Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow

Confession, by Way of a Preface

THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN FOR SEEKERS. Kabbalah, the ancient esoteric tradition of Judaism, has become of interest to ever-widening groups of willing students, Jews and non-Jews alike. Making this mystical path and its wisdom available in ways that will speak to this new and varied audience is the task that lies before us, and doing so will demand of both writer and reader that we change long-ingrained habits of mind. In writing this book, I have had to overcome the twin fears of revealing too much to the uninitiated and of watering down the tradition to the point of trivialization, as it is presented in English and outside its traditional framework. I have gone beyond the bounds of history, taking on the role of teacher to a community of seekers rather than treading the safer and more self-distancing path of historical scholarship. You, as reader, will have to stretch to new ways of thinking, an exercise that involves both heart and mind and, indeed, one that seeks to heal the breach between them that is so much a part of our intellectual life. This book is both a Jewish mystical theology and a work of religious psychology, understanding psyche in the original sense as soul. Through it I hope to speak to you in a deeper and more interior place than does most of your reading. Try to read slowly, with the contemplative mind open.

I hope that you will learn a good deal about Kabbalah from reading this book, but its primary purpose is not one of imparting information. Many books, including some very good ones, already exist for that purpose. Instead of just teaching you Kabbalah as it was in the past, I am inviting you to join me in highly contemporary exploration. What does the kabbalistic tradition have to teach today’s seeker? Are the ancient and mysterious symbols of any value to us, given the very different world in which we live? How might Kabbalah be refitted so that it can serve as an appropriate vehicle for a very contemporary spiritual quest? Can this be done without destroying the soul of the tradition? Can a thinking person turn to an ancient wisdom source like Kabbalah without fleeing today’s reality and abandoning responsibility for life in this world?

A mere generation ago, almost no teachers of Kabbalah could be found outside of a small, closed Jerusalem circle. Today there are too many. Some of them seek to entice students with rosy promises: Study Kabbalah and all of your problems will be solved! Happiness and success will be yours! Buy our books, drink our special holy brew, and you will be healed of all your ills.

I offer no such promises. I have nothing to sell except my faith in the importance of your inner journey. This is, as I have said, a book for seekers, and I am still a seeker myself. In that the word seeker is used to describe a great many people these days, a few words are in order about the one I have in mind as a reader of this book. I assume you are a person of some experience in the spiritual realm. You may have tried meditation according to one method or another. You probably have done some reading on Eastern disciplines and various wisdom traditions. I imagine that you have a sense that some deep truth is hidden in the mystical teachings of Judaism, but do not quite know how to go about gaining access to it. It may well be that you consider yourself a skeptic or an agnostic and yet still are drawn to exploring religious experience and uncovering deeper states of consciousness within yourself. You sense that ancient wisdom traditions, including Kabbalah, may offer you some important tools and insights to help deepen that quest. You may or may not be Jewish by heritage, but have heard of Kabbalah and want to know something of what it has to teach you as a contemporary seeker. You may be new to Jewish practice, or you may be seeking to deepen your own Judaism.¹ You are not looking for a detailed historical account of kabbalistic teaching as it developed in the past, nor are you seeking someone who will try to convince you that Jewish mysticism is the single and only path to truth.

Now I should tell you something about myself. I have been studying and teaching Jewish mystical writings for over forty years. I began as a seeker and remain one to this day. The psalm that says: Seek God’s face always has come to mean in my own personal prayer-life that the quest itself is endless, that the face of God is to be found within the seeking, not only as a final goal. Seeking and finding are inexorably tied to one another. The reward for the quest is to be found right here and now, along the path. Trained in the university as a scholar of Kabbalah, it was clear to me from the start that my goal reached beyond the academic, leading toward the cultivation of a spiritual path. The discipline of carefully reading and interpreting texts became very precious to me, however, and served to link the distinct academic and personal pursuits. Over the decades I have come to see myself as a builder of bridges between the scholarly ivory tower, with its great skills in deciphering difficult, obscure sources, and the community of seekers who want to know if there is any value or wisdom in those sources that might still speak to people who live in a very different age from those in which the texts were written.

I have always found it difficult to call myself a mystic. This has something to do with modesty, either real or feigned. (I do not know whether I am really a modest person. To ask such a question, and especially to muse about it publicly, is itself a rather immodest thing to do.) Mystics are often thought to be people who have great supernatural religious experiences, who see the room fill with light or the heavens alive with angels. If they write, their tomes are supposed to be filled with great revelations. In our tradition these often come in the form of impenetrable secrets, written in a symbolic idiom that only initiates can understand and that require commentaries by countless generations of disciples. I have no such experiences to share with you, dear reader. I do not consider myself to be an enlightened being, and certainly not one who has escaped and transcended the demands of the flesh. I write on spiritual subjects, as you are about to see, and I do so in a somewhat personal manner. But I try to keep my writing fairly straightforward and user friendly, perhaps in the hope that greater numbers of people will read the terribly important things I have to say. So much for modesty!

