1. The Exegetical Imperative
The generation of Jewish scholars before Recanati contributed greatly to kabbalis-tic hermeneukabbalis-tics, as was mentioned in chapter 5. Both the ecstakabbalis-tic Kabbalists, such as Abulafia and Yitzhaq of Acre, and the theosophical-theurgical ones, such as the Castilian Kabbalists, formulated systematic techniques of exegesis. However, Recanati, who was acquainted with many of these treatments, does not quote them at all. Though composing a book that invited, in principle, some elaborations on exegesis, in his main work, the Commentary on the Torah, the Italian Kabbalist does not indulge in theoretical speculations, describing precisely how secrets were extracted from the scriptures. In this respect his approach is reminiscent of
Nahmanides’ or R. Shlomo ibn Adret’s reticence in formulating exegetical sys-tems. These three authors belong to what I propose to call the first elite, a layer of authors who refrained from organizing exegetical methods into a more systematic structure.
This reticence notwithstanding, Recanati did not refrain from offering his own kabbalistic interpretations of the Pentateuch and of the various commandments.
In fact he invited everyone to do so, and his encouragement is both explicit and quite extraordinary in its formulation:
It is incumbent upon us to elevate all these good things, degree after degree, step after step, until these things arrive at God, blessed be He, who is perfect without any blemish . . . since every place in the Torah where you are able to elevate that deed or that commandment to a thing that is higher than it, does elevate it, and then it will be good to you, despite the fact that you did not receive that rationale from a kabbalistic sage, or even if you did not see it in one of the books of the sages. All this [may be done] lest you should say that this thing is not according to its plain sense but hints at a higher thing. . . . You should also not say that the rationale that you thought of by yourself is the principal reason why the Torah, namely that commandment, was revealed.
But you should say that if that commandment had not been promulgated, it would be worthwhile to be revealed because of this rationale.1
Recanati’s imperative is to elevate—the Hebrew verb is le-ha‘alot—namely to find a nexus between a commandment and a supernal entity to which to relate it.
This exegetical elevation should not consist in a denial of the plain sense of the commandment; rather, the kabbalistic explanation is to be understood as a link between an action and a supernal entity. Thus, the Italian Kabbalist strives to maintain the paramount importance of performance of the commandment even after discovering the kabbalistic sense. Discovering the sublime secrets of Kabbalah should therefore not preclude the performance of the commandments by Kabbalists in the mundane world. However, the emphasis is on the necessity to discover rationales, which are theosophical, and thus transform the performance into a theurgical act.
The method of discovery is very important. Recanati is aware of the existence of oral traditions, which were kept as esoteric teachings, as well as of the kabbalistic literature dealing with the rationales of the commandments. However, Recanati does insist that if someone does not receive rationales in the two ways, oral and written, someone should find out a rationale by himself, by using his own reason.
By offering this third source for rationales of the commandments, Recanati inserts his Kabbalah into the innovative trend of Kabbalah, which was ready to allow, and
even encourage, the independent spiritual exegetical literature. He is perhaps the first of the Kabbalists who belongs to the first elite and nevertheless allows such a free exegetical activity.
I assume that this freedom is part of the existential situation of this Kabbalist.
Assuming that he acquired most if not all of his kabbalistic knowledge from writ-ten documents, and lacking any name of a kabbalistic master who introduced Recanati to Kabbalah, we witness here the beginning of a new process in the his-tory of Kabbalah. It may be that Recanati was the first Kabbalist to be born and educated, for at least most of his life, outside a center of kabbalistic learning.2 Recanati does not emerge from a certain kabbalistic school, nor does he subscribe to any of them in a definitive manner, and this noncommittal attitude opened the way to a greater receptiveness to exegetical innovations. Apparently Nahmanides’
interdiction on innovating kabbalistic secrets by using reason—a policy adopted by most of his followers—was less relevant in Italy. Thus Recanati, a figure belong-ing to a first elite, inscribes himself in a line of intellectual activity characteristic of the secondary elite, just as he does when he imposes R. Azriel’s instrumental theosophy—stemming from a figure in the secondary elite—upon Nahmanides’
essentialist one, deriving from the first elite.
