The Zohar is a collection of over 32 different works with slightly different theologies and literary styles. Volume 11 of the new Pritzker editions is a collection of smaller works, including later pieces of Midrash ha-Neelam, and the Matnitin.
The new volume, Volume 11 was translated, edited and annotated by Joel Hecker, Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, who was ordained by RIETS and a PhD from NYU. Professor Hecker said that his approach to annotation is toward greater annotation, an arc already started in the latter volumes by Daniel C. Matt. Hecker also offers greater discussion of halakhic issues in his annotations.
Hecker’s approach to translation was to follow Matt’s lead, but to my ear he placed more emphasis on the poetics of retaining alliteration, use of synonyms, and the general sound and feel of the texts. The volume is a hefty 800 pages, so I have not yet worked though the translation- -it only arrived yesterday—however, even from the sample of passages that I looked at, they were marvelous in their capturing the original.
(Photo Credit: Philadelphia Inquirer)
Come and See: There is an Aramaic Zohar above and a Pritzker English Zohar below. The Zohar above and the Zohar below are perfectly balanced. When the Zohar descends into American Jewish culture, it needs to put on the garment of this world. If the Zohar did not put on a garment befitting this culture, the work could not endure in this world and the world could not endure them. Happy are they who look at Zohar properly! As wine must sit in a jar, so Zohar must sit in this garment. Hecker’s translation and annotation allows one to reference back to original text, allowing one to remember that these words are garments for the original printed Zohar.
My interview with the translator of the first nine volumes- Daniel C. Matt is here. For my review of one of the volumes and Melila Heller-Eshed’s work, see here. For a general interview with Joel Hecker in the Philadelphia Inquirer see here.
A little historical background will help in reading this volume. This volume contains several sections of the Zohar called Midrash ha-Neelam, which are separate in language and theology than the main body of the Zohar. They have a Hebrew core and an Aramaic overlay, they mainly concern the soul and other allegorical topics, rather than sefirot, and the named scholars are unlike the Zohar. The works use Neoplatonic philosophic language and philosophic terminology. The Midrash ha-Neelam offer a sense of how 13th century Castilian Jews integrated the Heikhalot and early esotericism with the scholastic philosophic traditions.
In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Yaakov Emden considered these sections separate and earlier than the rest of the corpus. In 1926, Gershom Scholem speculated in his inaugural lecture at Hebrew University, that these texts were earlier than the rest of the Zohar. Scholem completely buried this article and never referred to it; he considered these sections from Moses deLeon. Samuel Belkin, (1957) argued that there were Philonic elements in the work, which received a long critique from R.J. Z. Werblowsky (1960).
Current range for the origin of the Midrash ha-Neelam is between 1250 as an allegorical precursor to the Zohar to 1280 as part of De Leon’s large oeuvre, the opposite positions of belong to Ronit Meroz and Nathan Wolski.
Ah… but all this is only background. Pritzker Zohar Volume 11 contains a selection of later texts that are modeled on Midrash ha-Neelam. They are post-Zohar and before the 14th century Tikkune Zohar, and combine philosophic allegory with kabbalistic sefirot. They also have significant amounts of reworked later Midrash such as Eichah Rabbah or the short works of Batei Midrashot.
What is the origin of these later texts? 1250 and then additions in 1280? All 1280? How many strata? Was there an Aramaic overlay on Hebrew original or mixed language right from the start. Were they written by several people? Who were they? What did they think they were doing? Did they relate to one another?
Current Hebrew University thinking is to speak of an “intermediate layer” or a “middle layer” of the Zohar corpus written between the Zohar and the Tikkunim. They can currently fudge the issue by placing many short works that have no clear category into this basket.
An example of one of these works included in the volume is Midrash haNeelam on the book of Ruth. It was originally published as a separate volume independently of the Zohar and then was added later to the printed edition of the Zohar Hadash, which was extra material not included in the first printing. Elimelekh, Naomi, Ruth, & Orpah, are mapped onto four different aspects of soul (as often happens in Midrash ha-Ne’lam al ha-Torah). However, here those identifications were simultaneously mapped onto the tetragrammaton, with explicit reference to Father, Mother, Son, Daughter.
