Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death

Preface

PREFACE This book is based on the Taubman Lectures that I delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, February–March 2001. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor David Biale, who first approached me about preparing these lectures, and to Professor Daniel Boyarin, who followed up by extending an o‹cial invitation on behalf of the Program in Jewish Studies at Berkeley. The time I spent on the Berkeley campus was a turning point on my journey, both personally and professionally. The goal of my lectures was to illumine the nexus of time, truth, and death elicited from the symbolic imaginary of the Jewish esoteric tradition known by both practitioners and scholars as kabbalah. The inspiration and framework for my exploration, however, was the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, “truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet: alef, mem, and tau.1 These letters serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time: past, present, and future. Accordingly, I dedicated each of the three lectures to one of these letters, with the aim of elucidating the corresponding aspect of temporality. In revising the lectures for publication, I have added two introductory chapters. The first outlines the philosophical sources that have shaped my own hermeneutical understanding of time, which, invariably, entails a temporal understanding of hermeneutics. The second offers a conception of temporality, culled from a wide range of kabbalistic texts, that serves as the backdrop for the specific analyses in the three chapters on alef/past, mem/present, and tau/future. I drew the material for my textual reasoning in the lectures almost exclusively xi from two anthologies that can be viewed as the bookends of the earliest period of kabbalistic literary activity, the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries: Sefer ha-Bahir and Sefer ha-Zohar, the former also transmitted as Midrash Rabbi Nehuniah ben ha-Qanah and the latter as Midrash Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai. The choice of these pseudepigraphic texts—here I bracket the complex question of multiple layers of composition and redaction discernible in the literary landscape of both works, though it should be clear to the reader that I presume in neither case the existence of an “original” text that may be recovered or reconstructed by the canons of critical scholarship—is deliberate: the midrashic disposition exhibited in the bahiric parables and zoharic homilies provides a particularly useful prism through which to consider a narratological conception of temporality that defies the doctrinaire distinction between truth and appearance, reality and imagination. To elucidate this point fully I mention a comment made by Theodor Adorno in a letter written April 19, 1939, to Gershom Scholem, thanking him for sending a copy of Die Geheimnisse der Tora (1936). Adorno said of Scholem’s translation of a zoharic passage in this work: “The extract you have translated is an interpretation of the history of creation as a ‘symbol.’ However, the language into which the symbol is translated is itself a symbolic language, which calls to mind Kafka’s statement that all his works were symbolic, but only in the sense that they were to be interpreted by new symbols in an endless series of steps.”2 Adorno correctly understood that in presuming the parabolic nature of truth— an orientation that resonates with the symbolic imaginary proffered by medieval kabbalists—Kafka closed the gap separating fact and fiction and thereby opened the horizon of textuality to the measure of incommensurability, the limitless limit that delimits the interpretative standpoint from which a reader may summon a hermeneutical criterion of objectivity that avoids the extremes of absolute relativism, on the one hand, and relative absolutism, on the other. Critical to abiding in the sway of this stance is the discernment that language, poetically conceived as inherently metaphorical, is always a gesture of translation , a joining of disparate sign-codes rather than a harnessing of similar ones.3 In the particular cultural ambiance of medieval kabbalah, language performs this function by expressing the inexpressible, rendering the invisible visible. The symbol, therefore, brings the unknown into relation with the known, but without reducing the difference that binds the two incongruities into a selfsame identity.4 The obfuscation between story and event displayed in Sefer ha-Bahir, and even more extremely in Sefer ha-Zohar, represents an embellishment of the rabbinic parable to the point that one can no longer distinguish between signifier and signified, mashal and nimshal.5 In the kabbalistic mind...