Sex of the soul : the vicissitudes of sexual difference in Kabbalah

212 Pages·05.574 MB·English, Hebrew

by  Charles Mopsik, Daniel Abrams, Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla

Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism
edited by Daniel Abrams
Sex of the Soul
The Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah
Charles Mopsik
Edited with a foreword by
Daniel Abrams
Cherub Press
Los Angeles 2005
by Charles Mopsik
© Copyright 2005 by Cherub Press
Le sexe des ames. Aleas de la difference sexuelle dans la cabale
© Editions de l'eclat, Paris-Tel Aviv 2003, All rights reserved
David et Bethsabee. Le secret du mariage
© Editions de l'eclat, Paris 1994, All rights reserved
‘Union and Unity in Kabbalah’, translated by Sunthar Visuvalingam, appeared
in Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and
Hinduism, edited by Hananya Goodman, The State University of New York
Press, © 1994. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without the written permission of Cherub Press, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Ouvrage publie avec le concours du
Ministere Frangais Charge de la Culture ־ Centre National du Livre
This book may be purchased directly from the publisher:
www.cherub-press.com
ISBN 0-9747505-9-x
Contents
Foreword by Daniel Abrams i
1. The Primeval Couple and the Primordial One in the Religions of the
World 1
2. The Masculine Woman 5
Transmigration of Souls and the Construction of Masculine and Feminine in
Kabbalah on the Basis of a Text by R. Hayyim Vital
Brief Overview of Biblical and Rabbinic Antecedents
The Mystical-Esoteric Antecedents: Masculine and Feminine Traits
Androgyny, Bisexuality and the Sexual Union of Man and Woman
Discrepancies between Anatomical Gender and the Gender of the Soul in
Lurianic Kabbalah
Concluding Comments
3. Creation and Procreation: Beyond the Bounds of the Body - From
the Hebrew Bible to Medieval Jewish Mysticism 53
The Sefirot
The Mutable and the Immutable
4. Genesis 1: 26-27: The Image of God, Man and Wife, and the Status
of Women in the writings of the Early Kabbalists 75
Study of an Exoteric Text by R. Abraham ben David
An Ambivalent Vision of Woman
A New Version of the Ideas of the Rabad in the Catalan School
Another Perspective: R. Todros Abulafia and the School of Castile
5. Genesis 2:24: They Become One Flesh9: Several Interpretations by
Medieval Jewish Mystics 115
6. Union and Unity in the Kabbalah: The Proclamation of the Divine
Unity and the Male/Female Couple 128
Ancient Sources
Copulation as Mystical Experience
7. The Secret of the Marriage of David and Batsheva 150
Introduction
The Title and Organization of the Book
R. Joseph Gikatilla’s Text and the Zohar
Structure and Dynamics of the Divine World
The Secret of the Couple
David and Batsheva
The Hebrew Text and the System of Annotation
Bibliography of the Works by R. Joseph Gikatilla
The Secret of the Marriage of David and Batsheva: Text and Annotated
Translation
Bibiliography of the Works of Charles Mopsik 195
Index 201
Foreword
Sex of the Soul contains an English translation of two French volumes by
Charles Mopsik: Le sexe des ames: Aleas de la difference sexuelle dans la
cabale and David et Bethsabee: Le secret du manage. The latter volume
Charles and I discussed numerous times as a joint translation project. Le Sexe
des ames is a collection of studies published posthumously. During my last visit
to Paris, he recommended its publication with Cherub Press and made a
number of suggestions.
Charles’ contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism and the Zohar is
immense. He was best known to the English reading audience for a short piece
entitled ‘The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic
Tradition and the Kabbalah’, published in Zone: Fragments for the History of
the Body, New York, 1989, vol. 3, pp. 48-73. This article was cited often in studies
on gender and rabbinic Judaism. I decided to commission a new translation of
the ftdler French original which appears here in its entirety for the first time.
Another English article which did not appear in the two French volumes, but
which is included here is: ‘Union and Unity in Kabbalah’, published in the
volume: Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and
Hinduism, ed. H. Goodman, Albany, SUNY Press, 1994, pp. 223-242, 334-335.
This article is reprinted with permission of SUNY Press, and various changes
have been made to the text and sources cited in the notes.
In naming his book, Le Sexe des ames, Charles apparently was not referring
to the French expression, ‘Le sexe des anges’ (the sex of angels), but rather to
the saying from Enlightenment philosophy that the soul does not have a sex,
(Tame n’a pas de sexe’). A central argument throughout these studies is that the
soul has a gender and assumes a sex, which may be transformed as it
transmigrates into material bodies.
