Kabbalistic musar

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Kabbalistic musar is Jewish ethical literature written in a kabbalistic key: treatises of moral instruction that ground their demands not in proverb or philosophical argument but in the doctrine of the sefirot, so that the question of how to act becomes inseparable from the question of how the divine is structured.

The upper-Galilean hill town of Safed, where the kabbalistic ethical treatises were composed in the sixteenth century. — G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Musar — Hebrew for instruction, discipline, moral correction — names a genre much older than the kabbalistic turn. The biblical Book of Proverbs opens by naming itself a book le-da’at hokhmah u-musar, “to know wisdom and instruction”; the rabbis built on it a whole literature of conduct, and the medieval period gave the genre its philosophical maturity. The enduring landmark of that earlier idiom is Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, written in Judeo-Arabic around 1080 in Muslim Spain as Al-Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub and rendered into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon between 1161 and 1180 as Hovot ha-Levavot. Bahya divided the commandments into duties of the limbs — the outward acts the law prescribes — and duties of the heart, the inner dispositions of trust, gratitude, humility, and love that no statute can command but on which the whole religious life depends. He argued the case for those inner duties in the vocabulary available to him: Arabic Neoplatonism and the ascetic introspection of Islamic piety. The book became, and remains, the foundation of Jewish ethical reflection. What it did not have, and could not have, was a map of the inner life onto the inner life of God.

That map is what the sefirot supplied, and the kabbalistic variety of musar appeared the moment ethics was rebuilt on it. The doctrine of the ten sefirot holds that the hidden God, Ein Sof, unfolds into ten emanations through which divinity becomes both knowable and active — lovingkindness and severity, wisdom and understanding, beauty and foundation, each a facet of the one undivided light. If the human being is built on the pattern of those attributes, then conduct ceases to be mere obedience and becomes imitatio Dei in the strong sense: each quality of God has its human echo, and a person’s mercy or restraint answers, measure for measure, the mercy or restraint above. To be merciful is not to resemble a distant model but to actualize, in the small theater of a human life, the very attribute that the cosmos is built from. Ethics becomes a kind of theology performed in the body.

The ten sefirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the structure of divine emanation on which kabbalistic ethics maps human conduct. — AnonMoos, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

To this conviction the kabbalists added a second and stranger one. Deeds do not merely conform to the upper world or fall short of it; they reach into it. A sin damages the harmony of the upper worlds, slackening the channels along which the divine vitality flows; a commandment performed with proper intention helps to repair that harmony and to draw the flow downward again. This is the theurgic premise of all theosophical Kabbalah brought to bear on the ordinary moral life — the same logic by which kavvanah, directed intention in prayer, was held to act upon the sefirot, now extended to every merciful or cruel act a person commits. In this understanding the moral life is not preparation for the world above; it is maintenance of it. A person acting well is sustaining a structure, and a person acting badly is straining one. The genre states this without embarrassment, and it is the single feature that separates kabbalistic musar from every ethics that came before it.

The Safed treatises

The genre’s classic ground is sixteenth-century Safed, the upper-Galilean hill town where, in the decades after the expulsion from Spain, an extraordinarily dense circle of exiles and their students made the mountain into the most concentrated center of Jewish mysticism in history. The setting and its theology belong to pre-Lurianic Safed Kabbalah; what concerns the ethical genre is one strand of its enormous output.

The Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue in Safed, a surviving sixteenth-century house of study and prayer from the era of the city’s kabbalistic circle. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

Moses Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah (“The Palm Tree of Deborah”) is the genre’s most concentrated statement — a short treatise, printed at Venice in 1588/89, that gave the whole literature its template. Its title borrows the verse in Judges where the prophetess and judge Deborah sits beneath her palm to render judgment for Israel; the human soul, seated under the canopy of the divine attributes, is to do likewise. Cordovero opens not with the sefirot in the abstract but with the thirteen attributes of mercy, and he chooses pointedly the form of those attributes given in Micah 7:18-20 — the list that is all forgiveness and no judgment — rather than the more balanced enumeration in Exodus. From that opening he proceeds through the sefirot one by one, teaching for each the specific human conduct that imitates it: how a person enacts Keter, the crown of unbroken mercy; how a person enacts Hokhmah, the wisdom that sustains all creatures; on down the array. The work is the most rigorous systematic theologian Kabbalah ever produced (Cordovero of the Pardes Rimmonim) turning his system, in his most accessible book, entirely toward conduct.

Cordovero’s disciple Elijah de Vidas produced the genre’s encyclopedia. Reshit Hokhmah (“The Beginning of Wisdom,” completed in Safed in the 1570s — its manuscript dated to 1575 in the standard reckoning and printed at Venice before the century was out) is a vast compendium organized as a sequence of “gates”: the gate of fear, the gate of love, the gate of repentance, the gate of holiness, the gate of humility, and more. Each gate gathers rabbinic, ethical, and above all Zoharic material into a sustained exhortation, so densely woven with long citations of the Zohar that to read Reshit Hokhmah is, in effect, to read the Zohar’s ethical teaching anthologized and made usable. It was reprinted dozens of times and became the most widely read kabbalistic-ethical book of the early modern period — a fact out of all proportion to the obscurity of the speculative works from which it drew.

From the same circle came Eleazar Azikri’s Sefer Haredim (“The Book of the Devout”), printed posthumously at Venice around 1600. Azikri took the project in a more halakhic direction, enumerating the six hundred thirteen commandments but arranging them by the limbs of the body that perform them and by the times at which they fall due, so that the whole law is mapped onto the acting person — the commandments of the eye, of the heart, of the hand, the commandments of the day and of the season. The same volume preserves the first printing of his hymn Yedid Nefesh (“Beloved of the Soul”), still sung at the Sabbath table, which shows how seamlessly the genre’s devotional warmth passed from the treatise into the liturgy.

