The Universal Meaning of Kabbalah by Leo Schaya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Warehouse of Mythical Wisdom

Because this book goes beyond the literary uses of Kabbalah and makes some claims about 'what's really there,’ it is interesting to contrast it with similar claims by modern cosmologists. The book is also an intriguing anticipation/echo of various modern philosophical views. But because Kabbalah's claims are about reality rather than truth, the best way to appreciate it is as a cultural compendium of symbolic knowledge, a warehouse of myth in which all sorts of intriguing stories are stacked awaiting distribution. Schaya's book is a sort of outline catalogue of contents.

Schaya is obviously a theist who is employing Kabbalah as a theological tool, particularly to explain God's role in creation. He uses some interesting language to describe being itself coming into being "... by the first ontological irradiation, God determines all things." The phrase 'ontological irradiation' is certainly evocative of scientific cosmology. This impression is reinforced in his description of subsequent divinely creative activity: 

"God's wisdom determines the uncreated archetypes; his intelligence manifests them as spiritual and supraformal realities, which in their turn clothe themselves in subtle substance and gross matter, in order to give birth to the heavens and the earth."

Although Schaya's determinism isn't quite as deterministic as that of physicists (there's a bit of divine self-determination in everything for Schaya), this theory is not incompatible with, say, the scientific description of Quantum Gravity in its progression from the granular formation of space up through the manifestation of non-quantum events. The Uncreated Archetypes sound Platonic but they could just as easily be the fourteen or so quantum fields hypothesised in today's physics.

The fundamental difference between the Kabbalistic and scientific views is, of course, in the presumption of intention and purpose by the former. Schaya quotes God in the voice of the prophet Isaiah as his authority:

"For the rain comes down and the snow from heaven and returned not thither except it water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, and give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my Word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, except it accomplish that which I please and make the thing where unto I sent it prosper."

Although it is difficult to imagine the Quantum Covariant Field assuming such a personal stance, it is equally difficult to imagine that it produced intentional beings which can't find their intentionality within it.

Schaya moves on from ontology to epistemology, once again using philosophical language that is rather modern. He starts from a very Kantian point: 

“. thought is the psychic and rational mirror of all intelligible things, a mirror which never becomes what it reflects...This dualism in thought is the cause of doubt and error...Truth cannot be discovered by thought alone."

Richard Rorty's 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature points out precisely the same problems with the 'mirror analogy' that does Schaya, and then goes on to dissolve rather than resolve the problem, as does Schaya. Remarkably, Schaya also grounds his analysis not in some abstract principle of truth but in the human community itself:

"The only truth and only reality thus corresponds, under as many sacred forms, to the various comprehensions and temperaments of the great 'types' of the human collectivity."

Rorty would likely agree; Leibniz certainly would, as also Jurgen Habermas. Epistemology is ultimately a communal or, more precisely, a political undertaking.

There is also a striking affinity between Schaya and 20th century mathematical philosophy. Kabbalah has a strong tradition of the 'missing' elements. The first tablets taken down by Moses from Mt. Sinai and destroyed because of the golden calf are missing, presumed hidden by God. Similarly, there is a mythical missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet which is scattered but hidden throughout the Torah. These absences imply the permanent incompleteness of the interpretations of reality. Reality in Kabbalah is very much oriented toward numbers, which also signify attributes of God. The Gödel Incompleteness Theorem (that no formal mathematical system can contain its own axioms), therefore, is implied by Kabbalah.

The hiddenness of the divine word, its presence through absence as it were, also has another unexpected referent: the Christian Gospel of Mark. In Mark, there is frequent admonition regarding the secrecy of Jesus's message and role (e.g. Mark 4:12; 5:43) which is ignored as a matter of course (e.g. Mark 7:36). Kabbalah is also treated as secret with commentaries connecting to scripture: "The Haggadic Midrashim form the link between Talmudic or public instruction and the secret teaching of the Kabbalah." So, in both cases the secret is in fact public, an open secret but still secret because only those who are pre-disposed can understand the meaning of what is being said. In Mark those who are so prepared include the demons as well as the soldier guarding Christ's crucified body but not his disciples. The suggestion of Kabbalistic secrecy may similarly indicate a sort of 'democratisation' of spiritual understanding beyond Talmudic experts. 

Modern semiology, the study of signs, contends that there is neither a definable beginning nor end to language and the facility human beings have for interpretation of signs. This is also a contention of Kabbalah when it refers to the "...infinite chain of interpretations from Moses onwards...ultimately connecting Adam and the Messiah." When combined with the idea that there are missing elements in revelation, this contention is explained as a necessity: "The entire creation is an illusory projection of the transcendental aspects of God into the 'mirror' of his immanence. The Zohar notes, in fact, that the verb 'baro', 'to create', implies the idea of 'creating an illusion'... but it nonetheless is an illusion that contains fragments of reality." The clear implication is that even infinite interpretation will still contain illusory perceptions and conclusions.

Many of these themes - hiddenness, secrecy, incompleteness, infinite interpretability - are also themes in the modern philosophy of language. Wittgenstein for example seems on occasion to be quoting from Kabbalistic texts: " I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one." "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." Or even "The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is." When Schaya claims "The objective reality of The Sefirot is their indivisible infinity, their unlimited unity, which implies that every divine aspect is identified with the totality of God," it is unlikely Wittgenstein would have demurred.

So, it seems it is possible to balk at Schaya's, or anyone else's, contention that he is describing what 'really is'. Among other things this would appear self-contradictory in Kabbalah which concedes the ineffability of reality. But his lesser claim that the world is knowable only incrementally, tentatively, and with the assistance of an external agency, identified in Kabbalah as Ein Sof - the nameless, endless being - is a lot more compelling. To quote Wittgenstein one final time, "An entire mythology is stored within our language.” Kabbalah is a method for entering into the warehouse that is language.

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