“Corresponding to this: Naomi—נשמה (neshamah), holy soul. Elimelech—נשמתא לנשמתא (nishmeta le-nishmeta), soul of soul. Mahlon—רוח השכלית (ruah ha-sikhlit), intellectual spirit. Ruth—נפש השכלית (nefesh ha-sikhlit), intellectual soul. Chilion—רוח הבהמיות (ruah ha-behemi’ut), animal spirit.
“Of this Solomon said Who knows if רוח (ruah), the spirit, of man ascends on high and רוח (ruah), the spirit, of a beast descends into earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:21). Ruah of man—Mahlon. Bestial ruah—Chilion, from the left side. Bestial nefesh—Orpah, stiff-necked, from the left side. Thus Chilion—his name was not remembered in Israel.” (Zohar Hadash 78b).
Others works in this volume are the Matnitin and the Tosefta which present themselves as an earlier strata corresponding to the Talmudic Mishnah. In these works, we have a reworking of an ethos of the Heikhalot into a dramatic heightened style, almost poetic, awakening the reader to the visionary and hidden. I have always been quite fond of these sections and have always thought they would make a good volume of visionary poetry. They echo Sefer Yetzirah and other early works. Rabbi Moses Cordovero considered these works as primary keys to opening up the rest of the Zohar and that they may be the earliest part of the Idrot texts.
Try reading this passage aloud:
Matnitin. “Will of the deed, clusters of faith! A voice—voice of voices—arousing above and below. Open-eyed we were. Sphere above, rotating toward diverse sides. A voice intones, arousing, “Awaken sleepy, slumbering ones, with sleep in their sockets, who do not know to look and do not see! Stopped-up ears, lethargic hearts, they sleep and do not know. The Torah stands before them, yet they pay no heed, and do not know upon what they gaze; who look but do not see. The Torah sends forth voices, ‘Look, foolish ones! Open your eyes and understand!’ Yet none pays heed, and none inclines his ear! How long shall you remain in the darkness of your desires? Look and understand, and the shining light will be revealed to you!” Zohar 1:161b (Vol. 11, pp. 542-43)
If you read it aloud then you saw the contribution of Hecker’s concern with poetics and the sound of the text. Here is a section of Tosefta to read aloud:
We were close by, heard a voice concatenating above, downward, spreading throughout the world. A voice smashing mountains, shattering mighty rocks, gargantuan whirlwinds ascending, our ears patulous. Proclaiming in undulations: “Thorn-prick to slumberers, torpor in their sockets, subsisting in their subsistence.
The King speaks! Avoid inebriation, gatekeepers! The ruler of numerous troops is stationed in his place! All are insensate, unaware that the book is open, names recorded. Zohar 1:121a (Vol. 11, pp. 608-9).
This project will be finished with a final volume in a few months. The Pritzker Zohar will be known in future decades as one of the great Judaica projects of our era, whose immense contribution with be evident in the upcoming years as rabbis start to teach and integrate these texts.
Several decades ago, Prof. Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer of Hebrew University envisioned a Zohar project of dividing the corpus between many scholars to analyze its content. Maybe the completion of these volumes would be good time to renew the project in the United States and divide the 12 volumes among 40-50 scholars who would elucidate its meanings and treasures. However this time, since the volumes are in English, maybe invite poets, theologians, cultural theorists, and comparative students of mysticism, along with midrash, and Jewish thought scholars to open up the text.
1) What is Midrash ha-Ne’lam?
Midrash ha-Ne’lam is from the earliest stratum of Zoharic writing, first appearing in the early 1280’s. Midrash ha-Ne’lam is written in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, and those two different languages reflect greater interests in allegory and kabbalistic symbolism, respectively. The allegorical readings here are often spiritualized readings of biblical characters as stand-ins for different parts of the human soul and psyche.
Shifra Asulin has argued that the kabbalistically-inflected Aramaic material was written and woven in to an older allegorical Hebrew text of Midrash ha-Ne’lam.
Scribes and printers sometimes attached the title Midrash ha-Ne’lam to other texts. Rabbi Yaakov Emden, the first person to engage in extensive critical analysis of the Zohar, tried to delineate its parameters using careful methodological criteria; he refers to one Zoharic section as “not from the true Zohar, but rather typical of formulations from the Midrash ha-Ne’lam” (Mitpahat Sefarim, 21).
