77n17, 217 contraction of 534 essence of 207 hope related to 605 kingship of 521 light of 550n109 linear circularity of 574, 574n173 opposites related to 548, 548n107 otherness and 376 Sinaitic revelation related to 430 transcendence of 426 infinite finitude 513 infinite light 502 infinite series 55n167 infinitivity 28, 145n233, 401n89, 518, 565 alterity of 383 folds of 414 jouissance of 534

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

768 Index infinity 510 folds of 376 light related to 509, 509n17 trace of 369 inherent existence 30 inner force (koaḥ ha-​penimi) 525 inner intent (kawwanah penimit) 350 inner recess 548n106 innovation 61 inscription 333, 333nn292–​293, 337 instant 11–​12 integration (hitkallelut) 505n14 intellects 272, 282, 289n116, 309, 322, 388, 390n50. See also Active Intellect absolute 389 circumcision and 452 as first cause 313, 314n215, 317 imagination related to 297, 297n151, 301, 323 rectification of 460–​461 soul with 317, 317n228 supernal 389 intellectual conjunction and the mechanics of divine influence 259 intellectual good 237 intentionality 53n161, 352 intermediate secret (Yah) 326, 352 internal light (or penimi) 203n394 interrelatedness 427, 427n160 interweaving 32n96, 33n97, 35 in the blink of an eye 289 intuition 33, 56 mythological 108, 108n107 Irigaray, Luce 178n334, 185, 525n55 Isaac, binding of 297n151 Isaac, R. 141 Isaac of Acre 138, 180n337, 237, 277n71 Isaac the Blind 151–​152 Isaiah 152n253, 188n356, 368, 412n120, 503n9, 509 “I shall be as I shall be” (ehyeh asher ehyeh) 178, 568n157 Ishmaelites 237 ‘ishq 285, 285–​286n98 Islam 276, 278, 279n74, 288n110 Ismā‘īlī 345n15 Israel 234, 467n73 Jerusalem 229

land of 114, 233 love for 464 promised land as 388 “it was” (wa-​yehi) 379, 379n6, 383 Jacob 298, 434n188 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye 399–​400, 400n82, 403, 436, 437n199 James, William 1, 2n5, 11–​12, 31, 36, 553 on consciousness 13 Jerusalem 229 Jerusalem (Blake) 107 Jesus 292n126, 306, 598–​599. See also Christ; Messiah Jewish calendar 82n32, 87 Jewish males 149, 456 prayer by 471, 471n87 repair of 471 Jewish messianism 18n57, 596 Benjamin on 608 future and 608 Levinas on 605 Ouaknin on 606 Rosenzweig on 603 Scholem on 606, 606n113 Schwarzschild on 604, 605n106 Jewish mysticism 232 Jewishness 73n3 Jewish people (yehudim) 269, 271, 404n100 beyond time 390 Christians and 232 eternity related to 596 non-​Jews compared to 234, 504n9 Jewish ritual 497n172, 603 phylacteries as 459n51, 496 sacrifices as 128–​129 Jewish temporality 73–​74, 73n2, 74n4, 84 Jewish theological attitude 233 Job 158, 436 Jochmann, Carl Gustav 616n148 Jonah, R. 390n50 Josten, C. H. 561n142 jouissance 418n137, 492, 534. See also sha‘ashu‘a feminine nature of in Lacan 539n84 joy 484n123 Judah, R. 118, 191 Judah the Pious 535n73

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Judaism 73n3 Christianity compared to 81, 105, 105n94 judgment (din) 291, 291n122, 506–​ 507n15, 541 amelioration of 181 differentiation and 571n165 Ein Sof and the root of 546 of Elohim 204, 208n405, 291 feminine related to 165, 167, 175, 181n337, 183, 193n369, 200, 241, 250–​251, 364, 414, 414n125 Ḥesed and 541n91 mercy and 181n337, 187, 291n122, 305n181, 306, 336–​337, 402, 414, 547n104 in Proverbs 8:30, 337  and ṣimṣum 200, 204, 409 from will 509 Jullien, François 76 Jung, Carl G. 16–​17n53, 93–​94, 94n66, 186–​ 187n352, 298n154, 420n137, 467–​468n74 on Christ 639n210 and the coniunctio oppositorum 638n210 on paradox 93, 93n65 juxtaposition of opposites 394n66 Kabbalah  definition of 339 mathematics of 562n142 kabbalistic ethics (musar) 183 kabbalists 95n68, 341 Kafka, Franz 487n130, 606, 625n173, 629, 647n241 on Messiah 636 parable of 460, 460n52 Kahana, R. Abba bar 402n94 Kant, Immanuel 56–​57 Karo, Joseph 162–​163, 189 Kasher, Hannah 342n8, 349 Kaye, Lynn 73n2 Keller, Gottfried 610 kenesset yisra’el 162, 319, 319n234 kenotic expansion and temporal delimitation, and becoming nothing-​that-​is-​all 315 Keter 128, 144–​145, 145n233, 167, 175, 230, 420n137 Aṭarah related to 152n253 Binah related to 248 breath-​of-​the-​heart 170

769 concealment in 247 Ehyeh and 569 Ein Sof compared to 249 as female 249 hiddenness of 171 Ḥokhmah related to 248, 570 Malkhut related to 152, 184, 207n405, 209n409 as masculine 249 memory related to 487 mercy as 174n322 Messiah as 485n128 nothingness of the divine related to 489, 489n140, 493 order of time and 171 phallic nature of 208n408 RaShaB on 176n328 as source of time 172, 172n319 voice of 170 kidneys 478 Kierkegaard, Søren 107 Kingdom of God 81n27 kings 166, 166n301 kingship 218, 531 central point of 559 crown of 185, 207n405 disclosure of 478n104 of Ein Sof 408, 409n111, 519, 519n42 of infinite 521 kingship of 525 of Messiah 485n128 source of 559 kingship of the emanation (malkhut de-​aṣilut) 528 kiss 307n194, 308 Klee, Paul 628n177, 631 knowledge (yedi‘ah) 12, 165, 272, 643 copulation from 479 memory as 482, 490, 490n145 perfection of 467 in sleep 483 Kohut, Heinz 537n80 Kramer, Regan 506–​507n15 Kraus, Karl 620 Kristensen, William Brede 154n260 Kristeva, Julia 57, 58n174, 74n3, 92n63, 447n17 Kyoto School of philosophy 41

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

770 Index Lacan, Jacques 23, 449, 512n24, 538, 595 Badiou and 595, 595n74 kabbalistic symbolism and 539n84 Lacanian psychoanalytic theory 186n352 Langermann, Y. Tzvi 112n120 languages 220n435, 242, 277n68, 281, 309. See also Hebrew Adorno on 644–​645, 644n234, 646n241 of affliction 379, 379n6, 379n8 Arabic 276, 276n64 Aramaic 476, 476n99 Benjamin on 594, 618n154 death related to 591 of dream 618n154 Greek 276, 276n64 of love 384n27 of righteous man 471n87 sacred 276, 276n64, 475, 475n99 of sciences 611n129 Laozi 61n181 last god 359, 359n69 Lavi, Simeon 168n307 leḥaddesh otot u-​moftim ḥadashim (“to renew new miracles and wonders”) 172 Leib, Aryeh 487n135 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 609 Lekhah Dodi 211n413, 485n128 length, of eternity 602 letters 325 creation from 504 of name 309, 312, 366, 543, 544 permutation of 289 of prayer 473, 474 sefirot as 568n156 of Tetragrammaton 417 letters of speech (otiyyot ha-​dibbur) 205n399 letters of thought (otiyyot ha-​maḥashavah) 205n399 level of speculation (ma‘alat ha-​iyyun) 341n5 level of the true tradition (ma‘alat ha-​ qabbalah ha-​amittit) 341n5 Levin, David M. 443, 443n1, 444 Levinas, Emmanuel 105–​106, 383n24, 465 Bloch and 657 diachrony of 589 Heidegger compared to 578, 585, 585n43, 588, 657

