Dedicated to my dear friend Melila Hellner-Eshed, co-source of some of these insights.
For many years I have been a student and teacher of the Jewish mystical tradition. This is a body of lore to which many people have turned for healing over the centuries. They have often seen teachers of this tradition as holy men, tsaddikim who have some special closeness to God, resulting in an ability to pray successfully for the healing of the sick. There is a whole realm called “practical Kabbalah,” still widely practiced in Israel, both among Jews of Near Eastern origin and among ḥasidim, that deals almost exclusively with the curative power of blessings, amulets, and holy names. Jerusalem taxicabs and market stalls are often adorned with pictures of Moroccan or Baghdadi Jewish saints or Eastern European Hasidic rabbis, showing that popular Kabbalah is alive and well among certain sectors of the Jewish community. Over the years, various tales have come to my ears of someone who was cured from illness or saved from disaster by the blessing of the Lubavitcher or another hasidic rebbe. These, of course, echoed a great deal of what was present in the mystical sources I studied. Yet I remained uninterested in – and somewhat dismissive of - the alleged curative powers of either Kabbalistic amulets or the blessings of Hasidic rabbis. I considered this popular use of Kabbalah a betrayal of the deeper mystical tradition, one that which saw all worship as an act of pure giving and devotion, not seeking even such reasonable earthly rewards as health and longevity.
Decades of involvement with mystic teaching do have their affect, however. I am engaged with a realm of human understanding that by definition goes beyond ordinary rules of reason or scientific explanation. As a student of Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature, I have always sought to take the mystic’s testimony seriously, to analyze it in its own terms, perhaps to compare it with language heard elsewhere, either in Jewish or non-Jewish sources. I am especially wary of reductionist or dismissive explanations. This means that I have to listen to the mystics of prior generations, allowing myself to becoming open to the reality they describe. I cannot cut them off when they begin describing something – a miraculous healing, for example – that my modern mind and my own life-experience want to deny as absurd.
This involvement with the realm of inner mystery has forced me to admit how much there is that I—dare I say “we”—do not understand. I certainly cannot judge whether the visions or recounted experiences of mystical teachers throughout the world are “true” or not on the basis of my meager ability to explain them. I have come rather to accept them as strivings to express the ineffable, as attempts to describe an inner reality that makes powerful claims, both on the original visionaries who describe it and on later generations of faithful readers, sometimes including myself, who are inspired by them.
I have come to accept that there are forces or energies present in the world that we have not yet found ways to measure or describe. In ways we do not understand at all, there are people who have the psychic ability to “tune in” to the frequencies of these energies and come to see or know things that are otherwise beyond explanation. The field of psychic research is as yet very young and overwhelmed by both charlatanism and the excessive skepticism that comes in its wake. But I believe we still have much more to learn in this area than we know at present, and humility behooves us in our ignorance. This does not mean, of course, that we are to become patsies for the many spurious and suspicious claims in this area that appear every day.
The same has slowly come to be the case with regard to accounts of healing, whether based on the blessings of a tsaddik, the laying on of hands, or simply the power of prayer. As I have become aware of the defensive role that a certain cynicism about such claims plays in my own psychic life, I have been forced to become more open to the reality of experiences recounted by others.
But there is another sort of healing to be found in the study and teaching of Jewish mystical sources, one about which I have no question at all. I even consider myself a witness to its truth. This is the balm offered by beautiful teachings. The student of Zohar or of the Hasidic masters is carried on the wings of a rich symbolic language into a realm of consciousness that is inaccessible to us in our ordinary lives. The sources often refer to this experience as one of entering heikhalot, “palaces,” but often taken as “chambers” filled with divine light. The passageway into these inner chambers is one of opening the mind, letting go of prior assumptions, and allowing oneself to fill up with an almost childlike sense of wonder.
The homilies of the Zohar, the key text of classical Kabbalah, often imitate an earlier midrashic style by beginning with “Rabbi Yehudah” or “Rabbi Ḥiyya opened…” The word pataḥ there originally means “open” as “began.” He opened his teaching with the following words. But later readers took pataḥ to refer to a different sort of opening. He opened the verse to a deeper sort of reading; he used the verse as a key to open the way into those inner palaces of understanding. He opened the eyes of his readers to a realm of insight they had not previously experienced. “Reveal my eyes and I will behold wonders of Your Torah (Ps. 119:18)!”