Volume 11 contains sections that have received the label Midrash ha-Ne’lam—Shir ha-Shirim, Rut, and Eikhah—but they do not necessarily match the model of Midrash ha-Ne’lam on the Torah.
Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Shir ha-Shirim may be a fragment of a larger work, now lost, and it bears some of the characteristics typical of Midrash ha-Ne’lam on the Torah: multiple rabbinic figures; mix of Hebrew and Aramaic; allegorical interpretations; and with only slight use of kabbalistic symbolism.
- How does Midrash ha-Ne’lam fit into the formation of the Zohar?
Gershom Scholem argued that the entire Zohar was written by Moshe de Leon, a prolific 13th century kabbalist, including the earliest strata of the Zohar to the latest—from the work called Midrash ha-Ne’lam through the sections called the Idrot—even though many difficulties remained with this broad-brush thesis.
In the late 1980’s Yehudah Liebes, one of our generation’s foremost academic Zohar experts concluded that while Moshe de Leon may have been the primary author of the Zoharic compendium, he also served as editor, incorporating the works of others with whom he did not necessarily agree.
And for some time this new approach was adopted by scholarly consensus. Over the last decade there have been three primary responses to Liebes’ thesis.
Some scholars, many of them Liebes’ Hebrew University students, fine-tuned his argument, suggesting that there is another stratum of Zoharic literature. While the old topography of the Zohar’s textual composition had three stages—1. Midrash ha-Ne’lam; 2. Epic Layer of the Zohar (Zohar on the Torah); 3. Tiqqunei Zohar & Ra’aya Mehemna—according to the new scheme another layer intervened between numbers 2 & 3, and this came to be called the mediating or middle layer, i.e. the stratum written after most of the Zohar had been written.
To speak historically, we currently use a basic four-part scheme of authorship:
- Midrash ha-Ne’lam on the Torah;
- Epic Layer of the Zohar (Meroz’s name for guf ha-Zohar);
- a mediating period before Tiqqunei Zohar and Raya Mehemna, containing parts of Saba of Mishpatim, Yanoqa, Zohar Shir ha-Shirim, Idrot, Sifra di-Tseni’uta, Matnitin, Tosefta (and more);
- Tiqqunei Zohar and Raya Mehemna.
A second response to Liebes’ thesis has been pushed primarily by Ronit Meroz through careful study of Zoharic manuscripts in comparison with other contemporary (14th century) kabbalists. She has suggested that Sitrei Torah came from the pen of Rabbi Yaakov Shatz, and that large sections of Zohar Hadash came from Rabbi Yosef Angelet. These assignations are intriguing but probably require further investigation. The possibility remains that the Zohar texts and their “sister” texts may have had a source in common rather than originating from the same author.
A third response has been that of Daniel Abrams who argues that the Zohar is more a collection of literary phenomena bearing accretions and losses evolving over centuries into the anthology now called Zohar. For Abrams, Zoharic authorship is chimerical, and the best we can hope for is to observe trends of development over time through assiduous examination of the manuscripts.
The scholarship of Yehuda Liebes and Ronit Meroz has been very helpful in tracking down textual affinities between texts that appear in the printed Zohar and works written by kabbalists living in the late 13th-early 14th century.
Affinities may not prove authorship, however, and may demonstrate a relationship of source and target, or perhaps only that these authors and the Zohar as it emerges both drew on similar sources.
Even then, since the earliest identified manuscript that contains substantial Zoharic material was written at the beginning of the 15th century (and owned by Sabbatai Zevi!), there is at least 100 years of redaction before we have substantial amounts of Zoharic texts.
While there is little doubt that much of the conceptual and literary work would have been written in the decades between, say, 1280 and 1310, what existed at that time is like a black box buried at the bottom of the sea, or a rumored lost train carrying a fortune in gold lost in mountainous regions of Eastern Europe.
3) How was Midrash ha-Ne’lam Ruth originally considered a separate book?
Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Rut was first printed under the titles Yesod Shirim and Tapuhei Zahav (Thiengen 1559) without any reference to the Zoharic corpus. While the frontispiece of one of the first two printings (Cremona 1558) referred to Midrash Rut, only small parts of the work appear there. Ultimately it was published in 1658 in Zohar Hadash under the title Midrash ha-Ne’lam Rut.
