The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah

CHAPTER TWO. Aspects of Meaning in Kabbalistic Ritual: With Special Reference to the Case of Shabbat

CHAPTER TWO Aspects of Meaning in Kabbalistic Ritual: With Special Reference to the Case of Shabbat A PROGRAMMATIC INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTERS 2 THROUGH 4 In recent years anthropologists and historians of religion alike have devoted much energy to the study of ritual: its symbolic structure , societal function, and the reasons for its powerful ability to mobilize desire and create belief. For it is through such concrete acts that religious conviction generally emerges. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted, "[people] attain their faith as they portray it.//l Within the study of Judaism, new attention has been drawn to the activity of the theosophical Kabbalists, who have been well-known for their creativity in symbol-making and exegesis, and increasingly, for the extraordinary richness of their ritual life. In the ensuing three chapters we shall discuss some of the theoretical issues informing Kabbalistic ritual in general, and Sabbath ritual in particular. We shall focus on two broad hermeneutical questions throughout: what do these rituals mean, and how do they work? To wit: how does a given ritual create a certain sacred order and project it onto the cosmos and into the life of the devotee? What sorts of meanings, explicit and implicit, are stored in the myths that underlie the ritual?2 What sacred stories are told about society and cosmos, about the nature of being Jewish? What performance factors influence the ritual's meaning and efficacy, its transformative power? In fine, how does ritual construct a world3 that seems uniquely real to the devotee and legitimate his role in it? Viewed as a whole, chapters 2 through 4 constitute a kind of triptych, an extended meditation on the nature of Sabbath ritual and the problematics of its interpretation. The chapters assume the following structure. In chapter 2, to orient the reader, a kind of typology of Kabbalistic ritual is provided, placing special emphasis on the Sabbath-setting. Kabbalistic ritual is distinguished, briefly, from its Rabbinic precursors, as innovations and subtle shifts in emphasis are 186 Aspects of Meaning in Kabbalistic Ritual 187 noted4; then, the ontology underlying the life of mi~vot is elucidated and the consequences of ritual activity, charted, all as seen by the Kabbalists themselves. The next two chapters are more concentrated and form the heart of our inquiry. The focus is on those rituals located at Sabbath's margins: the rites of Preparation (chap. 3) and Separation (chap. 4), of entry and closure. As rituals of considerable complexity and dramatic urgency, they contain a wealth of interesting material from a theoretical point of view. All rituals are transformative agents to one degree or another, and these rituals-by dint of their liminal setting-are ontological transformers par excellence, dramatizing and modulating the shift from one modality-one cosmic order-to another . The analyses of these radical transformations will be informed both by the typology presented in chapter 2 and by some of the methodological approaches pioneered in the History of Religions and symbolic anthropology. A TYPOLOGY OF KABBALISTIC RITUAL Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Ritual: Some Contrasts Until recently, ritual studies have tended to be focused on nonliterate cultures. To this day, Kabbalistic ritual has received relatively little scholarly attention from historians of religionS; yet Kabbalistic ritual is a significant area of study not only because of its symbolic richness and the insight it affords into varying types of mystical experience, but also because it is largely a mythic re-reading of the rituals of a highly sophisticated and literate (i.e., Rabbinic) culture. Unlike the Lurianic mystics, the classical Kabbalists developed only a small number of new rites to expressly dramatize the mythic elements in their thought. Their creativity is primarily one of revision and re-casting, of "uncovering" new meanings in the old praxis. As Gershom Scholem has noted: "The existing ritual was not changed. It was taken over more or less intact,"6 enabling the Kabbalists to remain within the traditional nomos even as they transformed it. To express this in other words: outer praxis remained relatively constant while the inner landscape and underlying "story" was significantly altered. In this way, the Kabbalists' re-reading of Tradition was both conservative and boldly innovative, a classic case of "new wine in old skins," i.e., of religious revitalization. For this reason, Kabbalistic ritual is an excellent point of departure for studying 188 Aspects of Meaning in Kabbalistic Ritual the tension between continuity and change that necessarily suffuses a religious Tradition.7 The scope of the Kabbalists...