Our case study method of the different Judaism allows us add things to each of the Judaisms we have already studied by tacking back at appropriate moments. Our initial analysis of mystical Judaism--which Scholem refers to as "a new force in Judaism"--is just such an occasion. By comparing Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism to this radically different Judaism that emerges in its midst we have a new purchase of what is so distinctive about both Judaisms.

Scholem notes the ways in which the Kabbalah amounts to a remythologization within the heart of a decisively anti-mythological Rabbinic Judaism. So it is proper for us to pause to consider myth and anti-myth as categories of understanding religious thought and behavior.

Scholem, in accord with most scholars, sees the Bible itself as an oppositional text. "In opposition to the pantheistic unity of God, cosmos, and man in myth, in opposition to the nature myths of the Near-Eastern religions, Judaism aimed at a radical separation of the three realms; and, above all, the gulf between the Creator and the creature was regarded as fundamentally unbridgeable" (p. 88)

Just this separation is what we mean when the God of the Bible and the Rabbis is described as transcendent: He is beyond anything that is creaturely, beyond nature, unbound by time or history, beyond the category of space.

In the mythological religions of ancient Israel's neighbors, nature was seen as charged with divine force. Indeed it was in the very rhythms of the natural world that one came to understand the births of the divinity each spring, their waxing powers over the year, and their waning powers as nature each year died, only to be reborn each spring. This seasonal cycle of death and rebirth of nature disclosed the birth the dying and the rising of the divinities themselves. Thus in the Ancient Near East the myth of the creation of the universe, a cosmogony, that is an account of the making of the cosmos, was also a theogony, an account of the formation of the divinities, their lives, their deaths, their annual resurrections.

For mythological cultures therefore nature was the arena in which the divinities were disclosed in all their power and in all their majesty.

Israel's break with this form of religious thinking (and ritual practice) was decisive. The one God that was worshipped was beyond nature, himself unnatural. Nature was his handiwork, and the account of creation was strictly cosmogonic without a shred of theogony to it. Whereas the ancient myths would begin with elaborate narratives of the coming into being of the divinities and only towards the end would a world and the humans appear--almost as an after-thought--in the Bible there is no such account of the birth of YHWH. He appears from the beginning and without introduction: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth…" He enters the scene without a story of his birth, without an account of his genealogy or parentage, and most unusual, without a female consort. The Biblical text for its first readers must have been regarded as somehow defective, missing just the kinds of narratives that such an audience would be familiar with in a Creation story.

Though not bound by history, clearly this divinity had no reservations about appearing as a figure in it, indeed the central figure. Like nature, history was ordered and carefully designed by this God. He left both nature and history to the humans, a garden-world to tend for a couple that had time on their hands. Too much time even in the short period that they lived in this earthly paradise, it appears. Within a few verses of narration the first human has defied the one rule of the house and got himself and his new bride expelled from the garden into a much harsher environment. And so begins "the generations of man," (Gen. 5:10) the account of human history as a series of "begettings" in which each new generation seems to outdo the previous one in introducing some new ways of subverting the divine design in history.

Each new act of disordering produced only more interventions by God into history to set things aright: He tries a new creation after the flood, but things degenerate immediately with a drunken Noah whose son discovers him naked, typical of the sexual pollution that along with violence characterize humanity's inclination to disorder. He selects out one people for his blessings, but they seem no different from the rest of humanity. Indeed, they seem so defiant and wayward that the manage to get God to re-entering history with such regularity that one wonders how he possibly could get the rest of his work done in this and perhaps other universes. But of course we never know what he might be doing on his own time, for he is disclosed only within history, and this is the sole way in which he can become known.

The narrative both critically judges and yet seems to take pleasure in all of these unhappy goings-on. For it is just these occasions when God must come down into the historic realm that one gets some disclosure of what might otherwise turn out to be a rather distant, supremely transcendent Lord. Human foibles and divine meddling to set things aright make for some splendid stories and delightful storytelling, the source of the narrator's pleasure. Thus does the transcendent God who creates nature but is not part of it get revealed in a history which he has a major role in shaping. Thus does history, not nature, become the realm of divine revelation in the monotheistic revolution in Israel. Much more than the notion of one God--for other religions are developing notions of a supreme high god--even more than the ethical values introduced in the Bible, quite noble, but not radically different from ethical developments in other cultures at time--it is this focus on God revealed in history that makes Israel's religion different from others at the time of its origins.