MhN Rut is a shaggy dog of a text. I have often thought of it as a duffle bag into which all kinds of materials could be stuffed; indeed, this says something about the nature of redaction of kabbalistic texts in general.
MhN Rut cannot be said to have a clear message, per se. Many rabbis are quoted in it, which is a feature of Midrash ha-Ne’lam in general, without the central figure of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his cohort. It has stories about dreams, long passages about the various compartments of hell and the details of the tortures that go on there; it contains one of the versions of the popular story of the Tanna and the Restless Dead, a story that inspired the practice of children reciting Kaddish (and other parts of the liturgy) after a parent’s death.
The story enjoyed wide circulation in over forty versions in medieval folktales, liturgical works, midrash, ethical literature, and Kabbalah, but its best known source is from medieval Ashkenaz, where dreams and the fear of hell are frequent tropes.
It is interested in the nature of the soul. And, of course, there is a fair amount of allegorical and kabbalistic interpretation of the story of Ruth.
Noteworthy in Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Rut is the reliance on late, small midrashim published by Jellinek and Eisenstein. Much of the material regarding Geihinnom draws upon Masekhet Geihinnom, Masekhet Hibbut ha-Qever; on the fetus it gleans from Seder Yetsirat ha-Vlad; and on the martyrology from Heikhalot literature, but also from Elleh Ezkerah.
It is one of the ironies of Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Rut that while the biblical Book of Ruth is classically treated as a story of conversion and of a non-Jewish woman’s dedication to the people of Israel and their God, this section of the Zohar demonstrates its ambivalence and hostility toward non-Jews, and Christians and Muslims in particular. The Zohar’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia is prominently on display here.
4) Describe Midrash ha-Ne’lam Lamentations.
Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Eikhah is a beautiful, pathos-filled work that stands alone, but it was not published independently as was the case with MhN, Rut. The first part of the work is structured as dueling claims to greater suffering between the residents of Jerusalem and the residents of Bavel. The debate follows a trope established in a piyyut written by Solomon ibn Gabirol between two fictional wives of Israel, each suffering neglect. Here the winner will claim the right to offer a eulogy for Jerusalem after Her destruction.
The work draws on Eikhah Rabbah, but has a light overlay of kabbalistic symbolism, focusing on the absence of both the blessed Holy One, signifying Tif’eret, who abandoned the people of Israel, but Shekhinah too is absent.
It draws upon Eikhah Rabbah’s famous midrash that describes Rachel crying from her tomb in Bethlehem, refusing to be consoled over her children’s exile and suffering. While MhN, Eikhah strikes the same emotional tones as Eikhah Rabbah, the artistic skill of the authorship lies in the rereading of rabbinic midrash that seamlessly retrojects kabbalistic myth into the earlier material; or, put differently, elaborates literarily the mythos that is quietly embedded within the rabbinic texts.
5) What are your differences in translation from those of Daniel Matt?
One of the aims of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition was to maintain stylistic consistency throughout the 12 volumes and, indeed, originally Daniel Matt was originally hired to do all twelve—but Nathan Wolski and I were hired so that the project would be completed before 2022. While the careful reader can detect stylistic changes over the course of the nine volumes written by Daniel Matt, there is impressive consistency. Nathan and I were charged with the task of trying to sustain that consistency and I found little temptation to fiddle with a winning formula. That said, here and there one can find idiosyncratic divergences, particularly in my commentary.
I received rabbinical training at Yeshiva University and, as a result, there were times where I chased down halakhic issues that were of interest to me.
For example, I was interested in the issue of the three words that are repeated at the end of the Shema, as treated in Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Rut. Midrash Tanhuma on Tazri’a teaches that there are 248 words in the liturgical Shema, corresponding to the 248 limbs of the human body.
Bracketing the anatomical question, any brash 5th grader would challenge this teaching, noting that there are in fact only 245 words contained in the Shema’s three paragraphs. Hasidei Ashkenaz were deeply interested in numerical aspects of the liturgy and, confronted by this apparent contradiction, suggested that one could say the three words El Melekh Ne’eman, a putative expansion of the word Amen, after the blessing before the Shema and immediately preceding the Shema. Thus is the numerical discrepancy resolved.