Messiah and 652 Rosenzweig and 604 transcendence of 577–​578, 651 Levi-​Strauss 84–​85 Levi Yiṣḥaq of Berditchev 406, 431, 433, 433n187, 438 Liebes, Yehuda 459–​460, 487n135 life of world to come 325 lifetime 1 lights 201, 223, 234, 309, 417 absolute concavity related to 527, 540 of Active Intellect 334 of Ein Sof 202, 202n392, 206, 206n400, 207n402, 208n405, 209n409, 210n410, 219, 219n430, 220, 223, 228, 229, 530, 564 esoteric related to 555, 556 infinite 502, 549 infinity related to 508 internal 203n394 of moment 564 of sefirot 551 transcendent 503n9 withdrawal of 538, 540 limitlessness 518 line (qaw) 530 lineal conception of causality, challenge of 43 linear and circular time 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 85n41 convergence of 255 distinction between 255 Ein Sof related to 422, 423 Ḥabad and 422, 423 mythopoeic conception of 88 Nietzsche on 255, 255n2 reversibility of 89, 92 Sabbath in 105 sefirot as 151 linear circularity 398, 510n23, 512n24 contraction in 561 of infinite 572, 574n173 malkhut de-​ein sof and 561, 564n142 mimicked in creation 346 now related to 561 rituals related to 81, 82, 83 timeswerve of 398 line-​of-​measure (qaw ha-​middah) 168–​ 169n307, 207

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

771

Index literal compared to figurative 549, 550n109, 557n129, 558 literary montage 614 liturgical worship 173, 173n320 looping intersection 19 “the Lord is God” (yhwh hu ha-​elohim) (1 Kings 18:39) 221n438, 519 lost forms 614 love 17n56, 308, 384n27, 523n52 for Israel 464 perfect 476, 477n104 love of man for women (ahavat nashim) 477, 477n104 lovingkindness (ḥesed) 183, 200n385, 510 Löwy, Michael 608n116, 609, 611n129, 629, 629n178, 640 luminescence 204, 209n408, 210n409, 372, 411n116, 564 beyond polarity of light and dark 204n395 Luria, Isaac 501, 517, 519, 519n39, 548n106, 656n267 Lurianic doctrine 508, 509, 509n17, 545n101 malkhut de-​ein sof and 560 Lurianic myth 484n124, 655n262 Luzzatto, Moses Ḥayyim (Ramḥal) 239, 363n87, 373, 374n115 Adir ba-​Marom 363, 364n89, 365–​366 androcentric construction from 369, 369n104 beginning, middle, end of 363, 364, 367, 368 on concealment 371 on conjunctions 364 on contraction 370 dreams related to 372 dualism and 372 Ein Sof in the thought of 363, 363n88, 373, 373n113 Elohim in the thought of 364, 364n92 eternal will and 366 Ma’amar Yiḥud ha-​Yir’ah 368, 521 on masculine and feminine 366, 366n100, 367–​368, 370 on prophets 557, 558, 558n129 Sabbath in the thought of  368, 369 secret of time in the thought of 366, 366n100 Sod ha-​Yiḥud 363–​364, 363n89

Vilna Gaon and 549 Lyons, Kathleen 538n81 macrocosm-​microcosm 536, 562n142 Maggid of Kozhenits 378, 378n2 Maggid of Mezhirech (Dov Ber) 378n2, 378n5, 390n50, 403n96, 407n107, 418n137, 432, 433n18, 435n191, 436n193 Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bezalel) 74–​75, 120–​126, 122n155, 228, 235, 388, 431 Derekh Ḥayyim 379, 379n6, 379n8 durationless moment of 381n17, 382 on Exodus 19:1 124–​125 Gur Aryeh 386 Neṣaḥ Yisra’el 386 Netivot Olam 388 on nonthinking 394, 394n67 on novelty and repetition 124n161 on past, present, future 124, 125, 380, 393 on Rashi 120–​121, 121n151, 122n159 Scholem on 377 on sorrow 382, 382n19, 383n22 Tif’eret Yisra’el 386, 393 on time and space 124n162 on Torah 387, 388, 388n39, 389, 390n49, 390n50, 391, 392 Mahāyāna Buddhism 77n17, 220n435, 221n435, 557n127 Maimonides, Moses 6, 7, 109n108, 110, 110n111, 110n113, 111n115, 135n194, 135n196 Abulafia and 263, 263n20, 269, 286, 286n100, 289, 289n116, 315, 316n224 on angels 289, 289n116 Aristotle and 111, 135 on circumcision 445, 446n15 on creation 332, 332n280 necessary of existence of 263, 263n20 on prayer 312 prophecy and 289, 289n116 Ṣūfism and 262n16 use of his language to describe the Ein Sof 136, 549, 550n109 Maimonides of Ḥasidism. See Schneersohn, Shalom Dovber Malachi 3:6 215 mal’akh, adam, and saṭan 290, 291n120, 305 malbush (malbushim) (garments)  equivalence with ḥashmal 535n73 in Naftali Bachrach 205n399

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

772 Index malbush (malbushim) (garments) (cont.) and the name yhwh 534 sefirot and 11, 144n229 and the variation in worship 404 male and female 179, 179n336. See also masculine and feminine numerical equivalence for 292, 293 male androgyne 250, 251, 527n60 and the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother 252, 502 reconstitution of 225 splitting of 208, 247 male is not dominant (she-​ein ha-​zakhar manhig) 185n346 male waters (mayyin dukhrin) 180n336 Malkhut 146, 318, 408, 409, 421n138, 422, 530, 532n68 androgyny of 245 Binah and 166, 168n307 central point of 559 concealment of 206, 408, 519n45 Ein Sof related to 202, 202n392, 204n396, 206, 207n402, 223, 224n442, 229, 519, 519n42 garment related to 547n104 gender of 477n104 in gender symbolism 245 Ḥabad on 218, 219, 222 Keter related to 152, 184, 207n405, 209n409, 228 Messiah as 485n128 past, present, future related to 214, 219, 219n433, 415, 416n128 rectification of the intellect from 460–​461 Shneuri on 202, 202n392 souls of Israel related to 234 as source of time 218n429, 219, 219n430 Torah related to 520 Viṭal on 529n62 Yesod compared to 245 malkhut de-​ein sof  alterity of 540 contraction of 527, 527n60, 547, 548 determination of 547, 547n104 differentiation of 540 disclosure and 525, 526, 526n59, 527–​ 528, 530 endtime and 522

gender related to 522, 523n52, 524n53, 525n55, 527n60, 529n62, 530, 535 incomposite essence of 527 keter malkhut and 522–​523, 523n52 linear circularity and 561, 561n142 Lurianic doctrine and 560 openness of 547, 547–​548n106 otherness of other related to 540, 541n89 Shekhinah and 521 vessel related to 525, 526 will related to 526, 539 “the man” (ha-​ish) 303n176 Manchester, Peter 513, 517n34 manifestation  of the divine essence in time 258 of the imagination 625 of the Keter above time 167 of the light of the infinite in the concatenation of the four worlds 410n116, 501 of the nonmanifest 230, 410, 514n28, 545n100 of space as a facet of time 332 of the supernal oneness 364 of time in eternity 169 Marburg Theological Society (July 1924) 581 Mark, Elizabeth 186n352 marriage 252, 478 Martins, Ansgar 648n241 masculine and feminine 474 Luzzatto on 366, 366n100, 367–​368, 369n104 masculine and feminine days 405n102 masculine mercy and feminine judgment 414, 414n125 masculine overflowing (mashpi‘a) 179n335, 179n336, 208, 246 masculinity 248. See also Jewish males memory related to 446, 448n21 mask, exposed as the face  of the dissimilar in the pretense of the similar 356 and the multiplicity of beings 545n100 of time 1 masters of rational analysis (ba‘alei shiqqul ha-​da‘at) 341, 342n5