History, of course, the Bible does regard as the proper realm of the humans, and it is the human story--Israel's especially-- that is, disclosed in history. But God is around enough so that one can know a good deal about him that might otherwise be entirely obscured in mystery. For example, he takes pleasure in order (its his notion of "good"); he demands justice (indeed is willing to subscribe to being just himself as we see in his encounter with Abraham who demands that "the Judge of the whole universe do justice' (see Gen. 18:25). And for a distant divinity he is really quite susceptible to relationships, and he allows himself to enter into all sorts of them with various figures, most of them disappointing him to the point of rage. He might not be human, but spending as much time in the human realm of history seems to him quite caught up not only in human affairs but human affects: he has regrets, knows unhappiness, shows again and again a capacity for mercy and care, and like some fathers, has a short fuse once his patience-threshold has been passed. The Bible's authors, of course, are hardly naïve in telling stories that sometimes seem to us either quaint or just terribly "retro." This is a God that the biblical story makes available and familiar, not the God of the later philosophers that Scholem argues has become so purified of an anthropomorphism that he has become a mere concept not a living God.

And despite all the humanizing of this divinity, the Bible always preserves the sense of God's utter transcendence, his ultimate mystery. This God, concealed and revealed, mysterious and distant sometimes and at other times so close that he feels like a nudge, this kind of God is the hinge on which the religious revolution of the Bible swings from the monistic universe of myth, nature, fertility rites and magical ritual to this religion of historical narratives, rituals of remembering, holiness as separation. In opposing nature as the central arena of God's revelation, in making God so unnatural that he doesn't even have a consort to dally with, in producing this two-tiered universe in which God can come down but humans can never go up (the highest they get is to the peaks of mountain), the Bible and later the rabbis free up a space --the created world and history--that is not God-infused. It is in all these ways that we say that the Bible and the rabbis are anti-mythological.

Which brings us at last to the Kabbalistic re-mythologization of Judaism and what Scholem calls "the reappearance of a stratum of myth within Judaism itself" (p. 93). For Scholem, this "reappearance" has something of the quality of the return of the repressed to it. And here we can see the power, the dangers, the awesomeness of the mystical Judaism to which Scholem devoted his scholarly life. He is correct to refer to it as a form of religion that is almost always "paradoxical ", often "unintelligible" certainly "always surprising" sometimes "scandalous" in expressing itself "without restraint."

If the Bible substituted history for nature as the realm of God's overpowering revelations, than the Kabbalists replaced history with the depths of the soul as the charged inner world in which divine vitality and energy were manifested with all their sublime and terrible abilities to create and destroy. Scholem is picking up on the Kabbalists' own pre-occupation with the psyche, the soul, as that invisible, mysterious aspect of the human in which the most primitive human impulses along with divine cosmic forces fused and surged sometimes chaotically as the animating principles of life, erotic desire and creativity, evil and good, darkness and light.

Scholem sees the Kabbalah as sustaining Biblical oppositional thinking, except here the clash is within Judaism as an "revolt" against monotheistic tendencies to purify God, an "eruption of subterranean forces" within rationalistic Rabbinic medieval philosophy, "a repristination of myth that seems utterly incongruous in Jewish thinking" an uncovering "of the primordial religious impulses still latent in Judaism" that comes from "the primitive levels of human life." Here it is Judaism in opposition to Judaism. We have been arguing that Judaism at any given moment is contested. Here is one example how over its 2500-year history a later Judaism can vigorously contest an earlier formation, and yet, like the Kabbalah, argue itself as the "true" Judaism, and to its adherents seem properly conservative and traditional.

Scholem's focus on the psyche as the arena of divine revelation should not be confused with the ways in which some other contemporaries reduce this mysticism to a psychology alone. I think we would better understand the Kabbalah if we align ourselves with Scholem's reading of it--one I would suggest that is quite in line with the Kabbalists' own sense of what they were up to--as a profound descent into the dark mysteries of the human soul in which get disclosed cosmic and human secrets that are as sublimely arousing as our most erotic wet dreams, as awful and hazardous as our most fiendish nightmares. But what we have here is not psychology written in a theological language, but the sense that such entries into the inner precincts of the soul are the occasions for an encounter with the mysteries of creation, revelation and redemption.

Scholem strikes me as exactly right when he observes: "Many of the Kabbalists, we have seen, busied themselves with speculative and theological reinterpretation of such mythical thinking. But as interesting as such reinterpretation may be from the standpoint of the history of ideas, it cannot blind us to the psychic substance underlying the myths. In many cases, I am inclined to think, the speculative reformulation of myths was quite secondary even in the minds of those who engaged in it and served merely as an exoteric disguise for the mythical content which they looked upon as a holy mystery" (p. 109).

