Is Kabbalah Mysticism? Continuing the Debate | Shaul Magi...

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March 08

Is Kabbalah Mysticism?
Continuing the Debate
Shaul Magid and Boaz Huss
Is Kabbala Mysticism? Another View
by Shaul Magid
I

In a provocative essay “Jewish Mysticism in the University: Academic

Study or Theological Practice?” (Zeek December, 2007) Boaz Huss raises
a series of questions that should challenge academics and non-academics
alike who study and teach Kabbala, pietism, or Hasidism - what is
problematically known as “Jewish mysticism.” In this essay (as in an
earlier version published in Hebrew),1 Huss makes two basic claims: (1)
“mysticism” is a term that is foreign to Judaism and thus should not be
used to identity or describe kabbalistic literature; and (2) mysticism is a
theological category in any case and should not be part of academic
discourse more generally. Huss also argues that scholars, even those who
have rejected the “pure consciousness” notion of mystical experience and
adopted a more constructivist approach, have by and large retained an
uncritical notion that mysticism is a universal phenomenon.2 That is, even
those who agree that mystical experience, like all experience, is culturally
and linguistically mediated, maintain a positive stance regarding the
possibility and indeed actuality of such experience. While Huss himself
holds that such experience is certainly possible, he maintains that this
possibility cannot be of intrinsic interest to the scholar for at least two
reasons: first, because it is not verifiable by any scientific method; and
second, because the presupposition or affirmation of the experience
carries theological weight that is not a constructive part of any serious

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academic endeavor. Below I will question two dimensions of this thesis:

first, that mysticism is, by definition, is a theological category and
second, that nomenclature foreign to a particular tradition should be not
used to examine and explain such a tradition.

I begin with the second point since it is the foundation, albeit somewhat
unstated in Huss’s own argument. While Huss forcefully argues against
the use of the term “mysticism” because it is not indigenous to Judaism,
he also states, “I do not think academic scholars are obliged to use
exclusively concepts and categories that have been used by the subjects
of their studies; nonetheless there is no justification for an uncritical use
of a Christian theological term [i.e., mysticism] in academic research.”3
According to this statement then, the issue is not the foreignness of the
term but rather its “uncritical” adaptation to a foreign discourse and its
“Christian” origins. I can surely agree with the part of this claim that all
terminology should be critically deployed. Yet the importation of foreign
concepts to a textual tradition is not only permissible in principle but it is
precisely what academics do all the time (to the chagrin of many religious
traditionalists who here would agree with Huss). Engaging in a Western
discipline that includes, as Huss correctly notes, a colonialist and post-
colonialist perspective, those of us in the academy consciously struggle
with the nomenclature we choose to deploy and the often indecipherable,
or at least unexplained, words of the texts we read. Yet if we refused to
import these foreign categories we could not do the work we do. That is,
it is precisely the foreign concepts that open these texts, drawing them out
of their parochial “hermeneutical circle” that enable the scholar to
understand the texts in new ways.4

Second, Huss does not give us precise criteria to distinguish between a

critical or uncritical approach. Why can “mysticism” not be used but
“religion” can (if it can)? And what of the terms “God” and “ritual”? For
that matter, isn’t “Judaism” itself a foreign term for many classical texts
of the tradition? Although the term “Judaism” may have first been uttered
in Greek almost two millennia ago, the way it is used by laypeople and
scholars today is surely quite different than it was used by Greek
speaking Israelites or Hellenes in the past. It is telling that one rarely
hears the word “Judaism” spoken among haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews.
They readily speak about devotion (avodah), commandments (mitzvos) or
faith (emunah) but Judaism is not an indigenous term for one deeply
embedded in the tradition. One has to already be somewhat “outside” to
describe what he or she practices or believes in as Judaism. Huss notes

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correctly in his Hebrew article that J.Z. Smith argues that religion is a
construct of the scholar (following suit, Jacob Neusner argues that
“Judaism” is basically the same thing).5

Two other relevant terms that are often used in describing Kabbala but
are foreign to its own self-fashioning are myth and symbol.6 Huss does
not seem to be bothered by these terms. Therefore, I assume there must
be something distinctive about “mysticism” for Huss that makes this term
invalid. If so, then, the two issues are really one. That is, the problem is
not non-indigenous terminology in general but rather this particular term
because Huss claims it is, by definition, theological. In the remainder of
this essay I would like to address this very point to argue that
“mysticism” needn’t be exclusively a theological term. When it is, I am in
total agreement with Huss that it has no place in academic discourse.
When it isn’t, I think it can serve a positive function, both descriptively
and substantively, in the ongoing attempt to understand a particular
human phenomenon (whether universal, pure, or constructed) that is
sometimes expressed in Judaism, as it is in many other religious and
secular traditions and cultures.

