When we examine the mystical state of mind by comparing it to the Biblical/Rabbinic psychology we grasp even more completely how different these two Judaisms are from the Kabbalah.

We have been stressing all along the quality of alert mindfulness that Bible and the rabbis cultivate through their various rituals that sacramentalize daily life. In the Bible there are repeated instructions which require the mobilization of the normal senses, especially seeing and hearing. Thus will the Bible command the people of Israel to "see" scores of times (and typical is Deut. 1:8 "Behold [See] I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the Land which the Lord swore to you fathers…"). The Bible is also regular in re-iterating the command "to hear" (which in the Hebrew, shema, also means, "to obey"), as in the famous declaration in Deuteronomy 6:4 "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Similarly the Bible commands the constant use of the ordinary mental faculties of remembering, willing, discerning both through specific commands (Ex. 13:3 " Remember this day.." and in the various rituals that we have studied intended to produce collective memory through the telling of stories and active remembering. In some cases the Hebrew term for such remembering is zachor ; at other times the term shamor is employed, which can be translated as "remember," but also "observe," or "keep alert" or "be mindful."

A favorite construction in the Bible, one that captures the very essence of the Biblical and Rabbinic notion of a ritual act that produces (ordinary) mindfulness, a mindfulness that produces ritual action-- is the locution "li'shmor la'asot," that is "to be mindful to do" (as in Deut .15:5 "…be mindful to do all this commandment…").

At other times the Bible uses the formula "to be mindful and to do" (see Deut. 4:6, and Joshua 23: 6 "And you shall strengthen yourselves mightily to remember and to do all that is written in the book of the Torah of Moses…"). In such a conjunction of two one gets the sense that the doing must be a mindful, attentive, deliberate one.

Other times the Bible commands Israel "to hear/obey and to observe" (see Deut. 38:10 "…if you hear/obey [from shema ] the voice of the Lord your God and observe/remember (li-shmor) his commandments…" Here an action is a stimulation to right thinking, just as above right thinking produces right action.

Just as the Rabbis insist that perfunctory prayer without kavanah (right intention, mindfulness [and see Heilman, The People…, pp. 75-76) is without value, so too the Bible establishes as an ideal the performance of a sacramental act that is accompanied by just this kind of alert watchfulness and attention. Exodus 12 describes the Passover as a memorial day (vs. 14), and calls it also (vs. 42) "A night of watching (shimurim, from shamor…" , an occasion for special alertness. And echoing the Exodus command to "remember this day," Deuteronomy, uses the term "this day/today" seventy times emphasizing the presentness of such actions and the mindfulness required as one enacts the commands and ceremonies. Indeed the Bible explicitly commands mindfulness itself: "…be watchful (he-shamer) of yourself and watch your soul carefully lest you forget these words…").

In all these examples, as well as in the very ritualized acts of reading the Bible, hearing the history in the covenant ceremonies, studying the Talmud, praying with intentionality, these two Judaism are alike in mobilizing ordinary cognition and thinking as the favored psychological state in which ritual actions in the ordinary world are to be executed.

The five bodily senses and the faculties of memory, will, and judging are enlisted so that the stylized gestures of the body in ritual are accompanied by a heightened consciousness that we, along with Henry Thoreau would call wakefulness. This is a kind of hovering attentiveness to the daily routines, a mild sort of vigilance that allows one to stay alert to the sacred tasks that one is constantly enacting. The formulation in Walden, though more influenced by traditional Hindu notions of a similar sacramentalism, aptly expresses this Biblical/Rabbinic psychology:

"We must learn to reawaken ourselves and keep ourselves awake….I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor….Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour….I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

It is precisely this deliberateness that the Bible instructs, a wakefulness to a creation which might not contain the divine being but is shaped by God's inclinations towards order, a creation in which the separations of the dry land from the waters, the vegetation "each according to its kind" (see Gen. 1:11), the day from the night, and so forth are all blessed with God's sense that such order and balance and separation is "good."

