Gershom Scholem

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960).

No mysticism in general

Gershom Scholem teaches that there is no mysticism as such, only the mysticism of a particular religion: Christian, Muslim, Jewish. A mystic does not stand outside a tradition; the experience of God comes to a person formed by scripture, law and community, and is told in their terms. So Jewish mysticism must be learned from its own texts, in Hebrew and Aramaic, from the manuscripts in which it was written, as a living force within the history of the Jewish people.

Three stages of religion

He places mysticism in a story of three stages. In the first, the stage of myth, there is no abyss between the gods and the world: nature itself is full of gods. In the second, the stage of the great religions, an abyss opens between creator and creature, and God's voice crosses it in revelation and law. Mysticism belongs to a third, romantic stage. It does not deny the abyss but sets out to cross it, to recover on a new plane the unity that myth once had and religion broke, and it arises when a religion has reached its classic form and its believers seek to make it live again from within.

The symbol

The Kabbalist reads everything as symbol, and Scholem distinguishes the symbol from allegory. In allegory one thing that can be said stands for another that can be said: the lion for courage. A mystical symbol makes visible something that cannot be said at all, the hidden life of God, so that it can be glimpsed in a word, a letter or a commandment without ever being stated. The sefirot are such symbols, and so is the whole Torah when the Kabbalist reads it.

The Torah as the name of God

In the Kabbalah he studied, the Torah is more than a book of laws and stories. It is woven out of the names of God, or is itself the one great name; it is a living body, each letter a limb; and its meanings are without end, so that each verse has seventy faces and each soul its own reading. This is why the Jewish mystics so rarely wrote new scriptures: they spoke by commentary, opening the old words.

And it is why, in his teaching, the mystic is conservative and revolutionary at once. He holds fast to the letter of the tradition and fills it with new meaning, and only rarely, as in the movement around Sabbatai Sevi, does the new meaning break the law itself.

The chariot and the palaces

The first stage of Jewish mysticism, as he traces it, is the mysticism of the chariot, the throne that Ezekiel saw. Its texts, the books of the heavenly palaces, describe a dangerous ascent, which they call a descent, through seven palaces guarded at each gate by angels, who let the traveller pass only on being shown the right seals and names. At the end is the sight of the King in his beauty upon the throne. One text, the Measure of the Body, gives the limbs of the divine figure in numbers so vast that they cannot be pictured. Scholem saw in all this a Jewish form of gnosis, rooted in the time of the rabbis of the Talmud.

Letters, breath and the Zohar

After the chariot he follows the pious of medieval Germany, with their humility, their penances and their calm before insult; and then Abraham Abulafia, whose prophetic Kabbalah combined and recombined the letters of the divine names, with set breathing and movements of the head, to bring the mind to prophecy, a discipline Scholem likened to yoga. Then comes the Kabbalah of the sefirot and its great book, the Zohar, whose teaching of the ten powers, of the Shekhinah in exile and of the other side is given in the branches called The ten sefirot and The Zohar and Safed.

Luria: exile within God

His reading of Isaac Luria is one of his chief teachings. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, he argues, the Kabbalah turned from the beginning of things to their end, from creation to redemption. Luria's myth of God's withdrawal, the breaking of the vessels and the repair, taught in the branch The Zohar and Safed, made exile a condition of the world and even of God, and gave every Jew, in every commandment and every prayer, a part in ending it. It answered the experience of a scattered people with a meaning as wide as creation, and so it became the last form of the Kabbalah to shape the faith of the whole Jewish people.

Redemption through sin

The movement around Sabbatai Sevi grew from that ground. When the messiah its believers had acclaimed in 1665 became a Muslim the next year, his prophet Nathan of Gaza and the believers who stayed with him explained the apostasy as a last descent: the messiah had gone down into the realm of the husks to free the sparks held captive there. The radical believers drew the conclusion that a commandment may be fulfilled by its transgression, and that in the age of redemption the law is kept by breaking it. Scholem called this redemption through sin, and saw in it a crisis of the tradition from within, which loosened its hold on many before the modern age.

Hasidism: the messiah turned inward

Hasidism, the last stage he traces, took up the Lurianic sparks but turned their urgency inward. The sparks are raised not by hastening the end of days but in the ordinary acts of each person's life, in eating, working and talking; the aim is devekut, cleaving to God here and now; and the community gathers round its righteous master, the tzaddik. In his phrase the movement neutralised the messianic element, keeping the hope of redemption while drawing out its danger.

The golem

Among the images of the Kabbalah he traced was the golem. The Book of Creation teaches that the world was made with letters, and from it grew the legend that a master who knew the right combinations could make a man of clay and give him life. In the best known telling the word emet, truth, is written on its forehead; when the first letter is wiped away, met, dead, remains, and the golem falls back into dust. The golem cannot speak: the creature of the word lacks the word, since only God gives a full soul. For Scholem the legend shows both the creative power the Kabbalists gave to language and the limit they set on it.