'Judaism is often cal ed the religion of reason. It is this, but it is
also the religion of the soul. It recognises the value of that mystic
insight, those indefinable intuitions which, taking up the task at the
point where the mind impotently abandons it, carries us straight into the
presence of the King. Thus it has found room both for the keen speculator
on theological problems and for the mystic who, because he feels God,
declines to reason about Him--for a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also
for a Nachmanides, a Vital, and a Luria' (M. Joseph, _op. cit._,
p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism stands for spiritual inwardness.
Religion without mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume. This
saying is no more precise and no more informing than Matthew Arnold's
definition of religion as morality touched with emotion. Neither
mysticism nor an emotional touch makes religion. They are as often as not
concomitants of a pathological state which is the denial of religion. But
if mysticism means a personal attitude towards God in which the heart is
active as well as the mind, then religion cannot exist without mysticism.
When, however, we regard mysticism as what it very often is, as an
antithesis to institutional religion and a revolt against authority
and forms, then it may seem at first sight paradoxical to recognise
the mystic's claim to the hospitality of Judaism. That a religion which
produced the Psalter, and not only produced it, but used it with never
a break, should be a religion, with intensely spiritual possibilities,
and its adherents capable of a vivid sense of the nearness of God, with
an ever-felt and never-satisfied longing for communion with Him, is what
we should ful y expect. But this expectation would rather make us look
for an expression on the lines of the 119th Psalm, in which the Law is so
markedly associated with freedom and spirituality. Judaism, after al ,
allowed to authority and Law a supreme place. But the mystic relies on
his own intuitions, depends on his personal experiences. Judaism, on the
other hand, is a scheme in which personal experiences only count in so
far as they are brought into the general fund of the communal experience.
But in discussing Judaism it is always imperative to discard al
_a priori_ probabilities. Judaism is the great upsetter of
the probable. Analyse a tendency of Judaism and predict its logical
consequences, and then look in Judaism for consequences quite other than
these. Over and over again things are not what they ought to be. The
sacrificial system should have destroyed spirituality; in fact, it
produced the Psalter, 'the hymnbook of the second Temple.' Pharisaism
ought to have led to externalism; in fact, it did not, for somehow
excessive scrupulosity in rite and pietistic exercises went hand in hand
with simple faith and religious inwardness. So, too, the expression of
ethics and religion as Law ought to have suppressed individuality; in
fact, it sometimes gave an impulse to each individual to try to impose
his own concepts, norms, and acts as a Law upon the rest. Each thought
very much for himself, and desired that others should think likewise. We
have already seen that in matters of dogma there never was any corporate
action at al ; in ancient times, as now, it is not possible to pronounce
definitely on the dogmatic teachings of Judaism. Though there has been and
is a certain consensus of opinion on many matters, yet neither in practice
nor in beliefs have the local, the temporal, the personal elements ever
been negligible. In order to expound or define a tenet or rite of Judaism
it is mostly necessary to go into questions of time and place and person.
Perhaps, then, we ought to be prepared to find, as in point of fact we
do find, within the main body of Judaism, and not merely as a freak of
occasional eccentrics, distinct mystical tendencies. These tendencies
have often been active well inside the sphere of the Law. Mysticism was,
as we shall see, sometimes a revolt against Law; but it was often, in
Judaism as in the Roman Catholic Church, the outcome of a sincere and
even passionate devotion to authority. Jewish mysticism, in particular,
starts as an interpretation of the Scriptures. Certain truths were arrived
at by man either intuitively or rationally, and these were harmonised
with the Bible by a process of lifting the veil from the text, and thus
penetrating to the true meaning hidden beneath the letter. Allegorical
and esoteric exegesis always had this aim: to find written what had
been otherwise found. Honour was thus done to the Scriptures, though the
latter were somewhat cavalierly treated in the process; Philo's doctrine
(at the beginning of the Christian era) and the great canonical book of
the mediaeval Cabbala, the Zohar (beginning of the fourteenth century),
were alike in this, they were largely commentaries on the Pentateuch.
Maimonides in the twelfth century followed the same method, and only
differed from these in the nature of his deductions from Scripture. This
prince of rationalists agreed with the mystics in adopting an esoteric
exegesis. But he read Aristotle into the text, while the mystics read
Plato into it. They were alike faithful to the Law, or rather to their
own interpretations of its terms.
But further than this,--a large portion of Jewish mysticism was the
work of lawyers. Some of the foremost mystics were famous Talmudists,
men who were appealed to for decisions on ritual and conduct. It is
a phenomenon that constantly meets us in Jewish theology. There were
antinomian mystics and legalistic opponents of mysticism, but many,
like Nachmanides (1195-1270) and Joseph Caro (1488-1575), doubled the
parts of Cabbalist and Talmudist. That Jewish mysticism comes to look
like a revolt against the Talmud is due to the course of mediaeval
scholasticism. While Aristotle was supreme, it was impossible for man
to conceive as knowable anything unattainable by reason. But reason must
always leave God as unknowable. Mysticism did not assert that God was
knowable, but it substituted something else for this spiritual scepticism.
Mysticism started with the conviction that God was unknowable by reason,
but it held that God was nevertheless realisable in the human experience.