We do not know about the pervasiveness of this innovative practice, but both Ramban and Rashba felt called upon to object, emphasizing that reciting these words, even if they are only an expansion of the “acronym Amen” constitute an impermissible interruption between the blessing before the Shema and the recital act itself. They did not propose any other solution to the problem, apparently indicating a lack of concern for the midrash’s inaccuracy.
The battle over this issue did not subside, however, and a passage in the printed version of Midrash ha-Ne’lam on Rut offered a unique solution: repeat the last two words of the Shema (Adonai Eloheikhem) plus the first word of the subsequent blessing (Emet). Yet another solution had been offered, however, and that was to repeat the last three words of the Shema (Ani Adonai Eloheikhem).
Medieval Spanish Talmud commentators and poskim in the late 13th and early 14th centuries quarreled over this issue (as documented by Israel Ta-Shma). From my examination of Zohar manuscripts and consideration of variants in the different works of Moses de León that dealt with the same issue, I concluded that the Zohar’s original position was to repeat the words ani YHVH Eloheikhem (the “losing” position in halakhic history), and that scribes subsequently “corrected” the Zohar in light of the emerging halakhah.
I believe that I have also differed slightly from Matt in terms of some key word choices and emphases. Thus I was more likely to translate yir’ah as “fear” rather than “awe.” Similarly, I often characterized kabbalistic interests as “pious” rather than “spiritual.”
6) What Poetic principles do you follow in your translation?
Following Danny Matt’s model for the series, I have tried to produce a translation that is both “literal yet poetic.” The translator’s line between replicating the feel of a foreign language and rebirthing the text in a different vernacular is inevitably individual and sometimes fuzzy. One of the problems in creating a translation is that there is no such thing as a word-for-word translation. No two languages correspond so neatly that one could pull off this feat.
A recent estimate puts the numbers of words and roots in the Zohar at roughly 6,000, while the average North American with a graduate school education has close to ten times that number in her vocabulary. Indeed, Gershom Scholem wrote that “It remains to be added that the author’s vocabulary is extremely limited, so that one never escapes a feeling of surprise at his ability to express so much with the aid of so little” (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 163–65).
While the Zohar does not feel flat-footed, if one were to reproduce its iterative quality in English, the result would feel pedestrian. Many words are repeated but with subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuances and variations; the richness of English can reproduce these distinctions using different words.
Thus in Daniel Matt’s working dictionary for his volumes of the translation (an enormously helpful tool), he lists almost forty words or phrases to translate the root ahd (or ahid, itahid) whose simple meaning is “grasp” or “hold.” Similarly, the root qym (“exist, stand, abide”) in its various forms has well over one hundred possible entries, as does slq (“rise, ascend, depart, disappear”).
7) Can you give examples of your poetics?
Some of the poetic moves that I have adopted include the following:
- Dash—Often replaces words such as אינון (“they”) or דא(“this”) or אלין (“these”). This move compresses and tightens the English text, providing more punch.
- Exclamation marks—The dialogue of the Zohar’s fictional kabbalists is frequently punctuated with expressions of astonishment, delight, and dismay. The addition of this simple punctuation mark accentuates the literary experience and emphasizes the affective tone of the text’s characters.
- Elimination of the definite article yields compactness, poetry, personification, and mythicization.
- An attempt to reproduce alliteration or patterns of repetition where possible.
Alliteration and repetition are frequent literary features in the Zohar. Sometimes there is a greater literary payoff by mimicking the Aramaic repetitions in English, and sometimes a better effect is achieved through varying the terms. Using alliteration in the English (“power and potency”) is a poetic act that provides some of the feel of the text even if it is not a precise echo of the specific sounds.
Commenting on Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 1:16), the author of Zohar Shir ha-Shirim (63b) writes: “Its flame flares momentarily, flickering. Sparkles revolve, one shimmer entering the other.”
Sometimes a term carries two possible meanings and I opted to use two terms rather than simply one to convey the meaning. Thus (Zohar Hadash, Shir ha-Shirim 63c) as “When he approached her later and Seth was born, the world became stabilized and fragrant with the righteous and saintly ones who came into the world afterward.” The root bsm carries both senses of “stabilized” or “established” and “fragrant.” Danny Matt has translated this term as “fragrantly firm,” but that didn’t work for me.