II

It is quite telling that Gershom Scholem devoted part of the introduction

to his 1941 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism trying, unsuccessfully, to
define the term “mysticism,” acknowledging the deep ambiguity of the
term that serves as the book’s very subject. Since he failed to define the
term, I assume, therefore, that Scholem did not think a definition was
crucial to his work. In fact, perhaps it was the very ambiguity of the term
that made it efficacious in describing a series of traditions founded on a
particular undefined human phenomenon called “mysticism.” That is, the
ambiguity of the term made it the property of no one, not even the
Christians who first uttered it. Hence, he begins his study by unmooring
the term from its Christian anchor in order to use it to describe a tradition
that never uttered the word. And so begins the academic study of Jewish
mysticism.

Most scholars agree with Scholem that “mysticism” is a difficult if not

impossible term to define scientifically. As a human experience or
phenomenon, we may liken it to love (as many mystics in many traditions
do): while love is something many of us experience it cannot be
scientifically isolated nor, for that matter, accurately defined. Yet scholars

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write about love all the time and those who have been “in love” are not,
by definition, disqualified from writing about it in a scholarly way.7 Can
we say the same about mysticism? Can it, despite its ambiguity, serve as
a topic of scholarly inquiry or as a term to describe human experience?

I suggest that there are various non-theological ways of understanding

mysticism that may make such a term useful in describing kabbalistic
literature. If I am reading Huss correctly, and can show that mysticism
needn’t be, by definition, theological, I hope to cautiously, and
“critically,” salvage the use of the term mysticism as both a heuristic and
substantive lens through which we can understand kabbalistic literature in
an academic context.8

By non-theological uses of the term “mysticism” I mean that the term can
point to various dimensions of the religious life and/or human experience
that may be founded on certain theological principles (principles we can
accept, reject, or critically examine) but that are not bound to them or, at
least, that the human experience in question is not overly weighed down
by the theological presuppositions that may be implied in, or by, them . In
the following three examples I suggest mysticism can describe three very
different dimensions of this human experience: (1) the experience of
reading religious myth whereby the reader enters into the myth of his own
creation and becomes part of the imaginative narrative; (2) the experience
of an “event” (empirical or not) yielding a radical subjectification of the
subject and his experience such that the event becomes the touchstone
and exemplification of a universal philosophical truth that cannot be
rationally proven; and (3) an experience (here more specifically the
mystical experience of Moses) that by its very nature undermines the
subject’s ability to function as a complete authority. In these three cases
of human experience, i.e. reading, event, and religious authority, I
propose that mysticism might be a term that can amply describe these
phenomena.

My examples will be drawn from three very different twentieth-century

thinkers to illustrate how mysticism can be a term that does not carry a
theological agenda. The first, Michael Fishbane, is a scholar of the Jewish
biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic tradition. The second, Alain Badiou, is
a contemporary French philosopher known for his attempt to re-insert the
concept of truth as a philosophical category through his notion of the
“event.” The third is Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro of Piaszceno, a
Hasidic master in the Warsaw Ghetto who was murdered by the Nazis in

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the months after its liquidation; his sermons delivered in the ghetto were
found in its ruins after the war and posthumously published as ‘Aish
Kodesh (“The Holy Fire”). Only Fishbane explicitly uses the term
“mysticism” and he does so in relation to myth and not Kabbala. Yet I
suggest these three texts in different ways suggest “mysticism” as a
possible category into which we can examine the human experience in
question. None of these examples make a theological claim, although
they do work under certain theological assumptions as would be
expected: Fishbane makes a hermeneutical or interpretive claim about the
text and its reader. Badiou argues that a universal and infinite truth
emerges through fidelity to the event of the resurrection; while he does
not claim the event is itself real in any historical sense, the event becomes
the lens or standard of universality through which we test the truth each
element of the world. Shapiro makes a claim about religious authority and
its subversion in the collapse of the subject /object dichotomy.9 Each
takes a position whereby truth is not the direct outgrowth of rationality
but rather a place where the rational does not go, either, as in the case of
Shapiro, because of reason’s limitations or, as in the case of Badiou, there
is a place that knowledge simply does not know. In all cases, for different
reasons, we might deploy the term “mystical.”10

