Front Matter (PDF) - Stanford University Press

eads it. This leads us closer to the real purpose of Zoharic exegesis. The
who
wants to take the reader inside the divine life. It wants ever to retell the
Zohar
of the ¯ow of the se®rot, their longings and union, the arousal of love
story
and the way in which that arousal causes blessingto ¯ow throughout the
above
This is the essential story of Kabbalah, and the Zohar ®nds it in verse
worlds.
verse, portion after portion, of the Torah text. But each retellingoffers a
after
and often startlingly different perspective. The Zohar is ever enrichingthe
new
narrative by means of retellingit from the vantage point of yet
kabbalistic
hermeneutic insight. On each page yet another verse, word, or tale of
another
Torah is opened or ``uncovered'' to reveal new insight into the great story
the
the Zohar, that which it proffers as the truth of the Torah, of the cosmos,
of
of the reader's soul.
and
the series of homilies by various speakers around a particular verse or
In
in the scriptural text, the Zohar takes its readers through multiple
moment
of understanding, reaching from the surface layer of ``plain'' meaning
layers
ever more profound revelations. A great love of language is revealed in
into
process; plays on words and subtle shadings of meaning often serve as
this
to a total recon®guration of the Scripture at hand. For this reason, the
ways
best readers, both traditional and modern, are those who share its
Zohar's
fascination with the mystery of words, includingboth their aural and
endless
(or ``spoken'' and ``written'') manifestations.
graphic
kabbalists contemporaneous with the Zohar were offeringmultile-
Other
readings of Scripture as well. Rabbi Baḥya ben Asher of Barcelona immediatelveled
comes to mind. His Torah commentary, written in the 1290s, offers
best example of the fourfold interpretation of Scripture in its Jewish form:
the
after verse is read ®rst for its plain meaning, then according to ``the way
verse
Midrash,'' followed by ``the way of intellect'' or philosophical allegory, and
of
``the way of Kabbalah.'' Rabbi Baḥya's work is in fact important as one
®nally
the earliest sources for quotations from the Zohar.
of
Zohar offers no such neat classi®cations. Insights offered by a group of
The
discussinga text may bounce back and forth from readings that
``companions''
be (and sometimes indeed are) found in earlier midrashic works to ways
could
readingthat belongwholly to the world of Kabbalah. Kabbalistic interpretations
of
are sometimes so well ``sewn'' into the midrashic fabric that the reader is
wonderingwhether the kabbalistic referent might not indeed be the ``real''
left
a given biblical verse or rabbinic passage. In one well-known text,
meaningof
Zohar refers to mystical interpretations as the ``soul'' of Torah, distinguished
the
from the narrative that forms the outward ``garments'' and the legal
that serve as Torah's ``body'' (playingon the phrase gufei Torah
derivations
of Torah''], that in rabbinic parlance means ``essential teachings'').
[``bodies
Introduction
lviii
text also suggests a further level of readings, the ``innermost soul'' of
That
that will not be fully revealed until messianic times. But when encoun-
Torah
teringactual passages from the Zohar, it is not easy to determine just where