In a certain sense, however, I am a mystic, and this book is an admission of it. For all these years, I have been studying, teaching, and receiving most of my spiritual nourishment from the sources of mystical Judaism. I was not more than twenty years old when I discovered Hillel Zeitlin’s introduction to Hasidic teachings in his book In the Garden of Hasidism and Kabbalah.² When he spoke of a world in which only God exists, where everything else is but a garment covering the divine light, of raising the sparks of light and serving God everywhere and always, I knew instantly that he was speaking the truth. Not only the truth, in fact, but my truth. In four decades of a fairly stormy religious life, including lots of ups and downs in my need and ability to engage in religious praxis, this faith has never left me. I knew then, as I do now, that unity is the only truth and that all divisions of reality, including the most primal dualities (God/world, good/evil, male/female, and lots more), are relative falsehoods. That does not mean, I hasten to add, that we can or should live without them.

I have thought a good deal about the genesis of such an intuitive mysticism. Sometimes I have told myself that it arises in infancy, that I belong to an odd group of humans who did not succeed in learning the proper distinction and boundary between self and other. Those who know where the I ends and the Thou begins can follow Martin Buber or, more in fashion these days, Emanuel Levinas, in philosophies that see reality as so clearly divided between self and other. They can understand truth as proper recognition of the gaps between us and as a series of attempts to bridge them. But I experience Being as a single continuum, a constant flow of energy from the most recondite realms of Divine Oneness into the roots of each single and distinct being, each of us another garb in which the single One seeks to both hide and reveal Itself. And those recondite realms, of course, are not really distanced from each particular person, but are fully present here and now. Present, that is, insofar as we can open ourselves to them.

In this sense I feel that I have not been given a choice. It is only the mystics who tell the truth as I know it. In fact, I prefer a spiritual explanation of this mystical inclination to the psychological one, which I find too simplistic and reductive. Each human being has a divine soul, a part of God, a spark of light, or (if you are not ready for such metaphysical language) a deep longing for Oneness buried within us. That innermost self, the place where each of our individual selves discovers its root in the single Self of the universe, needs to be cultivated, drawn forth from its natural hiding place. The part of us that longs for God is an aspect of our most intimate and private person. It is the place where we are most vulnerable, most easily hurt or disappointed. For that reason we hide this aspect of our person, allowing it to come forth only in trusted situations where it is evoked and assured that it will not be harmed. This is the first function of all religious language: calling forth and reassuring that deeper self. Some people seem to have a natural gift for responding to such language and find it easier to open their hearts to that inner dimension. Spiritual discipline is all about training the heart for that response, a way of enabling ourselves to live with our inner doorways just a bit more open, able to respond more freely when we hear the sound of my Beloved knocking.

I live most of my life, of course, in the same world of separateness and dialogue that we all do. I have no choice about this, either. Life without borders would be impossibly painful, both for me and for those around me. Nevertheless, I have never given up on the faith that it is wrong. The most intimate meaning of my prayer-life is bound up with the verse that says, in an old Hasidic interpretation: "the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below; there is nothing else (Deut. 4:39). And on that day, we conclude, everyone will know and bow before the truth that Y-H-W-H is One and its name One" (Zech. 14:9), meaning that everyone will have the ability to see and name this single truth. Meanwhile, I am forced to pretend, to live here in the world that my teacher Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav called the kingdom of lies.³ Only he could have told the tale that helps to get me through, day by day:

Once the king was told that all the crops in his kingdom would be affected by a terrible blight. Anyone who ate of them would go mad. He called in his trusted adviser and asked him what to do. Of course, the king said, there is enough grain left from last year’s harvest so that you and I could continue eating of it. We would remain sane and keep all the others from doing any harm. Your majesty, replied the wise man, if only you and I are sane and all the rest are madmen, who is it that will be locked up in the asylum? I understand, said the king, but what is left for us to do? You and I will eat the same grain as everyone else, replied the sage, but right now I will place a mark on your forehead, and you place one on mine, so that whenever we look at each other we will be reminded of our madness. And that will be enough.⁴

Thank you, Lord, and thank you, rebbe, for making that mark. I still see it quite clearly and I know.