Footnotes
1
Boaz Huss, “The Mystification of Kabbala and the Myth of Jewish
Mysticism,” [Hebrew] Pe’amim (Winter, 2007); 9-30.
2
On the “pure consciousness” position, see Robert K.C. Forman,
“Mysticism, Constructivism, and Forgetting,” Norman Prigge and Gary
Kessler, “Is Mysticism Everywhere the Same?,” in The Problem of Pure
Consciousness R.K.C. Forman ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 3-52 and 269-287 . For the constructivist
approach as it relates to Jewish mysticism see Steven T. Katz, “Language,
Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis,
Steven T. Katz ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), pp. 22-74.
3
Huss, “Jewish Mysticism in the University,” p. 3.
4
While this does not always require deploying foreign concepts and
categories, it often does. On this point, relating specifically to the
precarious notion of comparison, J.Z. Smith argues that at times a scholar
must carefully use terms and categories from the outside to understand

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particular phenomena. See Smith,Imagining Religion: From Babylon to

Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), p. 11ff and idem.
Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the
Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
esp. pp. 36-84.
5
Huss, “Mystification,” pp. 10, 11. See J.Z. Smith, Imagining Religion,
p. 11 and idem. “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 179-196. Jacob
Neusner,
6
See, for example, Gershom Scholem, “Kabbalah and Myth,” in On the
Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York, Schocken Books,1965), pp. 87-
117, Isaiah Tishby, “Symbol and Religion in Kabbala,” [Hebrew] in
Netivei Emunah ve-Minut (Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 1982), pp. 11-22;
Yehuda Liebes, “De Natura Dei: On the Development of Jewish Myth,”
in idem. Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism (Albany: SUNY,
1993), pp. 1-65; and idem. “Myth verse Symbol in the Zohar and in
Lurianic Kabbala,” in Essential Papers on Kabbalah, L. Fine ed. (New
York, NYU Press, 1995), pp. 212-242.
7
For example, look at the various studies on romantic poetry by Harold
Bloom and others who sometimes use such terminology. Or, the works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Transcendentalist school whose agenda
was anything but theological in any conventional sense. For example, see
Alan D. Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the Reader,
and the Apocalypse Within (Penn State University Press: London and
University Park, 1989).
8
Classic studies like William James’ The Varieties of Religious
Experience and Freud’s study on the oceanic feeling offer us some case
studies and analysis of experiences that are sometimes called “mystical”
yet many have no specific “theological agenda.” See William Parsons,
The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic
Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Cf.
Dan Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and
Unions (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). For a recent study of the
sociological dimension so mysticism see Phillip Wexler, Mystical
Society: An Emerging Social Vision (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2000).
9
For other studies dealing with mysticism and/as exegesis, see M.
Fishbane, “The Book of Zohar and Exegetical Spirituality,” in his The
Exegetical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), pp. 105-122; Elliot Wolfson, “Maiden Without Eyes: Peshat and

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Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics,” in The Midrashic Imagination, M.

Fishbane ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); and idem Through a
Speculum that Shines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp.
326-392.
10
See, Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds (New York: Continuum, 2008).
====

First, the question of if, how, and when the transition from myth to
mysticism takes place occupies the final thoughts in Michael Fishbane’s
Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. Although Fishbane never
defines mysticism in this context, he writes as follows:

Where in this system does myth end and mysticism begin? Or:
Where in this world-view can we say that we have moved from
a mythical reality into a mystical one? There is no simple
solution and I would suggest the following consideration. The
move from myth to mysticism may be effected at the point
where the component features of myth are not elements of an
external narrative or divine drama, but rather spiritual
components of a divine reality which the individual has
internalized through the interiorization of the mythic dramas, the
person assimilates the modalities of the divine reality and strives
to actualize its truths in every thought and action…Myth may
therefore comprise and condition a mystical mentality – not by
being transcended so much as by being fully subjectivized and
lived.11

Concluding his study of myth and mythmaking in biblical, rabbinic and

kabbalistic Judaism, Fishbane suggests here that mythmaking, as a
product of the exegetical imagination, can also transcend itself into the
realm of the mystical. The reader and maker of the myth can, at times,
step inside the mythic creation through “interiorization” thereby
becoming a part, and not merely an observer or reader, of the mythic
drama. While it is true that Fishbane uses the term “divine reality” to
describe the myth interiorized, he is not making a theological claim, that
is, a claim about God, but rather a functional claim about how the myth
can transform its reader (and author). Thus Fishbane’s “modalities of the
divine reality” constituted by the myth itself are, in fact, creations of the
mythmaker that then become her template for living. As Fishbane
suggests in another context, this process is achieved through the act of
“reading.”12 This notion is proffered in a slightly different format by

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Melila Hellner-Eshed in her Hebrew study of the Zohar And the River
Goes Out from Eden.13 Hellner-Eshed offers an aesthetic rendering of the
Zohar as “art,”14 an object that can serve its reader as a vehicle for what
we may, in our context, call a mystical experience. Hellner-Eshed calls
our attention to various zoharic texts where a sage and his circle relate a
mythic story and then, through what she calls a “leap” become part of the
mythic story being told. The homiletical frame of the Zohar’s narrative is
sometimes transformed into the experience of the circle.15 This
transformation in the Zohar’s narrative Hellner-Eshed calls “mystical.”16
Is this a theological claim? In one sense it assumes a theological premise
but it not making any claim about the nature of God. In fact, its focus is
on the experience itself rather then the object of experience. In these
examples, mysticism serves as a category linked to but distinct from
myth, a term that describes the movement of myth from a dramatization
of the real to the real itself through reading.