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index mathematics 562n142. See also numerical equivalence matqela 248, 512n23 matriarchs 186n351 matrimonial union 181 matrimony 252, 476 matter 216n424, 436 “May the words of my mouth be acceptable to you,” yihyu le-​raṣon imrei fi (Psalms 19:15) 172–​173 Mazis, Glenn A. 385n27 McGrath, Sean J. 17–​18 measure of immeasurable 508 measuring 108, 109n108 meditational training 287, 287n106 meditation of letter-​combination 319 Meir, R. 194n372, 390n49 melancholy 484n123, 629–​630, 630n182, 640 melancholy science 633n191 Adorno’s classification of his thinking as 633 memory 51n157. See also zikkaron Benjamin on 624 before birth 487 circumcision related to 444, 445n10 n. 10–​13, 466, 480, 498 Deleuze on 51, 52n160 dreams and 16 femininity related to 448n21 Heidegger and 445 history related to 610, 620 identity and 353 imagination from 627 Keter related to 489 knowledge as 480, 490, 490n145 masculinity related to 447, 448n21 of moment 510, 512–​513n24 natural selection related to 512–​513n24 perfection of 498 science related to 611n129 sefirot and 199 timeswerve and 23n72 trail of 20 of world to come 491, 492n152 memory, mindfulness, and masculinity 443 Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov 572, 572n169 Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk 378, 378n5, 404

773 Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobyl 400, 405, 441n217 meontology 410n115, 511n23, 536, 630n184 Mercurius 298, 298n154 mercy 172, 227n451, 337 of Ein Sof 546 judgment and 181n337, 547n104 Keter as 174n322 merits 301, 573, 573n172 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 10n31, 24n74, 32, 241, 349, 385n27, 576, 591 Messiah 202n392, 229, 236, 306, 464, 625n173. See also Jewish messianism Active Intellect related to 303n176 Adorno and 651 Benjamin on 639 beyond time 464 Cohen, H., on 639n212 eternity related to 596 Kafka on 636 as Keter 486n128 kingship of 486n128 Levinas and 652 Malkhut as 486n128 Moses and 656 Sabbath related to 603 in “The Seven Beggars” 483–​485, 485n128, 487, 487n130, 487n134, 487n135, 496 waiting for 651 messianic consciousness 466 messianic kingdom 629n178 messianic nature 630, 630n184 messianic-​utopia 632, 632n190 messianic world 623, 623n165 messianism. See also Jewish messianism hope related to 607 past, present, future and 397 Paul on 602 metaontological beingness of being 410 metaontological reality of Ein Sof 503, 549 metaphor and symbol (mashal we-​dimyon) 557 metaphoricity 552, 552n115 metaphors 549n110 of sefirot 548, 554, 555n122 metaphysical exteriority 383n24 metasemantic matrix 178

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

774 Index Metatron 309, 317n228, 323, 329n274, 330, 332, 337 Active Intellect as 268n35, 287, 317n228 death related to 292 heart and 323 Hebrew related to 302 Mercurius and 298, 298n154 moon related to 298n155 poem by Zeitlin 167n307 two faces of 306 twofold nature of 337 metaxy 84, 517, 517n34 Michael 318n230 microcosm (olam qaṭan) 322 middle 548. See also beginning, middle, end Mill, James 11–​12 millennia 562–​563, 564n143 mimetic perception 623n163 mindfulness 400, 400n85, 443, 454n31, 462, 462n59 misunderstandings 49n148 models 505–​507n15 Mohist doctrine 133n188 moment 41, 68, 129, 130n179, 167, 167n307, 217, 513n28. See also own moment Arendt on 399 of birth 299 concrete abstraction of 397 darkness of 624 of desire 124, 480 distinction of 380 durationless 133n188, 380, 382n17 Ecclesiastes 3:1 on 386 eschatological 227 eternal spirit and 118 of eternity 400 event in 589, 589–​590n58 flux of 39 historical 598 of humans 404, 404n100 of intercourse, conception, birth 299 light of 564 memory of 512, 512–​513n24 of nature 402 now and 94 past, present, future related to 255, 256n7, 384n27 prayer related to 188, 188n356 present related to 513n28, 614

prohibition related to 187 reality of 572, 574n173 redemptive capacity of 227 renewal of 488n136 revolutionary energy in 628, 628n176 sameness of 573, 573n172 Shekhinah as 163, 189, 189n359 significance of 573n172 as sword 192, 192n366 three 299, 303n176 timelessness of 217, 217n428 Torah related to 400, 400n82 transtemporality of 396, 396n71 unpredictability of 381 waiting for 618n154, 657 yhwh related to 408 momentary substrates 31, 31n94 moment that is no moment (be-​et lo et) 138 money 497, 497n173 money lust 468n76 monistic orientation 160, 160n286 monotheism 73n2, 281 Moon 522n52 Mopsik, Charles 246, 251–​252 Mörchen, Hermann 645n235 Mordecai 298n155 and Esther 300n166, 407n105 morning prayer 415, 415n126 mortality. See death Moses 178, 187, 196–​197, 196n379, 227n451, 349n31 Aaron compared to 644n234 God and 289n116, 307n194, 555, 568n157, 656 Jesus and 292n126 Messiah and 656 name of 456, 456n37 nothing related to 435n191, 438 yod and 321 Mosès, Stéphane 178n332, 603n100, 627–​628 Moses Ḥayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow 401n89, 437n200, 438, 439n211 mother-​child relation 537n80 mothers 336n290, 524n53 Binah as 165 pregnancy of 529n62 motion 108, 334, 411 Motzkin, Gabriel 565n147

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index mouth, circumcision of 309 mouth that is full (melo fum) 470 movement 510 Muḥammad 112 Muller, F. Max 138n208 multidimensional reality 45n138 multiplicity. See unity musar (kabbalistic ethics) 183 music 466n72, 467n74, 471n86 Adorno and 644n234, 645n236 song 474, 474n95 mystical cosmography 557 mystical experience 283, 538n80 of union 553 mystical name 646, 646n240 mysticism 536, 538n81 myth  Lurianic 484n124, 655n262 of the primordial earth 511n23 mythical euphemism 585 mythological intuition 108n107 mythologoumenon 570n164 mythopoeic conception 88, 88n49 mythos versus logos 83n34 Nachträglichkeit 23–​24, 24n75, 512n24 Nadab 187–​191, 198 Nāgārjuna 30, 38n113, 132n188 arising of arising 42, 42n129, 42n130 on emptiness 38, 39n117 Mūlamadhyamak 28, 29n86 n. 86–​87 Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 28, 30, 37 Naḥman ben Simḥah of Bratslav 606 Naḥmanides, Moses 137, 141, 195n374, 263, 436n192 Naḥman of Cheryn 485 naked truth 2–​3, 551 names 268n35, 271, 346, 346n19 of Ein Sof 520, 521n48 of God 284, 286n99, 308, 312, 316n224, 321, 323, 328, 350 letters of 309, 309n198, 366, 545n100 of Moses 456, 456n37 past, present, future and 333 path of 313, 313n212 soul related to 333 narcissism 535, 536, 537n80 cosmic 537n80 mysticism and 536, 538n81

