Season 1: Episode 24 - Into the Mystic

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Theologians make choral, says Meister Eckhart, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. Now, I don't know if I can lay claim to speaking the same language as you, but I hope that we're telling the same story, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 24, Into the Mystic. So, we're going to be skipping between Ashkenaz and Spain in this episode, and perhaps for a bit of time to come, but it's okay, because I trust that you can keep up. And what I really want to cover in this episode is how a text which first appears in the late 13th century could completely capture the hearts and souls of Am Yisrael to this very day. And I'm talking about the Zohar, the Book of Brilliance.

But in order to understand the power of this mystical work and the controversy that surrounds it, we're going to need to grasp the political and the religious context from which it emerges. So, let's start with politics. When we last left Iberia, the Spanish Peninsula, for those who aren't familiar, the Reconquista was well underway. You'll recall that this was the advance of the Christian kingdoms of the north against the Muslim states of the south that followed the breakup of the Caliphate of Córdoba, in which the Christians considered to be a reclaiming of their lost Christian kingdom of the Visigoths. And we spoke about the fall of Toledo, that city at the heart of the Spanish Peninsula in 1085, and how that triggered a wave of Jewish refugees who fled northward, and how they, in their new homeland, felt such a nostalgia for the lost wealth and cultural refinement of Al-Andalus, that their feeling actually gave rise to the sense in their day that a golden age had been lost.

And we further spoke about Rabbi Yehudah Levy, the great poet of Am Yisrael, and how the experience of wandering between Christian and Muslim kingdoms convinced him that salvation lay in the east, in the land of Israel, with the end of exile. And furthermore, how he was part and parcel of the Messianic fervor, which began to rise once again in his day and has not let up. Furthermore, we spoke about how the Muslim states of the south, in order to hold off the Christian armies, began to summon Berber tribes from North Africa in order to strengthen their arm in battle. and how these Berbers were way more fanatical and purist in their devotion to Islam than the Arab kingdoms that they replaced, which was, of course, bad news for the Jews.

So he described the wanderings of the Rambam as he and his family fled from the Almohad kings and eventually found refuge in North Africa and Cairo. Now, you need to know that the momentum of the Reconquista is going to climb steadily during the first half of the 13th century and the Jews will actually play a critical role in this process. because they're going to be invited by the Christian conquerors to repopulate most of the war-torn provinces on the border between the Christian kingdoms and the shrinking Muslim territory. In fact, not only will they repopulate as colonists, but sometimes they're going to be relied upon to manage these newly conquered lands, because they had a mastery of both the Arabic language and the skill set that the Christians really needed, which was raising taxes.

And don't forget, this is a population which is more or less completely religiously incompatible with the Christians, if not downright hostile. The evidence of this is actually to be found all over the land grants, which are still in the records of the ancient kingdom of Castile and Aragon. We can see there that lands were granted to the Jews in all the conquered territories. In particular, they played a special role in reoccupying the fortified portions of certain major cities. It's a fascinating phenomenon that the Jewish areas, the ghettos, if you will, even though it's an anachronism to call them that in this day, were most often fortified elements of the cities which were held on behalf of the king.

Furthermore, there was a rise of a prominent Jewish noble class who used their personal wealth often to finance the king's expeditions in return for the rights to farm taxes, something we've spoken about before. And it's critical to remember that at this point in medieval Europe in general, but in Spain in particular, the distinction between the king's personal finances and the idea of a national economy is completely theoretical if it exists at all. And therefore, his personal Jewish financiers are going to, by definition, end up trying to set the whole country on a rational economic basis, which they sometimes will succeed in. But the key is, just remember, what this all boils down to is that the Jews establish the pattern which they will fill throughout the Middle Ages.

And that is, so long as there is a need for their assistance, the Jews will thrive because they are loyal and diligent servants of the king. But there's another benefit that they offer to the warrior kings of Castile and Aragon, which is actually a liability to the Jews themselves. Diligent, loyal, talented, and easily discarded servants. Because they're not part of the nobility with which the kings are always struggling. And they, of course, can always be labeled as killers of God. And it's important to note that at the height of the Reconquista, this Jewish courtier class is basically a revivocation, a renewal of the Jewish culture in Muslim al-Andalus. With one exception. It's not nearly as oriented toward the Torah.

