The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment

One of the many contributions that feminist scholarship has made to the academic study of culture and society is a heightened emphasis on the body for a proper understanding of the construction of human subjectivities. To be sure, speculation on the body is as ancient as recorded human history, but the approaches sponsored by contemporary feminist theories are distinctive insofar as they insist on the need to consider embodiment from the vantage point of gender and sexual difference. Like other disciplines in the humanities, the study of religion has been transformed by the feminist concern with engendered embodiment. In the specific case of Judaism, there has been significant progress as well in the application of feminist criticism to the study of this complex religious phenomenon, though predictably one can still detect resistance on the part of some Judaic scholars to the adoption of this method as a legitimate critical tool to engage the past; in fact, in some cases, one encounters ignorance laced with outright hostility, a posture that seems to me far worse and morally reprehensible than simple resistance.

An area where the insights of feminist criticism are especially applicable is the esoteric wisdom cultivated in the late Middle Ages, even though it is quite likely that there is some credence to the claims of kabbalists that their teachings and practices were older. An essential component of the kabbalistic worldview is the anthropomorphic representation of the divine to the point that the priestly notion of the image of God by means of which Adam was created is applied by kabbalists to limbs of the supernal human form configured in the imagination. Moreover, just as Adam is described as having been created as male and female, so the imaginal body of the sefirotic potencies is portrayed in terms of a gender binary, with the female, emblematic of the capacity to receive, linked to the left side of judgment, and the male, emblematic of the potential to bestow, linked to the right side of mercy. The erotic language embraced by kabbalists, especially conspicuous in the zoharic anthology which began to crystallize in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as in the material produced by the disciples of Isaac Luria in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is anchored in this decidedly embodied conception of the divine. It is thus startling that the majority of kabbalah scholars have not availed themselves of the most useful contemporary theoretical models to explicate the nature of embodiment enunciated in medieval Jewish mystical spirituality. Many prominent scholars have been critical of my attempt to utilize feminist theory to analyze the construction of gender in kabbalistic sources, and have thus betrayed a retrograde hermeneutic that masks ideological agenda in the guise of philological exactitude. Instead of exploring the discourse of body in a theoretically sophisticated manner, most scholars of kabbalah interpret bodily images in an overly simplistic way, decoding gender references in anatomical terms without appreciating the complex relationship between sex as a biological demarcation and gender as a cultural construction.

In this essay, I would like to explore the issue of embodiment from the vantage point of the body of the text and the text of the body. For medieval kabbalists, in consonance with contemporaneous patterns of Christian and Islamic piety, but especially the former, the body was a site of tension, the locus of sensual and erotic pleasure, on the one hand, and the earthly pattern of God's image, the corporeal manifestation of the incorporeal reality, on the other. Given the intractable state of human consciousness as embodied, it should come as no surprise that, in spite of the negative portrayal of the body and repeated demands of preachers and homilists to escape from the clasp of carnality, in great measure due to the impact of Platonic psychology and metaphysics on the spiritual formation of the intellectual elite, the flesh continued to serve as the prima materia out of which ritual gestures, devotional symbols, and theological doctrines were fashioned. There is, however, a decisive difference that distinguishes Christianity from the...