KABBALAH AND EROS

MOSHE IDEL
Y A L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / N E W H A V E N & L O N D O N
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Published with assistance from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation
Copyright 2005 by Moshe Idel.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Idel, Moshe, 1947
Kabbalah and eros / Moshe Idel. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-300-10832-x (alk. paper)
1. CabalaHistory. 2. LoveReligious aspectsJudaism. 3. SexReligious aspectsJudaism.
I. Title.
bm526.i337 2005
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1
INTRODUCTION
1. A Core Kabbalistic Formula
Judaism is widely conceived of as the source of monotheism. This seems to be the
most obvious statement in the history of religion. Nevertheless, in many versions
of the prayerbook, the most widespread Jewish book, an alarming Aramaic for-
mula is found: Le-Shem Yihud Qudesha Berikh Hu u-Shekhinteih. This kabbalistic
pronouncement is found in many versions of the prayerbook used daily by most
Jews during many periods of premodern Jewish history. It precedes the recitation of
some prayers and the performance of some commandments or, according to other
versions, of all the commandments. Its verbatim translation is: [Liturgy is per-
formed] For the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His Divine
Presence. Though this formula became part of Jewish rituals only in the mid-
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Introduction
sixteenth century, it crystallizes a long development in some circles over several
centuries, especially in the main schools of Kabbalah. It reects the supreme aim of
some important religious performances: to induce the union, which means the
sexual union, between a masculine divine attribute, on the one hand, described by
various terms like Tiferet, the Holy One, blessed be He, or the sixth serah and,
on the other hand, a feminine divine manifestation, designated by a variety of terms
like Shekhinah, Malkhut, Knesset Israel, Atarah, and the tenth serah.
Some of the following discussions will survey the most important phases of
Jewish thought which generated, late in the Middle Ages, the formula above. One
of the main claims in this study is that in some important trends of medieval
Kabbalah and Ashkenazi Hasidism, the discovery of an important role of a divine
feminine power created a polarity between it and a male divine power, a polarity
which is bridged by means of performing the Jewish ritual. This ritual was under-
stood as inducing an erotic and sexual encounter between those powers, ensuring
a unifying state of the divine realm. Thus, the rhythm of the intradivine life was
understood in bold erotic terms, and the main schools in Kabbalah were describ-
ing ways of participating in this rhythm and inuencing it by their religious
performance. My concern here is not with tracing the origins of an inuential
phrase, which is a pure philological-historical enterprise. Rather I am interested
in combining discussions dealing with concepts that germinated and culminated
in this formula, with more general considerations dealing with the speculative
impulses that generated this form of thought.
For most readers supercially acquainted with Judaism, this emphasis on the
need for a unication of divine powers, and perhaps no less on the sexual nature
of this event, may come as a great surprise. Sponsors of simplistic understandings
of Judaism as a whole as embodying or expressing a pure spiritual monotheism, a
religion which allegedly subscribes to the view that the divine realm was imagined
as the sphere of unchangeable perfection, and similar theological clichsdomi-
nant in many Jewish and non-Jewish images of Judaismmay be puzzled by the
acceptance of the formula above in the prayerbook. No doubt, this important
collection of texts reects more than one brand of Jewish theology, though in
many of its versions the kabbalistic formula is absent. However, the questions
which concern me here are why such a formula was adopted at all in a liturgical
book of such wide circulation and, even more, why such a formula emerged at all
in Jewish circles. Indeed, someone may wonder why and how a sexually dierenti-
ated conception of divinity emerged, and why it came to be perceived as a main
center of Jewish religion in some quite authoritative circles. No less important are
these questions: Why does the performance of the ritual by a Jew induce a sexual
union between divine powers? Do these developments represent an unexpected
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Introduction
and relatively late rupture in Jewish thought, the creation of an idiosyncratic
imagination, or do they crystallize much earlier impulses which remained alive
and looked for expression? And, as a corollary: What do the erotic and sexual
portrayals of divine realms mean for the understanding some Jews had of the
meaning of human eroticism and sexuality? Those are some of the questions
which I attempt to address in the following pages. The answers proposed below,
some of them tentative, strive not only to illumine the topics of eros and Kab-
balah, but also to situate them within a broader picture of Judaism and its mystical
expressions as theologically and experientially a polymorphic religion. This at-
tempt to situate them is valid from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.
The following discussions survey views expressed mostly by elitist literatures
representing various systemic attitudes. The rst chapter examines a variety of
Jewish and non-Jewish sources which deal with eros and the emergence of femi-
ninity in the divine realm. The second and third chapters are concerned with
theosophical themes and their impact on understanding human reality. Chapter 2
reviews various interpretations of the concept of du-partzun, the two-faced hu-
man being, understood as reecting metaphysical and psychical structures. Chap-
ter 3 traces the metamorphoses of the covenantal theology in late thirteenth-
century and early fourteenth-century kabbalistic theosophies. Chapters 4 and 5
are concerned with the individual and the cosmic attitudes: the reverberations of
Platonic and Neoplatonic understandings of eros from the thirteenth century to
mid-eighteenth-century Hasidism.
2. Between Concepts and Confessions
Because most of the discussions below are adduced from elite literatures and
reect elite views, they deal more with ideals than with actual mores. Views of eros
in an elite culture or religion, as in the case of many other primary topics in human
life, imply more general axiologies, and this is why they could not and should not
be understood in isolation. Cultural factors, like national and family traditions,
attitudes toward eros in both majority and minority environments, and personal
experiences all have dierent and varying shares in the emergence of the myriad
concepts of eros available in a certain religion. What remains, however, in a
written form may often be a clich, a pious thought, a moral admonishment,
rather than a confession of personal feelings or of corporeal experience. Kabbal-
ists and Hasidic masters are no exception. Despite these formalistic aspects,
which may reverberate in major themes found in authoritative literature, this
inertial approach serves an understanding of Jewish culture as much as, and
perhaps in some cases even more than, emphasizing the role of innovative but less
inuential discourses.
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Though perhaps somewhat less inhibited than many mystics in other reli-
gions, who also used erotic language, Jewish mystics are far from facilitating an
understanding of their inner life with regard to erotic and sexual issues. The few
confessions found in the immense kabbalistic literature constitute exceptions
rather than the rule. Some statements found in Safedian Kabbalah, in the writings
of R. Joseph Karo and R. Hayyim Vital related to their sexual relations, are, indeed,
revealing about the subordination of those personal topics to more general issues
which triggered indulgence in those confessions.

