Kabbalah Made Not-So-Easy

By BEN SCHRANK

ABSORBING PERFECTIONS
Kabbalah and Interpretation
By Moshe Idel.
Foreword by Harold Bloom.
668 pages. Yale University Press. $45.

In a passage noteworthy for its stupendous self-effacement, Harold Bloom introduces us to Moshe Idel's Absorbing Perfections by writing that, in reading this book, "difficulties are legitimate and rewarding, not only for the understanding of Kabbalah by general readers like myself but also for other common readers who have wearied of postmodern negations." Calling Bloom, one of the most respected literary critics in the world, a "general reader" is like calling Ralph Lauren a tailor; if Bloom is a general reader, I¹m not sure I even qualify as "common." So the bar for interaction with this text, winner of the 2002 Koret Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought, is set dauntingly high.

I hope that I have now deprecated myself sufficiently to proceed to my next argument without too much risk of arrogance: to read Idel without a good working knowledge of Gershom Scholem¹s On The Kabbalah and its Symbolism and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a waste of time. The play between these two masters of Kabbalah scholarship is essential to this new book–without Scholem, Idel is sometimes impenetrable. Even with a knowledge of Scholem, Absorbing Perfections is dense with mystery. Idel takes inspiration from Stephan Mallarme¹s statement that "mystery is an inherent quality of the sacred, both a systemic quality and a strategy, sometimes conscious, for ensuring the preservation and the continuation of the sacred." In other words, when it comes to the hermeneutics and exegesis of the Kabbalah, being in the dark, a lot, is OK.

With some background in Scholem, great pleasure can be found in this book, which is essentially a wide-ranging analysis of all sorts of "speculative hermeneutical corpora" filtered through Idel¹s incredible grasp of disparate interpretations of ancient text. But it¹s the sort of pleasure that drags the reader deeper into text–and not, ever, out into the world or into human relationships. For those seeking personal enlightenment through Kabbalah, writers like Michael Berg or Yehuda Berg offer plentiful applications of ancient mystical texts to the dilemma of being human. I¹ve no idea whether Moshe Idel would be willing to entertain such notions, but I can say for sure that he does not do so here. Absorbing Perfections does not contain a single sentence about how to do a better job of living life.

Before going further I must admit that I¹ve tried to make links between Kabbalah and modern life previously in my own work. As research for my second novel, I read Idel¹s Golem with the hope of extending his ideas into the arena of Fiction (which, for the purposes of this essay, should sit far closer to the Self-Help shelf in the bookstore than to the Jewish Studies shelf.) I wanted to see if Kabbalah might inform how and why we say "I love you" to each other. It turns out that it doesn¹t. I don¹t think Moshe Idel would laugh at my conceit. He¹s too smart. He¹d probably only sigh and turn away, once again, from the grasping, murky place where Kabbalah has leaked into our popular culture.

I found it best to read Absorbing Perfections with an expectation not of spiritual enlightenment, but of the great pleasure that comes with discovering completely esoteric concepts. For example, Idel introduces a late midrash that tells us, "Before the creation of the world, skins for parchments were not in existence, that the Torah might be written on them, because the animals did not yet exist. So on what was the Torah written? On the arm of the Holy One, blessed be He, by a black fire on (the surface of) a white fire." Because I¹m a big fan of anthropomorphism, this image of the skin of God¹s arm as a kind of white fire appeals. But because I prefer narrative to other forms of discourse, the great chunks of exegesis that follow were sometimes difficult to grasp. My mind wandered. I recognize that Idel¹s writing is magnificent, that his ability to thread the thoughts of Kabbalists from different centuries together without seeming to force connections is unrivaled, but I most enjoyed the passages with concrete images. I¹m that common, modern reader.

Idel sometimes seems aware that he¹s way out ahead of both his readers and his subject. He stresses that "The Kabbalists were haunted by their own inability to express themselves," and explains that they looked for instances of plenitude. Plenitude means completeness, or abundance. It is the opposite of reductiveness and postmodernism. Plenitude! It is "rich reading." It is the thing that the modern reader must grasp, like taking a roller coaster ride and hanging on to the safety bar. The reader/rider thinks, I¹m not in control here; I¹m very frightened; but if I can just hang on to this bar I might feel safe enough to experience real glee.

Idel¹s analysis must be approached the way Kabbalists approached sacred text: hyper-textually, with an eye toward plenitude. That noted, it seems foolish to start thinking about Kabbalah by reading Absorbing Perfections. But once the possibility of plenitude in exegesis is internalized, and any notion of help for self is tossed out, reading this book would become a wonderful place to begin.