There will be some scholars and rabbis among them, but by and large, they're going to be men of the world, as we say. And it's among these men of the world that the philosophical skepticism of their day will flourish. A philosophical skepticism which will become associated by Christian loyalists with the Jews. because these men held, as they say, that man is born destined to die and that everything in between is vain and meaningless. Now you can imagine what that meant for their adherence to the Torah when they found themselves in the heart of non-Jewish culture. And we're going to come to see the consequences of that and how it leads to a disastrous betrayal of the people when we finally reach the end of the 14th century.

But for now, know that the temporary prosperity and political power that the Reconquista brings to Jews comes at a high cultural cost. It's extremely unstable. Remember, loyal, diligent, and easily discarded servants. And furthermore, it begins to open up a gap between this small group of elite upon whom the Jews are truly dependent for their safety, and the broad mass of Jews who are at this point still artisans, craftsmen, farmers, whose piety and loyalty is offended by the high life. So that's the general political picture, and now to religion. Because, you know, there's an old joke, whose wisdom never fades, even though we're going to talk about religion. You know what you get when you mix politics and religion?

Politics. That's right. And it's never been more true than in the Middle Ages. Because the Church actually worked together with the kings of Europe to create a Christian continent. And the Crusades, as we saw, were probably the most powerful mix of politics and religion we've seen. And as we discussed in the last episode, that didn't bode particularly well for the Jews. the battle for purity of the faith is going hand in hand with the Reconquista with the physical conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and it's going to take a new turn in our time period what do I mean? well, even a passing glance at the Christian scriptures and rabbinic literature will show you that the disputation the learned argument between Christians and Jews is as old as the birth of Christianity itself I mean, to the degree that a core of Christianity actually arose out of the Beit Midrash, out of the rabbinic study hall, it makes perfect sense that the clarification of difference through argument would be a primary tool for the young church to establish its identity.

It's kind of like my teenager needs to argue with everything I say in order to be herself. Anyway, we've spoken about the hermeneutic battle, this struggle between Christianity and Judaism over who is able to interpret the text and therefore explain present reality, and most successfully guide us to redemption. Let it be soon, let it be now. Now, the 13th century was a time of debate in general. As we spoke about in the last episode, the method of the dialectic, the power of distinction and argumentation and clarification, rose within the Jews in the schools of the Tosfists, and it rose within Christian culture in the schools of the Scholastics. And the rise of scholasticism in the church encouraged many, many more Christians to attempt to push the Jews toward the light of their faith, thinking that now that they had the tools of reasoned argument, who could deny it?

And this flooding of the field of debate with a bunch of amateurs didn't actually bode well for the gathering of Christian converts. So much so that finally, in a bull of 1233, Pope Gregory IX condemned all public controversy. Public, mind you, as we're going to see. Official was another matter. But of course, people being what they are, nobody listened. The debates went on, people were duking it out on the street corners, and the Jews continued to hold their own. This frustrating fact actually gives us one of the great quotes of our time period when Louis IX, King, sorry, Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis, of France, right, said the following, I tell you that no one, unless he be a very learned clerk, should dispute with them, me and with the Jews, that the layman, when he hears the Christian law missaid, should not defend it, unless it be with his sword, with which he should pierce the missayer in the midriff as far as the sword will enter.

And as we'll see, unfortunately, St. Louis was good to his word. So, our story at this point starts with Nicholas Donnan. Nicholas Donham was a Jew, excommunicated by the Paris Jewish community in 1225 for denying the truth of the oral law. Apparently he'd spent a good ten years in the Beit Midrash arguing with the Tosfists until they finally kicked him out. And after living the life of an outcast for several years, he eventually converted and joined the Franciscan order. You'll recall that the Franciscans, together with the Dominicans at this point in history, had taken leading strides in pushing the intellectual and scholarly development of the Church So he essentially took his skills from the Beit Midrash and went straight to Franciscans His first act of revenge on his former people was to incite crusaders to riot in the mid-13th century, and there were large parts of Brittany that were actually emptied of Jews by these horrors.

But, unsatisfied with this scope of damage, in 1238, he decided to go for broke. He went to Rome and presented Pope Gregory IX with 35 accusations against the Talmud, against the Gemara, and further recommended its total destruction as a mass of blasphemy. He also added that the rabbis actually valued the Talmud more highly than the Bible, and that without it, the Jews would have left their obstinacy and been converted long ago. Now, to the Jews listening, this may not sound surprising, but you should know that this was big news to the Church. Who knew that the Jews had a commentary that they felt was more important than the Bible? And, furthermore, that the translations which Donnan provided evoked quite a powerful response.