Among the very first pieces I published, just as the 1960s were turning into the ’70s, was a pair of essays that gained me a certain notoriety. One was called Notes from the Jewish Underground: On Psychedelics and Kabbalah. It was published under the pseudonym Itzik Lodzer. (Yes, I am Avraham Itzik, and the great-grandfather who lent me that name came from Lodz in Poland.) The other essay was a reply to myself, written a year or two later, called After Itzik.⁵ Today I consider these to be juvenalia and find them slightly embarrassing. Nevertheless, they remain my points of departure. In them I called for a theology that describes the truth as we experience it both at the heights of mystical or psychedelic experience and back here, down at the base of the mountain. Psychedelics only confirmed for me what I had already seen and tasted in the Hasidic sources. They made the mark a little deeper, harder to eradicate or forget, but they did not put it there. God and the rebbe did that, as I have already said.

By then the importance of le-ma‘an tizkeru (so that you remember) was becoming clear to me.⁶ The religious life exists in order to keep both the individual and the community in touch with our own deepest moments of experience and insight. We may be destined to live in the valley, but we shape our lives in response to those few and rare moments we have spent on the mountaintop. We Jews call that mountain Sinai, a place and moment sacred to the collective memory of Israel. But it also stands for our own inner peaks, those moments in each of our lives when the border between earth and heaven dissolved and we stood directly in God’s presence. How we live, how we love, how we treat one another are all part of our response to those moments.

I have told you most of what you need to know. The rest is indeed commentary. But, as Jews have always known, that is where all the fun lies. I keep trying, in one way or another, to create, offer, preach, teach, bend, bang, and hammer into existence a mystical Judaism that works for me, that gives me a Jewish language in which I can remain faithful to those highest or deepest inner moments. After forty years of struggle I am still banging away. I have not yet come up with any definitive answers. All I have to offer are more—but, I hope, deeper—questions. The struggle with tradition, with Jewish religious language, and with God is my form of commentary. For some reason I am immodest enough to think that it might be helpful and interesting to you. Add to all of the above the fact that I am a fellow of rather little natural discipline, but one possessed of a seemingly limitless need for spiritual freedom. I am also burdened by a strong penchant for intellectual and historical honesty. I do not like pretending or fooling myself. Now you may begin to understand why shaping a Judaism that works for me is so difficult, a task that has engaged me across these several decades.

Ah, but you have an answer. "Bend yourself more and Judaism less, you tell me, ripe with the wisdom of the ages. Thank you, I reply. I’ll try."

Meanwhile, I offer these chapters. Still an old revolutionary, I offer them in the hope that reading them will change—or at least challenge—you.

Introduction: Ehyeh as a Name of God

KABBALAH TEACHES THAT Ehyeh (pronounced eh-yeh), or I shall be, is the deepest, most hidden name of God. It begins with the Hebrew letter aleph, which indicates the future tense. When Moses experienced his great moment of calling at the Burning Bush, he asked God: When the people—those Hebrew slaves he was about to lead out of Egypt—ask me ‘What is His name?’ what should I say to them? God answers with this mysterious phrase: I shall be what I shall be, and says to Moses, Tell them that ‘I shall be’ sent you (Ex. 3:14).

God’s puzzling answer makes the conversation sound like a koan-dialogue between a Zen master and disciple. I shall be as an answer to What is your name? seems like a master’s slap, a harsh rejection of the question itself. Like the koan, the text here is reaching to some place beyond words, seeking to create a breakthrough in our consciousness. What is it trying to tell us? I shall be can mean I am nameless, because no name could ever grasp who I really am. Or it could mean "Call Me whatever you like. It makes no difference what you call Me, because I fill all names—all words, all things, all times and places—and any name you give Me will indeed be mine. The answer becomes a bit clearer in the following chapters as Y-H-W-H, an impossible conflation of the verb to be," is revealed as God’s name. This means nothing less than the truth that God is Being itself. All of Being. Everything contains God. There is not a place, not a moment, not a thing, certainly not a person that is not filled to overflowing with the Divine Presence. This is the most essential teaching of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (1700–1760), one of the great mystical masters of all time and the founder of Hasidism, a later and more popular version of Kabbalah. The name Y-H-W-H should not be translated God or Lord, but rather Is-Was-Will Be. It is not really a noun at all, but a verb artificially arrested in motion and made to serve as though it were a noun. A noun that is really a verb is one you can never hold too tightly. As soon as you think you’ve got it, that you understand God as some clearly defined entity, that noun slips away and becomes a verb again.

This name is also considered too holy, too big and powerfully filled with God’s presence, to be spoken by ordinary mortals. In ancient times, when the Jerusalem Temple still stood in its place, the high priest alone, after a series of special purifications, was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies but once a year, on the Day of Atonement. Only then was he permitted to pronounce the Name. He