T H E J E W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 103, No. 1 (Winter 2013) 101–106

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Traces of Lurianic Kabbalah:Texts and their Histories

M O R R I S M . FA I E R S T E I N

JOSEPH AVIVI. Kabalat ha-AR’’I, 3 volumes. Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute,2008. Pp. 1563.

ISAAC LURIA (1534–72), the most influential figure of the sixteenth-century kabbalistic revival centered in Safed, was at the same time thebest known and least understood figure of this important turning point inJewish religious history. The religious practices that emanated fromSafed transformed how Judaism was practiced. New rituals created inSafed and esoteric concepts buried in the Zohar became the centerpiecesof Jewish religious life. Kabbalat Shabbat, hakafot on Simhat Torah, ushpizinin the sukkah, and numerous other practices that are universal todaywere either created in Safed or found in the Zohar and popularized bythe Safed kabbalists.

At the same time, the mystical theology that animated and explainedthe mystical significance of these new customs and practices, which cameto be known as Lurianic Kabbalah, was the preserve of a select group ofelite mystics who went to great lengths to keep these teachings secret andfrom being disseminated. Thus, we find ourselves in a paradoxical posi-tion. On the one hand we know a great deal about the life and activitiesof Isaac Luria. His personal religious practices and those of his circleformed the basis for the new practices that were so widely disseminated.At the same time, we know very little about the mystical theology thatLuria taught his disciples and was the mystical underpinning of thesepractices.

The ban on the public teaching of Lurianic Kabbalah and the copyingand publication of Luria’s mystical teachings made the accurate transmis-sion of these teachings close to impossible. An illustrative example of thisproblem is the literary legacy of Hayyim Vital, Luria’s most important

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The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2013)Copyright � 2013 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.All rights reserved.

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disciple. Vital was a graphomane who took copious notes on Luria’s lec-tures and later organized them into longer treatises. During his lifetimehe kept these writings in a locked chest and would on rare occasionsallow important scholars to read some of his manuscripts for a briefperiod of time. The scholars who were granted this privilege would try tomemorize as much as they could and immediately rush home to copy asmuch as they could remember. Once, when Vital was very ill and fell intoa coma, Joshua Bin Nun, the richest Jew in Safed, gave Vital’s brothera hefty bribe for access to Vital’s trove of manuscripts. Bin Nun hired asmany scribes as he could find and over the three days that Vital was inthe coma managed to have six hundred pages copied. Other pieces ofLuria’s teachings made their way into circulation through other means. Ittook more than two hundred years before systematic treatises of Luria’steachings were published and made widely available. In contrast, signifi-cant portions of the writings of Moses Cordovero, the most importantSafed kabbalist before Luria, were published by the end of the sixteenthcentury.

This aura of secrecy gave rise to the myth that Isaac Luria wrote verylittle and what we have of his teachings was refracted through the biasesof his disciples, making it virtually impossible to know with any degreeof certainty what Luria actually thought and taught. The stealthy andfragmentary nature of the early transmission of Lurianic teachings alsocontributed to the corruption of texts and misinterpretations. There werealso teachings attributed to Luria by close disciples that seemed to contra-dict each other. The differing interpretations of Luria’s teachings by Vitaland Joseph ibn Tabul are the best-known example of these differences.

Joseph Avivi has devoted many years of scholarship to answering thebasic and seemingly elusive question What did Isaac Luria teach? Thatis, what was Luria’s theory of Kabbalah as he himself wrote and taughtit? His attempt to answer this question spans three volumes and morethan fifteen hundred pages. It is pursued through three lines of inquiry:First where are Luria’s teachings, as he taught them and wrote aboutthem, to be found? Second, what is the process of divine emanation thatLuria taught? and finally, what is the meaning and significance of thisteaching according to Luria? The process of divine emanation is the cen-terpiece of Luria’s mystical teachings and its explication and analysis isthe core subject of the majority of writings subsumed under the rubric ofLurianic Kabbalah.

Avivi devotes the first two volumes of his work to a thorough, system-atic analysis and description of the Lurianic literary corpus, the writingsof Luria himself and the voluminous writings of his disciples and later

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authors who edited and copied the treatises containing the teachings ofLurianic Kabbalah. The starting point is the earliest known writings ofLuria himself, and the end point is 1780, about the time when majortreatises of Luria’s disciples began to be published. The first major Luria-nic treatise to be published was Hayyim Vital’s Ets h. ayim, in 1782.

