Карен Армстронг – The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (страница 5)
But this would take time. In the early sixteenth century, the exiled Jews found that traditional Judaism did nothing for them. The disaster seemed unprecedented, and they found that old pieties no longer worked. Some turned to messianism. For centuries, Jews had waited for a Messiah, an anointed king of the house of David, to bring their long exile to an end and return them to the Promised Land. Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come.9 Other peoples who have felt that their world has been destroyed by the onset of modernity would also evolve millennial hopes. But messianism is problematic, because, until now, every single messianic movement that has expected an imminent Redeemer has been disappointed. The Sephardic Jews avoided this dilemma by finding a more satisfying solution. They developed a new
A group of Sephardics had moved from the Balkans to Palestine, where they settled in Safed in Galilee. There was a tradition that when the Messiah came, he would reveal himself in Galilee, and the Spanish exiles wanted to be the first to greet him.10 Some of them came to believe that they had found him in a saintly, sickly Ashkenazic Jew, Isaac Luria (1534–72), who settled in Safed and was the first to articulate the new myth. He thus founded a form of Kabbalah that still bears his name. We moderns would say that Luria created this myth; that he was so perfectly attuned to the unconscious desires and fears of his people that he was able to evolve an imaginative fiction that brought comfort and hope not only to the exiles in Safed but to Jews all over the world. But we would say this because we think primarily in rational terms and find it hard to enter into the premodern mythical worldview. Luria’s disciples did not perceive him as having “made up” his creation myth; instead, as they saw it, the myth had declared itself to him. To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the
When confronted with the Lurianic creation myth, a modern person will immediately ask: “Did this really happen?” Because the events seem so improbable and cannot be proved, we will dismiss it as demonstrably false. But that is because we accept only a rational version of truth and have lost the sense that there might be another kind. We have developed, for example, a scientific view of history, which we see as a succession of unique events. In the premodern world, however, the events of history were not seen as singular but as examples of eternal laws, revelations of a timeless, constant reality. A historical occurrence would be likely to happen again and again, because all earthly happenings expressed the fundamental laws of existence. In the Bible, for example, a river parts miraculously on at least two occasions to enable the Israelites to make a rite of passage; the Children of Israel are often “going down” into Egypt and then making a return journey to the Promised Land. One of the most frequently recurring biblical themes was exile, which, after the Spanish catastrophe, seemed to color the whole of Jewish existence and to reflect an imbalance in the very ground of being. Lurianic Kabbalah addressed itself to this problem by going back, as all mythology must, to the beginning in order to examine exile, which seemed one of these fundamental laws, and to reveal its full significance.
In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent. The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum (“withdrawal”): the infinite and inaccessible Godhead, which Kabbalists called Ein Sof (“Without End”), had to shrink into itself, evacuating, as it were, a region within itself in order to make room for the world. Creation had begun, therefore, with an act of divine ruthlessness: in its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile upon a part of itself. Unlike the orderly, peaceful creation described in the first chapter of Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters, and false starts which seemed to the Sephardic exiles a more accurate appraisal of the world they lived in. At an early stage in the Lurianic process, Ein Sof had tried to fill the emptiness it had created by Zimzum with divine light, but the “vessels” or “pipes” which were supposed to channel it shattered under the strain. Sparks of divine light fell into the abyss of all that was not God. After this “breaking of the vessels,” some of the sparks returned to the Godhead, but others remained trapped in this Godless realm, which was filled with the evil potential that Ein Sof had purged from itself in the act of Zimzum. After this disaster, creation was awry; things were in the wrong place. When Adam was created, he could have rectified the situation and, had he done so, the divine exile would have ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam sinned and henceforth the divine sparks were trapped in material objects, and the Shekhinah, the Presence that is the closest we come to an apprehension of the divine on earth, wandered through the world, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.11
It is a fantastic tale, but if the Kabbalists of Safed had been asked if they believed that this had really occurred, they would have found the question inappropriate. The primordial event described in myth is not simply an incident that happened once in the remote past; it is also an occurrence that happens all the time. We have no concept or word for such an event, because our rational society thinks of time in a strictly chronological way. If the worshippers at Eleusis in ancient Greece had been asked if they could prove that Persephone had been held prisoner by Pluto in the underworld, and that her mother, Demeter, had wandered around mourning the loss of her daughter, they would probably have been bewildered by the query. How could they be certain that Persephone had returned to the earth, as the myth related? Because the fundamental rhythm of life that this
Luria was not a writer, and during his lifetime his teachings were known to very few people.13 But his pupils recorded his teachings for posterity and others spread them in Europe. By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement, the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews at this time.14 It did so not because it could be proved rationally or scientifically, since it obviously could not. It clearly contradicted Genesis in almost every particular. But a literal reading of Scripture is, as we shall see, a modern preoccupation, springing from the prevalence of the rational over the mythical consciousness. Before the modern period, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all relished highly allegorical, symbolic, and esoteric interpretations of their sacred texts. Since God’s Word was infinite, it was capable of yielding a multitude of meanings. So Jews were not distressed, as many modern religious people would be, by Luria’s divergence from the plain meaning of the Bible. His myth spoke to them with authority because it explained their lives and provided them with meaning. Instead of Jews being a marginalized people, thrust out of the modern world that was coming into being, their experience was in tune with the most fundamental laws of existence. Even God suffered exile; everything in creation had been displaced from the very beginning; divine sparks were trapped in matter, and goodness was forced to struggle with evil—an omnipresent fact of life. Further, Jews were not rejects and outcasts, but central actors in the redemptive process. The careful observance of the commandments of the Torah, the Law of Moses, and special rites evolved in Safed could end this universal exile. Jews could thus help to effect the “restoration”