The healing power of this engagement is difficult to describe, but entirely real. The palaces are filled with warmth and light. Basking in that light has about it some foretaste of the older rabbinic description of the afterlife, where “the righteous sit with crowns on their heads, enjoying the radiance of divine presence.”
Let me take you into one of those palaces, one that comes to mind in the light of our present situation.
“Y-H-W-H responded to Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1).” The se‘arah out of which God responded was the whirlwind of Job’s life. Everything this righteous man had counted on until that moment had been upended. Health, prosperity, and family had all suddenly disappeared. All the blessings for which we pray had been taken away from him. But it was min ha-se‘arah, from amid the whirlwind itself, that Job sensed a divine response. Not an answer, mind you, but a response. Job did not just have a question, something that can be answered. He stood with his entire self as a challenge, one that called forth the fullness of divine response.
Our entire human family is living through such a whirlwind. Our most basic sense of security has been overturned. Dare I breathe the air around me? May I safely have a conversation with another human being? Is it permitted to touch? To sing? Without these, what will be left of our humanity?
We struggle in vain to look for precedents, for parallel events from which we might learn. This is not the flood, not the holocaust; we are not, thank God, being utterly destroyed. But there is a collective fear in the air that is entirely unfamiliar, especially for us Americans, who lack any first-hand experience with the ravages of war or plague.
The Hebrew word that comes to mind for such a moment is shever, “brokenness.” Our ordinary understanding of how the world works, our simple confidence that we know how to survive from day to day, has been broken. Shever is also the root of the word mashber, “crisis,” a time when we feels that something in our lives is deeply broken. We have become used to hearing the pandemic talked about as a health crisis, one that challenges our medical system and its ability to heal. But it is also an economic crisis, a social crisis, and lots more. Existential is another word that comes to mind.
Shever is used several times by the author of the biblical Lamentations – traditionally identified as the prophet Jeremiah - written in response to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. The loss of this beautiful city called “joy of all the earth” (as it still is!) is referred to as shever bat ‘ami, the “brokenness of My daughter-people.” The most poignant evocation of that image comes in verse 13 of the second chapter: “How can I attest to you? To what can I liken you, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what may I compare you, to bring you comfort, virgin daughter of Zion? Your breach is as wide as the sea! Who will heal you?”
God is calling out to His beautiful city, His innocent virgin daughter. She has been raped, split open, by the invading forces. The gap is “as wide as the sea,” a sea so alien to landlocked Jerusalem. How could such a terrible breach ever be healed?
In steps the Zohar, and on its very first page (1:1b). It is not only the earthly Jerusalem that has been so terribly invaded, but the heavenly Jerusalem, the shekhinah, the “daughter” within God. The old rabbinic trope of the exiled shekhinah (“Wherever Israel were exiled, shekhinah was exiled with them”), identified with Mother Rachel weeping for her children, has now been elevated into a figure of the divine feminine. The very realm of the Godhead has been breached, even raped, by the evil forces of the “Other Side,” the heavenly counterpart of the earthly Babylonian armies.
“Your breach is as wide as the sea” reminds the reader that yam, the sea, is also a symbol-term for the shekhinah. The sea, like the moon, is a classic embodiment of the feminine in myth and symbol throughout literature. She is the sea into which “all the rivers flow (Eccles. 1:7),” the female receptacle for the flow of light, water, or seed from the mysterious beyond. Thus is the hopelessness of her situation magnified still further. She, Jerusalem, turns out to also be the sea. Of course she is breached wide open. This is her nature. Indeed, can there be any hope of healing from such a shever?
The Zohar’s answer comes quickly, as the verse proceeds. “Who can heal you” is taken not as a question, but as a statement. The divine feminine of shekhinah is herself a lower manifestation of a yet deeper female force, that of binah, the hidden Mother of the upper worlds, the cosmic womb out of which all life flows. Because binah is so deeply hidden and unknowable – the way none of us can remember the womb out of which we were surely born – one of her names is mi, or “Who?” Thus the “Who will heal you?” of our verse turns into “The Who will heal you!”
