The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition by Peter Cole
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Call To Nothing

All poetry strains language. The poetry of Kabbalah breaks language into pieces and reconstructs it. Kabbalah does this by treating language as holy, as an emanation of the divine, indeed as infinite variations of the Names of God. By using language properly, that is by allowing it to overwhelm oneself in abject submission, language breaks the bonds we place on it. Meanings are unmoored; words float about forming a new context; language no longer communicates, it removes itself and becomes angelic in order to reveal.

Cole claims (rightly I think) that Kabbalah is the real progenitor of modern literary techniques like deconstruction: “... long before Frenchified notions of trace and erasure took hold, a Kabbalistic poetics was drawing attention to aspects of language-in-action that slip readers into (as D. H. Lawrence put it in a wholly different context) a “dawn-kaleidoscopic” world of ramifying meaning where absence and presence evoke one another.” But these secular techniques are limited since they can only produce further interpretations and not glimpses of reality.

One way in which Kabbalah evokes reality is by hiding the Name of God within a poem (for example in the cumulative first letters of each line). The one who recites it is unaware, therefore, of his linguistic capture by the divine. Kabbalah also frequently uses litany towards the same end, as in the piece Windows of Worship:

“And Moses asked Metatron . . . What are these windows [of the first heaven]? And he said to him, These windows are:
Windows of worship
Windows of beckoning
Windows of weeping
Windows of joy
Windows of satiety
Windows of hunger
Windows of penury
Windows of wealth
Windows of peace
Windows of war
Windows of bearing
Windows of birth
and he saw—
windows without number and end”

Unlike typical Christian litanies, it may be noted that Kabbalah is not full of unremitting positivity. For example, the ‘windows’ above are of unpleasantness, even horrors, as well as of joyful things. Contraries and contradictions are embedded within almost everyone of these poems. This culminates in what Cole (and D.H. Lawrence) calls “theoeroticism,” the divine sex life in which the eternal masculine and feminine aspects of the divine are continually ‘at it’ creating the world.

Ultimately Kabbalah tells us what modern linguistic, philosophical and psychological research has only begun to understand, namely that we are trapped in the language that we thought we merely used. Cole quotes a fourth or fifth century text which is typical:

[The angel] Metatron said to me:
Come and I will show you
the letters by which heaven and earth were created;
the letters by which seas and rivers were created;
the letters by which mountains and hills were created;
the letters by which trees and grasses were created;
the letters by which stars and constellations were created . . .
the letters by which the throne of glory and the wheels of the chariot were created . . .
the letters by which wisdom and understanding, knowledge and intelligence, humility and rectitude were created, by which the whole world is sustained.”

The poetry of Kabbalah provides a sort of spiritual theory of the world, a theory which I find more inspiring as well as more accurate than the scientific theories of the Big Bang. In this spiritual theory, creation is shown to be what it has always been, a product of our ability to speak and write:

“He called to Nothing—which split;
to existence—pitched like a tent;
to the world—as it spread beneath sky.”
With desire’s span He established the heavens,
as His hand coupled the tent of the planets
with loops of skill,
weaving creation’s pavilion,
the links of His will
reaching the lowest
rung of creation—
the curtain
at the outermost edge of the spheres . . .
Who could make sense of creation’s secrets,
of your raising up over the ninth sphere
the circle of mind,
the sphere of the innermost chamber?
The tenth to the Lord is always sacred:
This is the highest ring,
transcending all elevation
and beyond all ideation.”

That tenth ring is there but always just out of reach, always the object of search, but never attained. It is after all Nothing, Ein Sof, the Void - more commonly known as Reality. Nevertheless, the call to nothing gets a generally better response in literature than in science.*

* I realise that it an overstatement. Nevertheless it is frequently the case that scientists do not recognise the ultimate hopelessness of their purported task to ‘find reality.’ The Spanish-American philosopher Miguel de Unamuno summarised the situation metaphorically for mathematics: “I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!” This appears to me to be the universal human tragedy, the very Original Sin wherein, according to biblical sources, God allowed mankind the power of language which He did not create.

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