INTRODUCTION:
Almost every single version of the various narratives about
Avraham contain the well-known moral lesson that he rejected the idolatrous and
occultist practices of his birth culture and pioneered a new monotheistic path.
In this article, however, based extensively on the research of Professor Oded
Yisraeli[1], we will
explore a very different narrative of the same story. This narrative is from
the Zohar which, according to Yisraeli, puts forward the view that:
[N]ot only did Abraham not
separate himself from these practices but he himself was responsible for them[!]
Before we look at what the Zohar says in greater
detail, let us first turn to the mainstream view as exemplified in the writings
of Maimonides (or Rambam, 1135-1204):
THE VIEW OF MAIMONIDES:
According to Rambam:
It is well known that Abraham…was
brought up in the religious community of the Sabians…[2]
The Sabians were a cult of Haranites who practised an
ancient form of hermetic[3]
religion which included idolatry, magic and occultism. Yisraeli explains that
the Sabians were often identified as the “inhabitants of the East” who
lived in Charan.[4]
The commentator, R. David Kimchi (1160–1235) interprets ‘‘the
land of the East’’ (Gen 25.6) as referring to ‘‘Charan and Ur of the
Chaldeans’’. This was where Avraham sent his sons from his concubines.
Rambam continues:
We have already made it clear in
our…Mishneh Torah, that Abraham…began to refute these opinions…[5]
Rambam thus presents the common view that Avraham rejected
the idolatrous practices of his father’s household and identifies those
practices as being of Sabian origin.
Let us now turn to a very different view as expressed by the
Zohar:
THE VIEW OF THE ZOHAR:
The Zohar states:
Rabbi Abba said: One day I happened upon a certain town formerly inhabited by inhabitants of the East, and they told me some of the wisdom they knew from ancient days. They had found their books of wisdom, and brought me one, in which was written: As one’s aspiration is directed in this world, so he draws upon himself a spirit from above, corresponding to the aspiration to which he cleaves. If his aspiration focuses on a supernal entity, he draws that entity from above to himself below. If he aspires to cleave to the other side, focusing there, then he draws that from above to himself below…
They said the essence of the
matter depends on words, action, and the aspiration to cleave, whereby the side
to which one cleaves is drawn from above to below.
I found in it all the ritual acts of star-worship,
Requisites, and how to focus the will upon them, drawing them down . . .
I said to them: My sons, this is close to words of
Torah, but you should shun these books, so that your heart will not stray after
these rites, toward all those sides mentioned here, lest—Heaven
forbid—you stray from the rite of the blessed Holy One. For all these books
deceive human beings, since the
inhabitants of the East were wise—having inherited a legacy of wisdom from
Abraham, who bestowed it upon the sons of the concubines, as it written:
to the sons of the concubines Abraham gave gifts, while he was still alive, and
he sent them away from his son Isaac eastward, to the land of the East. Afterward
they were drawn by that wisdom in various directions.
Not so with the seed of Isaac
and the share of Jacob, for it is written: Abraham gave all that he had to
Isaac[, the][6]
holy heritage of faith to which Abraham cleaved…
So a person should be drawn to
the blessed Holy One, cleaving to him.[7]
According to the Zohar, Avraham did not reject the
idolatrous mysticism of his birth culture in the sense that he rejected
something he just happened to find or inherit, but he was indeed responsible
for “bestowing it upon the sons of the concubines”. However, he kept the
purer and more noble mystical traditions for his people who descended from his
son Yitzchak.
Yisraeli then cuts straight to the chase. He maintains that
the Zohar emphasised[8]
this idea that Avraham was responsible for bequeathing a mystical and magical
tradition to the “inhabitants of the East” as part of a very real and
concerted historic and ideological strategy:
If the books of the Easterners
were in fact Sabean, the zoharic author’s attitude toward them reflects one of
the prominent religious controversies of the time.
THE GREAT CONTROVERSY OF THE TIME:
The timing of the emergence of the Zohar in around
1290 and the rise of modern Kabbalistic thought in southern France and
Spain (see previous
post) in the early 13th
century, followed very close in the wake of the passing of Rambam in 1204. Many
are of the opinion that the dramatic rise of 13th century mysticism
was orchestrated to serve as a counterweight to the recent threat of stark and
raw Maimonidean rationalism. This theological tension led to the great
Maimonidean Controversies and conflicts which shook the Jewish world particularly
in the century after Rambam’s demise, and continue to reverberate to this day
despite the fact that the mystical tradition became dominant.
[To get an idea of the depths of these controversies, see: Between
Provence and Barcelona, The
Politics Behind the Piety, Displacing
Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, The
South Will Rise Again?, and How
Rashi was Used as ‘Leverage’ During the Maimonidean Controversies.]