It should come as no surprise that some scholars imagined that Freud, that twentieth century archaeologist of the unconscious, was influenced by the Kabbalah. He was, perhaps, though in ways not really significant. (Carl Jung, of course is quite another matter and he always acknowledged his debt to Gnosticism, alchemy and the Kabbalah.) But scholars were taken by the parallels in these two systems--the Freudian and the Kabbalistic ones-- for in each one the excavation of the deepest layers of the human psyche reveal just those points in which utter madness and the most exalted mystical religious vision are so intertwined that to separate them only diminishes the revelation itself.

Just such a (con)fusion of psychotic dissociation with mystical illumination is not unusual in various mysticisms including the Kabbalah. The following testimony comes from a Kabbalist who had been doing serious meditation for some weeks and reports: "...behold, the letters took on in my eyes the shape of great mountains, strong trembling seized me and I could summon no strength, my hair stood on end, and it was as if I were not in this world. At once I fell down, for I no longer felt the least strength in any of my limbs. And behold, something resembling speech emerged from my heart and came to my lips and forced them to move. I thought--perhaps this is, God forbid, a spirit of madness that has entered into me? But behold, I saw it uttering wisdom. I said: 'This is indeed the spirit of wisdom.' "

As we shall be discussing below when we turn with Scholem to Kabbalistic rituals, these mystics were involved in theurgy, that is, in ritual practices that deserve the name magic. We are not talking about sleight-of hand here, nor do we use the term to degrade these practices as superstitious ones. We are focusing in on practices that are regarded as ones which have the power to produce change in the world.

More than likely the Kabbalists' sense of the theurgic power of ritual came from their own experiences with ritual meditation which resulted in profound changes in their own consciousness. Mysticism is not merely some set of ideas. It is an orientation to the world based on some radical changes in the very way of thinking. It is not so much what is thought than how one thinks that characterizes mysticism. The medievalists considered mysticism an experimental science, and experiential way of knowing. And the goal of the mystical experiment is the alteration of consciousness, the transformation of cognition in such a way that the Jewish mystic does not merely think about God, but imagines himself thinking with God, that is, knowing the world through the divine mind.

Thus for example, a Kabbalist of the 13th century makes use of medieval Aristotelian terms to describe the fruits of mystical meditation saying:

"If, however, he has felt the divine touch and perceived its nature, it seems right and proper to me and to every perfected man that he should be called 'master', because his name is like the Name of his Master [that is, God], be it only in one, or in many, or in all of His Names. For now he is no longer separated from his Master, and behold he is his Master and his Master is he; for he is so intimately adhering to Him that he cannot by any means be separated from Him, for he is He. And just as his Master, who is detached from all matter, is called Sekhel, Maskil and Muskal, that is the knowledge, the knower and the known, all at the same time, since all three are one in Him, so also he, the exalted man, the master of the exalted name, is called intellect, while he is actually knowing; then he is also the known, like his Master; and then there is no difference between them, except that his Master has His supreme rank by His own right and not derived from other creatures, while he is elevated to his rank by the intermediary of creatures."

Though we are tempted to read such accounts as psychology disguised in a mystical garb, the Kabbalists themselves understood that the penetration of the deepest recesses of the psyche brought one to an understanding of the very inner world of the divine. Creation was seen as an unfolding of the divine from his most recondite spirituality, the appearance of a spiritual Something out of a spiritual Nothing. God in his most hidden sate is called by the Kabbalists Nothing for he is utterly unknowable. Thus we read in the Zohar (p. 65): "He is hidden, concealed, transcendent, beyond, beyond….For he is unknowable. No one has ever been able to identify Him." The divinity emerges out of his Nothingness, experiencing ten stages of personality formation in which he takes on a kind of spiritual materiality, a crystallization of his Being that the mystic can grasp him in his most elevated stage. The mystic, beginning where he stands within the lowest domains of spirituality, the world created in the image of the upper world of Sefirot, works himself backwards through creation, upwards through the Sefirotic unfolding towards the Nothing. For the Kabbalist this is a process of returning the Something back to Nothing.

The beginning of this mystical journey is the point at which psychology becomes metaphysics. As the adept reaches the deepest level of the human soul he is able to establish an identity with the outermost manifestation of the Godhead. At this point, arrived at after making use of various techniques of meditation, some mystics have a puzzling out-of-the-body experience in which they come to recognize that what is within is outside and what is outside is within. (This is what Scholem means when he describes the Kabbalah as "paradoxical." Here is how one mystic put it as he recorded the results the latter stages of his intensive meditative regime:

"You then guide your thinking step by step, first by means of script and language and then by means of imagination. When, however, you pass beyond the control of your thinking, another exercise becomes necessary which consists in drawing thought gradually forth--during contemplation--from its source until through sheer force that stage is reached where you do not speak nor can you speak. And if sufficient strength remains to force oneself even further and draw it out still farther, then that which is within will manifest itself without, and through the power of sheer imagination will take on the form of a polished mirror. And this is 'the flame of the circling sword', the rear revolving and becoming the fore. Whereupon one sees that his inmost being is something outside of himself."