775 Nathan of Gaza 141n221 nationalism 234 nature 402 domination of 633n190 nature of the conditioned (Saṃskṛta-​parīkṣā) 42 necessary of existence (meḥuyav ha-​ meṣi’ut) 136, 262, 262n20 negation 39, 40n120, 44, 98 of determination 541n91 of negation 27, 28n84, 76, 77n17 negativity 432 Neher, André 382n19 Nekudoth 563n142 Neoplatonists 139–​140 Neumann, Erich 252–​253, 391n51, 396–​397, 440n215, 541n91, 573n172 Neusner, Jacob 85n41 new life (ḥayyim ḥadashim) 462 Newton, Isaac 151n245 Nicholas, of Cusa 574n173 Nietzsche, Friedrich 65n203, 94, 94n66, 105n94, 256n7, 354, 488n136 circle of 127, 127n172 on eternal return 257, 257n8, 259 on linear and circular time 255, 255n2 semblance of 626, 626n174 Zarathustra of 127, 127n172 nirvāṇa 39, 39n116 Nishida Kitarō 41, 76–​80 Noah 449 nomads 597, 597n80 nonconceptuality 394, 394n67, 643 noncontradiction, law of 79, 103, 346, 394 logic of 597n80 principle of 417n136, 543 nondifferentiation 153 non-​duality 131–​132, 132n188 nonegocentric piety 234 non-​halakhic rituals 274–​275 nonidentity 642, 642n224 nonoccurrence 18n57 nonpoint 41 nonsense 54, 54n166 nonthinking 394n67 nothing (ke-​la ḥashiv) 214, 215n419, 215n421, 430, 436n193 absolute 77n17, 344, 489 actual 493

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

776 Index nothing (ke-​la ḥashiv) (cont.) being and 20, 26, 27n81 divine 530 Keter related to 489, 489n140, 494 Moses related to 435n191, 438; as present 590 wisdom from 461n55 nothingness (basho) 77, 78, 78n21, 220n435, 493 of Ein Sof 534 shadow of 270, 270n42 as transcendence 493 Novalis 160, 160–​161n287 novel mindfulness (sekhel ḥadash) 462 novelty 426, 459n51, 487n135, 492–​493 novelty and repetition 93, 94, 100, 241, 365 Deleuze on 99, 99n80, 257, 257n8, 258, 593 Heidegger on 99n80, 357 Maharal on 124n161 now 217. See also Bloch, Ernst double visage of 59 eternal 77, 347, 513 linear circularity related to 561 moments and 95 punctuality of 36 sound of 20 transcendence of 60 universality and 35 now-​consciousness 36 nowness 19 number eight  for Binah 467, 467n74 for circumcision 466, 466n72, 480, 499 numerical equivalence 268, 268n35, 273n53, 277, 288n108, 296n145, 302, 535n73 of dreams 516n31 of imagination 289, 289n116 for male and female 292 of purim 300, 300n165 of secret of time 326, 327n260, 366, 366n100 for truths 296 for yhwh 326, 326n259 numerology 238 nunc stans 515, 515n29 Nuqba 529n62, 572 nuqba (feminine) 176, 200n385, 366n100

occasionalism 347–​348, 348n26 omer, counting 463 omnipresence 134–​135, 515n29 oneiric consciousness 385n27 oneness 270 one who acquired wisdom (zeh qanah ḥokhmah) 481, 481n115 one who counts (ke-​sofer) 262n20 ontological dualism 194 opposites 78, 299, 638n210, 642n224, 648n241 infinite related to 548, 548n107 juxtaposition of 394, 394n66 rejection of 555, 555n112 opposition 93n65, 357, 560 Oral Torah 126, 392n60 order 14n45 order of time (seder zemannim, seder ha-​zeman) 113 explanation of 147, 147n239, 149n243 finite time and 158 Keter and 171 particular time and 157n274 sefirot and 114n135, 156, 156n272, 159, 162 Yesod and 162 orders of creation (sidrei bere’shit) 156, 157n272 origin 620, 620n156 original repetition 358, 375 originary truth 358 Orphaniel 535, 535n73 orthography 321 or yashar and or ḥozer 178, 178n334 otherness 59, 376 after-​each-​ 11n34 being/​Being and 642n224 Ouaknin, Marc-​Alain 606 out-​of-​jointness 622–​623 own moment (waqt) 129–​130, 130n179, 130n181 past, present, future and 131n184 receiving of 131n183 paganism 232 panentheistic 315 panoramic 522n52 parables 406n102 of Kafka 460, 460n52

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index of three rings 278n74 truth from 552, 554n120 Paradise (gan eden) 296n145 paradox 310 Parmenides 96, 513 parṣufim 176, 502, 555 partial worlds 50 participability 426 particularism 233 particularity 426, 594 generality and 570, 570n161, 572 particularization 206n400, 234 particular time 157n274 passing away of passing away (fanā’ al-​fanā’) 536n79 Passover 405–​406, 405n102 past (avar) 23n73, 24n74, 41 Benjamin on 615, 617n153 future related to 17n56, 380, 383, 450 Heidegger on 513n24 history of 583 present and 53, 67 past, present, future (avar howeh we-​ attid) 101, 138, 213, 236, 412n119 achievement of 400 arc of 561 of Dasein 581 death related to 576n5, 578, 578n12, 581 within divine 106 Ehyeh and 567, 569n160 of eternality 417, 418 of God 140, 218, 333, 399, 508, 508n16 hayah howeh we-​yihyeh as 170, 215n419 Maharal on 124, 125, 380, 393 Malkhut related to 214, 219, 219n433, 415, 416n28 messianism and 397 moment related to 255, 256n7, 384n27 name and 333 repetition of 356, 638 of Shekhinah 418, 418n137 Tetragrammaton related to 216, 256, 258, 399 three temporal tenses as 565, 566n149 Torah related to 124, 395 waqt and 131n184 wisdom in 336, 336n290 of yhwh 333, 409n110, 429n169

777 path of names (derekh ha-​shemot) 313, 313n212 patriarchs 186n351, 473 patriarchy 650 Paul 602, 630n184 Benjamin on 609n121 Heidegger on 599, 599n84 peace (shalom) 237 Pedaya, Ḥaviva 160n285, 340n2, 414n125 Pentecost 406 perception 63, 622n163 reality of 37, 37n110 simultaneity of 24, 24n74 perceptual field 465n69 perfect love (ahavah sheleimah) 476, 477, 477n104 permanence 31, 31n91, 575 of Ein Sof 143, 409n109 permutation of letters (ṣeruf ha-​otiyyot) 289 Perone, Ugo 35–​36 perpetual creation 94, 94n67 Pessin, Sarah 348n26 phallic covenant 470, 471n87 phallic fecundity and spatio-​temporal enshrining of prayer 195 phallic nature, of Keter 208n408 phallic symbolism 186n352 phallocentric bias 560 phallocentrism 186n352, 239, 241, 246, 247 of symbolism 572, 572n169 phallogocentric hierarchy 185 phallomorphic bias 560 phallomorphic construction of gender 251 phallomorphism 452n27 phallus 468 androgynous 186 as bodies 450n26 corona of 208, 447, 449 covenant of the tongue and 475, 475n98 memory and 447–​449 rainbow related to 445, 449, 450n26, 473–​474 rectification of 475, 475n99 Pharaoh 568n157 phenomenality 356 phenomenological apperception 62 phenomenological time 34, 34n98 phenomenology 10n31, 63