In any case, the two confes-

sional statements are found in an autobiography and in a revelatory treatise
unusual literary genres in kabbalistic literaturea fact that accounts for their
occurrence.
By and large, the discussions that follow explore the interpretations oered by
Kabbalists of issues that in general terms we call eros and sex. Those interpreta-
tions are only rarely, if at all, the result of reections on personal experience. The
vast majority reect an attempt to apply the various theological and anthropological
schemes, inherited from earlier masters, to those topics. As in many other cases,
the overarching theologies or anthropologies provide the most important prism
for understanding the specic discussions of many Kabbalists. Though we cannot
completely ignore the possible impact of such powerful personal experiences as
the erotic and sexual, it is very dicult to penetrate beyond the objective mode of
discussion that is so characteristic of kabbalistic discourse. Thus, we learn far less
about the insights of Kabbalists into matters that were certainly part of their life
than about their exegetical and conceptual innovations and expansions. We see the
ingenuity of Kabbalists as religious thinkers in applying more generalthough not
always clearsets of theological and anthropological beliefs to certain traditional
topics. I would say that this assessment is as true of Kabbalists as of any thinkers
belonging to articulated speculative schools, whose thought dominates their vi-
sion of reality. Thus, by examining the kabbalistic visions of the topics under
scrutiny, we learn as much about the interpretive frameworks as we do about the
interpreted topics. Though we cannot ignore that some fugitive truthsto use
Cliord Geertzs expressionmay occasionally surface despite the reign of the
speculative systems, it is my concern here not to highlight those insights, but
rather to examine the systems that inspired the various visions. There will be no
thick descriptions of theories about eros, but only the minimum necessary to make
a point. I am concerned here with modes of conceptualization, or religious imag-
inaire, which may or may not reect forms of actual behavior, not with whether the
following discussions are ideal in themselves. Though much can be said both in
criticism of some of the following topics and their impact on life, especially about
the androcentric or patricentric-acquisitive and chauvinistic approaches that per-
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meate them, I shall leave the social and cultural critiques to other writers on the
topic whose crystallized worldviews allow them a more pronounced, though often
simplistic, attitude to the past. Still, in the dicult process of attempting to
understand the past, I often envy scholars who, in this quite initial stage of study of
Kabbalah, not only claim to have already understood it as a whole, but also imagine
themselves to have an answer to cultural quandaries that have been faced in the
past.
3. Religious Prescriptions and Descriptions
The approach adopted below assumes that there is no one single monolithic
approach to love in the diversied kabbalistic and Hasidic literatures, and that
neither did those dierent views evolve in a linear fashion. The clue to under-
standing the attitudes to eros in the vast literature is complexity, a term which is
pertinent not only for the literature as a whole but also for specic kabbalistic and
Hasidic texts, which adopted and adapted dierent views found earlier in Judaism
and in non-Jewish systems of thought. Like any culture that developed over cen-
turies in so many dierent geographical areas, and in contact with diverse cul-
tures, Kabbalah does not display a unied vision, even when sensitive issues were
involved. Judaism, a complex, synchronically and diachronically diversied re-
ligious culture, is a good example of the coexistence of a diversity of ideas about
eros and sex, which is quite obvious in the Bible, and becomes even more dif-
ferentiated over the centuries. On a more anthropological level: recent perceptions
of man assume complex or even multiple personalities, and a generous reading of
the thought of other sophisticated individuals should take into consideration such
complexity. Just as we would hardly feel comfortable if someone put us in a single
well-dened box or category, so we must resist reducing the traditional texts to
simple-minded categories.
Here it is impossible to do justice even to the views found in one single form of
Jewish literature, Kabbalah, given the diversity of attitudes to eros in this litera-
ture, which is a conglomerate of schools and tendencies. Drawing upon a variety