I have refrained from updating the notes or adding bibliographic references
to additional studies that add to the themes discussed in the studies contained
in this volume. My intent is to present Charles’ work at the various stages of his
scholarly career. Nevertheless, a number of studies have emerged in recent
years which respond to these articles and continue to grapple with these
themes. They are: my review of Le Secret du mariage de David et Bethsabee,
which was published in Kabbalah 1 (1996), pp. 278-282; Michal Oron, ‘Place a
Seal upon My Heart: Study of the Poetics of the the Author of the Zohar in
Sabba de-Mishpatim’, Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish
Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb, ed. M. Oron and A.
Goldreich, Jerusalem, 1996, pp. 1-24; Asi Farber-Ginat, R. Joseph Gikatilla’s
Commentary to Ezekiels Chariot, Los Angeles, 1998 (in Hebrew); Pinchas
Giller, Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah, Oxford, 2001;
Devorah Gamlieli, ‘The Feminine Aspect in Lurianic Kabbalah’, Ph.D.
Dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003 (in Hebrew); Moshe
Idel, ‘The Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Secret of ‘Arayyot in Early
Kabbalah’, Kabbalah 12 (2004), pp. 89-199; Daniel Abrams, The Female Body
of God in Jewish Mystical Literature: Embodied Forms of Love and Sexuality
in the Divine Feminine, Jerusalem, 2004 (in Hebrew); Elliot R. Wolfson,
Pathwings: Philosophic and Poetic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time
and Language, New York 2004; Idem, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic
Hermeneutics And Poetic Imagination, New York 2005.
In editing these two volumes I have benefited from the kind and expert
assistance of Aline Mopsik, Michele Valensi, director of Editions de Yeclat and
Esther Singer who faithfully translated the French text, with the exception of
the citations from primary sources. These passages I have translated into
English from the Hebrew and Aramaic, bearing in mind the spirit of Charles’
scholarly project and his gift for capturing the double meaning of Hebrew and
Aramaic terms in his French translations. Additionally, I have located every
primary source of significance which is cited in these volumes and added the
original Hebrew or Aramaic to the footnotes. A complete bibliography of
Charles’ works, based on the bibliography complied by Michel Valensi, is
included at the end of this volume. It is my hope that this first English volume
of Charles’ opus will reach a wide audience of readers and will find its place in
the canon of studies which serve the field of the study of Jewish mysticism.
Daniel Abrams
1. The Primeval Couple and the Primordial One
in the Religions of the World
The leitmotif of the primeval couple is found in many religions throughout the
world but it often supersedes a supreme deity who has been relegated to the
sidelines. However, this couple is simply the projection or the result of a
separation that occurred within this supreme deity who is seen to be
androgynous. Divine bisexuality is hence one of the most pervasive traits in the
world. Even the quintessential male and female deities are commonly
considered to be androgynous.1 This general scenario of belief in the existence
of a primordial and androgynous supreme being replaced by a first couple,
whether composed of two brothers, a brother and a sister, the Heaven and the
Earth, the Sun and the Moon, etc., is itself the paradigm for a primeval
mankind whose first representative or representatives were also endowed with
both genders. The primeval divine couple acts as the genitor of the cosmos and
fulfills the demiurgic function originally held by the now overly remote bisexual
supreme being. For instance, the ancient religions of the Near East assigned a
key role to a god and goddess couple: liturgies celebrated their sacred marriage,
and myths recounted their loves and the cosmic and social implications of their
unions. In Assyria and in Mesopotamia, the Sumerian and Akkadian divine
couples - Dumuzi-Inana in Sumer, and Marduk-Sarpanit in Akkad, to mention
only the most well known - preoccupied and obsessed religious thought of the
peoples of Antiquity, just as Pharaonic Egypt was haunted by the memory of the
figures of Isis and Osiris and the mysterious couples of primordial theogonies.2
1 Mircea Eliade provides a lengthy series of examples that can be found in his
Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed, London, 1958, pp. 410-436. In
Jewish monotheism, the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) which in Kabbalah is considered
to be the female facet of the divinity, was also perceived as androgynous by numerous
medieval kabbalists such as R. Joseph of Hamadan.
2 See for example the excerpts from pyramid texts published in Cahiers Evangile
n.38, supplement, La creation du monde et de Vhomme d’apres les textes du Proche־
Orient Ancien, Le Cerf, Paris, 1981, pp. 44-45. The myth describing the first god, named
Atum, who gave birth by masturbation to the first couple, the twins Shu and [his female
counterpart] Tefnut, from whom a whole series of other couples of divine opposites are
derived, is quasi-paradigmatic.