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

778 Index philosophers 350, 491n148, 633 philosophy 64, 316, 643–​644 phylacteries 459n51, 496 physics 45, 45n138, 48 Pico della Mirandola 553 piety 234, 459, 459n51 pious Gentiles 278 Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer 345, 517, 519, 519n39 place (maqom) 200, 200n385, 330, 330n275 place that is no place 173 Plato 84, 96, 132n184, 260n13, 513, 517n34 Plotinus 47n142, 132n184, 353, 502, 515n29 poems 523n52, 602 of Scholem 622n161 polarity 243 Polen, Nehemiah 453n27 politics 234, 597n80, 630 polyontological indifference 536 polyontology 410, 504 polytheism 537n79 Poppers, Meir 550n109 power 532n68 of Shekhinah 244 transference of 483 powerlessness (ke-​la ḥashiv) 215, 215n421 prayer 195, 309n198, 310, 310n201, 419n137 Ein Sof and 494 faith and 490, 491n147 by Jewish males 471, 471n87 letters of 473 Maimonides on 312 moments related to 188, 188n356, 189n357 morning 415, 415n126 as rainbow 473 Torah study and 470, 475, 475n97 as weapon 473 pregnancy 529n62 premature death 70, 71 Presence (ha-​shekhinah) 299 presence (parousia) 97, 358, 517n34 absence and 565n147 being as 580n26 present (attah) 13n44, 51, 51n157, 51n158, 384n27, 386 Benjamin on 608, 609, 609n120, 609n121, 615, 619, 624, 639 future and 658 historian and 608, 609, 609n120, 609n121

history related to 465 illusion related to 466 moment related to 513n28, 615 nothing as 590 past and 53, 67 repentance and 566n148 timeless time of 126 present future 596 presentism 11, 11n34 present moment (waqt) 513n28 priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24–​26) 177 primordial ether (awir qadmon) 531 primordial human 143, 176, 205n399, 235. See also Adam Qadmon primordiality (qadimah) 144, 145n233 primordial parable (meshal ha-​ qadmoni) 406n102, 430, 441 primordial temporality 64 printing revolution 553, 553n117 priority of time (qadimat zeman) 145 Proclus 132n184 progress 632n190, 645, 650 promised land 388 prophecy 272, 285, 449, 450n26, 471 Maimonides and 289, 289n116 mechanics of 289, 289n116, 290n120, 290n121 Prophet 536n79, 545n100 prophetic-​angelic status 404n100 prophetic gaze 616, 616n148 prophets (mar’ot ha-​nevi’im) 287n104, 288, 342n5, 343n9, 350, 551, 615 Luzzatto on 557, 557n129 Proust, Marcel 57, 74n3, 101 Proverbs 166, 275n53 Proverbs 8:30 335, 336n290 inscription in 337, 337n292, 337n293 Psalms 158, 187, 188n356, 372, 468 2:7 464 19:15 173 72:17 461 106:44 473 113:2 217 pulsating forward and resurging backward (or yashar and or ḥozer) 178, 178n334 punctuality 36 pure or chosen few (ṣafwa) 265n22 purgation 512n23 purification 511n23

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index Purim 280, 298n155, 300–​301, 407n105, 433n187 purim (pur) (lots) 300, 300n165 qabbalat torah 393 Qaṭina, R. 165 quantum level 426, 427n160, 502n8 quantum theory 45n138 quasi-​divine nature of time 111 queen (malkah) 529 quotations 613, 615n141 Qur’ān 129n179, 188n355, 515n28, 536n79 al-​Qushayrī, ‘Abd al-​Karīm Ibn Hūzān Abū al-​ Qāsim 129, 129–​130n179, 192 rabbinic dicta 110, 110n113, 117, 123, 124n161 rabbinic literature 87, 88 radical philosophy 64 rainbow 449, 450n26, 473 RaMaK. See Cordovero, Moses Ramḥal. See Luzzatto, Moses Ḥayyim Ranke, Leopold von 612 Rappaport, Roy A. 83n33 RaShaB. See Schneersohn, Shalom Dovber Rashi 119–​120, 119n147, 456n39 Maharal on 120–​121, 121n151, 122n159 Raviv, Zohar 238 al-​Rāzī, Fakhr al-​Dīn 111, 112 Raziel. See Abulafia, Abraham the Real 513n28 reality 45n138, 52n158, 59–​61, 60n181, 62–​63, 372, 373n113 comprehension of 558 dreams and 618n154, 624n168 of moment 573, 574n173 of perception 37, 37n110 reason 282 reception of consciousness (qabbalat ha-​moḥin) 461 reciprocity 569 rectification (tiqqun) 553, 555, 555n122 rectification of the intellect (tiqqun ha-​sekhel) 460–​461 redemption 106n96, 184n346, 247, 295, 387, 450n26, 573n172 Adorno on 641, 645, 650 Benjamin on 610, 610n124, 623n165, 624, 627, 631 future related to 603

779 gnosis of 295 redemptive capacity 227 reductionism 505n15 reflection 24n74, 68, 68n215 self-​ 534 reincarnation 95n68 relative time 151n245 relative truths 221n435 relativity 45n138 remembering expectation 360, 398, 512n24 renunciation 129n179 consciousness and 493 repentance 402, 402n94 present and 566n148 repetition 99, 354, 384n27, 398, 569n160. See also novelty and repetition of difference 574n173 eternity of 229 first cause and 358, 375 Heidegger on 66, 68n215, 99n80, 357, 593, 593n68 innovation from 505n15 original 358, 375 of past, present, future 356, 638 in returning 356 singularity and 354 reputation 244 reshimu 207, 370–​371, 374, 520n45, 540. See also trace rest 396 retention 24 returning 356 return of the altogether otherwise 354 revelation 94, 105n94, 310, 384n27. See also Sinaitic revelation of Ein Sof 115 of faith 491n149 of sefirot 412 Revelation  1:8 103n89 3:3 637 reversibility 99 of linear and circular time 89, 92 revolutionary energy 628, 628n176 Ricchi, Immanuel Ḥai 199 Richter, Gerhard 658 Ricoeur, Paul 600 righteous man (ṣaddiq) 453n28 attachment of 479