Accepting and adopting various Neo-Platonic theories of emanation,
elaborating thence an intricate angelology, the mystics threw a bridge
over the gulf between God and man. Philo's Logos, the Personified Wisdom
of the Palestinian Midrash, the demiurge of Gnosticism, the incarnate
Christ, were al but various phases of this same attempt to cross an
otherwise impassable chasm. Throughout its whole history, Jewish mysticism
substituted mediate creation for immediate creation out of nothing, and
the mediate beings were not created but were emanations. This view was
much influenced by Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-1070). God is to Gabirol
an absolute Unity, in which form and substance are identical. Hence
He cannot be attributively defined, and man can know Him only by means
of beings which emanate from Him. Nor was this idea confined to Jewish
philosophy of the Greece-Arabic school. The German Cabbala, too, which
owed nothing directly to that school, held that God was not rational y
knowable. The result must be, not merely to exalt visionary meditation
over calm ratiocination, but to place reliance on inward experience
instead of on external authority, which makes its appeal necessarily to
the reason. Here we see elements of revolt. For, as Dr. L. Ginzberg wel
says, 'while study of the Law was to Talmudists the very acme of piety,
the mystics accorded the first place to prayer, which was considered
as a mystical progress towards God, demanding a state of ecstasy.' The
Jewish mystic must invent means for inducing such a state, for Judaism
cannot endure a passive waiting for the moving spirit. The mystic soul
must learn how to mount the chariot (Merkaba) and ride into the inmost
hal s of Heaven. Mostly the ecstatic state was induced by fasting and
other ascetic exercises, a necessary preliminary being moral purity;
then there were solitary meditations and long night vigils; lastly,
prescribed ritual of proved efficacy during the very act of prayer. Thus
mysticism had a farther attraction for a certain class of Jews, in that
it supplied the missing element of asceticism which is indispensable to
men more austerely disposed than the average Jew.
In the sixteenth century a very strong impetus was given to Jewish
mysticism by Isaac Luria (1534-1572). His chief contributions to the
movement were practical, though he doubtless taught a theoretical
Cabbala also. But Judaism, even in its mystical phases, remains a
religion of conduct. Luria was convinced that man can conquer matter;
this practical conviction was the moving force of his whole life. His
own manner of living was saintly; and he taught his disciples that
they too could, by penitence, confession, prayer, and charity, evade
bodily trammels and send their souls straight to God even during their
terrestrial pilgrimage. Luria taught al this not only while submitting
to Law, but under the stress of a passionate submission to it. He added
in particular a new beauty to the Sabbath. Many of the most fascinatingly
religious rites connected now with the Sabbath are of his devising. The
white Sabbath garb, the joyous mystical hymns ful of the Bride and of
Love, the special Sabbath foods, the notion of the 'over-Soul'--these
and many other of the Lurian rites and fancies still hold wide sway
in the Orient. The 'over-Soul' was a very inspiring conception, which
certainly did not originate with Luria. According to a Talmudic Rabbi
(Resh Lakish, third century), on Adam was bestowed a higher soul on
the Sabbath, which he lost at the close of the day. Luria seized upon
this mystical idea, and used it at once to spiritualise the Sabbath and
attach to it an ecstatic joyousness. The ritual of the 'over-Soul' was
an elaborate means by which a relation was established between heaven
and earth. But all this symbolism had but the slightest connection with
dogma. It was practical through and through. It emerged in a number of new
rites, it based itself on and became the cause of a deepening devotion to
morality. Luria would have looked with dismay on the moral laxity which
did later on intrude, in consequence of unbridled emotionalism and mystic
hysteria. There comes the point when he that interprets Law emotionally
is no longer Law-abiding. The antinomian crisis thus produced meets us in
the careers of many who, like Sabbatai Zebi, assumed the Messianic role.
Jewish mysticism, starting as an ascetic corrective to the conventional
hedonism, lost its ascetic character and degenerated into licentiousness.
This was the case with the eighteenth-century mysticism known as
Chassidism, though, as its name ('Saintliness') implies, it was
innocent enough at its initiation. Violent dances, and other emotional
and sensual stimulations, led to a state of exaltation during which
the line of morality was overstepped. But there was nevertheless,
as Dr. Schechter has shown, considerable spiritual worth and beauty
in Chassidism. It transferred the centre of gravity from thinking to
feeling; it led away from the worship of Scripture to the love of God.
The fresh air of religion was breathed once more, the stars and the open
sky replaced the midnight lamp and the college. But it was destined to
raise a fog more murky than the confined atmosphere of the study. The
man with the book was often nearer God than was the man of the earth.
The opposition of Talmudism against the neo-mysticism was thus on the
whole just and salutary. This opposition, no doubt, was bitter chiefly
when mysticism became revolutionary in practice, when it invaded the
established customs of legalistic orthodoxy. But it was also felt that
mysticism went dangerously near to a denial of the absolute Unity of
God. It was more difficult to attack it on its theoretical than on its
practical side, however. The Jewish mystic did sometimes adopt a most
irritating policy of deliberately altering customs as though for the
very pleasure of change. Now in most religious controversies discipline
counts for more than belief. As Salimbene asserts of his own day:
'It was far less dangerous to debate in the schools whether God real y
existed, than to wear publicly and pertinaciously a frock and cowl of
any but the orthodox cut.' But the Talmudists' antagonism to mysticism
was not exclusively of this kind in the eighteenth century. Mysticism
is often mere delusion. In the last resort man has no other guide than
his reason. It is his own reason that convinces him of the limitations
of his reason. But those limitations are not to be overpassed by a
visionary self-introspection, unless this, too, is subjected to rational
criticism. Mysticism does its true part when it applies this criticism
also to the current forms, conventions, and institutions. Conventions,
forms, and institutions, after al , represent the corporate wisdom,
the accumulated experiences of men throughout the ages. Mysticism is the
experience of one. Each does right to test the corporate experience by
his own experience. But he must not elevate himself into a law even for
himself. That, in a sentence, would summarise the attitude of Judaism
towards mysticism. It is medicine, not a food.