Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation by Moshe Idel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Better Driving

While driving a car, it’s impossible to focus on the windscreen and the scenery at the same time. It’s the same with experience and the language we use to express it. Focus on the experience of perceiving a text or a conversation, and the language itself, even to oneself, becomes invisible. Focus on the language, and the experience of the text or conversation becomes sterile as the words themselves are disconnected from everything except other words, other spots on the windscreen. Without language, the experience is mute, perhaps even impossible.

Language is, in other words, anything but a neutral conduit of our experience. It is, like the experience of the scenery or the text, namely a something. And as something, it carries with it all sorts of baggage: personal associations, historical references, social judgments, and untold depths of nuance. All this means that the scenery is mixed with the windscreen in unpredictable ways. Dust and rain obscures our vision. A sudden crack from a thrown pebble distracts us. An annoying fleck of bird poop resists all attempts at removal. These things get in the way of what’s ‘really there’, namely the scenery - and other traffic - which is what is of vital interest. And consequently language also makes for somewhat diverse interpretations of literary texts. Language conceals and distracts while it communicates.

Philosophers and literary critics have spent much time and intellectual effort trying to understand the connections and disconnections between language and our experience of the world. But whatever success they’ve had - and it’s not really that much - is tempered by the fact that they’re focussed on the windscreen. That leaves the rest of us none the wiser about the effect of language on our experience. It tells us a great deal about textual windscreens - grammar, technique, vocabulary - but not very much about how to read - or drive - more intelligently.

Mystical literature like the Kabbalah has a very different approach to the problem of language and experience. Unlike philosophical or critical analysis, Kabbalah is a mode of thinking which doesn’t accept the presumption that language and experience are different things. Both are so intimately connected that the presumption in a sense causes more problems than it solves. By dissolving each into the other, Kabbalah starts from a unique perspective, that of the reader - or driver - one might say.

In Kabbalah, as Idel documents, two sets of processes go on simultaneously. The first is very similar to what is called ‘deconstruction’ in modern philosophy - essentially the ‘making strange’ of language itself. Kabbalah in a sense defocuses attention from the windscreen of language. Language is alienated or, as Idel terms it, arcanized. These processes elaborate “secretive understandings of the canonical texts understood as pointing to these realms in allusive ways: anagrammatic, numerical, allegorical, or symbolic.” I suppose this is not unlike probing the chemical or atomic composition of the glass of the windscreen. But the analogy starts to break down because Kabbalah is also a kind of poetry, and so difficult to connect productively to analysis of a windscreen.

The second set of processes is what philosophers call hermeneutics, essentially the re-interpretation of experience in terms of the arcana of deconstruction. It involves deliberate re-construction and “consists in the emergence of complex exegetical systems that present specific methods to decode the arcana believed to be concealed within the canonical texts.” This in turn involves imagination, an ability to connect the previously unconnected in interesting ways. Herman Hesse’s masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), describes how this occurs. All experience, all texts, all symbolic representations are fair game; anything can be connected with anything else to reveal surprising relationships.

Re-construction is based on an interesting central presumption: that there are secrets to be found. “Secrets are commensurable to the methods that will resolve the enigma implied in the secrets. On the other hand, secrets should be imagined to exist, otherwise the resort to eccentric exegetical techniques, without the trust that something inherent in the text or in the mind of the author is available, would become a hollow game.” Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) traces the consequences of this presumption, which is essential to modern information theory, in deciphering signals from an alien world. In Kabbalah, however, the sender is identical to the receiver, not some extra-terrestrial civilisation. Kabbalah, in other words, is about de-ciphering secrets about and within oneself not understanding messages from outer space or some other dimension.

Idel places Kabbalah in the historical context of Judaism as part of its “Renomadization” or Diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This is important because it literally displaces the deity from a fixed location to not merely the text of a sacred book, but also to the reader of the sacred text. “In the postbiblical period God is conceived of much less as penetrating reality at His free will, using the apparatus of the Tabernacle or the Temple, than as constantly present within the literal signs of a portable book.” Signs are of course nothing without a sign-knower, that is, an interpreter.

The implication is that God is to be found most readily within oneself, a conclusion remarkably congruent with that of the 19th century Christianity of theologians like Frederick Schleiermacher, or for that matter with the psychological theories of Freud and Jung. In short, God, if he is allowed, speaks constantly through the thought of the individual and in the language of his social milieu. In semiotic terms, the sign, the signified and the signifier are considered as one. This is one way to understand Idel’s title of ‘absorption’. Kabbalah absorbs everything into itself. Hearing the divine voice, however, is not merely a matter of listening, of absorbing text; it demands the active work of de- and re-construction. This involves discipline as well as practice. Sort of like driving a car.

For more on Kabbalah and literary interpretation see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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