Front Matter (PDF) - Stanford University Press

passages where Moses becomes the kabbalistic hero and himself weds
rare
enteringthe Godhead in the male role. The contemplative and erotic
Shekhinah,
of attachment to God are just different ways of depictingthe same
aspects
quite wholly inseparable from one another.
reality,
the experience of human love and sexuality as its chief metaphor for
With
the Zohar depicts devequt as a temporary and ¯eetingexperience.
intimacy,
have debated for some time the question of whether true unio mystica
Scholars
to be found in the Zohar. But this debate may itself hinge on the sexual
is
Is there true loss of self or absorption within union to be attained in
analogy.
climax? How does one begin to answer such a question without inter-
sexual
of the world's great lovers? Whether or not the experience underlyingcountlesviewingall
passages in the Zohar can be described as ``union'' lies, I would
beyond our ken. But it is clear that there is no possibility offered of
submit,
bliss to those still attached to bodily existence; only in the world to
permanent
will the disembodied spirits of the righteous enjoy the endless delight of
come
the divine presence. Religious experience in this world is but a
baskingin
of that eternal joy.
foretaste
the Zohar seeks to develop a language for what we may call its eros of
As
creativity, exegesis of the Song of Songs plays a major role. The Zohar
poetic
with great frequency, especially in its proems or homiletical ``warm-ups,''
turns
that great font of sacred eros. The Songof Songs, a text in which eros in fact
to
unconsummated, offers poetic language for every other aspect of the
remains
drama of courting, including even loss, separation, and longing. All of
complete
come to the fore in the Zohar's frequent disquisitions on the Song, which
these
often most surprisingly linked to verses describing some aspect of the
is
cult or another seemingly dry detail of biblical law. Those texts
Tabernacle
utterly transformed by association with the Canticle. The Torah text as a
are
it may be said, is ``washed over'' in an eroticizingbath created by
whole,
juxtaposition of Torah texts with verses of the Songof Songs, poetically
repeated
enrichingthe eros of se®rotic symbolization itself.
Zohar learned from the Neoplatonist milieu within which it existed to
The
of the ¯ow of energy, usually described as light, from one cosmic realm
speak
the next. The Neoplatonists tended to emphasize the diminution of that
to
as it reached ``downward'' toward the material plane. For the kabbalist,
light
constantly renewed pouringforth of divine presence could be felt, both in
this
daily renewal of nature and in the creative vigor of Torah interpretation.
the
sought to align himself with the cosmic ¯ow, in order to receive its bounty,
He
also to act in such ways as to stimulate the ¯ow itself. Images of both light
but
water abound in the Zohar's pages to describe the shefa, the endless ¯ux of
and
bounty that sustains the universe. In the context of the Zohar, itisclear
divine
this ¯uid is also the divine seed, that which enters into Shekhinah and
that
for the constant rebirth of life in the realms beneath her.
allows
Introduction
lxvii