The hand that composed this first account of creation, later in the Bible (Leviticus 20:22ff.) returns to disambiguate the rather unclear divine declaration "Let us make man in our image and our likeness" that comes towards the end of the first creation story. Here in Leviticus the Jewish people are commanded to be like God in doing acts of separation, acts in which discerning and distinguishing are critical to becoming holy. Note well, the identity with God is not in terms of his unknowable essence, his being, but in an imitation of his actions.

The Leviticus text reads: "You shall therefore keep/observe all my statutes and ordinances, and do them….And you shall not walk in the ways of the nation which I am casting out before you….I am the Lord your God who has separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean beast and the unclean, between the unclean bird and the clean….You shall be holy [kadosh, separate] to me for I the Lord your God am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine."

How radically different is this psychology of distinguishing and separating, of discerning mindfulness, from the psychology produced in the Kabbalistic practices of meditation, contemplative prayer, and theurgic ritual. If separation and dis-identification are the hallmarks of Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism--a divine separation of Israel from the peoples, a separation and dis-identification of the transcendent divinity from his creation, acts by the people of Israel that sustain the separating order that God inscribed upon the world--then we might say that in Jewish mysticism it is fusion and identification that rule the religious life of the Kabbalist. And it is in the production of a mystical psychology, a transformation of ordinary consciousness, an n alteration of the very faculties of cognition that we can best see how the impulses towards fusion and identity are released and dominate this Judaism.

The Rabbinic ritual practices of the sacramentalizing of the ordinary through study, prayer, and social action are ones that produce the mindfulness we have been describing. Heilman is especially useful to us in seeing how this goes on in the ritualized study practices he is analyzing. It is also in practices-- Kabbalistic forms of meditation, Hasidic contemplative prayer, and so forth-- that one can see dramatically the liquidation of ordinary mindfulness in the here and now. Such an annihilation of ordinary thinking is experienced as self-loss, a preliminary stage and the essential psychological condition for an ecstatic consciousness in which the mystic imagines himself as fused with the divine mind.

As we suggested in the last lecture, the Kabbalists introduce the notion into Judaism that the arena in which the human encounters the divine is in recesses of the soul. In some of the more ecstatic traditions of Jewish mysticism there are texts--manuals really--which describe in detail techniques for inducing mental transformations in which florid images are visualized and sounds and voices heard. In some of these texts we have quite extraordinary psychological phenomenologies of rather unusual interior states as the stages of self-loss and the sense of divine identification are recorded. In most of the texts the techniques and the experiences they produce are kept in the background, and, as in the Zohar one sees only the novel midrashic interpretations of the Biblical narrative which such experiences produce.

It is especially in these kinds of midrashic texts that psychology opens up to metaphysical and theosophical speculation. For the focus here is almost exclusively on the intradivine life of the Godhead, what is going on in his soul(s). In these novel Midrashic reinterpretations of both Biblical and Rabbinic texts one sees how the Kabbalah maintains that the laws of association and connection that obtain in the soul are the same laws that govern the cosmos, the Torah text itself, and the inner dynamics of the Godhead. The move is from the human soul directly into the intradivine theogonic processes in which creation, revelation, and redemption are dramatically unfolding.

For some of the most radical within the ecstatic tradition of the kabbalah, this joining of psychology and metaphysics is based upon the mystic's sense that his true identity is divine in nature. Fusion and identity God's own most interior spiritual state as the Infinite (Eiyn Sof) are so complete that the mystic temporarily loses entirely his human identity. A late Hasidic master says that the adepts who achieve this state experience a total absorption into the divinity "…are stupefied and this is the nature of their annihilation since they self-annihilate themselves...and this is the complete attachment (devekuth) since the mystic is comprised in Eiyn Sof, blessed be He."