2. On Symbols in Recanati’s Kabbalah
The main tool for the elevation of scriptural discussions related to the higher enti-ties is the symbolic interpretation of the sacred texts. Recanati’s recommendation should be understood in this specific context, as promoting a textual exegesis but not a symbolic interpretation of reality or history. By being so specifically text-oriented, the Italian Kabbalist can help us better understand the gist of the kabbalistic symbolic project, which deals predominantly with adding new theosophic meanings to the plain sense of the canonical texts.
Let me survey first what I would designate as the pansymbolic perception of modern scholars, which assumes that the Kabbalists perceived not only sacred scriptures but also reality as possessing symbolic valences. So, for example, we read in an essay by Isaiah Tishby dedicated to kabbalistic symbolism: “the Kabbalistic symbols are not only means for understanding reality, or ways of expression, but the entire reality is conceived of as a texture of symbols for divinity, and the vision of the existents without understanding the significance that is hidden within them, is a flawed vision.”3 A less grandiose attempt to explain the sources of the kabbalistic symbols is found in one of Scholem’s essays, where he characterizes the kabbalistic symbols as “symbols of a very special kind, in which the spiritual experience of the mystics was almost inextricably intertwined with the historical experience of the Jewish people. It is this interweaving of two realms,
which in most other religious mysticisms have remained separate, that gave Kabbalah its specific imprint.”4 Elsewhere Scholem reinforces this historically oriented explanation of symbolism: “The more sordid and cruel the fragment of historical reality allowed to the Jew amid the storms of exile, the deeper and more precise the symbolic hope which burst through it and transfigured it.”5
Despite numerous attempts to tie kabbalistic symbolism to nonscriptural matters, there is little evidence to support the too-comprehensive visions attributed to Kabbalists. They were apparently not concerned with nature or history, and did not transform them into symbols. Had they done so, we could learn something from their symbolism about their experiences and historical setting. However, the poor information we have about the lives of the Kabbalists—and Recanati is a perfect example—leaves us unable to extrapolate from the symbols to the historical events, the places, or the persons contemporary with the Kabbalah. As I have argued else-where, not all the kabbalistic literature is symbolic, and even in the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, symbols are of different sorts, and we would do better to analyze individual Kabbalists’ use of symbols before generalizing prematurely about the nature of kabbalistic symbolism. Such an approach has been applied already in the cases of Sefer Ma‘arekhet ha-’Elohut and of R. Joseph Gikatilla.6
Let us now examine Recanati’s writings to see whether they indeed corroborate scholars’ impressions about a pansymbolist approach. Like many other theosophic-theurgic Kabbalists, Recanati adopted a modest approach, restricting himself to the interpretation of biblical and rabbinic issues, commandments and stories. His fear that the plain sense of the sacred scriptures would become problematic for an intel-lectual may be related to the allegorical exegesis of the Jewish philosophers, which reveals a reluctance to create embarrassment for more conservative Jews concerned with maintaining the traditional halakhic approach. I assume that this is also the case with Recanati, and it seems that at least in one major case he should be under-stood as reacting to a philosophical interpretation to what I propose to call a primary symbol in Judaism. Such a tension between the old and new elements is more evi-dent when the absorption of new elements is a very massive one, or when some of these novel elements reflect a religious or intellectual sensibility that conflicts sub-stantially with some of the core symbols of the adopting structure. The more central the symbol that is interpreted in a new manner, the greater the potential conflict. If a symbol interpreted in a new way is a primary one,7 it can easily involve a confronta-tion between its tradiconfronta-tional concept and the novel one. The secondary symbols are less liable to provoke strong resentments among more traditionalist figures when these symbols are transposed into different keys.