Alain Badious’ Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism is not at all

about mysticism but about constituting “truth” out of what he calls the
“event” (here the event of resurrection as experienced by Paul) as the
source out of which all truth emerges.17 My interest in Badiou here is to
use his discussion of “charisma” as a way to think about how the term
mysticism can relate to moments or, in this case, events, that express
“truth” without the unwanted baggage of theology. The context of
Badiou’s comment is Paul’s rejection of works and law as salvific in
Romans 4.4, “To one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a grace
but as his due.” On this Badiou writes,

But for Paul, nothing is due. The salvation of the subject cannot
take the form of a wage or reward. The subjectivity of faith is
unwaged. It pertains to the granting of a gift, kharisma. Every
subject is initiated on the basis of a charisma; every subject is
charismatic. Since the subjectivating point is the declaration of
the event, rather than the work that demands a wage or reward,
the declaring subject exists according to the charisma power in
him.18

At first blush, Badiou seems quite close to the rabbinic adage of “not
serving one’s master for the sake of reward” but for its own sake.19 But
there is more here. The rabbinic assertion is made precisely in a
covenental theology where reward is promised. But for Badiou, the

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charisma, or gift, is an act of grace whereby one’s “subjectivity is

unwaged” that is, where the distinction between the giver, the gift, and its
recipient ceases to exist – in fact it never existed. The radical subjectivity
in question is the unfolding of charisma of the believing subject, not a
belief in God or in resurrection as a historical phenomenon, but in the
universalizing power that can be born from fidelity to what the event of
resurrection represents. Only a truly believing subject – one’s whose
fidelity is unassailable - can actualize the event by remaining faithful to
it; only she can reach the place where “wage” or reward has no economy
whatsoever. The truth thus lies in the collapse of difference as the
“practice” of the universal. Badiou continues, “the subject constituted by
charisma through the gratuitous practice of the universal address
necessarily maintains there are no differences. Only what is charismatic,
thus absolutely without cause, possesses this power of being in excess of
the law, of collapsing differences.”20 Badiou's interests here are neither
historical nor theological. His focus is one of fidelity to the (non-
historical) event of resurrection - the centerpiece of Paul’s theology - and
bringing about or produce its universal and universalizing power. My
more limited interest is to consider whether we have here an example of a
non-theological experiential claim (i.e., not about God but about the
human and his relation to other humans) that may enter into the realm of
the mystical.

Coming from very different places Fishbane and Badiou may be making
similar observations about what Fishbane calls the transition from myth
to mysticism (using the terms interiorization and subjectivication) and
Badiou calls the subjectivization of the event as an act of salvation,
defined as the charisma, or gift, of every believing subject. As long as the
myth remains external to the subject in Fishbane and the event is not a
charisma, or gift, in Badiou, the subjectivication cannot fully unfold and,
for Fishbane myth remains myth distinct from the subject (and thus not
mystical) and, in Badiou, the event is not salvific (and thus not “true”)
and Paul’s question “what is due” (i.e., works or the law) remains
relevant.

Finally, I want to cite a excerpt from a homily by Kalomymous Kalman

Shapira’s Aish Kodesh which I hope illustrates this point of
subjectification as the condition of the mystical. Here my claim is that the
mystical (implied but ever mentioned) makes a claim about human
authority in relation to divine decree.

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In the early spring of 1939 Shapira gave a sermon to his besieged

congregants in the Warsaw Ghetto based on Rashi’s comment to Exodus
39:43 concerning the work of constructing the Tabernacle.21 And when
Moses saw they performed all the tasks – as God had commanded, so
they had done, Moses blessed them. Shapira invokes a Talmudic passage
(b.T. Berakhot 5a).

When God told Moshe, ‘go tell Bezalel, make me a Tabernacle,

an Ark, and vessels,’ Moses went and reversed the order. He
told him to ‘Make an Ark, vessels, and a Tabernacle.’ Bezalel
responded, ‘Moshe my teacher, it is the way of the world that a
person first build a house and only afterward bring vessels into
it but you told me to build the Ark and the vessels and only
afterward the Tabernacle. If I do it that way, where will I bring
the vessels? Perhaps [Bezalel says] God told you, Make the
Tabernacle, Ark, and then the vessels?’ Moses replied, your
name means ‘in the shadow of God’ (be-zel ‘El) and thus you
must know [the correct procedure].’