Rambam was outspoken in his condemnation of superstitious
and magical practices. He even developed the idea that many commandments of the
Torah were put in place specifically to counter these occultist beliefs,
customs and practices.
Rambam writes in no uncertain terms:
I . . . say that the meaning of
many of the laws became clear to me and their causes became known to me through
my study of the doctrines, opinions, practices…of the Sabians.[9]
The Sabians are selected and discredited as representing
everything that Avraham and Torah stood for, and tried to eradicate:
You know how widespread were in
those days the opinions of the Sabeans: all men, except a few individuals, were
idolaters, that is to say, they believed in spirits, in man’s power to direct
the influences of the heavenly bodies, and in the effect of talismans.[10]
Rambam believes that it was within this hermetic and
occultist context that Judaism arose, essentially, in order to counter it.
But, as Yisraeli points out, the Zohar took a
different and more “complex” stance on the matter:
The Zohar’s complex attitude
toward the hermetic book of the ‘‘Easterners’’ must thus be understood as a
response to Maimonides’s critical position and an alternative to his absolute
rejection of such esoteric teachings.
The Zohar, and the other emerging Kabbalistic traditions,
now offered a mystical alternative to Rambam’s stark rejection of magic and
theurgy as the antithesis of Torah. The mystics came up with a complicated
solution somewhere between partial acceptance and outright rejection of
hermetic and magical principles.
As we saw in the Zohar above, “ritual acts of
star-worship” are somehow considered “close to words of Torah” although
they are to be shunned lest we “stray after these rites”.
THE ‘STRATEGY’ OF THE ZOHAR:
The Zohar walked a fine line by connecting Avraham,
not just to but as a source for, the occultist practices of the “inhabitants
of the East”. He was responsible for
teaching the ‘‘sons of the concubines” those practices and beliefs in
the first instance. Of course, he made a distinction between his sons and only
gave the more refined version of mysticism to Yitzchak – but this does not
detract from the idea that he also gave the occultist practices to Easterners
or Sabians.
This ‘comprehensive’ if not ‘conflicting’ theology opened
the way for the inclusion of some radical mystical practices and ideology within
the bourgeoning Jewish mystical movement. While claiming to reject idolatry
outright, this mysticism broke with Rambam’s definition of a Judaism that completely
rejected theurgical practices and beliefs no matter how they were sanitised or presented.
Yisraeli suggests that this is why the Zohar rejected
some of more traditional views that Jewish mysticism was given at Sinai, and
claimed it was given to Adam.[11]
By adopting this approach, the Zohar could show that there was a
universal aspect to Kabbalah and cover itself for the instances where
there appeared to be some overlap with other mystical traditions.
According to Yisraeli:
The affinities between the world
of the Zohar and foreign—and even idolatrous—worlds around it appear to have
troubled its authors, and they sought a fitting response. These are the
circumstances, it seems, that form the background to the emergence of the
zoharic traditions according to which the Kabbalah originated with Adam.
[This][12]…helped
the zoharic authors explain the close affinities between their own views and
ideas in the non-Jewish world around them…
This framework provides both a
concrete explanation of the dissemination of kabbalisticlike concepts in
foreign garb and a pagan environment and acknowledges the universal birthright
of the Jewish kabbalists who, according to this narrative, alone received the
‘‘holy heritage of faith’’ from Abraham as Isaac’s descendants…
Receiving the kabbalistic
doctrine from Adam, Abraham was thus the teacher and patriarch who held this
ancient universalistic teaching, dividing it between his sons by giving the
lesser versions to non-Jewish ‘‘Abrahamic’’ streams and the pure and clean
version of historical Jewish Kabbalah to Isaac.
THE ZOHAR JOINS THE ANTI-MAIMONIDEAN CAMP:
This way, the Zohar was able to join the
anti-Maimonidean camp and offer an alternative theology to that where magic had
no place in Judaism. Now it did have a place because these teaching were indeed
given to all humanity through Adam. And later Avraham disseminated the more
radical aspects of these belief systems amongst the “inhabitants of the East”.
While, as the Zohar says, these magical systems and “ritual acts of
star worship” were “close to words of Torah”- although to be shunned
- the ‘purer’ forms of mysticism were handed down to Yitzchak.
CONCLUSION:
By emphasising that the origin of these “Eastern” magical
ideas originated with Avraham, it opened the door for some of these
mystical concepts to be reflected in a ‘holy’ form within the emerging Jewish
mystical movement. This new radical mysticism served as a counterweight to the
equally radical rationalism of Rambam who emphatically denied the
permissibility of any such magical or theurgical notions within a monotheistic
Judaism. [See The
‘Lost Religion’ of Maimonides.]