On March 3rd, in the year 1240, while the Jews were praying in their synagogues, it was Shabbat, every copy of the Talmud that could be found in France was seized and transported to Paris, where the book was condemned to be judged for blasphemy before the royal court. So a trial was quickly organized, and soon enough, Nicholas Donnan faced off against the four leading rabbis of French Jewry, the great Tosfess Yechil of Paris Moshe of Kusi, Yehudah Melun and Shmuel ben Shlomo by the way, Yechil of Paris had been his teacher he was the one that excommunicated him to begin with, not that anything here is personal. Now, this was a blasphemy trial, but not against these four men, rather against a book and let me tell you it didn't go well because Danan knew the Talmud intimately and he was able to pull pieces of it in ways which were sometimes true and sometimes downright dishonest, but all the time evoked a sense of horror and outrage amongst his listeners at the court.

And though the rabbis did their best to defend it, it's actually an open question among scholars, and I share it, whether they completely disagreed with Donnan, that the Talmud disparages Christianity and blasphemes against their religion. And they were certainly unable to win over the hostile judges to this opinion. At the close of the trial, a commission of Christian theologians condemned the Talmud to be burned in its entirety. And in June 1242, wagon after wagon left the Franciscan convents where the Talmud had been in prison during its trial, and were driven slowly through the cobblestone streets of Paris. the first wagon came and the second and slowly an immense crowd gathered drawn by the novelty of the site because up to this point books had never been publicly burned in Paris the Jews of course stayed hidden in their deepest mourning too terrifying to go out to witness the destruction that was going to take place now I want you to picture it parchments piled high, remember this is 200 or more years before the printing press.

These were copies of the Talmud written at the hands of the Tosafists themselves. Twenty-four wagon loads. It took two days until the pile was complete. And when the torches were brought, the fire did its work. To this day, on the 9th of Av, Ashkenazi Jews say poems of mourning for the destruction of the Talmud in Paris. And in some ways, this marks the beginning of the end for French Jewry, though we will revisit them at least one more time. But for now, let's jump back to Spain, where hope still lives, and a new light and leadership are being born. And that is in the person of Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman, known as the Ramban Nachmanides. He's born in Girona, which is in Catalonia, close to the major city of Barcelona, in 1194, and he's destined to become a leader of the Jewish people whose fame and greatness in Torah will actually rival even Maimonides, the Rambam.

Don't get them confused, for those who aren't familiar. Ramban is Nachmanides. Rambam is Maimonides. I know it's annoying, but what can you do? Anyway, by age 16, his powerful mastery of the Torah already began to show itself and he wrote a work that's known as Milchomus Hashem, the Wars of the Lord, in defense of the halachic positions of the Riff, Rabbi Tzach al-Fasi, If you recall, he was the great Talmudist that brought his knowledge from North Africa to Spain back in 1088. And the driving principle of the Ramban's thought, and you could really even say of his entire life, was already apparent in this early work. He says that the words of the earlier authorities, either the sages of the Mishnahh or those of the Talmud or even the Gaonim, were neither to be doubted nor criticized.

I quote, We bow before them, and even when the reason for their words is not quite evident to us, we submit to them. This is the elevation of tradition to the ultimate authority. And you'll recall the Rambam controversy, with which we ended a couple episodes ago. And by the time this controversy over the philosophical positions of Maimonides and how they affected the culture of Spanish Jewry in Provence, you know, that southern France-Spanish border country. By the time it broke out in 1232, the Ramban was already the rabbi of Barcelona and a leading authority in the eyes of all the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, and of course was not deeply fond of philosophy. Nevertheless, it was he that attempted to make a compromise between the pro- and anti-Maimonian camps by suggesting that the ban against the philosophical portion of the Mishnahh Torah, of Maimonides' legal work be revoked, and the one against the study of the guide to the perplexed, his chief philosophical work, actually be strengthened, and furthermore, that they should really attack those who made allegorical interpretation of the biblical text.