As we saw in chapter 9, Recanati, like other Kabbalists, created a very strong linkage between the commandments and the Divine Chariot, the Merkavah. In my
opinion, the divine chariot should be seen as a primary symbol, since it had a deep influence on many issues in Jewish mysticism, and (as we shall see below) it orga-nizes the structure of one of the central issues in Judaism, the commandments.8 Let us look at how Recanati portrays the philosophical understanding of the divine chariot:
[The philosophers] . . . have no part or heritage whatsoever in the secrets of the Torah and the secrets of our sages, and it would be better to refrain from [dealing with] the commandments and the homilies [of the sages] rather than speaking about them, distorting their [authentic] meaning, and pro-posing a rationale for them with which even children are acquainted. Look at the third part of the Guide, and you will know their [the philosophers’]
issues. And if that wisdom is a wisdom, know indeed and explicitly that it [philosophy] is not the wisdom of our Torah, since they did not believe [in anything] except in matters that they derived by logical demonstration, and they interpreted all the Sitrei Torah according to the Greek wisdom, and the Merkavah “came up and went out of Egypt” [1 Kings 10:29].9
Indeed, in another book Recanati asserts that philosophers reject issues con-nected to the words of prayer and Ma‘aseh Merkavah.10 Immediately afterward he attacks Maimonides himself.11 Jewish philosophers in general, and Maimonides in particular, distorted the traditional esoteric issues by interpreting them according to Greek philosophy. They presented the secrets of the Jews as if they stemmed from alien sources, referred to as “Egypt.” In the same place Recanati also mentions the Merkavah in a context that clearly deals with the meaning of the commandments. As we have seen above, Recanati explicitly connects the rationales of the command-ments with the Merkavah; we therefore have in his approach a clear criticism of the Maimonidean view of the commandments based upon Recanati’s rejection of the philosophical conception of the Merkavah as stemming from external sources. Is it sheer coincidence that the vast body of kabbalistic literature dealing with Ta‘amei ha-Mitzwot flourished in the hundred years following Maimonides’ attempt to propose rationales, which Kabbalists conceived as being innovations? However, my proposal should not be understood too simplistically; the symbolic mode was much more than a reaction to Maimonides’ and other philosophers’ allegorical exegesis.
As we saw in the quotations from Monoimos the Arab in the previous chapter, the Ten Commandments and the ten plagues were understood as “symbols of creation”
on the one hand and as divine mysteries on the other, in an approach in which theosophy and theurgy were deeply intertwined.
To counteract this interpretation, Kabbalists in the thirteenth century, and Recanati after them, portrayed the divine chariot as the preeminent symbol of the
divine potencies, the sefirot.12 This explanation of the origin of symbolism as strongly dependent on the status of the rituals seems to me one of the main ways to conceptualize the emergence of the theosophic-theurgic Kabbalah, although it is difficult to adduce decisive proofs for this explanation.13 However, in the case of Recanati it seems that there is indeed a nexus between a philosophical interpreta-tion described explicitly as alien, and the kabbalistic symbolic approach to the Merkavah, In other words, the symbolic hermeneutics of these Kabbalists should be better understood as an attempt to counteract the allegorical monosemic code, historically stemming from an alien source, which was conceived of as subverting the plain sense of the sacred texts. As we saw in the passage above, for Recanati the battle was between the philosophers’ interpretation of the secrets of the Torah, understood as identical with, or at least similar to, Aristotelian philosophy, and the kabbalistic appropriation of these secrets in symbolic terms.