As to repetition, sometimes I opted to translate the same term with multiple words as a way of enhancing the experience. I translated a passage in Zohar Hadash, Shir ha-Shirim 62c as follows: “Come and see. When Israel are righteous, the supernal Throne of Glory ascends in teeming delight, in an abundance of love, higher and higher… All worlds are saturated, blessed, and sanctified with a profusion of blessings, brimming with sanctities. Then the blessed Holy One rejoices with them in total rapture.” Here, I have translated the word kamah in four different ways (teeming, abundant, profusion, brimming) as a way of capturing the plenitude that the language itself suggests.
And yet at other times the repetition works well: “In this manner, The Song of Songs of Solomon, ascending in bliss, descending in bliss, joining in bliss—all the worlds in bliss.” Repeating the word “bliss” (bliss, bliss, bliss, bliss) has its own sensual qualities.
8) Why is Zohar Song of Songs important and special?
Following Rabbi Akiva’s famous statement in Mishnah Yadayim (3:5) that “All of scripture is holy, but Song of Songs is holy of holies,” Jewish traditions have treated the love song as an allegory for love that transcends the love of young lovers, as an allegory for the love between God and Israel; love between the individual soul and God; and in kabbalah, as a symbol for the love between the masculine and feminine potencies of Divinity. It is hard to overstate the pervasive influence of the Song of Songs on the Zohar as a whole, as the Song’s themes suffuse the Zoharic corpus.
The Zohar on the Song of Songs represents the Zoharic authorship in its most mature phase—masterful in exegetical craft, soaring in its rhetoric. As noted above, the Zohar on the Song of Songs contains material that is similar to the interests of the later strata of the Zohar, Raya Mehemna and Tiqqunei Zohar (specifically the letter mysticism). It also appears to be familiar with some of the Zohar’s favorite themes, and re-renders them skillfully.
The literary framework for much of the text is an exchange of mystical homilies between Rabbi Shimon son of Yohai and the prophet Elijah, running a sustained commentary on Song of Songs 1:1–11. For many of the first homilies, each speaker demonstrates a thematic consistency: Rabbi Shim’on’s teachings are about ascent (within the sefirot or of the individual soul), while Elijah’s deal with the ruptures caused by the presence of the demonic Other Side, human transgression, and the ways in which evil is overcome and harmony restored.
Much of the latter part of this large work transposes the romance of the Song onto the exalted plane of masculine and feminine letters that are the fundaments of reality, with an overarching theme in both speakers concerning the restoration of linguistic and divine harmony.
In this text, as in much of the Zohar, the demonic Other Side is a personification of the current of evil and judgment that runs through humanity and the world. Evil is understood (in strong contrast to Maimonides) as a real force in humanity, but also as a celestial force, corresponding to Divinity though inferior in stature. This modified dualism has anthropological consequences, raising the stakes that appear in Bahya ibn Paquda’s Hovot ha-Levavot, in which every human action is a step toward holiness or sin. For the Zohar, these fateful steps result in one abiding in one dimension of reality or another—the holy or the demonic. This dualism has metaphysical significance as well, inasmuch as it calls for a recasting of the Neoplatonic approaches that were popular at the time.
9) What are the Matnitin and Tosefta?
The Matnitin (“Our Mishnah”) and Tosefta (“Addenda”) sections of the Zohar corpus consist mostly of anonymous enigmatic revelations. These two sections have different names, but are identical in style, imagery, and tone. Their primary interests are the process of emanation; the development of the soul; and the role of the forces of judgment and evil.
These striking, compact passages, often have oracular, hortatory voices that call upon sleeping humanity to awaken from their spiritual slumber in order to learn the esoteric truths of Torah and God’s inner being. Their style is terse, dramatic, and at times rhythmic, suggesting that some of them may have been chanted to induce mystical consciousness.
Matnitin and Tosefta show strong familiarity with a range of Zoharic themes, and this led R. Yaakov Emden first, and then later Scholem and Tishby to characterize them as early compositions—just as the terse style of the Mishnah leads to the expansive discussions of the Gemara. I agree with Daniel Abrams’ position that it is more likely that the authors wrote them with many Zoharic texts before them.