It was a compromise that might have actually ended the whole struggle, but was in the end rejected by both sides in spite of his great authority. And this controversy will rear up again, not in this episode, but probably in the next, in the person of the Rosh and the Rashba. But we'll get to them, by and by. Meanwhile, as we talked about, that this controversy, rather than ending in a compromise that the Ramban could build, at least at this stage, ended in the burning of the Rambam's works. And it was actually Nachmanides' cousin, the great moralist and preacher, Rabbeinu Yonagrandi, who was a driving force behind that act of fanaticism. but following the burning of the Talmud in Paris which came only 10 years after the burning of the Rambam's works he had a change of heart and in an act of repentance whose honesty and sincerity were truly characteristic of this holy teacher Rabbeinu Yonah confessed in public in the very shul in which he had issued the ban against those who learned Maimonides that he had been wrong he then vowed to travel to Israel and lay himself in the grave of Maimonides in order to beg forgiveness for the dead sage.

Unfortunately, he didn't make it, because every community that he stopped in begged and pleaded with him to stay there and teach, and he ended his days in Toledo. But I can't help wonder whether the Ramban Nachmanides, again, when he faced the greatest trial of his life, also felt a sense of divine judgment against Am Yisrael because of their treatment of the Rambam. Because the territorial advances of the Uconquista in the later half of the 13th century, as we spoke about, fueled a resurgence of missionary zeal amongst the Dominican and Franciscan orders. One symptom of that was Nicholas Donnan and his attempt to convince the Pope that the Talmud was blasphemy. But after that attempt, which though it was locally successful, ultimately failed because the Talmud lived on, these orders appointed monks to learn Oriental languages, Hebrew, Arabic, in order to acquire deeper knowledge.

And, therefore, in the wake of this dispute, the Talmud actually became the central focus of their efforts instead of the Bible as it had been. However, there was one slight shift. Because, if in the Paris dispute, the Talmud had been accused of blasphemy, there was an entirely new perspective that was offered today. And, once again, it was driven by an apostate. Pablo Christiani was a Jew born in Aragon in the early 13th century who converted to Christianity and eventually became a Dominican friar you notice the pattern, we'll speak more about that when we get deeper into the 14th century the details of his life before conversion are lost to us but those afterward, for better or worse, are quite well known because inspired by the damage that had been done to Tomlin in the Paris dispute but nonetheless frustrated by its failure to bring about the mass conversion of the Jews Christianity convinced the head of his order who also happened to be the confessor to King James I of Aragon that he could prove the truth of Christianity from the Talmud and Rabbinic writings now it's no longer a matter of blasphemy but it's a matter of a claim that the deepest truths of Rabbinic culture indicate the truth of Christian redemption the friar was sent to the king and in the year 1263 King James I ordered the Ramban Nachmanides to stand and defend Judaism against his accusations this is what's known as the disputation at Barcelona and this pattern of disputation became characteristic of the middle ages and will not go away because it was a sign of the relatively tolerant nature of the times as well as apparently what history reports to be a positive relationship between James I and the Ramban which predated this trial It was a sign of that that the Ramban asked for and was granted complete freedom of speech in his replies to Christianity.

This was not a given, and it would no way be the case in the disastrous debates of the coming centuries. But for now, who can imagine trying to argue with the Ramban on a level playing field? So for four days, the great sage and the apostate argued their cases before the king, his court, and a host of clergy. And the questions at hand were three. Number one, whether the Messiah had appeared or not already. Number two, whether, according to scripture, the Messiah is a divine or human being. And number three, whether the Jews or the Christians, as a consequence to the first two answers, held the true faith. small matters, but quite profound. The details of this dispute actually lay beyond the scope of our discussion, but the history of it is important, because as the argument seemed to turn in favor of the Ramban, the Jews of Barcelona began to get nervous, and in between two of the sessions begged him to quit, because they were afraid of the reprisals that the Dominicans would bring about them if they actually succeeded in winning.

Nonetheless, when the Ramban told the king of their fears, he ordered him to proceed and promise to protect the people. Now, I'm not going to step into the middle of the fight about who won. Clearly the Dominicans were going to claim victory no matter what. And clearly Jewish tradition makes the Ramban the victor. But what we do know is that King James ended the debate after four days with this comment to the Ramban, I've never seen a man defend a wrong cause so well. He also gave him a gift, by the way, of 300 gold pieces, and made an action which was unique in the Middle Ages of coming to the synagogue in Barcelona on that Sabbath day to address the Jews. Now, you should know that the law was that the Dominican and Franciscan friars were permitted to come into the synagogues to preach to the Jews, but the idea of the king coming was unprecedented.

and the Ramban understood full well that the claims of the friars to have defeated him could easily overwhelm the reality of what had happened in the room during the dispute and therefore he decided to publish a text in the entire debate this in turn, however, came around to haunt him because it resulted in charges of blasphemy I mean, the text was full of all kinds of very controversial statements about Christian theology even though there was nothing in the text which he hadn't spoken before the king himself Nevertheless, the result was that the Ramban subsequently left or was banished from Aragon. And after a few years of wandering, he came to his ultimate destination, Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, the Holy Land.

