Front Matter (PDF) - Stanford University Press

Land, they encounter various other teachers in the form of mysterious
Holy
wondrous children, merchants, and donkey-drivers, all of whom are
elders,
of secrets that they share with this band of lovingand faithful companions.
possessed
Usually these mysterious ®gures know more than the wanderers had
and Rabbi Shim'on's disciples are often outshone in wisdom by these
expected,
unlikely ®gures. That too is part of the Zohar's story. A contemporary
most
notes that there are more than three hundred whole and partial stories
scholar
this sort contained within the Zohar text. In some places the narrative shifts
of
the earthly settingto one that takes place partly in heaven or ``the Garden
from
Eden,'' in which the master is replaced by God Himself, who proclaims His
of
at the innovations offered as the kabbalists engage in Torah.
pleasure
tales of Rabbi Shim'on and his disciples, wanderingabout the Galilee
These
thousand years before the Zohar was written, are clearly a work of ®ction.
a
to say that is by no means to deny the possibility that a very real mystical
But
underlies the Zohar and shapes its spiritual character. Anyone
brotherhood
reads the Zohar over an extended period of time will come to see that
who
interface amongthe companions and the close relationship between the
the
of their wanderings and the homilies they occasion are not the result of
tales
imagination alone. Whoever wrote the work knew very well how
®ctional
students respond to companionship and support and are inspired by
fellow
another's glowing rendition of a text. He (or they) has felt the warm glow
one
a master's praises and the shame of beingshown up by a stranger in the face
of
one's peers. The ZoharÐleavingaside for now the question of who actually
of
the wordsÐre¯ects the experience of a kabbalistic circle. It is one of a
penned
of such circles of Jewish mystics, stretchingback in time to Qumran,
series
Provence, and Gerona, and forward in history to Safed, Padua,
Jerusalem,
Bratslav, and again to Jerusalem. The small circle of initiates
Miedzybozh,
about a master is the way Kabbalah has always happened, and the
gathered
is no exception. In fact, the collective experience of this group around
Zohar
Shim'on son of Yoḥai as ``recorded'' in the Zohar forms the paradigm for
Rabbi
later Jewish mystical circles.
all
group life re¯ected in the text is that of a band of living kabbalists,
The
that they occupied Castile of the thirteenth century rather than the land
except
Israel of the second. They lived in Toledo and Guadalajara rather than
of
and Sepphoris. Whether these real kabbalists wandered about in the
Tiberias
countryside as their ®ctional counterparts did in the Holy Land is hard
Spanish
know, but they certainly felt that the most proper settingfor study of Torah
to
out of doors, especially in a garden or a grove of trees. Occasionally the
was
in the Zohar's pages have conversations indoors, as when the
companions
visit Rabbi Shim'on or they all travel to the home of Rabbi Pinḥas
disciples
of Ya'ir. Interestingly there is no house of study or synagogue that appears
son
a settingfor any of their encounters. The Zohar very much prefers that they
as
Introduction
lxii
take place under the shade of a certain tree, at a springof water, or at some