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

780 Index righteous man (ṣaddiq) (cont.) consciousness of 480 drawing the spirit to 470, 470n85 infant compared to 498 language of 471n87 sexual mating of 479, 479n107 speech of 471, 471n86 yod related to 469 ritual fringe garment (ṣiṣit) 497n172 ritual purity 162 rituals 82n32, 83n33, 85–​86, 86n42, 274n58, 312. See also Jewish ritual body and 440, 440n215 linear circularity related to 81 non-​halakhic 275 Shneur Zalman of Liadi on 440, 441n216 Rolland, Romain 536, 538n80 Romano, Claude 51–​52, 589n58 root of roots (shoresh ha-​shorashim) 176 The Roots of Jewish Consciousness (Neumann) 252 Rose, Gillian 630–​631, 633n191 Rosenberg, Shalom 389n41 Rosenstock, Bruce 539n84 Rosenzweig, Franz 90, 106n96, 384n27 on eternity 596 Heidegger compared to 597, 597n80, 600, 600n89 idea of the future in 629n178 on Jewish messianism 603 Schwarzschild and 604, 605n106 system in the thought of 592n65, 592–​593 Ro’sh ha-​Shanah 208–​209n408, 407n105, 532n68 Rubin, Salomon 154n260, 428n168 Rūmī 129n179 Sabbath  Binah related to 166 circle and square related to 167n307 creation related to 86 eating on 495, 495n166 effluence on 404n100 eternal life as 104 holy spirit on 434n188 of Luzzatto 368 Messiah related to 603

prohibitions of 447n16 sacred language related to 475n99 sanctity of 390n50, 466n72 she-​ein ha-​zakhar manhig on 185n346 above time 412n120 union of male and female on the night of 185n346 world to come as 492 sacred and profane 86, 86n42, 86n43 sacred languages 276, 276n64, 475, 475n99 sacrifices 128–​129 Safran, Bezalel 378, 378n2 Sagerman, Robert 292n126 sages 294, 339n1, 341, 341n5 Said, Edward 62 Sallis, John 64 salvation 402, 402n93, 403n94, 600 samādhi 3n6 sameness 26, 27n81 distinguished from identity 26 of moments 573, 573n172 sanctification of the new moon (qiddush ha-​ḥodesh) 87 sanctity 390n50 Śāntideva 500 sarcasm 241 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 15n51, 40, 81n27, 98 timelessness of 2n5, 96 Saruq, Israel 518, 520, 535n73, 570n164 Satan 290, 305–​306, 305–​306n185, 306n186, 335 Saturn 628, 628n177 scale of debt 301 scale of merit 301 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 362, 412–​413n120, 541n89, 655n262 Schlegel, Friedrich 615 Schneersohn, Menaḥem Mendel (Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq) 208n408, 211n412, 211n413, 221n436, 222, 393n61, 409n109, 410, 425, 429 on Psalm 113:2 217 Schneersohn, Shalom Dovber (RaShaB) 204n396, 223, 234, 526 on attributes 532n68 on concealment 440 on division 427, 428n168, 429n169 on eternality 418, 420n138

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index on Keter 176n328 on Torah 128–​129, 129n178 on unity 503, 503n9 Schneersohn, Shlomo Zalman 421 Schneersohn, Shmuel 211n412, 223n441, 228n453 Schneersohn, Yosef Yiṣḥaq 219n433, 423n144, 532n68 Schneerson, Menaḥem Mendel 429, 429n169, 429n170, 430n171, 441n220, 503n9, 532n68 Schoenberg 644n234 scholarly overreach 239 Scholem, Gershom 134n192, 149, 186n352, 240, 286n100, 339, 390n50 Adorno and 646, 647n241 Benjamin and 611n129, 629, 630n182, 630n183, 631n187, 633 Buber against 432 on Jewish messianism 606, 606n113 on Maharal 377 poem of 622n161 on worlds 134 Schürmann, Reiner 591 Schwartz, Dov 418–​419n137 Schwartz, Yossef 269 Schwarzschild, Steven S. 605n106, 606 Rosenzweig and 603, 605n106 Schweid, Eliezer 72n2 sciences 63–​64, 221n435 language of 612n129 memory related to 610 physics 45, 45n138, 48 seal (ḥotam) 102 secret 280, 326, 342n9, 556, 556n124 secret of inversion (sod ha-​hippukh) 299 secret of splendor (sod ha-​ziw) 284–​285 secret of time (sod ha-​zeman) 326, 327n260, 332. See also order of time of Luzzatto 366, 366n100 numerical equivalence of 327, 327n260, 366, 366n100 sefirot (sephirot) (emanations) 108n111, 113, 144n229, 296, 298n155, 373n113, 516n32. See also engendering time and feminine indeterminacy Azriel on 159, 160n283, 543 circle and square related to 167n307

781 concentric circles as 561n142 as days 161 duration from 202n390 Ehyeh and 569 four worlds, temporal currency and 114–​115 gender of 195, 195n374 letters as 566 lights of 551 as linear and circular time 149 memory and 199 metaphors of 548, 554, 555n122 order of time and 144, 156, 156n272, 159, 162 paradox of 543 particulars of 503, 505, 505n14 revelation of 411 Sefer Yeṣirah on 314, 543 seven lower 155, 161, 468n75 stimulation of 114 supernal time and lower time from 114, 115n135 unity with 314, 314n216 yod related to 298n156 self-​concealing 355–​356, 358 self-​disclosure 514n28 self-​identity of absolute opposites 78 self-​reflection 534 Self/​self 76, 384n24, 536n79 self to 536, 537n80, 538n83 Ṣemaḥ Ṣedeq. See Schneersohn, Menaḥem Mendel semblance 626, 626n174 semiotic theory 594 sense 54n166, 597n80 sentient good 237 separation in essence (havdalah be-​eṣem) 250 sephirot. See sefirot serpent 153, 190, 272–​273, 305n185, 556n122 inseminated Eve 272 “The Seven Beggars”  circumcision related to 499 forgetfulness in 489, 490n142 joy in 484, 484n123 Messiah in 483–​485, 485n128, 487, 487n130, 487n134, 487n135, 496 severity (gevurah) 541

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

782 Index Ṣevi, Sabbatai 141n221 sexuality 180n337, 190, 252, 466n72, 471n87 sexual mating 479, 479n107 sexual purity 452n27, 466n72, 472n92, 499 adultery and 475, 475n99, 479, 497n172 phallic covenant and 470, 471n87 shamefulness related to 468 speech and 471, 471n87 spilling semen and 452n27, 472n92 sha‘ashu‘a 145n231, 520, 520n47, 530, 537n80, 538n83. See also jouissance Shaddai 296n145 shadow of nothingness 270, 270n42 Shapira, Natan 366n100, 535n73 Shapira, Nathan Neṭa 511n23 Sharabi, Shalom 529n62 Shealtiel 140 Shekhinah 414n125, 437n199 Assembly of Israel as 319 Binah and 246 blessing related to 195n374 circumcision related to 560n139 as et 163, 189, 189n359, 195 garments of 474 Jewish women as 183 malkhut de-​ein sof and 521 as moment 163, 189, 189n359 past, present, future of 417, 418n37 phallocentric bias and 560 power of 244 Presence as 299 splendor of 286 sword related to 193, 193n369 Tif’eret and 183, 246 transformation of 450n26 wife related to 182 Yesod and 189, 189n359 yod related to 321, 321n241 Sherwin, Byron L. 382n21 Shi‘ur Qomah 284n95, 448n21, 473, 554 Shmuel, Yehuda Even 404n100 Shneuri, Dovber 203n394, 207n402, 406n102, 421, 431 on end of everything 203n393, 206n400, 207n404, 207n405 on male and female 179n336 on Malkhut 202, 202n392 Shneur Zalman of Liadi 203n394, 205n399, 210n411, 218, 405n102, 406n102, 407,