In trying to comprehend Bezalel’s daring correction to Moses’ prophecy

Shapira deploys a talmudic passage from b.T Yebamot 49, “Menashe
asked Isaiah the prophet, ‘Moses your teacher said, no one can see [the
face of God] and live. And you say, And I saw God. The gemara responds
that Moses saw through a clear glass (aspaklaria he-meria) and Isaiah
through a dark glass. Shapira continues that from Moses’ too-clear
prophetic prospective, one cannot see God, but since Isaiah’s perspective
was already tainted (or, tinted), he could, in fact, see God. Shapira then
continues, this distinction applies not only to prophecy but also to
devotion, even devotion that includes all manner of kabbalistic
preparation. In such a case the kabbalistic preparations are only
efficacious if the physical mitzvah is enacted. Yet, in the divine world
where Moses dwelled, there are no distinctions; all worlds become
nothing until there is no possibility of any particularity as there is in the
lower world, the world of concealment. Hence, the physical enactment of
constructing the Tabernacle was accomplished by Bezalel because Moses
could not (physically) perform (or even fully understand) the act.
Distance from the divine allowed Bezalel see more clearly than Moses.

In other words, this text suggests that Moses was incapable of correctly
getting the order of the construction because he occupied a space where
those distinctions did not matter – in fact where they did not exist. That

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is, he experienced the world from a mystical dimension that he could not
transcend. Put in another way, there was no distinction between Moses
and the commandment he was commanded to relate. This is one way to
read “a glass that shines” (aspaklaria he-meira) a state where the glass
ceases to function as intermediary. And without such an intermediary,
prophecy is too clear; it cannot address the implementation of the details
of any commanded act. The mystical source of commandment that is not
mediated by something outside itself can never be a part of the world and
thus can never function authoritatively. While the authority of the
message (the commandment) remains and Moses as its source is
maintained, the authority of the mystic here is undermined, not because
he is distant from God but rather because he is too close to God. In this
light Shapira cleverly turns the talmudic description of Bezalel as “the
shadow of God” – a complimentary term in the Talmud - on its head.
Bezalel means “the shadow of God” that is, one who sees God as one
sees a shadow, in a concealed manner – he is far enough away from God
to be able to know the details of divine will. Because Bezalel is not a
mystic, he can (and must!) correct Moses in the practical implementation
of the commandment. Moses, as a mystic, is too close for there to be any
details, or difference, at all. While surely founded on definite theological
principles, Shapira’s observation that “Moses can only command” but not
enact tells us more about religious authority than it does about theology.

While it is true that in Shapira Moses’ experience is, I assume, an

experience of God, I do not think that is the point or intent of the homily.
Rather, the point is that Moses’ experience of God, while often viewed in
laudatory terms, is simultaneously the foundation of, and also limitations
to, religious authority. The mystic and his mystical experience is
authoritative only the extent to which he can transcend his mystical
experience. If he cannot (or if he does not have one who can correct him)
he cannot be trusted to fully or adequately convey his message to those
who choose to listen.

So, as in Fishbane and Badiou, mysticism here means the description of a

human experience of radical “subjectification” or
“interiorization” (contextually determined) whereby the individual comes
to experience the world, and herself, in a new way. This definition is not
theological; it does not necessarily require an encounter with God. With
Fishbane it is an encounter with a humanly created myth, with Badiou an
(imagined) event, and with Shapira (using Moses’ encounter with God as
a template) the realization that a human experience that may reach

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beyond the details of worldly existence cannot fully function as

authoritative.

III

While I sympathize with Boaz Huss’ attempt to unmoor the academic

study of Kabbala from the doctrines and suppositions of kabbalistic
praxis and belief, and I agree that when the term “mysticism” is deployed
uncritically or to push a particular theological agenda, it should be
avoided, I suggest that the term still can serve a positive function as a
means of describing certain dimensions of human, and religious,
experience.22 In the three examples provided above – each with widely
different conclusions – I suggest the deployment of a category such as
“mysticism” may be useful to define and examine a human phenomenon
that is part of a religious activity that stands outside the normative
structures we usually use to define human perception or behavior.
Whether it is the spiritualizing dimension of reading, the truth of the
universal embedded in fidelity to an event, or questioning the problematic
transition from unmediated prophecy to religious authority, the term and
category we call “mysticism,” if deployed critically, can play a role for
the scholar. Thus, even without an air-tight definition (following
Scholem) and without using it to make or bolster theological claims that
would make it unworthy of academic discourse (following Huss),
mysticism can still serve the scholar of religion and Judaism.

