Genesis 1:1b

Chapter 3, pp. 114-118, I:16a

Since Chapter 2, there have been references to the “enlightened” (הַמַּשְׂכִּילִים, ha-maskilim). The Pritzker edition explains (footnote 14, p. 109) that this term can refer to “philosophers and kabbalists” but is here used to refer to “the letters [consonants] and vowels, as well as to the sefirot.” In this metaphorical usage, then, as the concealed radiance of Ein Sof and Hokhmah moves into the lower sefirot it becomes revealed, “enlightening” the sefirot as a whole. Okay. But always a second meaning is implied: the kabbalists themselves or, more generally, the spiritual adepts–teachers and gurus of the highest order–”those who lead many to righteousness.” This sets up a three-way parallel between the event of creation itself (which, as we saw, is eternally renewing and recurrent); the movement of truth into the world, ultimately in the form of the “letters and vowels” that appear in Torah; and the teaching of Torah as its gurus “enlighten” their students. We might symbolize this as the truth itself; the written Torah; and the oral Torah. All parallel processes, all mutually interaffecting, all one and at the same time infinitely various and ever exquisitely attuned to the ceaselessly dynamic flux of the cosmos. Indeed, these intertwined processes constitute the flux of the universe.

In this portion we extend this metaphor through three different prisms: music (chant), Solomon’s pavilion, and the sky. The melody of the chants, which by the time of the Zohar were inscribed into the Hebrew text of the Torah itself (in form of cantillation marks, a shorthand to indicate melodic figures and cadences), “illuminate the letters and vowels,” in recapitulation of the radiance emanating from the upper sefirot to the lower. Melody bathes the text in light.

The Song of Songs, a book of the Tanakh attributed to Solomon, is often interpreted as a love song between the people of Israel and God. The erotic epicenter of this love becomes Solomon’s “pavilion,” a reference (according to some) to Solomon’s temple, the original temple in Jerusalem. The Zohar re-sets this love affair on sefirotic terrain, between Shekhinah and Tif’eret, and so it becomes part of the emanation of God that passes through the sefirotic structure, becoming visible and concrete in the form of the pavilion itself, the Temple, here represented by “the heavens” of the first verse of Genesis. The enlightened ones are visualized as the “pillars and sockets” of this pavilion. In reference to this, a pun of considerable metaphorical power is deployed. Rabbi Sim’on says, “Happy is מַשְׂכִּיל (maskil, one who considers) the poor,” quoting Psalm 41:2 (in the linked translation (JPS, 2023) it is rendered, “Happy is someone who is thoughtful of the wretched”). So “enlightened” equates to one who considers or is thoughtful of the poor or wretched. One can thus read this as suggesting that the very pillars of Judaism rest on consideration of the systematically disempowered. This constitutes and defines any spiritual attainment of value. The ethical meaning could not be more clear. An Infinitist would have to acclaim: hear, hear!

The final metaphor of this section raises the sky “above the heads of the living being” or “illumining the heads of the living being”–those heads, don’t you know, belonging to the enlightened ones, radiating the radiance they have received from on high. This section quotes from Ezekiel 1:22, in which the prophet describes his vision of a sudden “stormy wind” and a “flashing fire surrounded by radiance” where, “above the heads of the [Seraphim] was a form: an expanse, with an awe-inspiring gleam as of crystal, was spread out above their heads.” Unlike earlier images associated with the radiance of God’s emanation, this one crackles with volatile power and fearsome might. Revelation, as we find again and again throughout the Hebrew Bible, exposes one to mortal threat and terror. The radiance overpowers and blinds even as it illuminates. We might say the same of truth itself: it is unavoidable and necessary; it is liberating; and it spares no one.