407n106, 407n107, 408n108, 109n110, 410n116, 416, 430 on eternality 414, 418, 418n137, 420n137 on ritual 440, 441n216 on unity 429 Viṭal and 213n416, 215, 412n119 shofar blowing 469 Shulman, Eviatar 3n6 Shūnyatāsaptatikārikānāma (Nāgārjuna) 30 silence 202, 312 Simeon ben Yoḥai (Rashbi) 159n279, 161, 556 similarity 27n81 Simon, Judah bar 146, 158 simple splendor (zohar pashuṭ) 345n19 simple will (ḥefeṣ pashuṭ) 345, 345n15 simplicity 316, 316n224, 542 Simplicius of Cilicia 6, 48, 48n146, 96 ṣimṣum and replication of difference 361 Ein Sof and 362 ground in 361 literal vs. figurative 549 retroactive not yet in 363 self-​concealing in 362 ṣimṣum; ṣimṣem. See contraction simultaneity 24, 24n74, 242 simultaneous coexistence of contraries 103 sin 189, 234 Sinaitic revelation 118n144, 119n145, 121, 128, 388 Babylonian Talmud on 118 content of 116n137 counting omer related to 463 infinite related to 430 singing 471n86 single eye 175, 175n327, 249 singularity 55n167, 354 truth related to 594, 595n74 singular universality 424 skepticism 79n23, 373n113, 628 sleep 483 small king (melekh zuṭa) 207n402 snake encircling throne 112n124 solar and lunar rhythms 83n32 Solomon 277n71 song (neginah) 473 Song of Myself (Whitman) 339 Song of Songs 182, 210n410, 433n187, 460n51 sorrow 382, 382n19, 383n22 souls 147–​148, 147n240, 295

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index body and 391, 555 as bride 321n241 commandments for 274n58 consonants related to 327, 328n265 garments and 236 God related to 270, 271n43 Hebrew related to 283, 283n91 intellect with 317, 317n228 of Israel 234 name related to 333 split of 508n15 sound 20 source of understanding (meqom binah) 331 space 109n108, 134–​135, 135n194 feeling of 414n125 Jewish temporality and 72n2 mastering of 597n80 time related to 14, 14n45, 21n66 space and time 330–​331. See also time and space sparks of thought (niṣoṣei maḥashavah) 294 spatiality 73, 73n3 special theory of relativity 45n138 speech (dibbur) 267, 342n9, 418n137, 471, 471n86 figurative 555 letters of 205n399 of righteous man 470, 471n86 sexual purity and 471, 471n87 spilling semen 452n27, 472n92 Spinoza 285–​286n98, 328, 328n265, 541–​542n91 spirits 433n188, 470, 470n85, 562n142 spiritual vision (mar’eh ruḥanit) 342 Stern, Sacha 72n2 Sternberg, Meir 83n34 Sternhartz, Nathan 452n27, 454n31, 470, 470n85, 561n142 “a still, subtle voice” (qol demamah daqqah) 343n9 straight lines 55n167 strange fire (esh zarah) 190, 191n364 structuralism 241 Suares, Peter 77n17 subjectivist 349 subjectivity 31n93, 80n26 sublation 594 substance (mahut) 348 succession 242

783 Ṣūfism 112n124, 129n179, 132, 193, 544–​545n100 Abulafia, A., compared to 312, 313n210 Maimonides and 262n16 al-​Qushayrī and 192 on self-​disclosure 514n28 on sword 192 Suhrawardī 193 sun 223, 223n441 supernal crown 424n150 supernal intellect 389 supernal lustre (ṭehiru ila’ah) 204, 204n398 supersaturation 275 sword 192n366, 193, 193n369, 194n370 Ṣūfism on 192 symbolism 186n352, 194, 194n372, 558, 647n241 gender 244 phallocentrism of 572, 572n169 theosophical 450n26 symmetry 355 synchronicity 16, 16n53, 19 synchrony 242 Synesius 562n142 synthesis 466n69 systems 592, 592n65 Szondi, Peter 620n156 Szulakowska, Urszula 562n142 Targum Yerushalmi 155–​156 Taubes, Jacob 3, 91–​92, 631, 651 Taubes, Susan 7–​8, 44, 60n180 telling time 10 tempocentrism 15, 15n51 temporal 580n26 temporal creation of the world (ḥiddush ha-​ olam) 332, 340, 344 temporal eternity 513 temporality 5, 22, 58, 173n320 Jewish 72, 72n2, 74n4, 85 primordial 64 temporalization of temporality 14 temporal ontology/​eventful grammar 161 temporal pleasures 433n187 tempus discretum and eternal return of what has never been 254 ten divine sayings (asarah ma’amarot) 503n9 tension 93, 93n65

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

784 Index tenth attribute 318 tenth millennium 562–​563, 564n143 testimony (edut) 533n68 testing 397 Tetragram 137 Tetragrammaton 106, 149, 170, 303, 312n209, 399, 414 androgyneity from 330, 330n275 creation from 345, 345n17 dream related to 516 God related to 201 Hebrew as 227, 268 identity of opposites as 299 letters of 417 past, present, future related to 217, 255, 258, 398 Sefer Yeṣirah in 164 twelve permutations of 416 tetralemmic logic 28, 28n84 that which bestows (mashpi‘a) 179n335 that which is hidden (alam) 75n7 theogony 134 theological-​political 597n80 theologico-​poetic sense 597n80 theology, history and 612n129, 613n132 theophany 113 theory of cosmic cycles 340n2 theosophical symbolism 450n26 “there is no king without a nation” (ein melekh be-​lo am) 525, 525n56 thinking back 358 this, spatial property of 81n27 “this day” (ha-​yom) 321–​322 threefold Torah (oryan telita’ah) 163–​164, 164n296, 164n297 three moments 299, 303n176 three numerical groups 199 three rings, parables of 277n74 three temporal modalities 44, 46n139 three temporal tenses 565, 566n149 Tif’eret 146, 152n253, 170, 181n337, 183, 246, 560 Tillich, Paul 11n34 time  accident of motion 508 beyond time 388, 459n51, 492 calculation of the incalculable 510 of consciousness 79 definition of 48n148

interface of 410, 410n116 as retroactive not yet 363, 375, 599 and space 121n151, 123, 124n162, 126 space and 72 time-​consciousness 12 Husserl on 14n45, 19–​20, 22, 41, 47, 62–​63 time cycles (gilgulei zeman; gilgulei zemanneinu) 147, 149 timefully retrieving instant beyond time 431 timeless eternity 105n94, 106n97 timelessness 509n17 beyond time 79n24 of moment 217, 217n428 timeless time 96, 108, 126, 133n188, 142, 150–​151 timeliness of time 7 time of suffering in suffering of time 379 time out of time 384 time’s linear circle and reiteration of inimitable 62 timespace 80, 558 timeswerve 23n72, 71, 354 of linear circularity 398 time that is not actually time (kakh yesh zeman we-​eino zeman mammash) 393 time that is not in time 139, 145, 169, 172, 386 time without end 129 Tiqqunei Zohar 152, 169, 186n351, 189n359, 414n125, 450n26, 469, 567 Ein Sof and sefirot in 170, 170n309, 171n311, 171n314 Vilna Gaon’s commentary on 171 Tishrei, as the recreation of the world 405n102 today, as what-​is-​as-​having-​been 26 Togarmi, Baruch 268n35, 336n290 Mafteḥot ha-​Qabbalah 295, 296n145, 307, 307n194 tolerance 232 Torah 272, 273n53, 315n224, 386. See also Hebrew; Sinaitic revelation as absolute intellect 392 beyond time 120, 123, 387, 392 body as 440 commandment compared to 388, 389, 389n41 concealment of 464 conjunction related to 323, 323n249

