Early Jewish mystics tried to achieve visions of the Divine.
By George Robinson
Reprinted with
permission from Essential
Judaism, published by Pocket Books.
Jewish mysticism proper may be said
to have begun around the second century C.E. (although some of the early texts
may be older) with the advent of merkavah mysticism.
The merkavah mystics focused their attention on the
startling vision that opens the book of Ezekiel, in which the exiled and
shackled prophet sees a manifestation from ?the heavens,? an astonishing
tableau ringed with fire, of four winged creatures ?like burning coals of
fire,? faces, surrounding a heavenly chariot. (Obviously, Ezekiel?s vision
itself is evidence that there was some mystical strain in the prophetic era,
long before the period of the merkavah mystics.) The idea of the students of
the chariot was to re-create Ezekiel?s experience and ascend in the chariot to
explore the heavens, or the chambers of which Heaven was supposed to consist.
The latter was the chief province of the heikhalot mystics who, in works like Heikhalot Rabbati (The Teaching of the Chambers), expounded on the journey through
heavenly precincts.
These mystical writings are profoundly visionary in nature,
clear examples of scholar Moshe Idel?s intensive mode (a type of mysticism
aimed at ecstatic experience), a search for the formula that would allow
practitioners to make the same journey the prophets had made. Jumping off from
Ezekiel?s vision or passages in the Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs), they paint
a vivid and imaginative picture of God?s heavenly domain. In one of these
works, Shi?ur Komah (The Measurement of the Height), the
author actually describes the Creator in anthropomorphic terms, a humanlike
creature of such gigantic dimensions as to occupy the whole cosmos: his neck is
130.8 million miles long, his fingers are each 150.3 million miles in length.
The mystics who engaged in such creative speculations are
unknown to us, but their works are proverbially (and incorrectly) attributed to
such prominent men as Akiba and Rabbi Ishmael (sages of the first and second
century C.E.), and there is a tradition that they were, in fact, members of
Akiba?s circle. Within the rabbinic literature, there is some justification for
that view. The Mishnah, Tosefta, and
both Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds all contain parallel passages in which
it is explicitly stated that ?it is forbidden to expound the Work of the
Chariot before more than one? listener, passages in which Rabbi Akiba always
figures prominently. Clearly, what Akiba and his colleagues were acknowledging
is that a secret known by more than two people is not a secret, and a master
must be sure of a pupil before giving him such highly charged information.
Indeed, in each version of this proscription, the teachings are explicitly
linked with two other topics that may be conveyed only under highly regulated
circumstances: the secrets of Creation and the laws of incest.
George Robinson is the
recipient of a Simon Rockower Award for excellence in Jewish journalism from
the American Jewish Press Association. His writing has appeared in The New
York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Jewish Week, and the Detroit
Jewish News.