And it was here, on the soil of our ancestors, that the Ramban's most well-known work was written, and that is his commentary on the Torah. And not only is this work important because of the lucidity of its thought and the amazing creativity of its content. It's critical because this is the work which introduces us to the Ramban as a Kabbalist. And I think a word of introduction on that word might be in order. Kabbalah. The root of the word Kabbalah, the Kabbal in the infinitive, is to receive. And as we'll see, the question is, what is it that one is receiving? Now in rabbinic literature, if you look into the Gemara and the Midrashim, the word Kabbalah most often actually refers to the teachings of the books of the prophets and the wisdom literature, which are part of the Bible but lie outside of the Torah itself.

It's really only in the 12th century in Spain that its dominant meaning comes to be the teachings of Jewish mysticism. And as I said, the question is, what is it that's being received? Now the Ramban had a very clear stance on this question, and it's consistent with his entire approach to the Torah. He says in the introduction to his commentary on the Torah, I quote, I do hereby firmly make known to him, meaning the one who's reading, that my words will not be comprehended nor known at all by any reasoning or contemplation, excepting from the mouth of a wise Kabbalist speaking into the ear of an understanding recipient. reasoning about them is foolishness. In other words, the Ramban and the school of practice that he founded claim that the oral transmission done in a controlled fashion from a reliable master to his student is the only source of authentic Kabbalah in the present.

What you're receiving in mystic knowledge is therefore ultimately the same as the source of all Jewish knowledge, a revelation which goes back to Moshe at Sinai and is faithfully transmitted through rabbinic authority. Now just to make it clear the implications of what he said, this is what I call an anti-hermeneutical situation. Meaning what? That without a reliable transmission, there is no way, according to the Ramban, to reconstruct the secrets of the Torah through independent analysis or reasoning. However, you should know that the Ramban's perspective on the origins of mystic knowledge and on the meaning of the term Kabbalah was not the only one out there. Rav Avram Abu Lafya, who eventually establishes the discipline which he termed prophetic Kabbalah, was born in Zaragoza in northern Spain in the year 1240.

And apparently he was born with a wandering spirit. because soon after his father's death at the age of 18, rumors of the Mongol conquest sweeping through Asia reached him, though in a somewhat confused form, because at that age, Abu Lafayr set off on a quest to find the ten lost tribes who he believed were actually now returning to the land of Israel. After two years, he actually arrived in the port city of Ako and, upon investigation, found his disappointment that the Mongols were not, in fact, Jewish. And therefore, he continued his wandering. And in around 1270 or 1271, a turning point occurred in his life. It was a vision. It was a vision in which he was ordered to speak with the Pope, as indeed he would do in about a decade.

He continued to wander and teach and have visions as he moved around the Mediterranean, particularly in Greece. And his gentle nature, purity of character, and charismatic teaching style attracted many, many students. and in 1279 he had another vision and now in its way he began to compose the first of his prophetic works Sefer Hayashar, the book of the upright and it's in that notion of prophetic works that we come to the essential difference between the mysticism of the Ramban and that of Abulafia which will ultimately draw us toward the question we open with which is, what's up with the Zohar? So as I said, Abu Lafi called his system prophetic Kabbalah. And he did so in order to distinguish it from that of those who had come before him.

Because he saw the systems of people like the Ramban as essentially speculative. Meaning what? They were creating systems of mystic thought, or what we might call metaphysics. Talking about God and transmitting secrets which they themselves had received but had not lived. and Abu Lafya looked at this as a definitively inferior grade of knowledge because he believed that man's highest goal is prophecy or at least a certain degree of communion with God. And he gives the following definition to Kabbalah. In order to understand my intention regarding the meaning of kolot, of voices, I shall hand down to you the known Kabbalot, some of them having been received from mouth to mouth, from the sages of our generation, like the Ramban said, and others that I have received from the books of, named Sifre Kabbalah, or the books of mysticism, composed by the ancient sages, the Kabbalists.