Here a union with the divinity is often described in the most extravagant sexual terms, and the mystical experience is understood as the orgasmic bliss achieved in sexual union. This was the preferred language of so much of Medieval Christian mysticism and is found abundantly in Islamic Sufism also. In the Kabbalah it is a much more diminished voice, though one that gets expressed in 18th and 19th century Hasidism where the possibility of union with the divine is more pronounced.

The Zohar is more reticent about such utter abandon of the self within the Godhead, along with the mainstream of Jewish mysticism. Here divine identity is understood as the parallel structure of the human soul to the divine. Devekuth, attachment to the divinity reveals this similar structure and this theosophic illumination becomes the basis for Kabbalists ritual agenda. The mandate is not so much to unify with the divinity but to promote the unity of the Godhead himself.

In a passage you read from the Zohar (p. 43-45) the parallel structures of the soul and the divinity (as well as the Torah itself) are alluded to. An even more explicit parallel is articulated in another passage (p. 66), one in which the human body/soul relation is projected onto the Godhead whose lower soul is as it were animated by an upper soul: "Neshamah (the soul/psyche) of a human being is unknowable except through the limbs of the body, subordinates of neshamah who carry out what she designs. Thus she is known and unknown. The Blessed Holy One too is known and unknown. For He is Neshamah to neshamah, Pneuma to pneuma [this is the Greek word for spirit], completely hidden away; but through the gates, opening for neshamah, the Blessed Holy One becomes known."

The mystic comes to recognize that the soul to his soul is but the most outward form of the divinity, the Godheads spirituality materialized into a (spiritual) body, one that can be visualized by the mystic in his most exalted state. But this divine soul itself has a soul, and beyond this there is the soul of that soul, which in the Zohar is pointed to but hardly ever mentioned, so unfathomable is this utterly transcendent aspect of the divinity.

Thus in another passage (p. 50), which re-introduces the notion that the creation story is not only a cosmogony but a theogony, the first three words of the Torah, Bireshit (In the Beginning), bara (created), Elohim, (God) are understood as five words, four available and one totally absent yet critical to this mystical interpretation.

This phrase is mystically read as Bi, meaning "with, " Reshit, (here understood as a name of the second of the divine manifestations, the Sefirah Chokhmah, Wisdom); thus so far: "With Wisdom"; and here in the text there is not even a signifier word, merely a white space, an absence, a blank that is mystically read as an invisible pointer to the first unknowable sefirah, Keter; and thus "With Wisdom Keter (with the blank here filled in, the signified of this invisible signifier) created Elohim." Here Elohim is the third of the Sefirot, the first of the feminine aspects of the divinity, who is theogonically made by Keter through Wisdom/Chokhmah.

In such passages of bold midrashic interpretation one sees, incidentally, how the mystical reading of Torah text is informed by mystical experiences that are rarely described but which hover in the background. What Scholem referred to (p. 109) as the "psychic substance" which gets disguised in such "theological reinterpretation" can be intuited in this language which suggests such a thoroughgoing pneumaticizing of human and divine reality. The Torah itself--its black letters as well as its white spaces in between--is itself a series of invisible souls within souls in which the blanks are closer to invisible spiritual realities than the inked words. Here is a case where that which is absent--a blank space of pure spirituality as it were--is visualized as fully present, at least for those who can see with the eyes of the soul.

The Zohar does set limits, however, on what the mystic might know of the most inner dimensions of the Godhead and of the Torah. (See Zohar, p. 44: "The wise ones…those who stood at Mt. Sinai, look only at the soul, root of all, real Torah. In the time to come [that is, in a post-mortem state or in the time of Redemption, whichever comes first] they are destined to look at the soul of the soul of the Torah.") But there seems to be no limit of what the human is capable of in transforming the intradivine realm, though, paradoxically, the Godhead himself is constrained from being able to achieve on his own his inner unity. That is, in the realm of knowing there is might be restraint; but in the world of doing, in the sphere of Redemption, the sky is the limit.

