by Jerome du Bois
You can't call up the Shekhinah and then expect Her to behave. -- paraphrase of a Fox Mulder line.
A voice from the stew kept speaking, in a low murmur: "I have lost my heart and you will lose yours. To the end of days, the end of all flesh, all living hearts must be broken -- a piece broken off and eaten, sticking in your throat." -- from one of Isaac's dreams, Zohar, tr. D.Rosenberg.
If I tilt my mind just right, Kabbalah Goes Hollywood, the wonderfully detailed, excellent article by Yossi Klein Halevi, is as funny as a Christopher Guest movie, chock-full of cultural tchotchkes. One could have a lot of fun with the healing water (whoa, that's new, California) and the red bracelets (against the "evil eye?" C'monnn), separate seating for the sexes (real progressive), and meditating on the seventy-two names of G-d (don't you dare spell it out, m-n). But the funniest thing is that while they're all down at the Centre [sic] chanting Satan's chaos into dust, the real Kabbalah, like Joseph bugging out on Potiphar's wife, has escaped their clutches yet again, laughing through its tears all the while. And the Follywood fools, like Potiphar's wife, are left marvelling over a beautiful, empty garment. They seem satisfied, and so am I, so long as they continue to avoid even the appearance of authenticity. Real quick example to give you a sense of the scene:
In the traditional Kabbalistic schools that have survived for centuries, the 72 names of G-d form the basis for arduous meditations and ascetic practices. Here [at the Kabbalah Centre], though, all you need to do is glance at the letters to be infused with their healing and invigorating power. In the Centre's literature, each name is endowed with a quality that can readily be accessed — such as "defusing negative energy and stress," "dumping depression," and "the power of prosperity." You can even call the Centre for a free ten-minute personal consultation with a highly trained 72-names specialist on how to find the name that best suits your needs. [from Halevi]
Moses wept. It's enough to make you rend your garments.
According to the poet and scholar David Rosenberg (translator of The Book of J), there are three kinds of Kabbalah, which he describes in his short, lucid millennial book with the jaw-dropping title Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah. (He means "literary" literally, too: words have power.) In the book, he draws distinctions between practical, creative, and frontier Kabbalah. In what follows here, I'll summarize briefly all three, and show my preference for the latter.
I also want to show some respect for Moses de Leon and Isaac Luria and all the other wise men in disguise who created the giant metaphors this pseudo-New Age crew want to miniaturize: Ein Sof (Endlessness), The Tree of Life, The Chariot, Tzimtzum, The Breaking of the Vessels, gathering the divine sparks . . . And the strangeness: Samael and Lilith as shapeshifting twins, demon babies born from nocturnal emissions; cannibalism; dismemberment.
That which has been received by these Follywood fools falls far short of what happens when you confront the voice from the stew, the sitra achra, the other side. It is a terrifying thing, if you look through this particular prism, to find out exactly where you fit into the dynamic creation, this Unstoppable Now. Frontier Kabbalah is like the shattering of the shaman, because the heart of Kabbalah is heartbreak, the stumbling block for any feelgood cult.
Here's an example of practical Kabbalah, from Rosenberg:
It is not unusual to oberve a standing-room only crowd pay twenty-five dollars a person to attend a seminar on "Kabbalah and Dreams." . . . The rabbi would like to talk further about what happens when the soul leaves the body -- to read more from his texts -- but someone yells out, "What does it mean to dream that my hat is burning in a fire in my basement?" The rabbi replies that he will not address actual dreams because it is a very spiritual thing to interpret someone's dream. He will merely talk about dreams in general. But the crowd cannot resist . . . So, the rabbi relents and hands out the meanings of dreaming about hats, fires, basements, weddings, spouses, and beach towns. This is practical Kabbalah, which is only concerned with success and career, not with failure. More important, it reads its texts literally. Dreams are data that equal something. . . pages 138-9.
And, in kind of dream sequence, Rosenberg presents Oprah Winfrey (not a professed Kabbalist) as a good example of a modern creative Kabbalist, whose main concern is tikkun (healing and restoration):
For her, the Zohar [Book of Radiance] would be a creative Kabbalah, offering guidance to formulating a personal religion . . . Above all else, she wishes to preserve something of the creative principle, with the goal of restoring and transforming the self, and, in the process, the culture. . .
Although she reads interpretively and creatively, there is still one thing that is literal: the self. The creative Kabbalist continues to read the self and personal spirit literally, and as I daydream my fantasy of an Oprah Winfrey Kabbalah show, I uncover my own wish to keep that domain sacred. The writers of the real Kabbalah did not even let that wish go unexamined. The real secret to the Kabbalah is that you know you can read it when you can laugh at yourself. Page 142.
The frontier Kabbalist recognizes that the soul, the self, is something that's stretched between Earth and the Heavens and connected to everything, and since the divine world is dynamic, not stable, so also the self. The practical and creative Kabbalists's need for a settled, complete soul is forlorn and doomed to the failure of all the self-help religions: that is, the failure to displace oneself out of oneself and into the cosmos. We humans may be the greatest things in creation, and I certainly think we are, but we are not the center. The nonhuman overwhelms us. The frontier Kabbalist tries to grapple with immensity: the darkness, the uncertainty, the novelty, the suspense, the ignorance, the bone-chilling, gnawing contingency of it all. We need to be up to it. Wearing red threads and chanting ooga-booga won't do it.
Hollywood Kabbalah sells both people and creation short, but these people want it that way. They want to avoid uncertainty, chaos, and death. Halevi writes:
The Centre sees itself as, literally, the center of the struggle against Satan. By releasing the hidden traditions of Kabbalah to humanity, it claims, it is threatening Satan's power of "chaos," which is responsible for everything from wars and illness to depression. The end of chaos will mean the end of human suffering. And so the creation of the Centre is nothing less than the most momentous event in history.
It wouldn't be the first. What's hilarious here is that Ein Sof encompasses chaos, eats chaos for breakfast, and that chaos is essential to creation and life. The frontier Kabbalist recognizes this. For my example, I'll take a hint from Rosenberg. Just as he pressed Oprah Winfrey into service as a quasi-Kabbalist, so I shall do the same with Donna Tartt, in the voice of Julian Morrow, the professor of Greek in her novel The Secret History. This is how he describes Greek encounters with the divine in the way they learned -- bacchic frenzy:
The Greeks . . . had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism . . . Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks and our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! . . . To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
Now that's what I'm talking about. And that's frontier Kabbalah: wrestling with the Angel, trying to confront the cosmos on the scale it deserves.
So, what becomes of the broken-hearted? If they're wise -- if they're blessed -- they'll stay that way. Kabbalah or not, how else to be strong these days?
Posted by Jerome at May 30, 2004 08:34 PM | TrackBack