of earlier Jewish and non-Jewish sources, medieval Kabbalists oered various
conceptualizations of eros, which sometimes diered rather dramatically.
A survey of many of the Jewish sources from late antiquity and the Middle Ages
may allow the use of the phrase culture of eros in the context of many forms of
Judaism. In the texts adduced below it would be wise to assume that culture is
the theoretical attitude to and sometimes also the result of conscious eorts by
some elite gures to introduce certain behaviors and attitudes to the larger masses
of Jews. While the modern view of culture is an abstraction formulated by modern
scholars who examine the disparate evidence emanating from the eld conceived
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of as forms of behavior, articulating a certain modern development, in the way I
use the term it is more an issue of surveying prescriptive statements found in
written documents of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. My presentation below
deals more with prescriptive statements found in the writings of Jewish authors
who attempted to shape the behavior of others, rather than with sociological or
anthropological observation. In other words, in the following I shall deal more
with theoretical articulations, which are not corroborated by any facts, though
also not negated by facts as we know them.
Before addressing more detailed concepts and texts dealing with some aspects
of eros and Kabbalah, I would like to remark that the term reality, as used above
and below, conveys not my vision of reality, but what I believe Kabbalists saw as
real, and often their visions of reality may conict with both our visions of reality
and our sensitivities. Therefore, some of the discussions below should be under-
stood not as reecting a valid metaphysical truth, but as describing ways of
extrapolating from others visions of reality, mundane or supernal, visions respec-
tively of the meaning of eros, supernal or mundane.
We may distinguish between two main propensities in religious literature: the
prescriptive one, which proposes an ideal that diers, or even contradicts the
more common way of behavior, promising an extra benet; and a more descrip-
tive approach, which sancties the normal by constructing a spiritual or meta-
physical explanation that oers a raison dtre for the common behavior. Let me
characterize the rst tendency as prescriptive, the later as descriptive.
The prescriptive approach assumes certain forms of denial in order to achieve
something which is beyond the reach of those who follow the more common way
of life, and thus both their behavior and their compensation transcend what may
be gained by a common behavior. These proposals are sometimes extraordinary,
and strive to shape a way of life which is based upon a denial, compensated by an
extra, basically spiritual, achievement. To a certain extent, we may describe this
approach by a term of Eric Voegelin, metastasis.

By this term the philosopher

designates assumptions and aspirations, basically Gnostic ones, which strive to
change reality, conceived in his Platonic-oriented philosophy as rather static. For
Voegelin, understanding reality is the highest philosophical enterprise, the meta-
static impulse being conceived of as impossible and thus pernicious. The ap-
proach striving to shape an extraordinary form of behavior is therefore metastatic
in a double sense: the recommended behavior of man is extraordinary, because
only an unusual behavior is able to attain a higher ideal, which in some forms of
Kabbalah means changing the nature of divine realm, which is also extraordinary.
On the other hand, the descriptive approach is much more static and conserva-
tive from the behavioristic point of view, though it may sometimes adopt meta-
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static explanations. If the starting point is descriptive, the attempts to oer ra-
tionales may be a projection either of the lower, human processes, on the higher,
or of supernal processes described in kabbalistic theosophical systems. Thus, a
more metastatic explanation emerges.
In other words, we may assume that the prescriptive tendencies start with a
more idealistic approach and attempt to shape mundane reality and behavior so
that it will reect a higher structure whose logic may dier either from the more
standard behavior, or even from the standard structure of reality. To formulate the
preceding view in metaphorical terms, the descriptive is vertical and ascending,
our assumption being that the lower structure and processes constitute the para-
digm that was propelled on high.

