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2. CIRCUMCISION, VISION OF GOD, AND TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION: FROM MIDRASHIC TROPETO MYSTICAL SYMBOL
- State University of New York Press
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• 2 • CIRCUMCISION, VISION OF GOD, AND TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION: FROM MIDRASHIC TROPE TO MYSTICAL SYMBOL Before and after the word comes the sign and, in the sign, the void where we grow. Only the sign can be seen, being a wound. But the eyes lie. -Edmond Jabes, The Book ofQuestions The use of sexual imagery to depict religious experience is a wellattested fact in the history of world religions. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that the seeing of God, or a God-like presence , is described in religious texts especially by means of language derived from human sexuality. Such formulation, of course, is not strange to any of the major religious traditions in the Occident or in the Orient. It is often the case, moreover, that especially the mystics of particular cultures express themselves precisely in this modality. To experience God involves a state of ecstatic union akin to the union of male and female partners in sexual embrace. This chapter is a study of one particular motif related to this larger issue in the phenomenology of religious experience. We will examine an idea developed in the Zohar, the main sourcebook of thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish mysticism,! concerning the correlation between two apparently unrelated phenomena: circumcision and the ability to see the Shekhinah, the divine Presence. The causal nexus between these two phenomena is suggested by earlier rabbinic passages but is given an elaborate treatment in the theosophic system of 29 30 CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE the Zohar. As we shall see, implicit in the zoharic discussion is the notion that mystical experience involves a type of sexual union between the initiate and the divine. Beholding the face of the Shekhinah becomes in the Zohar an actual embrace or penetration of the mystic into the divine feminine. Given the normative halakhic sexual mores, it follows that only one who is circumcised can have such a visionary experience.2 Circumcision is thus an act of opening that not only ushers the circumcised into the o.wenantal community of God, but places the individual into an immediate-visual-relationship to the divine. The phenomenological recip:ocity between the opening of circumcision and the visionary expenence of God functions in the Zo11ar as a model for divine-human relations in another way, though in this case as well the sexual implications are evident. It is stated explicitly that only the one who is circumcised is permitted to study the Torah.' The underlying notion here, as I shall show, is the congruity between textual interpretation and circumcision. Yet, one may weJI ask, what is it in the nature of hermeneutics that aJIows the zoharic authorship4 to link it specifically with circumcision? Or, to invert the question, what is in the nature of circumcision that leads the author of the Zohar to limit textual study of the Torah to one who is circumcised? Although a complete answer to this will not be forthcoming until the latter stages of this analysis, we may 01JUine in a preliminary fashion the elements that serve as the basis for this conception. Circumcision is not simply an incision of the male sex organ;" it is an inscription, a notation, a marking.(' This marking, in turn, is the semiological seal, as it were, that: represents the divine imprint on the human body.7 The physical opening, therefore, is the seal that, in its symbolic valence, corresrond~; to an ontological opening within God. Hence, circumcision provides the author of the Zohar with a typology of writing/readingl that: is at the same time a typology of mystical experience understood in a sl'xual vein. The opening of circumcision, in the final analysis, is transformed in the Zohar into a symbol for the task of exegesis. The appropriateness of this symbolization lies in the fact that the relation of the visionary to the Shekllinah engendered by the opening of the flesh is precisely the relationship of the critic or exegete to the text engendered by the semiological seal. This relationship is simultaneously interpretative and visionary. Through exegesis, that which was concealed, hidden, closed-in a word, esoteric-becc·mes opened, disclosed, manifestin a word, exoteric. The uncovering of the phallus is conceptually and structurally parallel to the di5closure of the text. The significance of this dynamic for understanding the literary genesis of the Zohnr [54.175.70.29] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:14 GMT) CIRCUMCISION, VISION OF GOD, AND INTERPRETATION 31 should not be ignored.9 The closing...