Rambam tried to stem the tide of belief in the supernatural
and magic while the Zohar came and opened the floodgates by permitting a
partial form of supernatural belief.
This fantastic divergence of opinion offers us a
cross-sectional view into the theological tensions which went on to shape and
define much of post-13th-century Jewish thinking, Hashkafa and
worldview.
ANALYSIS:
If Yisraeli is correct in his reasoning that the Zohar
needed to find a way to permit aspects of mysticism that were practiced in the
“East”, one might add one more point to his argument:
In the same Rambam quoted above (Moreh Nevuchim
III:29), Rambam writes that after Avraham rejected the occultism of the Sabians,
their religion eventually vanished and most of the civilised world followed Avraham’s
lead in one way or another by rejecting idolatry:
[W]e see today, in the consensus
of the greater part of the population of the earth [that they acknowledge and
glorify Avraham for rejecting the Sabians][13]…so
that even those who do not belong to his progeny pretend to descend from him.
No one is antagonistic to him or
ignorant of his greatness except the remnants of this [Sabian] religious
community that has perished, remnants that survive in the extremities of the
earth, as for instance the infidels among the Turks in the extreme North...
You should know from the texts of the Torah...that the first intention of the Law as a whole is to put an end to idolatry, to wipe out its traces and all that is bound up with it, even its memory...and to warn us against doing anything at all similar to their works and, all the more, against repeating the latter. It is explicitly stated in the text of the Torah that everything that was regarded by them as worship of their gods and as a way of coming near to them, is hateful and odious to God.
It strikes one as rather astounding, then, that later in
history - after most of mankind rejected Sabian idolatry on Rambam’s view - some
of the real progeny of Avraham would try to find a way to somehow incorporate
and revive aspects of this eradicated mysticism by regarding it as “close to
words of Torah” although essentially forbidden except for certain aspects
which were transmitted to Yitzchak and finally manifesting in the mystical
writings of the 13th century.
Such was the nature of the ferocity of the Maimonidean
Controversies.
[1] Jewish
Medieval Traditions concerning the Origins of the Kabbalah, by Oded Yisraeli.
The reader is urged to see the previous post as this article is a continuation of
the same theme.
[2] Guide
of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines (Chicago, 1963), 3:29.
[3]
The term ‘hermetic’ is derived from Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary author of
magical, astrological and alchemical works. It was said he created a magical seal
to keep vessels airtight. In our context, the term is used to refer to the
practices of the occult.
[4]
See Gen. 29:1 and 25:6 as well as 28:10.
[5] Guide
of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines (Chicago, 1963), 3:29.
[6]
Parenthesis mine.
[7] Zohar,
I, 99b–100b, Pritzker ed.
[8] The
Zohar had an earlier rabbinic basis for this idea that Avraham gave the
mysteries of “the unhallowed arts’’ to the sons of the concubines. The
Gemara speaks about the “gifts” which Avraham gave to the sons of the
concubines:
What gifts [did he give
them]? — R. Jeremiah b. Abba said: This teaches that he imparted to them [the
secrets of] the unhallowed arts. (bSan. 91a)
Yisraeli acknowledges this Gemara as a possible
support for this zoharic idea, but while he believes it influenced the Zohar,
he insists that:
[W]e must also address the
issue of its concrete historical context.
According to Yisraeli, the Zohar was referring
specifically to the Sabian hermetic literature of the Haranites which Rambam
regarded as the antithesis to Judaism.
[9] Guide
of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines (Chicago, 1963), 3:29.
[10] Guide 1:63.
[11] As we saw in the previous post,
there were three early and contemporaneous views which the kabbalists used to
explain the origins of Jewish mysticism at the time of the emergence of the
Zohar in 1290:
1)
The first (and probably the earliest) position claims that Kabbalah was
given to the Children of Israel at Sinai as part of the Revelation and
Oral Tradition. [R. Ezra of Gerona and Ramban.]
2)
The second approach claims that Kabbalah stemmed from an original
revelation of mysticism by the prophet Eliyahu haNavi to the Ra’avad’s
father, beginning only around the 12th century and then held
exclusively within the first Kabbalistic groups particularly in Provence
and the later in Gerona. [R. Menachem Recanati.]
3)
The third school maintains that Kabbalah was revealed to the first man, Adam,
and hence has not just Jewish but universal relevance and significance. [R.
Moshe de León and the Zohar.]
[12] Parenthesis mine.
[13] Parentheses mine.
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