I am in full agreement with Huss that the scholar of so-called “mystical

texts” should not confirm or deny any of the claims made by the texts.
Rather he or she is the business of closely examining how these claims
are made, their taxonomy, texture, and argumentation, and then attempt to
describe and illuminate these claims through critical, historical, and
phenomenological analysis. As Moshe Idel has argued in what he calls
“methodological eclecticism” (and as many scholars practice) the scholar
of Kabbala should have the full array of methods, terminology, and
nomenclature at their disposal to best achieve these goals.23 Nothing
should, by definition, be excluded from the scholars’ toolbox as long as
she is critical and careful about how such methods are utilized. The fact
that categories may be rooted in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or
Hellenism should, perhaps, give the scholar of Kabbala pause but should
not limit her work of translation, as all “western” scholarship of “non-
western” phenomena is in the end an act of translation. While I am in
agreement with Huss about the origins, and even the dangers, of the term

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“mysticism,” I argue that the term can be productive to illuminate certain

human experiences that are expressed throughout the history of human
creativity, including those of some kabbalists.

To return once more to Fishbane and Badiou, the structures that inform
our religious lives, be they myths, historical, or phenomenal events, exist
outside the purview of the mystical experience as pure subjectivity. But
what do we call such human experience that arises from within these
structures yet crosses a line to territory yet undescribed? In this sense, I
suggest the kabbalist can become a mystic but in that state he or she is not
a kabbalist. This is because the kabbalist is more (by being less) than a
mystic. He (or she) must transcend the experience – move beyond the
ecstatic by leaving it behind - in order to provide mediation necessary for
communication. Moses, in Shapira’s rendering, was a mystic but no
kabbalist, and kabbalists, I would suggest, cannot purely be mystics (as
the rabbi of a community in crisis perhaps this is part of what Shapira
wanted to convey in his homily). Achieving what Fishbane calls “the
interiorization of the mystic drama,” what Badiou calls fidelity to the
“event” may require a leap from the real to the realm of the mystical
(whether it is a place within or outside human subjectivity is not the
interest of the scholar) but the description of such a reading, or the
implementation of the event’s universal message, requires one to move
beyond, by moving outside, the experience itself. I suggest that the term
“mysticism” works here as a way to describe one dimension of this
process in order to highlight the difference between these two moves –
from the “real” and then back to the “real” newly constituted by stepping
outside it. In principle, this does not require any fidelity to a particular
theological truth or claim about universal “mystical” experience. It is,
rather, one way to describe the complex nature of human subjectivity and
how that subjectivity constructs the world.

Footnotes
11
Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford,
UK, 2003), pp. 313-314.
12
See Fishbane, “The Book Zohar and Exegetical Spirituality,” p. 110.
“The mystical meaning builds on the literal dimension of this reading,
even as it simultaneously interprets the images symbolically. Through
such a characteristic interfusion of hermeneutical registers (the literal and
the symbolic), a ,ytic dimension emerges from Scripture. In this case, the

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scholar assimilates the properties of the Torah he studies and becomes a

tree - a cosmic tree, in fact, that links the earthly and divine realms into
one divine whole.”
13
Melila Hellner-Eshed, And the River Goes out From Eden [Hebrew]
(Jerusalem, 2006). This dimension of Hellner-Eshed’s thesis is discussed
by the forthcoming review essay by Nathaniel Berman, “Aestheticism,
Rationalism, and Esotericism: Medieval Scholarship and Contemporary
Polemics,” in Jewish Quarterly Review. I want to thank Nathaniel
Berman for making his essay available to me before its publication.
14
Hellner-Eshed, And the River, p. 16.
15
This is also similar to the children’s book The Little Prince where the
boy draws a picture that he steps into and then becomes his world.
16
See, for example, ibid. p. 289.
17
The “event” as a philosophical truth category is the subject of his major
work Being and Event (New York: Continuum International, 2007). In
his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Ray Braissier trans.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Badiou examines Paul’s
notion of resurrection as an “event” that embodies truth. However, this
“event” has no theological import and the event itself is not necessarily,
or not at all, the basis of Christianity. It is, rather, an exemplar of a
moment that embodies universalism through difference. The event is
something that we cannot perceive until after the fact. Truth is thus
constituted in the wake of the event, the event itself is not true but
produces the truth. I want to thank Kenneth Reinhard for his help in
formulating Badiou’s position.
18
Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 77.
19
Mishna Avot 1:3.
20
Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78.
21
Shapira, ‘Aish Kodesh, (Jerusalem, 1960), pp. 25-27.
22
In regard to Huss’ comment on the assumption that “various cultural
formations, including the Kabbalah, are a Jewish expression of universal
mystical phenomenon” (“Jewish Mysticism in the University” p. 1), I
remain agnostic. That is I do not know, nor am I particularly interested, in
whether Kabbala is an expression of such a phenomenon or whether such
a phenomenon is, in fact, universal. But I would claim that human
experience, construed loosely and widely, is universal to human beings
and that, as human beings, Kabbalists may have experiences that one
could deem mystical that are surely not identical to those in other
civilizations but can still be examined through a lens that is deployed

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elsewhere to describe different experiences as long as one remains aware

of the pitfalls of simplistic comparison.
23
Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines,
Ladders (Budapest, NY: CUP Press, 2005), pp. 1-18.