As Scholem describes it, first the Zohar, and then nearly three centuries later the Kabbalists in Safed imagined God himself in a state of internal exile. The Rabbinic notion of a God who joins the people of Israel in their exile as described by Eisen, Neusner, and others whom you have read is now understood as split asunder by his own attempt to unfold himself. The originally unified Godhead, in externalizing himself and taking on personality, has become unbalanced. His different potencies, ideally to be in a state of equipoise and balance, have become separated, the inmost from the outermost, the upper three from the lower seven, the left-side female from the right-side male. The effort of God to promote within himself more knowledge about himself seems to have subverted his ability to sustain his primal unity.

This root condition of the divinity experiencing a multiple personality disorder of cosmic proportions explains a world that is likewise fragmented. For the Kabbalists, the inner fracture of the divinity results in a world where conflict invades even the most intimate of domains such as the relations between men and women. In the Godhead, in the world, and in the human psyche also, the male and female impulses are in opposition though they both seek reconciliation; evil has been severed from good, and harsh judgment dominates over mercy; the forces that produce separation are more powerful than the inclinations powers that seek harmony. Exile and displace rule.

Though according to the Zohar and the Lurianic Kabbalah past opportunities to mend the shattered world above and below resulted in even more separation, the Kabbalah throughout its development over the past seven centuries has been optimistic about the human project of Redemption. Indeed the Kabbalah has spawned a number of intensely messianic movements and communities, including a contemporary one that we shall be reading about later this semester.

It is especially in the theory of ritual action that the Kabbalah announces its hopeful sense that a reparation of the breaches within the Godhead can be accomplished. Various Kabbalistic texts provide detailed accounts of precisely what defects in the intradivine world can be mended though a mystically understood fulfilling of the commandments. Though the theory of ritual is radically new with its theurgic emphasis, there is also something profoundly conservative here. Ritual and law are not abandoned by the Kabbalists in favor of a strictly contemplative life. Rather the rabbinic regulations become revitalized as meditative exercises, techniques for concentrated thought and forceful, magical action.

In highly expressive ceremonies, laden with emotion, the Kabbalist imagined themselves as stirring from below divine erotic impulses above. Their own desire for fusion, their accomplishments in achieving their own transformations of consciousness must have given these mystics the confidence that they could produce union and harmony among the Sefirot. The releases of psychic energy they experienced in their meditative exercises encouraged them to believe that they could produce similar discharges of energy within the intradivine world. And it was such an unleashing of energy that would bring about union of the above with the below, the left and the right, the female and the male, evil and good.

Redemption was not so much the coming of some messiah that would end Israel's exile. Rather it was conceived of as the cosmic bliss that would come about when a conjunction of the celestial male and the female was re-established. This unity and balance was not something dependent on God, indeed he was incapable of producing it on his own. The task became the mission and mandate of the Jewish people, according to the Kabbalists. Brave souls, these Kabbalists, armed with not much more than charmed words and the conviction that comes with ecstasy, they imagined themselves as fully capable of producing a cosmic transformation in the world above and the world below on the basis of their heroic descents into the world within.

No wonder the Dalai Lama--the teacher of an exiled people without armies, the leader of a people without the power of a state, with little more than his own traditions of mystical psychology and techniques for psychic liberation--was as interested in hearing from the Jews about the secrets of the Kabbalah as he was interested in the secrets of their survival in exile. This astute interlocutor was able to pose just the right question about survival to his Jewish conversation partners that got them talking sometimes in new ways about this subject. And he recognized, as only another adept could, the power of the Kabbalah. Early on in his book, Kamenetz makes clear that it was the exchange of secrets about meditation in the two traditions that was for him the most transformative element of the journey. He writes: "Another important feature of the dialogue was the Dalai Lama's request for teaching about the Kabbalah and Jewish meditation. And he in turn would respond to questions about Buddhist esoteric teachings and practices. This exchange of secrets proved to be more powerful and fascinating than I could have imagined when I set out. The exploration of Buddhist tantra and Jewish Kabbalah opened me to whole new ways of thinking and feeling" (p. 3)