Note he differs with Ramban there as well, because just by reading a book you could derive these truths. Furthermore, others, which came to me from God in the form of a bat kol, literally daughter of a voice, an echo of the prophetic emanation from God. These being the higher Kabbalot. So here we have it. To Abba Athiyah, the plural for Kabbalah, which is Kabbalot, is actually a play on the word Bat Kol. It's the echoes of the divine voice. And therefore the highest form of Kabbalah is not what you receive through oral and written translation, but what you receive through revelation. And in case you think his visionary work was entirely limited to leaving this world, he followed through, because in 1280 he went to Rome, in order to convert Pope Nicholas III as he had been commanded in his vision.

Now work got out, and the Pope heard that he was coming from his summer palace at Suriano, and he issued orders to burn the fanatic as soon as he reached the place. In fact, the story goes that they had actually set up a stake close to the inner gate for just that purpose. But Abulafia was not in the least disturbed. He set out for Suriano, and when he reached there on August 22, he actually had passed through the outer gates of the palace when he heard that the Pope had died that night from a stroke. And it's near this time when history loses track of Abraham Abulafia. He's assumed to have died around 1291, but his contributions didn't disappear with him. And it's critical really to understand that Abu Lafiyah saw himself not just as a specific kind of Kabbalist with a superior method, his method was largely built around imagining and visualizing permutations of words, letters, and names of God, but he saw himself primarily as a prophet and even a messiah albeit on a personal plane Because he saw a new world arising a new relationship with God on the horizon By the way, one of the outgrowths of this view was his interaction with Christian mystics of his day and his willingness to use downright Trinitarian imagery to relate to them.

And that approach brought down the wrath of traditional authorities. There is a tradition that he was actually excommunicated by the Rashba, one of the chief students of the Ramban, who we'll discuss in a coming episode. And it also meant that most of his writings would be lost entirely, or left in his own handwritten manuscripts until well after his death. In fact, until relatively recently, you could say honestly that his major influence was actually on the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance, and how he helped to fuel the rise of Christian Kabbalah. But nevertheless, for our purposes, by comparing him to the Ramban, and holding the tension which they represent, I think we can get an important insight.

Because these two holy rabbis represent two poles of authority, tradition and revelation. And I believe that between these two lies the answer to one of the most foundational questions of Jewish mysticism, where did the Zohar come from? So before we can answer that question, of course, we have to answer the question of what is the Zohar, the Book of Brilliance, and how did it come to be the essential text to Jewish mysticism. So, what we can say for sure, is that sometime near the turn of the 14th century, Rav Moshe Shem Tov De Leon published a massive collection of mystical teachings, which he said were the work of the Holy Tana, the sage of the Mishnahh, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. You may recall, from previous episodes, that tradition records that when Rabbi Shimon was fleeing from Roman persecution in the 2nd century, he took refuge in a cave with his son for 13 years.

There he and his son delved deeper into the secrets of the Torah than any had before them, and indeed merited to revelations from none other than Eliyahu Hanavi, the prophet Elijah. Now, Rav Moshe Shem Tov was a member of a circle of Kabbalists, which is known to us now as the Drona School, circled around the city of Drona, of course, which thrived in the late 12th to the 14th centuries, and whose member included both the Ramban, Abu Lafya, and many of their students. So in form, the Zohar is part mythic adventures of Rabbi Shimon and his companions as they wander through life in Torah, part interpretive discussions of the Torah itself in its own highly esoteric mystic way, and part downright mystical system.

in essence I'd say that the Zohar is premised on the idea that the moral perfection of man is a driver for the ideal world of these ten modes through which the divine will is manifest in creation and it teaches us that the infinity of God is itself dependent upon man for manifestation in the world that it's only humanity that can bring about divine influx As the Zohar said, the dew which enlivens the world flows from the just. And therefore, it preaches the practice of virtue and moral perfection through which one can increase the outpouring of heavenly grace. Because even physical life depends on virtue. And in this, it takes serious aim in many of its parables at the culture of the wealthy courtiers of Moshe de Leon's day.

And that's because the Zohar assumes that all visible things, the phenomena of nature included have an inner reality which is essential because the universe is a series of emanations from the infinite perfect one down to the world which we have it and so it follows that by grasping the physical world with the right intellectual, moral and spiritual consciousness one can ascend to the cause of all causes and it's worth it to note as well that it's in the Zohar and amongst the students of the Jorona school that we first find the four-part structure of biblical exegesis known as the pardes, the orchard, chat, the surface meaning of the text, understanding the words, remez, the meaning in context, understanding in the wholeness of the structure of text, intertextuality being one of its primary tools, drash, the meaning of the text in total context, where the oral and the written Torah meet, and the reader's grasp of the wholeness comes into play.