====

"Paying Extra": A Response to Shaul Magid

by Boaz Huss
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a
thoughtful tone.

"When I make a word do a lot of work like that." Said Humpty

Dumpty, "I always pay it extra"

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I am grateful to Shaul Magid for his thoughtful response to my essay

"Jewish Mysticism in the University: Academic Study or Theological
Practice", which I hoped would stimulate reflection and discussion of the
founding category of the academic field of "Jewish Mysticism", a
category that many scholars in the field, including Magid, admit is
ambiguous and hard, if not impossible, to define scientifically -- a
statement which in itself gives sufficient reason to abandon its use in
academic research.

In his response, Magid attempts to "salvage the use of the term mysticism
as both a heuristic and substantive lens through which we can understand
kabbalistic literature in an academic context." While Magid offers
interesting discussions of various topics in his essay, his attempt at
salvage enhances, rather than refutes, my criticism of the use of the
theological category "mysticism" in academic scholarship.

Magid questions two arguments which he claims I raised in my essay:

"first that mysticism is, by definition, a theological category and second,
that nomenclature foreign to a particular tradition should not be used to
examine and explain such a tradition." As did Magid, I will address the
second point first.

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While in my essay I indeed asserted that mysticism is a theological

category, I did not claim that only indigenous terms should be used in the
study of a particular culture. Such a point is not only (as Magid admits),
unstated in my article, but also runs contrary to my own statement that "I
do not think academic scholars are obliged to exclusively use concepts
and categories that have been used by the subjects of their studies." As to
why I choose to direct my criticism to the term "Mysticism", and not to
other terms such as religion, myth, symbol, ritual, Judaism and God,
Magid's query is based on a wrong assumption: that I think that only emic
terms should be used in academic research. I am happy to clarify that
indeed many of the terms he mentioned deserve a critical analysis, and
some of them, should not be used as analytic categories in academic
research. This is especially true in regard to the term "religion", which, as
several scholars have demonstrated, is based on theological assumptions.
As to the use of the term "God" - this is exactly my point! Just as God (or
for that matter, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, Baal, the Divine Self, etc.,) cannot
be used as an analytic category and an explanatory term in scientific
discourse (in Natural Sciences as well as in the Humanities and Social
sciences), so should we avoid the use of the term "mysticism" that refers
to an encounter between human beings and a divine reality, as a
descriptive and analytic term in academic research.

The reason why I choose to direct my critique on the category

"mysticism", and not the other terms Magid mentioned, is (as I stated
explicitly in my article) that "mysticism" has become the defining
category of the academic study of Kabbalah and Hasidism (as well as
some other Jewish cultural phenomena). As a scholar in a discipline
which is usually defined as "Jewish Mysticism", I think the founding
category of the discipline is the first to deserve critical reflection.

The main part of Magid's essay consists of a refutation of my argument

that mysticism is a theological concept. As his discussion is based on a
misreading of my argument, I will restate it. As I have shown in my essay
in Zeek, as well as in my article "The Mystification of Kabbalah and the
Myth of Jewish Mysticism" (Pe'amim 110, 2007; 9-30) the term
"mysticism" has been used, since the 19th century, to describe and
classify different artifacts and practices that are assumed to be
descriptions, expressions, or products of an experience of an encounter
between human beings and a divine, or transcendent, reality. In this
framework, various Jewish cultural phenomena, foremost Kabbalah and

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Hasidism, were, and still are, classified, analyzed and studied as "Jewish
Mysticism".

According to the definitions of the term mysticism that I have surveyed in

my articles, the common denominator of the various mystical phenomena
is that they are all dependent or related to an experience of an encounter
with a divine/transcendent reality. As the existence of such a
divine/transcendent reality is a theological position, which in my opinion
should not be accepted in academic discourse, and as scholars have not
offered any other viable common denominator(s) which are common to
all the phenomena that are usually classified as "mystical", and only to
them, I suggest we abandon the use of the category "mysticism" in
academic research. By this, I do not mean a "politically correct"
avoidance of the word mysticism, but rather, the much more difficult task
of dissipating fundamental categories, accepted truisms and standard
methods of study. My suggestion is to abandon the assumption that there
is an essential affinity between Kabbalistic cultural productions and other
so called "mystical" phenomena (both in Jewish and other cultures) and
the discursive practices such an assumption entails.

