Zohar as Mystical Poetry: A Kabbalistic Lyric of the Sublime

• In Event: Kabbalistic Texts as Evidence of Medieval Jewish-Christian Intellectual Exchange

Abstract

I start from the foundational and broad claim that the Zohar, at least in many cases, is a form of mystical prose poetry—both mythic-theological and in its expression of emotion, insight, interpersonal relations, and theatricality among the zoharic characters. What indeed is the formal nexus between poetry and mystical expression? Among the issues and modalities I shall explore are: 1) the ways in which the Zohar can be characterized illuminatingly as a mystical lyric of the sublime—a category used extensively in various fields to characterize elements such as mystery, ineffability, and the borders of expressibility. In this context, I will also explore the ways in which zoharic poetry functions to both express and to generate discernible states of emotion and feeling—consequences of reading that reflect a poetics of spiritual experience, evoking an illuminative experience in the reader, that combines the poetry of emotion and of the ineffabilities of mystical consciousness. 2) Imagery: Prompted in part by considerations in Jonathan Decter’s Iberian Jewish Literature, I consider how the emphasis on imagery among the so-called “New Critics” (e.g. John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks), along with a host of other critical models, may be heuristically instructive in understanding the texture of the Zohar. What is the relationship or dialectic between the sensuous mental picture generated by certain images and the use of theologically figurative or symbolic imagery on the other? This will include attention to nature imagery and the poetics of space. Here I will consider zoharic uses of images drawn from the natural world, both sensate and figurative-symbolic to evoke the theological reality of kabbalistic thinking. I shall correlate key observations of Geoffrey Hartmann regarding Wordsworth and others to the romantic nature-poetry of the Zohar. 3) Finally, I plan to integrate comparative examples from the poetry—particularly those examples of mystical-spiritual resonance—and broader aesthetics of the Zohar’s Christian-dominated time and place in order to situate the Zohar in this wider literary and artistic context.

Author

• Eitan Fishbane, Jewish Theological Seminary