And finally, Sod, secret, that level of meaning, which is really the experience of truth as an intimate interaction, not just between reader and text, but between reader and the voice which speaks the text. And since Sod is the level of meaning that really emerges within the mind and soul of the reader, it stands to reason that you could say that there are levels of meaning which are organic to the original text they were always there but which were unavailable to anyone until a particular reader at a particular point in history arrived at that text and that brings us back around to our historical question now it's critical to note if you want to know who wrote the Zohar that right from the outset that there was an argument about its authenticity.

There is a traditional account in a book called Sefer Yuchusin, written by Rabbi Avram Zucuto, which tells how Rabbi Yitzhak of Akko, who was a student of the Ramban, while after the Ramban made it to the Holy Land, actually came to Spain in order to examine the question for himself. He met Rav Moshe de Leon in Valladolid, and Rav Moshe swore to him under oath that he was in possession of the manuscript written by Rabbi Shimon himself. He said it was in his hometown of Vila, and they should go there to travel and see it. Unfortunately, as soon as they parted company, Rav Moshe died. Now, Rav Yitzchak was crushed by this news. Nevertheless, he persevered, because he wanted to get to the bottom of the story.

And when he met Rav Moshe's widow, he heard a disturbing story. Because there was a very wealthy man who had offered a large amount of money, she was left destitute by her husband, if she would give him the original copy from which her husband had copied the Zohar, and she said that Mav Moshe had never possessed such a work. Rather, he had written it from his head, his heart, his knowledge, and his own intellect. Disturbed, Rabbi Yitzchak traveled on until he found another great sage, Rav Yosef Halevi. And in speaking with him, and he was a student of Mav Moshe, he swore by heaven and earth that he had put Rabbi Moshe to the test and discovered that the Zohar was indeed written by Rabbi Shumen bar Yochai.

So this was all in the day and age of the author himself. But I want you to note that these are questions about the authenticity which depend on authorship. And that's the perspective of the Ramban. Kabbalah is only that which has been handed down faithfully. So therefore the question of who the author is is critical. But what would Nehavu Lafya say? What about the authenticity of the power of revelation? In other words, I think that the issue of authorship only distracts from the real question, is the Zohar true? Now, I can offer all kinds of theories about where it came from. Rashbi wrote it all. It was compiled from his source text over centuries, and that is indeed one of the answers that's given. Rab Moshe DeLeon made it all up, and everything in between.

But just remember that within a century, the Zohar will sweep all of Am Yisrael into its wake. despite the periodic skeptical voices, and will become the foundation of Jewish mystical thought to this day. And anyone who's ever seen over 800,000 Jews celebrating at the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai by learning his works knows the power of this book. Now listen, I'm too much of a skeptic to believe that the Kool-Aid is good just because I see everybody drinking it. But I've tasted from some of these waters myself, and they're very sweet. I believe that the question around the origin of the Zohar can serve once again to teach us something fundamental about the link between our understanding of the past and our vision of the future.

Because if I insist that the Zohar's truth is contingent upon the historicity of its authorship, then once again I'm insisting that the past is only relevant in its literalism. And furthermore, if I believe that the deepest secrets of the Torah were only revealed once upon a time. And our access to them depends on an unbroken tradition. It means that the highest aspiration I can have, if I want to touch those depths, is to idealize the past, the good old days, when people as holy as Rebbe Shimon walked the earth. But on the other hand, if the truth of the Zohar lies in its truth, be it revealed or received, then my story of the past finds it important in the type of person that it creates. And if that's the case, then the truth of those are, no matter how it came down to us through history, will truly be revealed in the future which it helps us to shape.

I just want to thank a couple of people. I want to thank you for listening, and especially those of you who are supporters of this show. You can join them if you're not yet. You can go to www.patreon.com And you can find my M. Foyer page and hit donate for a little per podcast support. Or you can send me a personal message or go to my Rav Mike page on Facebook to see the info. I want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me the opportunity to reach such a broad audience. I want to thank Pardes Institute, that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for allowing me to touch the hearts and minds of so many special Jews. I want to thank Suam Yaakov dot com, that's my home. And I want to thank you for listening.

I'm Rav Mike Boyer and this is The Jewish Story