Avivi’s analysis begins with the writings of Luria himself. His interestin this part is not primarily with the ideas found in the particular workbut the ‘‘history of the book’’ aspects of these writings. He follows a simi-lar pattern in treating each document, first creating a brief description ofthe text and its contents. Then he adds any information that may be ofinterest in dating the document or offers information that will contextual-ize the writing or history of the text.

For example, in his fragmentary comments on a section of the Idra Zutasection of the Zohar, Luria cites an opinion of Moses Cordovero on thispassage. What is noteworthy is that Luria mentions Cordovero with theencomium indicating that he was still alive. This means that he wrote itbefore the summer of 1570, when Cordovero died. It is also instructivethat Luria mentions Cordovero because he disagrees with his understand-ing of the particular point. It tells us something about Luria and his self-confidence that he had no problem disagreeing with the most importantkabbalist of the generation. Avivi also adds information about where thetext is found in manuscripts and where it is cited in the writings of Luria’sdisciples. Gershom Scholem published an article in which he endeavoredto list all the authentic writings of Isaac Luria. Avivi has added to thequantity of texts known to be by Luria and to the depth of our knowledgeabout them.

Subsequent chapters are devoted to Luria’s disciples, each one in turn.First and most important is Hayyim Vital, the premier interpreter andtransmitter of Luria’s teachings. Vital’s most influential work, Ets h. ayim,receives an extended treatment. The literary history of this work is atextbook example of the problems encountered in dealing with Lurianicliterature. Vital rewrote parts of this book several times, and after hisdeath, his son, Samuel Vital, reedited it and renamed it Shemone shearim.There were several more efforts by other editors to reorganize this bookbefore it was finally published in 1782. Avivi gives a full and informativeanalysis of the varied history of this work and its various editions, supple-mented by a full bibliographical listing of the many manuscripts that havesurvived, starting with Vital’s own autograph manuscript and concludingwith a list of the printed editions of the various rescensions.

Throughout, Avivi presents many examples of new research that shedlight on previously unresolved issues. Though I had thoroughly explored

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the existing literature on Vital’s mystical diary, Sefer hezyonot, and pub-lished both a critical Hebrew edition and an English translation, I learnednew things from Avivi’s treatment of this work. It is well known that thename Sefer hezyonot is first mentioned in H. D. Y. Azulai’s book Shem ha-gedolim (1774). However, it has always been a mystery why he gave thisname to this work. The original manuscript, in Vital’s own handwriting,does not have a title. In the course of his research, Avivi solved this mys-tery, along with a second one. The full text of the Sefer hezyonot was notpublished until 1954, edited by the late A. Z. Aescoli. However, a partialversion of this work was published in the early nineteenth century, underthe title In Praise of Rabbi Hayyim Vital. In the course of his manuscriptresearch, Avivi found a manuscript written by Vital’s grandson, MosheVital, which solved both mysteries. The younger Vital created an abbrevi-ated version of the Sefer hezyonot, which was in his father’s possession. Henamed it Sefer hezyonot. This was the manuscript that Azulai saw anddiscussed in his book, and it was also the basis of the work that waspublished in the nineteenth century.

Another important insight that Avivi gained from his intensive study isthat the original manuscript of the Sefer hezyonot is not one treatise, as wasassumed by the different editors of the text, including myself. Rather,there are two separate treatises written sequentially, one after the otherwithout any indication that it is a new treatise. The Sefer hezyonot consistsof four chapters, each one with its own title. In the first three chapters,each paragraph is numbered. In the fourth chapter, the first two para-graphs are numbered but the remainder of the chapter is not. Each of themodern editions adds the ‘‘missing’’ paragraph numbers. Avivi concludes,on the basis of his research in the whole corpus of Vital manuscripts, thatthe last chapter is in fact a separate treatise that Vital appended to hismystical diary but was not meant to be a continuation of the three previ-ous chapters.