If this explanation is correct, the crystallization of the symbolic mode in Kabbalah is part of a comprehensive conflict between Aristotelian noetics when applied to scripture, and a growing theosophical system stemming from both earlier Jewish sources and Neoplatonic ontology, which invited a more Neoplatonic noetics and a more nebulous and polysemic approach to the canonical texts. Indeed, scholars have described the Zohar, the most important kabbalistic corpus using symbols in a creative way, as a reaction to Maimonides.14 This general observation is also perti-nent to the symbolic hermeneutics of Kabbalah. To understand better the scriptural nature of the symbolic code, we should introduce Umberto Eco’s semiotics.15 The use of the concept of code is particularly pertinent in the kabbalistic systems, where the sefirot are conceived of not as essentially divine powers but as instruments of divine activities. The quandary involved in knowing the divine system understood as consisting of sefirot as instruments and symbolized by scriptural terms is much smaller than it may be in the essential systems; in my opinion, even in these systems the Kabbalist was acquainted with the signifié, the sefirotic system and its details, before he started the exegetical enterprise. I am inclined to see Scholem’s vision of the symbol as expressing an inexpressible entity or process, and its more recent exaggerations as the result of the impact of an apophatic approach, namely a nega-tive theology that is characteristic of Western Christian mystical thought.16
Let us look at the kataphatic, or positive theological, approach found in Recanati’s discussion of elevation. In the introduction to his Commentary on the Rationales of the Commandments, he writes: “The commandments of the Torah are divided into many categories,17 and all of them depend on one power, which is Causa Causarum, blessed be He and His Name. And each and every commandment has a great principle [‘Iqar Gadol] and hidden rationale, which is not understood from any of the other commandments except via this [specific] commandment,
which discloses the secret.”18 The epistemology that informs this statement assumes that the commandments are the specific venue for understanding the corresponding sefirotic powers or aspects. Thus, we may assume that the cultiva-tion of the Jewish ritual was both a modus vivendi and a modus cognescendi. The commandments therefore function as symbols that allow the practitioners to intuit the structure of the supernal world. These direct statements are reminiscent of the correspondences between plagues and the decadic anthropos mentioned above in chapter 9, in the name of the Gnostic Monoimos the Arab. There, too, the creative powers are related to human activities, the Ten Commandments. In the cases of both the ancient Gnostic and Recanati, as we shall see immediately below, the supernal world contains all the information that concerns what is going on here below. So, for example, Recanati writes, in the context of the quotations adduced above in our discussions of the Merkavah and commandments: “The sages of Kabbalah said that the secret of the seven days of creation hint at what is past, is present, and will be in the future.”19
Thus, the symbolic structure is not only a matter of understanding the symbolic valence of the sacred scripture, which is indeed the most important function of the symbolic mode, but also an experiential mystical dimension of the Kabbalist as a performer. Let me address now a much more literary treatment of the symbolic mode. In his Commentary on the Torah Recanati writes: “From all these matters you may know that all the stories of the Torah have their principle on high. And because they are on high, they are, in any case, generating fruits upon the world below, in their likeness, like the light that emerges from the sun. This is the reason why you may find in the Torah issues that may seem, on their plain sense, super-fluous. But when you elevate these matters [to a position] opposite the face of the supernal candlestick, they will illumine, as it is written: ‘Take the veil from my eyes that I may see the marvels that spring from thy law’ [Psalms 119:18].”20
The principle of elevation is mentioned here in a discussion of the nonritualistic aspects of the Bible, just as Recanati deals with the commandments in the quota-tions analyzed earlier. Thus the two major subject matters of the Bible, stories and ritual, are conceived of as intimately related to the supernal world, which is the principle that informs the meaning of the lower world. From the epistemological point of view, Recanati does not seem to be much concerned with the matters of the ineffability of the divine and the indescribability of the hidden, in contrast to mod-ern scholars. In fact, the lower is conceived of as a type of copy, through which the knowledgeable Kabbalist is able to find out its original on high. Such a strong rela-tionship is portrayed in two seminal statements on the relarela-tionship between the higher and the lower and between the human body and the sefirotic realm. In his Commentary on the Torah Recanati asserts: “All the supernal things are generating
their paradigm here below.”21 More conspicuous is the view expressed earlier in the same treatise:
Man comprises all the supernal [entities]. His hands hint at the arms of the world; the tongue and the circumcision correspond to the two preponderant [Powers], and also the spinal cord [corresponds] to the first preponderant [Power]. The legs correspond to the branches. The heart corresponds to the Great Sea or its [female] companion. And these signs are made in the like-ness of the supernal [entities]. . . . And this is the reason why man is a microcosm, as he comprises everything. All his limbs are in likeness and
Man comprises all the supernal [entities]. His hands hint at the arms of the world; the tongue and the circumcision correspond to the two preponderant [Powers], and also the spinal cord [corresponds] to the first preponderant [Power]. The legs correspond to the branches. The heart corresponds to the Great Sea or its [female] companion. And these signs are made in the like-ness of the supernal [entities]. . . . And this is the reason why man is a microcosm, as he comprises everything. All his limbs are in likeness and