AJS Conference Day Two Session Three (Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah and its Aftermath)

Mor Altshuler
"Tikkun Leil Shavuot of R. Joseph Karo and the Epistle of Solomon ha-Levi Elkabetz"

The tradition of tikkun leil Shavuot, of studying all night on Shavuot, comes from the Zohar where the practice is associated with the Rashbi circle. In essence playing out the revelation of Moses at Sinai. The first historic tikkun that we have evidence of was practiced by R. Joseph Karo, R. Solomon Elkabetz and their circle in Salonika. According to Elkabetz, the voice of the Torah came out of Karo. The voice identified itself as the Shechina in exile; God had left her and her children had abandoned her for idols. The revelation of the Shechina takes them from Moses at Sinai to Joshua conquering the land of Israel. Soon afterwards there was a plague in Salonika. Karo lost his wife. This eventually led Karo and Elkabetz to moving to Safed and establishing the golden age of Safed Kabbalah.


Zohar Raviv (University of Michigan)
"Rabbi Moses Cordovero's Sefer Gerushin: Contemplation, Devotion, and the Negotiation of Landscapes"

R. Moses Cordovero's Sefer Gerushin has not been heavily studied. Lawrence Fine has done the most extensive study of it to date and he only gives it a page and a half. The main theme of the book is the exilic existence of the Shechina and how one relates to it. The book advocates the practice voluntary exile in order to enact the exile of the Shechina. By doing it specifically in the Galilee one is literally following in the footsteps of the Rashbi. One should do what was done in the Zohar in the specfic place done there. Codovero advocated a practice in which a living mystic would lie on the grave of an ancient sage whereby the person would become the Shechina and the ancient sage would take on the persona of Yesod. Underlying all this was the premise that if one understands the divine structure once can force God to do certain things.


Eitan P. Fishbane (Jewish Theological Seminary)
"Identity, Reincarnation, and Rebirth in the Writings of R. Hayyim Vital"

Belief in the afterlife and ressurection is a basic part of many religions. R. Hayyim Vital's Shar ha-Gilgulim is about the search for ones place and function in the redemptive restoration of the primal cosmic order. The identity of the person is the soul that travels from body to body. Isaac Luria's great ability was that he could identify the identity of his students' souls and understand their purpose. (See Lawrence Fine's Physician of the Soul) The actions of a person can have a cosmic affect. The intentions of a person, while having sex can affect the children born. A father's energy can make a child wild or lazy.


Lawrence B. Fine (Mount Holyoke College)
"Spiritual Friendship in Jewish Mystical Tradition: The Bet El Contracts"

There is a difficulty in studying the history of friendship. Friendship is something so universal that it is easy to ignore. One has to recognize that the concept of friendship differs from place to place. Friendship also has to be distinguished from other social realities. There is the prescriptive (what friendship should be) and the descriptive (what friendship is).

The Bet El circle is an example of community friendship. Bet El did not go the way of Hasidism; it remained an elitist and not a popular movement. They signed a pact as a group to love one another and to share in each other's merits. Members of the group were not to praise another too highly and everyone was to treat each other as equals. This pact has its precedent in the circle of David ibn Zimra. Among the people included in this pact was Isaac Luria. To go further back one can point to this model as being rooted in early Christian and early rabbinic thought.

AJS Conference

Here I am at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference (AJS) in Washington DC; a three day gathering devoted to Jewish Studies. It has been wonderful on many different levels for someone with my interests. I cannot think of many of places where I can accidentally run into people whom I know based on having read and admired their books. For example I was sitting in a lecture and I turned to the person sitting next to me and I see on his name tag Marc Saperstein. I also got to talk to Lawrence Fine and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. I have posted on both of these people in the past. (See here and here.) I even got to trade barbs over the History Channel with Lawrence Schiffman. Apparently he was just interviewed for a program on the Garden of Eden by a person who was trying to ask him for a geographic location. I also got to touch base with some old professors of mine from Yeshiva University such as Louis Feldman, Elisheva Carlebach, Steven Fine and Ephraim Kanarfogel. Finally there was the pleasure of running into old friends from various places. I even ran into an ex girlfriend. She did not cheat on me, lie to me, steal from me or do anything calculated to put me in a dangerous depression state so this was actually a good meeting. We left on good terms. She is now happily married and I wish her the best. I got to meet a blogging friend, Baruch Pelta, in the flesh.

While this was a vast conference and I was not able to be everywhere at once, I will be posting one the various lectures I attended. Obviously this reflects those things that interest me, mainly medieval and early modern Jewish history as it relates to philosophy, Kabbalah or messianism.
More to come so stay tuned.

Sin, Safed and Lurianic Kabbalah.

Lawrence Fine’s Physician of the Soul Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship is a sociological analysis of Isaac Luria (1534-72), the central figure of sixteenth century Kabbalah, and the circle that surrounded him. Fine is not particularly interested in the theology of Luria per se, that ground having already been thoroughly covered by Gershom Scholem. Instead Fine approaches Luria from the perspective of Luria’s distinct practices. Fine is less interested in Luria theology of exile and redemption than the sort of rituals that Luria and his followers engaged in order to bring about redemption. This sort of prax based approach is important when dealing with the Jewish History. Judaism is a highly prax based religion; everything has to make itself relevant in terms of ritual practice, halacha. Any discussion of Judaism that remains solely in the theoretical realm of theology is missing something. Fine is following Moshe Idel’s criticism of Scholem’ treatment of Kabbalah, as primarily a theology and as something separate from rabbinic Judaism. Fine’s treatment of Luria keeps him within the framework of rabbinic Judaism and of halacha.

What I found most interesting about this book was Fine’s discussion of the penances that Luria proscribed for various sins. Figuring prominently within the list of sins, we have from his student, Hayyim Vital, are drinking gentile wine, committing sins which require one of the four types of capital punishment, sexual relations with a menstruant, relations with an animal, sleeping with gentile women, adultery, sodomy and masturbation. According to Vital, he learned of Luria’s proscribed penance for homosexuality from three people who actually carried it out. Luria’s remedy was that a person should fast for 233 days, which is the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word regel, foot. This denotes the part of the Ze’ir that the sin displaced the saphira of Yesod into

The fact that such emphasis was placed on how to repent from sexual transgressions raises some questions as to nature of the people living in Safed in the sixteenth century. If you read Haredi “history” books, all you will hear about sixteenth century Safed is that it was a holy city, full of holy people. In truth Safed was a much more interesting and dynamic place. Clearly the city contained people who had a lot more weighing on their consciousness then missing morning prayers every once in awhile. For one thing many of the people, who migrated to Safed, were ex-conversos, who had lived as Christians for significant parts of their lives. Many of them had left behind non Jewish wives and children. To say nothing of the sins that people committed while living in Safed. Safed was not Lakewood or the Mir; it was an openly dysfunctional place and that was the point of it.

This sinful side of Safed is important for understanding the community and Luria. More than any other movement within traditional Judaism, Lurianic Kabbalah confronted the reality of sin in this world. The goal of Lurianic Kabbalah was to bring about the redemption of the world by redeeming the divine sparks that trapped by the forces of darkness, which in the terminology of Lurianic Kabbalah is referred to as the qelippot, the shells. It is not enough to simply remove oneself from the world and be holy; one has to confront the forces of sin. In effect one tries to redeem even sin. This is not the theology of people convinced of their utter righteousness; this is the theology of people confronting their own sinfulness.