Abstract
This chapter examines the cosmological significance of the performance of queer hermeneutical practices in the Zohar (The Book of Splendor). The Zohar is a thirteenth-century mystical compendium and the core text of Jewish mystical thought. It is a narrative theosophical work aimed at narrating the structure of the cosmos through the actions of its main characters. Some of their most important actions are reading and interpreting. This sort of reading is presented as redemptive, and in this, it emulates and acts upon the structure of the cosmos it describes. The Zohar describes an emanational and bigendered cosmos with elements that interact with one another sexually. In this model, gender is positionally based rather than essential, and it is therefore flexible. The characters act out the relations between cosmological elements in their reading practices. The Zohar argues that these practices are redemptive for both the reader and the cosmos. As such right reading, sexually conceived and flexibly gendered, reproduces the cosmological model of the Zohar and then alters it. This cosmological model and its attendant hermeneutic acts as a polemical response to the rationalist model articulated by Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed and to others like it.
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Notes
See Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) (New York: SUNY Press, 1993).
Arthur Green explains that “In a series of homilies by various speakers on a particular verse … the Zohar takes its readers through multiple layers of understanding, reaching from the surface of plain meaning into ever more profound revelations.” In Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford, 2004), Pinchas Giller, an important scholar of the Zohar, describes it as “mystical fiction” and Green describes it as a “work of sacred fantasy.” (p. 65). See also: Pinchas Giller, Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 3.
Robert Bonfils, “Cultural and Religious Traditions in Ninth-Century French Jewry”, Binah: Studies in Jewish History, Thought, and Culture 3, ed. J. Dan (Westport, CT and London: Praeger Press, 1994), p. 4. The earlier source for this information is the letter of Agobard, a ninth-century Carolingian cleric who calls attention to the anthropomorphic views of God held by the local Jewish community, complaining, “And they say further that their God has concrete form and is distinguished by limbs having concrete contours, and that like us he hears with one organ and with another he sees and with another he speaks or acts; hence man’s body was created in God’s image.” Bonfils, p. 4.
Maimonides engages but ultimately refutes the arguments of the Mutakalimun because of their insistence on the necessity of unquestioning faith. However, he is strongly influenced by the thought of Saadya Gaon, as he works to develop Saadya’s Kalam-influenced negative theology. See Lenn Evan Goodman, Rambam: Readings in the Philosophy of Moses Maimonides (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 125–26.
While other parts of the Guide show that Maimonides’s attitude toward the body was not derogatory but quite practical, this rigid separation between the earthly and the divine is maintained throughout the book. This is true because the only way to achieve devekhut, or cleaving to the divine is through detachment from the physical. See especially Kalman Bland, “The Well-Tempered Medieval Sensorium”, The Artless Jew (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) for a discussion of Maimonides’s attitudes toward the body.
In this way, Maimonides found it necessary to strictly delimit the signification of linguistic signs. To this end he proposed a gesture theosophy that emptied out words as they were used. He argues in the Guide that all positive statements about God are true only insofar as they deny divine imperfection: “We say, on that account, it has power, wisdom, and will, i.e., it is not feeble or ignorant, or hasty, and does not abandon its creatures; When we say God is immaterial we mean that he has no body; when we say he is eternal, we say that he has no cause, and when say that God is omniscient we exclude from God all ignorance.” Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 138.
Vivian Mann’s book, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) presents a wide range of rabbinic responses on issues of visual representation.
Moshe Idel “Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed and the Kabbalah,”, Jewish History 18 (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004): 197–226.
Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 18
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.
Maimonides is famous for this exhortation that “matter is a married harlot” appearing in his Guide, 3.8. For more information on the medieval Jewish conceptualizations of the soul, see Tova Rosen’s “Poor Soul, Pure Soul”, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 83–102, which deals with this topic.
Sara Schneider, Kabbalistic Writings on the Nature of Masculine and Feminine (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001), p. 28.
Isaiah Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. David Goldstein (Oxford. Oxford University Press: 1989), p. 1205.
In Elliot Wolfson’s article, “Woman—the Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah” (in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. L. J. Silberstein and R. L. Cohn (New York: NYU Press, 1994), pp. 155–203) he argues that “the feminizing of the masculine affected by circumcision is predicated on the ontological fact that femaleness is part of maleness. It is the same ontic assumption that allows for the masculinization of the feminine” (p. 188). Thus, for him, these transgenderings simply reflect an androcentric view, in which the female originated as a part of the male, and in which redemption consists in restoring their union. He elaborates further that the female parts of the divine are only conceived positively when they are performing male functions. This view reflects a strong psychoanalytic bias that privileges the undifferentiated state before creation as an originary state to be regained through redemption, but which assumes its fundamental maleness. Other points of view on gendering and transgendering in the Zohar include the one expressed by Moshe Idel in his article, “Sexual Metaphor and Praxis,”, The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. D. Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 197–224 in which he writes: “The return to a primal androgyne state of humans, which was commonly described by the Gnostics, or the endeavor to transcend the feminine plight by mystic transformations of the female into a male, recurring in ancient Christian thought and mysticism, is alien to Talmudic and theosophical weltanschauung” (p. 211).
This title is given by Daniel Matt, in his book, Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983). He places this passage at the end of his introduction as a demonstration of Zoharic hermeneutics in practice.
Pinchas Giller writes in his book, Reading the Zohar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) “The skills brought to the traditional analysis of a sacred Jewish text are very specific. The reader attempts to understand the canonical text through the use of methodologies that derive from the reader’s beliefs and critical faculties that are relevant to the genre being studied.”(p. 1) According to this understanding, each work demands its own combination of hermeneutical processes, which the reader must determine and systematically apply. Even if it does not make them simple, the Zohar makes these complicated processes manifest.
David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 6.
Lee Edelman, “Queer Theory: Unstating Desire,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2 (4) (1995): 343–48.
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© 2013 Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol
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Segol, M. (2013). Queer Hermeneutics and Redemption in the Cosmology of the Zohar . In: Brown, J.N., Segol, M. (eds) Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137037411_4
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