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“An English version of
Zohar, a guiding text of Jewish mysticism, offers new insights. - By David van Biema -TIME Magazine: April 19, 2004 issue
The road winds like a Talmudic discourse, first one way and then another, up toward Daniel Matt's home in Berkeley, California, hills. ‘There's a more direct route that my wife likes’, admits Matt, 53. ‘But I find this one more interesting.’
That's not surprising. Matt is embarked on a solo journey through one of most influential — and maddeningly difficult — works in history of religious literature. After six years of his labor, Stanford University Press has published first two books of his translation of Zohar, wellspring of Jewish mysticism, or Cabala. He will do nine more volumes, all rendered from Zohar's original Aramaic. The work has received ecstatic advance reviews (‘A superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up Zohar to English-speaking world’, blurbed lit-crit colossus Harold Bloom), and two weeks ago it won a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for ‘monumental contribution to history of Jewish thought’. Beneath praise runs an undercurrent of awe that someone was crazy enough to take on job.
The Zohar's elusiveness dates to its appearance in Spanish region of Castile around 1280. Written in Aramaic, a language Jews had not composed in for centuries, book was attributed to a great rabbi of a millennium earlier. But in fact, in 1930s scholars determined that it was penned by one Moses de Leon and his associates in 13th century.
De Leon had every reason to fake his work's pedigree: Zohar was far too radical to be accepted without a fabricated imprimatur. An utterly original 1,800-page mix of Torah commentary, parody, erotic poetry, numerology and experimental narrative devices, it crams some 400 subplots into a Chaucer-like {Chaucer is an alchemist too.} tale of a band of traveling sages. The book's form alone, says Matt, is ‘a challenge to normal workings of consciousness.’
Its theology is wilder still — nothing less than division of God's personality, which Judaism had always seen as a unity, into 10 interacting emanations, two of them female. One of these, Shekhinah, was Zohar's obsession, portal through which it pulled believers willy-nilly into divine drama. Only their prayer and good deeds could save her from hordes of demons and effect her mystic marriage to God's male aspect, a reunion described in sometimes erotic detail. ‘Without arousal below’, de Leon noted, ‘there is no arousal above.’
Remarkably, his book caught on. By 1600 Jewish world saw Zohar as its third holiest text, preceded only by Bible and Talmud. Cabalistic study and meditation flourished, and zoharic principles formed basis of Hasidic Judaism. The Zohar's use faded as Judaism absorbed just-the-facts influence of European Enlightenment, but it left behind dramatic mementos such as Bar Mitzvah coming-of-age celebration and gorgeous Friday-evening song welcoming God's "Sabbath bride". The Zohar also informs current Cabalistic resurgence, so fascinating to Jews and spiritual adventurers like Madonna. And this created new demand for an authoritative English version.
Enter Matt. By 1995 he had taught Jewish mysticism at university level, written a book comparing Cabala and scientific cosmology, and translated some Zohar excerpts. Nevertheless he was stunned when Margot Pritzker, wife of chairman of Hyatt Corp., who was studying book, offered to bankroll a full translation. ‘I told her, optimistically, that it might take 18 years’, Matt says. ‘And she said, 'You're not scaring me.'’
The result is not for everybody. From its opening, an extended discourse on image of a rose in Song of Songs ("Just as a rose has 13 petals, so Assembly of Israel has 13 qualities of compassion on every side"), first volume only plunges further into esoterica. Matt's commentary, which offers tidbits about ancient water clocks and silkworm's arrival in Spain, along with his exegesis of mystical concepts, is often twice as long as his translation. Yet there are those eager to use it. Says Samuel Cohon, a Tucson, Arizona, rabbi who has ordered 40 copies at his congregants' request: ‘I thought; 'It'll be too hard'. But there's a great desire to get at source. If this is a profound text, then let's see why.’
Matt still has slightly dazed look of an Ahab whose white whale has arrived un-hunted. He hopes to finish his task by age 70. It's not time that he will regret. ‘When I wake up, it's all I want to do’, he says. ‘I feel like I'm inside De Leon's mind now. I know tricks he's up to. And he's a genius. This is most astounding book in Judaism.’ It is a judgment his own work makes even clearer.” (7)
I am open to possibility that knowledge or tricks he finds are in Zohar and De Leon’s mind are long-standing knowledge systems which had been kept secret by likes of Tartessians of Spain and Southern France in a line of schools going back to pre-Christian eras. I have many inter-connections which have been made in other books and we have again touched a few of them in regards to Templars and Rennes-le-Chateau in this book.
I am an activist for ecumenicism and an end to the Churchian divisiveness that leads to war and worse.