After completing his discussion of Vital and his writings, Avivi contin-ues with a similar analysis of each of Luria’s other disciples and theirwritings, in order of their importance. The most important disciple afterVital was Joseph ibn Tabul. Vital saw him as a rival in many ways andwent out of his way to denigrate and insult him in his Sefer hezyonot. Amajor problem of Lurianic scholarship is that the Lurianic teachings pre-sented by ibn Tabul differ in significant aspects from Vital’s interpreta-tions of the same themes. Avivi presents evidence for the idea that Luriahad four distinct groups of disciples, each of which was taught, at a differ-ent time, different interpretations of the theory of Divine emanation, thecenterpiece of Lurianic Kabbalah. The groups were seen as being on dif-

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ferent spiritual levels, and Luria tailored his teachings to the level of theparticular group. Avivi argues that this would explain the different andsometimes contradictory presentations of Luria’s teachings by his variousdisciples.

The relationship of Israel Saruq to Lurianic Kabbalah is controversial.Saruq purported to be a disciple of Isaac Luria teaching what he saidwere kabbalistic doctrines he learned from Luria. Some scholars havequestioned Saruq’s claims to have been Luria’s disciple, while otherscholars have accepted them. An obvious problem is that Saruq’s namedoes not appear in any of the lists of Luria’s disciples found in the writ-ings of Hayyim Vital and others. Another concern is that Saruq’s termi-nology differs from ‘‘standard’’ Lurianic usage. There are also otherdifferences between the teachings of Saruq and those of Luria’s accepteddisciples. After an examination of Saruq’s writings, Avivi concludes thatSaruq did have access to authentic Lurianic writings. However, he taughtthem and disseminated them with many changes and additions of hisown. Therefore, Avivi excludes Saruq’s writings from his discussions ofLuria’s legacy. As for the more basic question of whether Saruq had per-sonal contact with Luria, there is insufficient information to reach a firmconclusion either way and Avivi remains agnostic on this question.

Despite the remaining questions about the actual relationship betweenSaruq and Luria, Saruq is a central figure in the dissemination of Luria-nic Kabbalah, or at least his version of Lurianic Kabbalah. He was peri-patetic and his journeys took him as far from Israel as Frankfurt andCracow. He also spent extended periods of time in Italy. Saruq createddisciples and left behind copies of his writings wherever he went. Thus,his influence on the subsequent history of Kabbalah was immense, partic-ularly in Europe. Avivi documents his many travels, places he lived forextended periods of time, and the disciples he left behind.

The year 1620 marked the death of Hayyim Vital, the last direct disci-ple of Isaac Luria. From then until the first publication of Ets h. ayim in1782, the history of Lurianic literature was one of editing and disseminat-ing manuscripts. The aura of esotericism surrounding Luria’s mysticalteachings was preserved. Avivi documents this process and organizes itby period and geographical location.

The second part of the second volume is composed of several usefulappendices. A list of names of people mentioned in the work includesthumbnail sketches of each figure. This is particularly helpful with regardto the more obscure figures whose information is not readily available.The list is not alphabetical but follows the order in which the figuresappear in the book. A numbering system makes it easier to cross refer-

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ence individuals and the discussions about their writing or editing. Thereare approximately forty high-quality photographic reproductions illus-trating manuscripts covering the range of figures from Isaac Luria toH. Y. D. Azulai, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Lastly, there areseveral samples of critically edited texts to illustrate Avivi’s approach tothe editing of these texts.

The third volume is devoted to answering the basic question that wasposed at the beginning of the work. What was Luria’s theory of Kabba-lah, his understanding of the concept of divine emanation and the theo-logical questions relating to it? The volume ends with several indices ofpeople, manuscripts, printed books, and scholarly sources cited in hisanalysis.

Avivi has produced a veritable encyclopedia of Lurianic history andteachings from the time of Isaac Luria (the mid-sixteenth century) untilthe first publication of Hayyim Vital’s major work in the late eighteenth.His primary focus is on the history of Lurianic literature, and in thecourse of his research he collected and recorded extensive informationabout Luria and his disciples that is of value for anyone interested inLurianic Kabbalah. To give one example: he devotes three pages to an in-depth discussion of which liturgy, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Luria person-ally favored. Though this may seem unimportant, it is crucial in under-standing Luria’s mystical prayer intentions (kavanot).

In conclusion, Avivi’s work is the most comprehensive overview of theLurianic literary corpus and is an indispensable resource for anyone whowants to navigate the esoteric and often mysterious realm that is LurianicKabbalah.

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