How might we translate this bit of poetic hermeneutics into terms that might speak to the contemporary reader? Shekhinah, the outer world, might indeed seem deeply broken. We hesitate before going out of doors, especially in the city, lest we be pounced upon by some mysterious droplets left over from an anonymous passer-by’s cough. How thoroughly polluted that outer realm seem to be. This is the brokenness amid which we find ourselves, as soon as we step out the door. But there is an answer. Go deeper, turn to a more secret inner place, one that you have to traverse forty-nine intricate pathways to reach. Those pathways are all the complex interweavings of deed and emotion that constitute your religious life, your pathways of walking through the world. But when you direct them properly, you will find that they all lead you inward to the fiftieth gate, that of binah. She is the place within you that has been kept so hidden and protected that She has never been broken. Therefore She can be the beginning-point of your healing, one that is nothing other than a new birth.
It is no accident, for the Zohar, that the two words yam and mi, “Sea” and “Who?” are composed of the same two letters. Take your most broken self, turn it around, view it from a different perspective, and it will become the Source of your healing.
The later Kabbalists were fond of depicting their symbolic universe in the figure of a primal human form, called Adam Kadmon, “the primal human.” Yes, they said, the lower worlds are a broken place. But the breakage only goes halfway, as far as His navel, they insisted. Above that, the divine world remains unbroken. Yours too, since you are made in the divine image. Finding binah, Inner Mind and Inner Mother, is what it’s all about.
Mashber as “crisis” is an innovation of modern Hebrew. Eliezer Ben Yehudah’s dictionary refers to it as something that had appeared “in recent times,” meaning that it was not his invention. But the word does exist in a few biblical examples with the meaning of “birthing stone.” It seems to have been the place where the opening or “breaking” of the womb was to take place. But it may also refer to the breaking open of the womb itself. Speaking metaphorically of Israel’s situation in the face of its Assyrian enemies, King Hezekiah cries out to his priest and prophet: “Children have come to the mashber, but there is no strength to birth them (Is. 37:3).” The verse seems to mean that the situation is desperate, that we cannot move forward. We can understand how the modern writers got “crisis” out of this. The Yiddish writer called Der Nister even wrote a famous novel titled Di Mishpokhe Mashber, “The Crisis Family (but pointing toward “the family crisis!).”
As so often, there is wisdom to be found in the etymologies of Hebrew words. A mashber, crisis, like the one we’re facing now can also serve as a mashber, birthing-stone, for all sorts of good things – if only we find the strength to bring them forth. A birthing-stone sounds like a pretty solid object to hold onto when you’re in the midst of a whirlwind. Find one, an inner place within the crisis of this storm, hold on tight, and see what comes forth. May it be born whole and healthy!
The best-known usage of shever in Jewish mysticism is that of the later Kabbalists, followers of R. Yitsḥak Luria in the sixteenth century, who introduced the term shevirat ha-kelim, “the breaking of the vessels,” into the Jewish religious vocabulary. Thanks to the writings of Gershom Scholem and his school, this term is now widely familiar to readers of Jewish literature. When God created the world, so the story goes, the pure light of divine Creation was sent forth into the empty space that had been set aside as the place where the non-God might exist. The contrast between the divine and the non-divine, or the light of God’s rays and the darkness of the void, was so great, however, that the vessels containing the light split apart and shattered. Bits of light and shards of broken vessels were scattered throughout cosmic space, becoming nitsotsot, sparks of divinity, and kelipot, shards or husks, that hide them.
This “accident of birth” in the process of Creation is presented in the most starkly dualistic terms. The kelipot are not just accidentally broken fragments, but active forces that seek to hide the light; the word kelipah, in later Hebrew usage as well as in Yiddish, comes to mean “demon.” The motif of broken vessels is linked, already in Luria’s own teachings, with others myths pointing to the existence of primal forces of evil that preceded Creation itself. Before this world was created, according to an ancient rabbinic source, there had been prior attempts at forming worlds that did not survive. The cosmic flotsam and jetsam of these earlier emanations are in turn identified with dark hints about primordial “kings,” rulers of the demonic forces of Edom, who actively oppose the emergence of the present universe. All this means, in short, that the brokenness of existence is of cosmic origins. It is “the way the world is,” and will periodically manifest itself.
