The Zohar Is Not Heavenly

Dear Editor,

I must say I was surprised to see such credulity in Laurance Wieder's review of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. First Things has a reputation for intellectual rigor, yet Wieder seems to buy hook, line, and sinker into the silly claim that the Zohar's doctrine dates back to rabbis of the 2nd century. The Talmudic sages would have denounced Kabbalah's doctrine of the sephirot as heresy for infringing upon their unitarianism. There is no doubt in my mind that, upon discovering that the Zohar interprets the first person plural of Genesis 1 similar to the way Christians interpret it (1:22a-1:22b), Shimon bar Yohai would have pronounced its authors to be minim.

The Talmudic sages would also have balked at the way Kabbalah makes the infinite deity impersonal and unknowable, and reduces the personal God of the Old Testament and the Aggadah to an aggregate being of the bottom seven sephirot. As Dr. Arthur Green notes in his introduction to this very work,"Kabbalah represents a radical departure from any previously known form of Judaism... The God of the kabbalists is not primarily the powerful, passionate Leader and Lover of His people found in the Hebrew Bible... [but] a God of multiple mythic potencies, obscure entities eluding precise definition" (p. xlv). Further on, "Out of the womb of Binah flow the seven lower sephirot, constituting seven aspects of the divine persona. Together these comprise the God who is the subject of worship. 'God,' in other words, is the first being to emerge out of the divine womb, the primal entity to take shape as the endless energies of Ein Sof begin to coalesce" (p. xlviii). Shimon bar Yohai would have none of this.

But what is more serious, while Wieder faults the Soncino Zohar for omitting certain passages which the translators deemed unintelligible, he neglects to mention that the Pritzker Zohar does us the much greater disservice of omitting entire folios which Daniel Matt has apparently deemed embarrassing. The reader might note with surprise that, on p. 170, we skip straight from 1:22a to 1:29a. What does the Zohar say on these pages which we are not privileged to hear? On folio 25b we are informed that, inter alia, "Redemption will not be complete until Amalek will be exterminated." Context leads me to believe that Amalek refers to Gentiles who do not convert to Judaism, and Green supports this identification on pp. lix-lx.

But at least, to Matt's credit, he does not omit folio 47a (p. 252), on which we are informed that Jewish souls derive from God, but Gentile souls derive from the demonic realm, and are mere "foreskin." Israeli liberals such as Shahak and Mezvinsky point out that this aspect of kabbalistic doctrine is routinely suppressed by its popularizers, e.g., Gershom Scholem. Jews who rightly find this teaching abhorrent ought to take a long, hard look at Heinrich Graetz's suggestion that Kabbalah be abandoned (for that matter, they would do well to consider what Graetz said about the Talmud as well).

In all, Wieder's glowing review rings hollow for one who knows a bit about what the Zohar contains. While Matt's work is certainly a service to scholarship, and I suppose a service to heaven, in so far as God wills that every false, esoteric doctrine be subjected to the light, the work he has translated is anything but heavenly.

Ben Douglass
State College, PA