In the Far East, India still reveres the couples who form their supreme gods,
like Brahma and his Shakti (Sarasvati or Brahmi). One of the oldest myths to
come down to us involves the deified couple the Sky (male) and the Earth
(female) whose union gives rise to all living beings. A Sumerian liturgical poem
describes their union in unequivocal terms:
Smooth, big Earth made herself resplendent, beautified her body joyously. Wide
Earth bedecked her body with precious metal and lapis lazuli, adorned herself
with diorite, chalcedony, and shiny camelian. Heaven arrayed himself in a wig
of verdure, stood up in princeship. Holy Earth, the virgin, beautified herself for
Holy Heaven. Heaven, the lofty god, planted his knees on Wide Earth, poured
the semen of the heroes Tree and Reed into her womb. Sweet Earth, the fecund
cow, was impregnated with the rich semen of Heaven. Joyfully did Earth tend to
the giving birth of the plants of life.3
When a couple does not occupy the first rank, a supreme androgynous god,
simultaneously male and female or father and mother, like the Zeus in the
Orphic myths, is responsible for creation. Thus, from the religion of the
Australian aborigines to the Zurvanism of ancient Persia to Greek mythology,
regardless of the particularities of these gods, the belief in the existence of a
divine primeval couple, whether gendered or not that often replaces a first
androgynous god, is anchored in the innermost reaches of the religious thought
of humankind, at all times and places.
At first glance the biblical religion of the Hebrews, the heirs in more ways
than one of these civilizations and whose roots reach back to the prehistory of
humanity, might appear to have supplanted all references to this mythic
representation by the belief in one God. This supreme deity incorporated the
totality of the traits parceled out elsewhere between the male and female deities, or
rather was divested of almost all feminine traits to finally correspond to the figure
of a single Father. The emergence of Hebrew monotheism is often presented as the
victory of a patriarchal societal system over a preexisting matriarchal system
where the figure of the mother-goddesses was central. It is impossible to review all
the heated debates among historians of religion as to the historical and mental
processes which prompted such a reduction of the divine world to a single
primarily male creator. However, the Hebrew Bible also considers that humankind
derives from a first couple, but Adam and Eve are quickly stripped of everything
that could have made them akin to divine beings and are rapidly evicted from the
3 See Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia, 1989, pp. 303-304.
garden of Eden and condemned to mortality and labor.
This fall of the primeval couple, which constitutes their transition to
ordinary existence is a kind of stark intrusion of the reality principle that breaks
the spell of the mythical world by transforming the stakes of human adventure
into a history for which people are directly responsible. The decoding of the
dramas of the first human families (the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, the
flood, the scattering of peoples and languages) become the edifying material of
a history motivated by the desire to overcome this original failing. Time, despite
its inevitable repetitions acknowledged - as is the case everywhere - by rites of
renewal, ceases to be a pure and simple reoccurrence of sameness, and the fall
of the first couple emerges as the irreversible point of departure of a humanity
bearing the weight of its own destiny. Generally the history of first couples -
divine or human - is not a happy one. Some type of accident tends to occur that
disrupts the orderly sequence of their loves and their unions, as though the
emergence of duality was branded by the seal of misfortune, and the necessary
downfall of the primeval principle of unity, its schism into two distinct entities,
invariably leads to a cascade of tragedies.
Nevertheless, this patently obvious and seemingly indisputable fact of the
eradication of all female figures of divine rank from Hebrew monotheism
clashes with another contradictory historical fact; namely, the emergence in the
Middle Ages of a religious system of thought within Judaism called Kabbalah or
‘tradition’ that developed within the framework of classical monotheism, and
which gives the female form of the divine - and the concept of a divine couple
made up of a masculine and a feminine face - an exceedingly large role, as I will
attempt to show in the chapters that follow.4 In Christianity, the emergence of
the figure of the Virgin Mary, and even at certain periods, the appearance of a
feminization of the figure of Christ called ‘Jesus our mother’s and even his
androgynization in early movements (certain Gnostic schools at the end of
Antiquity)6 or in medieval times (John Duns Scotus?) have to a great extent
4 See also Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘Erasing the Erasure/Gender and the Writing of God’s
Body in Kabbalistic Symbolism’, Circle in the Square - Studies in the Use of Gender in
Kabbalistic Symbolism, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995, pp. 49-78. See also the texts
presented in my book, Cabale et cabalistes, Bayard, Paris, 1997, pp. 130-131, 133-135,
161.
5 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother Studies in the Spirituality of the High
Middle Ages, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.
6 See infra, Genesis 1: 26-27, notes 19, 22
7 See Francis Bertin, ‘Corps spirituel et androgynie chez Jean Scot Erig&ne’, in
LAndrogyne, Cahiers de VHermetisme, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1986, pp. 63-128.