In his response to my article, Magid seems to accept my observations

concerning the genealogy of the term "mysticism" and its employment in
academic studies. He also explicitly affirms my rejection of using
theological assumptions in scientific research. Nonetheless, he rejects my
conclusion that mysticism is an inadequate category, and suggests that
"that there are various non-theological ways of understanding mysticism
that may make such a term useful in describing kabbalistic literature."

In order to salvage the category of mysticism, Magid suggests that

"mysticism" describes three very distinct dimensions of human
experience: "the experience of reading religious myth whereby the reader
enters into the myth of his own creation and becomes part of the
imaginative narrative", "the experience of an “event” yielding a radical
subjectification of the subject and his experience such that the event
becomes the touchstone and exemplification of a universal philosophical
truth that cannot be rationally proven" and "that mysticism (here more
specifically the mystical experience of Moses) is an experience that by its
very nature undermines the subject’s ability to function as a complete
authority".

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In order to clarify the dimensions of human experience that mysticism

refers to and illustrate how mysticism can be a term that does not carry a
theological agenda, Magid presents an interesting discussion of three
texts written by 20th century thinkers. Although he argues that these
examples do not make theological claims, Magid admits that they work
under certain theological assumption. Two of the passages, who do not
use the term "mysticism" at all, Alain Badiou's on St. Paul and Rabbi
Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro of Piaszceno`s on Moses are explicit
theological texts. The third passage, by Michael Fishbane, uses the term
mysticism, and describes it as "spiritual components of a divine reality
which the individual has internalized through the interiorization of the
mythic dramas." Magid insists that "while it is true that Fishbane uses the
term “divine reality” to describe the myth interiorized, he is not making a
theological claim, that is, a claim about God." I beg to differ. Fishbane's
assertion that cultural phenomena are explained by the assimilation and
interiorization of "the modalities of the divine reality" is a theological and
not a scientific claim. Furthermore, Magid's own statement concerning
the "mystical dimension" that Moses could not transcend, and "the
mystical source" of a commandment seem to refer to a divine or
transcendent reality.

The main problem with Magid`s redefinition of "mysticism" is that it

involves a radical change of the standard referents of the term. The three
dimensions of human experience which he describes as mystical can be
applied to phenomena which are not usually described as such. Badiou
and Shapiro discuss events that they do not perceive as "mystical" and
Magid`s few examples of the human experience he describes as
"mystical" include Moses, who is not usually perceived as a mystic, and
Saint Exupéry's Little Prince!

Not only do Magid's criteria apply to phenomena not usually perceived as

"mystical", but they also do not apply to phenomena generally referred to
as "mysticism" and "Jewish mysticism". Magid himself doubts the
applicability of his definition of mysticism to Kabbalah when he states
that: "the kabbalist can become a mystic but in that state he or she is not a
kabbalist. This is because the kabbalist is more (by being less) than a
mystic… kabbalists, I would suggest, cannot purely be mystics"

Magid's attempt to salvage the category "mysticism" consists not only of

a new definition of the significance of the term but also of a new
delineation of its referents. His suggestion to re-define the term

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mysticism, and change its reference, seems quite similar to Humpty

Dumpty's declaration: "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it
to mean, neither more, nor less".

Magid who agrees with me that theological assumptions have no place in

academic studies, attempts to show in his essay "that mysticism needn't
be, by definition, theological." His endeavor consists of a complicated
redefinition of the term "mysticism," still implicated with theological
assumptions, and changes the term's usual referents. That, as Alice said to
Humpty Dumpty, is: "a great deal to make one word mean." I think it is
preferable to unburden the academic scholarship of Kabbalah of this
ambiguous category and its theological implications, rather than paying it
such an extra price.

An earlier version of Professor Magid's paper was delivered at a panel

entitled “Is Kabbala Mysticism?” at the Association of Jewish Studies
conference in Toronto, Canada, December 2007. Professor Huss’ paper
was also read at that panel. Other members of the panel included
professors Pinhas Giller, Hartley Lachter, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson.

I am grateful to Jody Myers, who read an earlier draft of my response, for

her helpful comments.

Professor Shaul Magid teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at

the University of Indiana. Professor Boaz Huss teaches in the Department
of Jewish Thought at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Professor Boaz Huss teaches in the Department of Jewish Thought at the

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

© 2006 by Zeek Magazine and the author. This article may not be
distributed for commercial purposes without the express written
permission of Zeek Magazine ( zeek@zeek.net). Reprints and other
distributions must contain this copyright notice.

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