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

785

Index from Ein Sof 128–​129 eternity of 403 festive seasons related to 405n102, 406 five supernal mysteries of 342n9 God as 116, 117n141, 400, 401n89, 419n137 ignorance related to 461, 461n55 as intermediary 288 inwardness of 430 Maharal on 387, 388, 388n39, 389, 390n49, 390n50, 391, 392 Malkhut related to 520 moment related to 400, 401n87 money lust and 468n76 Oral 126, 392n60 paradox of 430 past, present, future related to 124, 395 RaShaB on 128–​129, 129n178 rationality of 122, 122n159 timelessness of 117, 125 as transcendence 123, 430 Written 392n60 Torah study 470, 475, 475n97 tor esther (“turn of Esther”) 301 trace 64, 199, 204n398, 205n399, 207, 370–​ 371, 374–​376, 398, 506n15, 519–​520n45, 632. See also reshimu of infinity 369, 376 in Levinas 588n53 of light 371, 525, 540 time as 374–​375, 512n24, 623 of transcendence 592 tradition 107, 112n124, 264, 316, 341n5. See also history Trakl, Georg 70, 71 transcendence 60, 105n94, 259, 260n13, 426 of consciousness 62 death related to 577, 577–​578n10 of Husserl 575 of Levinas 577–​578, 651 nothingness as 493 Torah as 123, 429 in world 565n147 transcendental (sovev kol almin) 503n9 transcendent light (or ha-​sovev) 505n14 transcending 466n72, 489 transference 483 transformation 307, 432, 450n26, 531, 531n68 transmission of the true tradition (qabbalah shel emet) 265

transtemporality 396, 396n71 Tree of Life 306 trial 633, 634n193 truth 26, 43, 101, 186n351 death related to 107 end of 636 fictional 618n154 freedom related to 383n24 Heidegger on 102n87, 360 history and 610 numerical equivalence for 296 originary 358 from parables 554, 554n120 relative 221n435 singularity related to 595, 595n74 time of 103 of Torah 316n224 veil of 551 and the vestment of untruth 3 turn (Kehre) 80n26 twins 301 Tworek, Wojciech 411n116 ultimate attainment (fanā’ al-​fanā’) 130n181 uncircumcised Gentile 277n71 ungrounding 100 Ungrund 175n327 unifying unity 361 union of union ( jam‘ al jam‘) 130n181 unique name (shem meyuḥad) 268n35 uniqueness 69, 357 of death 586n49 unity 322, 426 beyond time 177 community 27n81 ecstatic 20n61 of Ein Sof 407n107, 408, 502, 502n8 pleasure of 535 RaShaB on 503, 503n9 with sefirot 314, 314n216 systems related to 592, 592n65 Zalman on 430 universalism 233, 237, 272, 272n52, 273, 273n53, 278, 562n142 universality 35, 424 universalization 69 universal knowledge (yedi‘ah kelalit) 272 universal secret (sod kelali) 326, 326n259, 331

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

786 Index universal singularity 424 universal thought 431, 431n178 unselfconscious anachronism 85n39 unthinkable 60n181 unveiling 513n28 Upanishads 138n208, 171n314 upper and lower worlds 552 Urbach, Ephraim E. 136n197 Uriel 329 uterus 560 utopia 643, 650, 650n244 utopian hope 641. See also Benjamin, Walter utopian pessimism 631, 631n186 vacuum (ḥalal) 520n45 Valéry, Paul 40 variability 416 veil 544n100, 551 vessels (kelim) 176, 527n59, 547n106 Vilna Gaon (Elijah ben Solomon) 171, 224, 549, 568 virtual reality 52n158 Viṭal, Ḥayyim 137–​138, 200n385, 203n393, 215, 409n110, 412n119 on Ein Sof and sefirot 144 gender theory of 546 on Malkhut 529n62 Shneur Zalman of Liadi and 213n416, 412n119 vitality 423n144 Voegelin, Eric 83, 517n34 void. See efes waiting 637 end of 592 for Messiah 651 for the moment 618n154, 658 waqt. See own moment Wargo, Eric 23n72 warp and woof (sheti wa-​erev) 292, 292n126 Warren, Nicolas de 22 weakens this place like a female 200, 200n385 Wexler, Philip 398n75 “what was is what shall be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) 510n23 Whitehead, Alfred White 47 Whitman, Walt 339

Wiesel, Elie 657 Wildmann, Isaac Eisik Ḥaver 163–​164, 347n25, 366n100, 529n62, 574n174 will (raṣon) 172, 347, 347n26, 348n27, 509 wisdom 339, 340n2, 430n173, 439, 439n210 desires compared to 432, 432n185, 433n186 forgetfulness related to 459n51 Ḥokhmah and 481, 481n115 from nothing 461n55 in past, present, future 336, 336n290 Wiskind-​Elper, Ora 452n27 withdrawal (histallequt) 224, 224n444, 442, 538 withdrawals (ha-​ṣimṣumim) 207, 207n404 without duration (wujiu) 133n188 witnessing 97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48–​49n148, 254, 644 and Adorno 644n232 Wohlfarth, Irving 612n129 Wolfson, Harry Austryn 108–​109 Wolski, Nathan 167n307 women 211n413, 452n27, 524n53 mind of 304n176, 483 word (dibbur, kalima) 342n9, 384n27 world (olam) 75, 75n7, 222, 222n438, 440 in history 623n165 transcendence in 565n147 world of mercy (olam ha-​raḥamim) 172, 173, 173n322 worlds (ha-​olamot) 547n104 Being-​in-​ 384n24 comprehends 331 construction and destruction of 110–​111, 111n115 Ein Sof and 517 of RaMaK 113 Scholem on 134 temporal currency of 114, 114n130, 114n131, 115n135, 344, 344n12 upper and lower 552 world that is entirely good (olam she-​kullo ṭov) 213n417 world to come 325 Ḥasidism on 625n173 memory of 491, 492n152 Sabbath as 493 worship 237, 404, 458n45

Elliot R. Wolfson - 978-90-04-44934-3

Index beginnings related to 458, 463 liturgical 173, 173n320 Written Torah 392n60 Wyschogrod, Edith 256 Yah (intermediate secret) 326, 352 circumcision related to 560 Yehoyada 140 Yesod (foundation) 245, 559 order of time and 162 Shekhinah and 189, 189n359 yhwh 199, 252, 325, 407, 419n137, 422, 509 Ehyeh and 567, 567n152 Elohim as 235, 429 numerical equivalence for 326, 326n259 past, present, future of 333, 409n110, 429n169 in Zohar 144n229 yod 197, 208, 298n156 contraction and 410 covenant of 470 God related to 319 heart and 470 Moses and 321 righteous man related to 470 Shekhinah related to 321, 321n241 Yom Kippur 166, 300, 457 Yose, R. 188 Young, Edward 72 Yudan, R. 86–​87

787 Zarathustra 127, 127n172, 255n2, 256n7, 315n220 Ze‘eir Anpin 165, 167, 175, 180n336, 200n385, 204n395, 209n409, 210n411, 219, 219n433, 366n100, 406n102, 416n128, 529n62 Zeitlin, Aaron 167n307 zikkaron 199, 447–​448, 482, 491, 499. See also memory zimzum. See contraction Zion 195n374 Žižek, Slavoj 585 Zohar 154, 175, 182, 187n352, 190, 191, 195, 198n380, 249, 400, 494, 569 1:11b 215n421 1:15b 167n307 1:16a 510n23 1:223b 578n11 2:27b-​28a 193n370 2:95a 491n149 2:170a-​b 215n421 3:61a-​b 95n68 3:115b 448n22 3:290a (Idra Zuṭa) 248 forgetfulness in 490n145 yhvh in 144n229 Zohar Ḥadash 73c 328n265 Zoroastrianism 112n124, 154n260 Zurwān 112n124, 154n260 Zweifel, Eliezer 472n92