Suckling at My Mother's Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism

Chapter 2: Suckling the Divine Overflow in Early Kabbalah

Chapter 2 Suckling the Divine Overflow in Early Kabbalah “Suckling at my mother’s breasts” (Song of Songs 8:1). And you will receive suckling from the place of my suckling, [from this place] which is the spirit of the living God. —Rabbi Ezra of Gerona’s Commentary on the Song of Songs 8:11 This chapter looks at three kabbalistic texts from the late twelfth through the early thirteenth centuries. In these works, the image of God as a nursing mother takes shape as part of an emerging mystical theology. As in the previous chapter’s rabbinic literature, the texts apply suckling imagery to the process of spiritual transmission. The early kabbalists, however, divert the metaphor from its human context and instead apply it to the sefirot, the kabbalistic divine gradations that express God’s inner life. Rather than images of a child suckling spirituality from its mother or a man suckling knowledge from the Torah, in Kabbalah the suckling metaphor describes God’s flow of life-giving energy through the sefirotic system and into the human world. In this context, the suckling-as-spiritual-transmission metaphor no longer emphasizes physical, spiritual, and intellectual lineage. Instead, breastfeeding ’s connotations of nurture, sustenance, and dependence express sefirotic intimacy and humanity’s close connection to the divine. The texts presented in this chapter—Isaac the Blind’s Commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, the early kabbalistic volume Sefer ha-Bahir, and Ezra of Gerona’s Commentary on the Song of Songs—reveal exegetical dynamics and theological concerns that prefigure Sefer ha-Zohar’s emotionally 39 40 Suckling at My Mother’s Breasts rich breastfeeding imagery.2 The nursing divine does not emerge fully in these texts. In fact, it is only with the latest work, Ezra of Gerona ’s kabbalistic Song of Songs interpretation, that feminine imagery is clearly linked to the suckling metaphor. Isaac the Blind, who taught Ezra, uses suckling in an abstract, though richly nuanced, manner. The earliest of these works, Sefer ha-Bahir, does not contain divine nursing imagery at all. Instead, it applies milk imagery to Torah transmission and emotions later associated with spiritual suckling. Despite the image’s incomplete presentation in these texts, they bridge the gap between rabbinic literature’s human suckling imagery and the Zohar’s divine breastfeeding by opening thematic issues central to the nursing mother’s later use as a relational model for thinking about God. Two thematic developments set the stage for this transition. The first, evident in Isaac the Blind and Ezra of Gerona’s work, reconfigures the suckling metaphor as a way of explaining the sefirotic system’s complex, interdependent nature and its relationship to humanity. Connected by the divine overflow (often called shefa‘), each sefirah receives God’s energy from those above and all are bound together by partaking in this divine life process. Human beings are also connected to this system, receiving the overflow from God as it passes through the sefirot and into the human world. Nursing imagery helps to define the sefirotic and human relationships as nurturing, sustaining, and interdependent . The second thematic development is suckling’s association with the affective language that provides nuance for this divine relational model. Suckling’s positive emotional attributes are not fully developed in these works, but are clearly implied in both Sefer ha-Bahir and Ezra of Gerona’s Commentary. Although these writings allow an understanding of the exegetical and poetic processes that contribute to the Zohar’s image of God as a nursing mother, a full discussion of the image’s cultural context will be deferred to chapter 4, after the weight of textual evidence has been presented . Determining breastfeeding’s social, intellectual, and emotional implications for twelfth and thirteenth-century Jews helps to further define the relationship between God and humanity that these texts encourage. The works in this chapter cannot be used to fill cultural space; they are obscure even to themselves. They can, however, provide a view of the thinking that underlies Kabbalah’s nursing mother image, pointing toward its later development. Suckling the Divine Overflow in Early Kabbalah 41 Isaac the Blind’s Spiritual Suckling Rabbi Isaac the Blind (ca 1165–ca 1235) was one of the most influential Provençal mystics, and his teachings provide some of the earliest kabbalistic sources available.3 He was the first known kabbalist to use suckling imagery as a way to clarify the relationship between...