In the seventeenth century the manner crossed from the Galilee into Ashkenazic Europe in the work of Isaiah Horowitz (c. 1565-1630), a rabbi born in Prague who studied the Safed literature, emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1621, and served as rabbi of the Ashkenazic community in Jerusalem. His Shenei Luhot ha-Berit (“The Two Tablets of the Covenant”) — known universally by its acronym as the Shelah, the name that also became Horowitz’s own byname — was printed posthumously at Amsterdam in 1648-49. An immense work braiding halakhah, homily, ethics, and Kabbalah, quoting de Vidas and Cordovero and the Lurianic material at length, it carried the kabbalistic-ethical manner into the Ashkenazic home and held it there. For generations the Shelah was standard devotional reading: a book a household actually owned and lived by, the conduit through which the sefirotic vocabulary entered the ordinary piety of central and eastern European Jewry.

Scholarship and the question of transmission

These are short books, or anthologies, with no great theoretical ambition of their own; and yet scholarship has assigned them an importance far out of proportion to that modesty. The reason is a thesis about transmission, advanced above all by Gershom Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and developed by the historians who followed him. The great speculative monuments of Kabbalah — Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim, the Lurianic system, the Zohar itself in its difficult Aramaic — were read by very few. What households read, what was printed and reprinted and worn at the binding, was Reshit Hokhmah and the Shelah. Kabbalistic musar was therefore the chief channel by which Kabbalah entered ordinary Jewish life: the medium through which a vast population that would never open a theosophical treatise nonetheless absorbed the sefirot as the grammar of everyday piety, learning to feel that an act of mercy reached upward and a cruelty did damage there.

The same channel carries forward into Hasidism. The immanentist conviction at the heart of Cordovero’s thought — that the divine vitality fills and sustains all reality — passed, as Bracha Sack has shown in detail, through the Shelah into the early Hasidic doctrine of divine omnipresence, and the ethical literature was the form in which the eighteenth- century movement first met its kabbalistic inheritance. When Hasidism made the sanctification of the ordinary deed its central teaching, it was building on a foundation that the musar treatises had already laid in the household. The genre also stands beside, and partly independent of, the dominant theosophical schools: a reader could prefer the Cordoverian or the Lurianic Kabbalah account of the upper worlds and still read the same ethical books, which is part of why the genre outlasted the displacement of Cordovero’s system by Luria’s.

A caution belongs to any account of the genre. The word musar attached itself in the nineteenth century to a quite different movement — the Lithuanian Musar movement founded by Israel Salanter, which shared the name and the preoccupation with character but not the kabbalistic frame. Salanter’s discipline was psychological and introspective, a regimen of self-examination and the correction of traits, deliberately stripped of theosophical machinery; it belongs to the same family of concern but to a different intellectual world, and the two should not be run together. Kabbalistic musar is defined precisely by what Salanter’s movement set aside: the conviction that the structure of the divine is the structure of the good, and that a human act is felt above.

The texts and where they survive

The primary corpus is comprehensively public domain by age, the authors having died in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the early Hebrew printings survive in good digital surrogates. Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah, the small book that founded the genre, was first printed at Venice in 1588/89; its Hebrew text, with later translations, is freely consultable in the digital library at Sefaria. De Vidas’s Reshit Hokhmah, the genre’s encyclopedia, exists in numerous early printings, of which scanned copies are openly available — one such early Hebrew printing of Reshit Hokhmah is held in the digitized record. Azikri’s Sefer Haredim (Venice, c. 1600) and Horowitz’s Shenei Luhot ha-Berit (Amsterdam, 1648-49) likewise survive in their early editions.

The scholarly apparatus is recent and almost entirely in copyright. Scholem’s Major Trends (1941) set the interpretive frame, treating the ethical literature as the popular face of Kabbalah; Joseph Dan’s surveys of Hebrew ethical literature gave the genre its first systematic literary history; Lawrence Fine’s Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (2003) reconstructed the Safed milieu in which the treatises were written and the devotional practices they assumed. Bracha Sack’s work on Cordovero’s afterlife established the line of descent from Tomer Devorah through the Shelah into Hasidic immanentism, and Eugene Matanky’s studies have traced the reception of Cordoverian Kabbalah specifically through Reshit Hokhmah. The one persistent gap in the record is translation: there is no public-domain English rendering of Tomer Devorah — the first scholarly translation, by Louis Jacobs, dates only to 1960 — so the English reader meets the founding text of the genre either through copyrighted modern versions or through the Hebrew itself.

What these books carry, across the gulf between the Galilean hillside and the European household, is a single demand made without apology: that a true account of how the divine is structured already contains the instructions for how to live. The treatise on the sefirot and the treatise on conduct are, in this literature, the same treatise. A person learning from Tomer Devorah how to forgive as Keter forgives, or from Reshit Hokhmah how to fear and love, is not being told to copy a remote pattern but to take up a station in the working of the world — to become, in the measure of mercy shown to a neighbor, one of the channels by which the upper harmony is kept.

→ In the library: The Zohar (Nurho de Manhar, 1914) — partial English

→ Related: Moses Cordovero · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Kavvanah Mystical Prayer · Pre Lurianic Safed Kabbalah · Kabbalah · Jewish Mysticism · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Lurianic Kabbalah · Hasidism · Gershom Scholem · Theurgy