The use of neologisms in these sections heightens their sense of mystery and allure—often derived from Greek, Latin, Persian, or Arabic—and made these sections the most fun to translate. Several examples:
- “Glow of ten flowing streams” renders קוזטיפא דהרדינא עשרא דאפקותא (qoztifa de-ha-redina asara de-afquta), (V206, 331a). The neologism qoztifa apparently implies projection or flow. See the expression קסטיפא דשמשא (qastifa de-shimsha), “ray of the sun” (Zohar 3:283b); and the Arabic root qdf, “to throw.” The word רדינא (redina), or perhaps הרדינא (hardina), is utterly cryptic and probably a corruption, but it may derive from the root רדי (rdy), “flow, liquefy.”
- “Lusters” renders קסטורין (qastorin) (Zohar 1:232b), apparently derived from קסיטרא (qasitra) and Greek kassiteros, “tin.” “Constricted caissons” renders טסקורי קמיטין (tasqurei qemitin); alternatively, “furrowed forms” or “tautened templates.” The strange word tasqurei appears nowhere else in the Zohar, or classical or medieval rabbinic literature. The author may have in mind the other Zoharic neologism טסקוסאי (tasqosa’ei) on Zohar 2:234b where טסקוסאי (tasqosa’ei) is linked with Targum Yonatan, Ezekiel 43:10: טקוסיה (tiqquseih), “its pattern” (recorded in Bei’ur ha-Millim ha-Zarot as טסקוסטיה [tisqusteih]), deriving from Greek taxis, “arrangement, order.”
- I translated קולפי בסיכתא (qulfei de-sikketa) (1:232a) as “nail-studded (or flanged, spiked) clubs.” The singular form קולפא (qulpa), “club,” derives from the Persian kūpāl, “club, lance.”
10) What is the Sitrei Torah?
Sitrei Torah is the title given to a collection of Zohar passages from the later period that are mostly connected to the book of Genesis, but the title is also sometimes used in manuscripts and by early commentators to refer to texts that appear without that title elsewhere. In other words, it is a somewhat generic title that is applied somewhat randomly. A central focus of these passages is the power of the demonic Other Side.
11) Why should we study Zohar?
The Zohar has charmed its readers because of its literary richness, its acute midrashic eye, and for the lush interlacing of Tanakh, midrash, halakhah, aggadah, medieval philosophy, and kabbalah. It is a poetic, visionary masterpiece whose system—both structured and fluid—offers shining religious homilies. Encompassing the entirety of Judaism, its narratives and mysterious characters confer a quality of both mystery and familiarity, and an aura of authenticity even as it is endlessly creative. The flow from one set of symbols is seductive, and induces in the reader a desire to participate in its associative process.
For today’s spiritual seeker, Hasidut is often more accessible because it is more expressly psychological, and has usually dropped the arcana of sefirot, angels, demonic forces, etc. Each spiritual seeker, of course, will find the practices, texts, and forms of contemplation best suited to her or him.
12) How does the Zohar influence your spiritual life?
The Zohar strongly informs my spirituality and the religious intentions that I bring to my Torah study, prayer, and observance of mitsvot, but I do not regard myself as a mystic. The religious imaginaire supplied by the Zohar fills my brain, but it is not the only constellation that guides me. And yet, a large tetragrammaton graces the door of my study serving as a focus for visualization during davenning, inspired by my study of the Zohar.
When I first read through the entire Zohar in the early 90’s, I would spend hours every morning reading large chunks of text. Then I would take a walk down the block to Riverside Park and everything appeared differently: sun, sky, birds, trees, etc. all carried symbolic weight, having become portals onto Divinity itself.
After several months of immersion in the Zohar’s letter mysticism, I received an aliyah at shul. Nothing mystical occurred, but my relationship to those letters, parchment, and the entire text had been transformed, and I was filled with reverence and awe.
13) What do you do with the nasty parts of the Zohar?
When saying kaddish after my father died several years ago, I thought frequently about the Zohar’s injunctions to say Kaddish and other public rituals to save the deceased from Hell, along with the Zohar’s extensive descriptions of the various compartments and sufferings of Hell. Literal readings of those texts have no purchase on my religious thinking. While I feel deeply religious, my academic training, extending back to a B.A. in English Literature at the University of Toronto, has inculcated in me a ironic distance between me and any text. Moreover, I am aware that any and all texts I read are filtered through my own subjectivity, and through the broad range of Jewish religious texts with which I have spent time.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 