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LOBBY
Courses
Eating from the Tree of Life: A Course on the Zohar
INTRODUCTION
The Zohar, the Book of Radiance, is revered, even feared, but
rarely studied. Yet it is an exhilirating and challenging text,
as compelling today as when it became known in thirteenth-century
Spain. This course is an invitation to explore the Zohar from
a liberal Jewish religious perspective. It includes introductory
essays on Zohar study, and a selection of texts translated from
the Zohar, with brief commentaries, as well as recommendations
for further reading. You are invited to begin with either the
introductory material or the texts, and move back and forth between
them. There is also a bulletin board for your questions and insights. WHAT THE ZOHAR IS
TOPICS Introduction What the Zohar Is
Reading the Zohar is entering a dream-world where boundaries shift
and dissolve, an exploration of the self and of reality itself
which can be both disturbing and exhilirating. While advocating
a traditional Jewish life of learning and observance, it challenges
our most basic assumptions about Judaism or any conventional religion.
We will approach the Zohar as a high point of the traditions of
Midrash (imaginative Biblical interpretation) and mysticism, and
as a resource for our own questing and creativity.
The Zohar is the central book of Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition
which also has Christian and occult offshoots. But it is more
than that, and it is possible to be nourished by the Zohar without
being interested in Kabbalah or deeply knowledgeable about Judaism.
The word zohar is Hebrew for "radiance" or "splendour" or perhaps
"enlightenment". The Zohar, the book, is a long work -- at least
three large volumes, more than a dozen when a commentary is included.
It is a kind of midrash, an imaginative commentary on the Torah,
in which any verse or word can inspire pages of teachings and
stories. It has also been called the first modern novel, because
its interpretations of the Torah are placed in the mouths of characters,
a circle of rabbis, and interspersed with stories about the rabbis
and their travels and adventures.
The language of the Zohar is not the Hebrew of the Bible and most
Jewish books, but a simple form of Aramaic, the language of the
Talmud. The grammar is iffy, and the vocabulary is mixed with
medieval Hebrew and occasionally Spanish, which have helped academic
scholars make their case that the Zohar was written in Spain,
where it first became known, in the late 1200s. Traditional Kabbalists,
nevertheless, believe that it was written more than a thousand
years earlier, by the rabbis mentioned in it, whose names are
known from the Mishnah and Talmud.
Since its first appearance in Spain the Zohar has been associated
with a rabbi named Moshe de Leon. Skeptics in his own time, and
scholars more recently, have considered him to be the author.
A more recent theory, developed by Yehudah Liebes, helps to make
sense of the disagreements and divergent points of view found
in the Zohar. The theory is that de Leon belonged to a fellowship
of Kabbalists, who wrote the Zohar together as a literary version
of their own adventures and Torah discussions.
The Zohar circulated at first in manuscripts, with no fixed order;
it was finally arranged according to the weekly portions of the
Torah and put into print toward the end of the 1500s. Bit by bit,
it had been accepted as a holy work, because it was thought to
be ancient and because of the power of its dreamlike images and
radical ideas. It became the central text of the Kabbalistic tradition;
great Kabbalists such as the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria, 16th century)
presented their new ideas in the form of commentaries on the Zohar.
Christian and occultist students of Kabbalah celebrated it as
well. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Zohar was
accepted by many Jews as a holy book on the level of the Bible
and the Talmud. Its prestige declined with the wave of rationalism
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, today, the Zohar
is revered in many traditional religious communities, especially
among Sephardim and Hasidim. In liberal communities, more and
more people are discovering the Zohar as a spiritual treasure.
A LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE
From a liberal (non-Orthodox) Jewish perspective, in which truth
is not easily pinned down, no book, not even the Bible, has absolute
authority for us. This course will not claim that the Zohar is
true, and you are invited to feel free to disagree with it. At
the same time we will try to follow a great principle of all serious
study, which I learned from my teacher Rabbi Michael Skobac: you
don't have to agree with the text, but you do have to try to understand
it.
Actually, knowing that we do not have to agree with something
frees us to truly understand it. We are all attached to our own
ideas and outlooks, and it is a great temptation to misread texts,
or people, as if they are only telling us what we already believe.
Therefore, finding that you disagree with a text is often a good
sign that you are understanding it correctly, and not forcing
it into your own perspective.
My teacher Rabbi David Greenstein points out that the communities
which revere the Zohar rarely study it in its own terms. In some
communities, there is a spiritual practice of chanting the Zohar
without attempting to understand its words; in others, it is studied
only through the commentaries of later Kabbalists who overlaid
it with their own ideas. Paradoxically, since we approach the
Zohar with less reverence, with the freedom to disagree, we can
try to read it on its own terms, to understand what it actually
says.
At the same time, we want the Zohar to be useful to us, as a resource
for our own lives, a model for our own quest. Therefore, we will
feel free to reinterpret it, to build ideas on its ideas, to rework
its ideas and images to make them meaningful to us. Ideally, understanding
the text comes first, then reinterpreting and working with it.
In practice, the two processes inevitably go on simultaneously
and get mixed up, but it is useful to at least be aware that both
are going on. The best moments of study happen, unpredictably,
when both come together, when a sound grasp of what the text is
actually saying opens new doors for us to go through on our own.
A Liberal Perspective
Zohar & Kabbalah
A Crash Course
Images
Plurality & Unity
Evil
Christian Ideas
The Self & Other
Female & Male
Zohar as Resource & Model
How to Study Zohar
Module 1