This version of the Lurianic tale, however, is lacking in a key element that was necessary to permit such a Gnostic worldview to exist within the framework of rabbinic Judaism. It contains no sense of human moral responsibility. The demonic forces and the brokenness that comes about because of them exist in the world from the first day of Creation. Evil is inherent to existence; humans, created on the sixth day, are its victims from the moment they appear on the scene, rather than its perpetrators. Such a view was not one that could be permitted. The tale of the breaking of the vessels was combined, for that reason (though “reason” reflects a very different mental process than that of the emerging mythic imagination), with one of the most ancient tales carried forth by the sources of Judaism, the biblical account of the first humans’ sin.
Unlike early Christianity, rabbinic Judaism is not a religion in which the need to atone for an original sin plays a critical role. The early rabbis mostly believed that the struggle with evil and temptation begins over again with each person. The battle is that with one’s own yester ha-ra‘, an inbuilt inclination toward evil (based on Gen. 8:21), but not related to the guilt of Adam over a primal sin that afflicts all humans. Indeed, a well-known Talmudic passage seems to explicitly reject such a notion: “In the hour when the snake approached Eve, he cast a poison into her. Israel, who stood at Mount Sinai, had that poison pass out of them. The nations of the world, who did not stand at Mount Sinai, did not have that poison pass away (b. Shabbat 146a).” This statement, sounding horribly racist when taken at face value, seems to be a remnant of the early Jewish/Christian polemic. If you Christians want “original sin,” you can have it; that is not our problem. We were wiped clean of it by accepting the Torah. But the stain of sin, the passage goes on to say, returned to Israel after they worshipped the Golden Calf. This refocuses attention toward the new sin of idolatry and the struggle to overcome it, rather than harking back to the sexual guilt associated with Adam and Eve.
But the tale of Eden does belong to our scripture, and the faint memory of a lost paradise haunts our tradition. The rabbinic rejection, or downplaying, of original sin is reversed in the Kabbalistic sources. This allows for a highly confused mingling of the notion of a primal breakage built into Creation and the assumption that the first humans bore responsibility for evil in the world and the existence of the kelipot. Fragments of these two very distinct visions often appear together in the same work, even in the same sentence.
This all has a suddenly familiar ring as we listen to biomedical experts discussing the origins of our current pandemic, and perhaps others to come. The microbes were here long before us; they are as much a part of the web of life as we are, and we need to accept that reality. But the danger of such calamities increases as we so rapidly destroy the habitats of other creatures, burn down rainforests, consume wild life-forms, cross those boundaries within which humans so long have found our place. Is the universe primally broken, or did we humans bring this upon ourselves?
Most interesting here is the Hasidic response to this prior and well-established Kabbalistic conversation. Hasidism, we should remember, began as a popular religious revival movement at the end of the eighteenth century. That was the very era when the elaborate intellectual constructions of Kabbalah were beginning to collapse, partly due to outside pressures, but mostly from within. The Hasidic masters took the parts of Kabbalistic language that they found useful to their revival, but left much behind. In this case, they chose the nitsotsot, the sparks, but not the shevirah, the breakage, the account of how they came to be. Reading many a Hasidic source (and I beg the scholars’ forgiveness for over-simplification), we find that the sparks of light were intentionally planted throughout the universe so that we might discover them, and by our joyous service reunite them with their Source. There is no essential brokenness about this world, neither that of a fault in Creation nor that of primal human sin. We see those only because of the blurriness of our vision, caused by our own sins, mainly those of chasing after our desires and abandoning the singular quest for light. When we refocus both eyes and heart (see Num.16, the final section of the shema‘), we see before us only bits of light, waiting to be uplifted.
Even this terrible hour, like many that have come before it, offers us endless opportunities to do so.