In the Kabbalah the soul and the divine world are parallel worlds. The human is considered to be a microcosm of the pleroma, the fullness of the world of the divine personalities. The goal of the mystic is to recognize through experience this parallel identity, and even more. His ultimate goals is to attach himself to the Godhead (the Hebrew term for such attachment is devekuth, meaning adhering, clinging on to). In such clinging, often described in sexual terms, the initiate experiences an illumination of the deepest processes with the intradivine world, in some cases an absorption into the ongoing theogonic/cosmogonic process.

The Kabbalists' illuminative experiences of visualized light are understood as a evidence of their entry into the domains of the Godhead, that point in which again that which is experienced as outside seems to flow from within. One Kabbalist writes:

"The third night, after midnight, I nodded of a little….The I noticed that the candle was about to go out. I rose to put it put it right….Then I saw that the light continued. I was greatly astonished, as though after close examination, I saw that it issued from myself. I walked to and fro all through the house and, behold, the light is with me; I lay on a couch and covered myself up, and behold, the light is with me all the while."

Another describes light emerging from the books studied and commentaries being composed in a form of automatic writing:

"…things came into our eyes from the verses in the image of red fire towards evening, until we were astonished by them…"

Just such illuminations are often the basis for the very radical Kabbalistic interpretive recasting of some traditional ideas from the Bible and the Rabbis. Thus does the author of the Zohar (which it self means shining or splendor or light) bring together Biblical notions of the creation of light on the first day of creation ('Let there be light") with a Rabbinic midrash that says that this was the light hidden away for the righteous, for clearly it is not the light from the sun and moon and stars created later in the week of creation:

"If it were completely hidden the world would not exist for even a moment. Rather it is hidden and sown like a seed that gives birth to seeds and fruit. Thereby the world is sustained….And everywhere that Torah is studied at night one thread-thin ray appears, from that hidden light and flows down and is absorbed by her [the Torah], as it is written: 'By day YHWH will enjoin His love; in the night His song is with me.' As we have already established…Since the first day, it has never been fully revealed, but it plays a vital role in the world, renewing every day the act of creation.

Notice that the Kabbalist is trying to account for light that appears at night ("In night his song…") and alludes to the kabalistic custom of meditative exercises and study at night ("And everywhere that Torah is studied at night…") and equates the light of mystic illumination (and experience perhaps similar to the not too unusual one recorded above) with this first created light that was re-absorbed into the Godhead immediately after its creation (for it obviously is no longer in the world). The Zohar itself is reserved about describing first hand such experiences, but they amount to the "psychic substance" which Scholem argues is primary for these Kabbalists in their speculations and mystical midrashic interpretations. Though most of the medieval Jewish mystics stopped short of the kinds of self-obliteration that would lead to a complete identity with the Godhead, their task was to take themselves, and their readers along with them, into the intradivine realms such that the verse from the prayerbook that concludes the passage ("renewing ever day the act of creation') is not merely a theological principle, but is experienced by the mystic as part of the intradivine drama of God's own self-creation.

For some of the most ecstatic of the Kabbalists these exercises in self-transcendence were rewarded with the mystic's total transformation of identity, his fusion with the divine world itself. Much later in the tradition a Hasidic master who used prayer as a meditative technique describes such a theurgically induced transformation:

"The human body is always finite; It is the spirit that is boundless. Before he begins to pray, a person should cast aside that which limits him and enter the endless world of Nothing. In prayer he should turn to God alone and have no thoughts of himself at all. Nothing but God exists for him; he himself has ceased to be. The true redemption of man's soul can only happen as he steps outside the body's limits."

And in a assertion that went beyond even what most of the earlier Kabbalists would claim, the Hasidic master describes his total annihilation and his transformation from something to nothing, an ultimate reversal of the creation process which results in a fused identity with the most concealed aspect of God

"In prayer seek to make yourself into a vessel for God's Presence. God, however, is without limit; "Endless" is His name. How can any finite vessel hope to contain the endless God? Therefore, see yourself as nothing: only one who is nothing can contain the fullness of the Presence.

Such experiences are unlike anything we encountered in Biblical or Rabbinic Judaism, and in the next lecture we will sharpen some of the differences between the two classical Judaisms we have studied and this novel re-interpretation of them by the medieval mystics.