The prescriptive is also vertical, but descend-

ing, assuming that a metaphysical reality should be imitated by the behavior of the
lower one.

4. Agape, Eros, and Sex

I propose to distinguish among three terms that will serve us throughout the
following analyses. Agape, a term which means disinterested love, will designate a
spiritual attraction to either God or human beings, an attitude which is devoid of a
libidinal urge, hetero- or homoerotic. Eros will denote a complex of feelings, of
ontological constructs and forms of behavior found in a certain culture, that
inform the drive to establish sexual or emotional contacts, corporeal or spiritual,
between two entities, in which at least one of them attracts the other. An erotic
impulse may be consummated corporeally, and this consummation may be desig-
nated as sex; or, if consummated spiritually, this may be a form of what is called
Platonic love or mystical experience; or it may not be realized at all, in either way.
Though sexuality may be an important part of erotic discourses as dened above,
it is only one aspect of its much more variegated nature. To a certain extent,
sexuality embodies the end of the erotic impulse to the extent that it denes its
realization. In most of the axiologies explored below, sexuality is directed much
more to procreation than to any other purpose.
Eroticism and sexuality are not, by denition, conceived of as part of a mean-
ingful continuum. Just as Platonic or troubadour love does not automatically
involve sexual fulllment, so also sexual activity does not automatically imply
eroticism. Although obviously the two issues may be and were strongly related to
each other, they can exist alongside each other. Moreover, some forms of eroti-
cism centered on the divine may sometimes invite strong ascetic trends which
explicitly prohibit any sexual fulllment in the common sense of the word, as in
the case of monastic life; and we shall deal with this issue more in the Conclud-
ing Remarks. The intensication of the erotic elements, when dened in purely
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emotional terms, is sometimes discussed in the framework of the dichotomy
between soul and body: the erotic feelings toward God, conceived to be spiritual
and sublime, were sometimes contrasted to sexual fulllment, conceived to be
corporeal and coarse. Therefore, we may distinguish between eroticism when
potentially conjoined to sexuality as one form, while the separation between the
two amounts to another form of eroticism, which will be designated as agape. The
emphasis upon the bodily feelings as representing the culmination of the erotic
experience would, therefore, be much more welcome in one category, while the
more spiritual feelings of exaltation would be much more welcome in a system
that encouraged the spiritualistic approach alone. Moreover, even spiritualistic
erotic approaches will dier when expressed within forms of mysticism situated
within religious cultures which express a much more positive attitude to sexuality
than in religions less sympathetic to this form of human experience. In any case,
my assumption is that those terms dene signicant moments in the religious life
of Jewish mystics. This is why I do not subscribe to the symbolistic phenomenol-
ogy of Anders Nygren, who designated the Greek as representing eros, Judaism as
representing nomos, and Christianity as agape.

This is but a more sophisticated

version of a Paulinian theology, which simplies each of the three phenomena.
The following analyses will be focused more on the erotic and sexual aspects of
Jewish mysticism, since I believe that in those domains its systemic novelty is
substantial and also the mystics own interest was great. Jewish mystics contrib-
uted to the emergence of a vocabulary of desire which represents erotic and sexual
concepts like yihud, ziwwug, tiyyul, and shaashua,

especially in the theosophical-

theurgical Kabbalah, but much less to a language of agape, which was more
important for the ecstatic and philosophical trends of Kabbalah and their rever-
berations in Safedian Kabbalah and Hasidism. Nevertheless, unlike the Su-
mysticism complex language of desire, which is related to a ladder of mystical
stages,

or the Christian forms of mysticism, Jewish mysticism is poor in describ-

ing an elaborate and detailed mystical path based on love. This is quite obvious in
the small amount of erotic mystical poetry available in kabbalistic literature and an
almost complete absence in Hasidism. Only with the emergence of rabbinic litera-
ture did the imperative to love God, which recurs in the Bible, become a source of
agapic attitude in contexts dealing with martyrdom.
5. Two Major Impulses in Postbiblical Jewish Theology
I assume that the Bible and the rabbinic literatures embrace narratives less con-
cerned with systematic thought and analytical expositions. These literary corpora
were more oriented toward the practical, namely to teaching a certain way of life,
to creating a communal space of understanding, rather than to advancing a sys-
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