#isaac luria

[todaysjewishholiday]

Hi! I'm halachically a Jew but never got a proper Jewish Education. When it next rolls around I would love to hear more about Tu Bishvat!

I love the idea of this blog btw, I hope it grows into something splendid!

Todah! (Thanks!)

Today is Tu B'Shvat (at least it's still tu bishvat in the Americas and the Pacific this side of the international date line, sorry to those of you in other places for not getting this posted earlier)

Tu is simply the Hebrew numerical indicator for the 15th day of a month. You may have encountered it in Tu b'Av, the fifteenth of Av, another minor festival. Other holidays known simply by their hebrew date are the fast days of Tisha (9th) b'Av and Asara (10th) b'Tevet.

So what is Tu b'Shvat? It's New Year's Day. For trees!

But we had New Year back in Tishrei? Well, yes. The talmud lists 4 Jewish New Years, three of which coincide with the new moon (Rosh Chodesh) and then this special one on the full moon.

The main religious New Year, Rosh haShana, actually wasn't the new year at all until we were exiles in Babylon and adopted their month names and their autumnal new year's cycle. It was still a holiday before then, the day of sounding the shofar, to remind the community to prepare for Yom Kippur. But in the Torah, Tishrei is not the first month, it's the seventh month.

That's thanks to New Year 2, Rosh Chodesh Nisan, the month haShem delivered us from the narrow places of slavery in Egypt. In the Talmud, the sages call this one the New Year of Kings/Sovereigns and claim that before the exile the years of the reigns of kings of Judah and Israel were counted from Nisan. Also, as noted above, in the Torah when it says "the first month" that's Nisan and then the count goes on from there to Adar being the twelfth month, which is why it's still Adar that gets doubled in leap years and not Elul.

Speaking of Elul, there's New Year 3, the New Year for Livestock/Herdbeasts. This is basically a fiscal New Year for shepherds and other livestock farmers, so animals born since the Rosh Chodesh Elul were counted for tithes to the Levites in the days of the Beit haMikdash. In the absence of the temple it's no longer very relevant but it's still officially on the books.

And then there's today, Tu b'Shvat, the New Year for Trees. Which started out as a fiscal year for orchards and tree fruit parallel to Rosh Chodesh Elul being Rosh HaShana l'Behemot, with all fruit that grew after Tu b'Shvat being eligible for tithes on the harvest. It was conveniently in the dormant months between the harvest finishing and the trees putting out new buds, and some people say it's the day when the sap first moves in the trees to prepare them for spring. So why is it still celebrated today instead of being a footnote like the Sheep and Goat New Year?

It's the kabbalists, in particular the Arizal himself, Yitzchak Luria, who gave this holiday an unexpected revival, drawing a connection between the literal fruit trees in orchards that the new year originally marked a new start for, and the mystical kabbalistic etz chayyim (tree of life) that the kabbalists used to symbolize their ideas about the interplay of divine forces (sephirot) and realms of existence through which they sought spiritual enlightenment.

The Arizal and his students instituted an allegorical Seder for this mostly ignored minor holiday in which different kinds of fruit and different mixtures of white and red wine represent a journey up the branches of the tree of life to the realms of pure possibility, in order to attempt to draw themselves and with them the entire world into alignment with the divine.

The focus on fruits and harvest in the middle of winter, suspended between the abundance of harvest at Sukkot and the fresh greens of the Pesach table makes Tu Bishvat a sort of mirror to Sukkot, where we celebrate not a harvest already gathered, but the assurance that there will in fact be future harvests to look forward to. It accepts the need for times of dormancy and acknowledges the chaotic nature of our world while holding onto hope for a transformed future with justice and abundance for all. In its kabbalistic form, Tu b'Shvat is likely the holiday most focused on yearning for olam haba (the world to come) not as an afterlife but as a total transformation of society, a fulfillment of the promise of tikkun olam (the repair of the cosmos).

In the past century, as ecological concerns have risen to the forefront for many of us, Tu b'Shvat has also taken additional shape as a Jewish Earth Day/ Arbor Day, with tree plantings and other projects focused on ecological restoration giving a newly practical form to the kabbalistic fervor for a repaired world.

Happy tu b'shvat! Enjoy your fruits and thank the trees for all their efforts.

[rosario-aurelius]

Draconian Liturgies: A review of Thomas Karlsson’s Qabalah, Qlippoth, and Goetic Magic and Asenath Mason’s The Draconian Ritual Book

The Draconian Path has become known for its heavy-handed techniques, rooted in the Left-hand path tradition, imagery drawn from serpentine and Draconian mythologies around the world, and strong influence from the Typhonian tradition. When I first approached this path ten years ago, The Draconian Ritual Book was the first book I read on this subject. The focus of this review is to compare Asenath…

Draconian Liturgies: A review of Thomas Karlsson’s Qabalah, Qlippoth, and Goetic Magic and Asenath Mason’s The Draconian Ritual Book

[ouroboros8ontology]

It means briefly that the existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God. Luria begins by putting a question which gives the appearance of being naturalistic and, if you like, somewhat crude. How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all,’ how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing? This is the question. The solution became, in spite of the crude form which he gave it, of the highest importance in the history of later Kabbalistic thought. According to Luria, God was compelled to make room for the world by, as it were, abandoning a region within [Themself], a kind of mystical primordial space from which [They] withdrew in order to return to it in the act of creation and revelation. The first act of En-Sof, the Infinite Being, is therefore not a step outside but a step inside, a movement of recoil, of falling back upon oneself, of withdrawing into oneself. Instead of emanation we have the opposite, contraction. The God who revealed [Themself] in firm contours was superseded by one who descended deeper into the recesses of [Their] own Being, who concentrated [Themself] into [Themself], and had done so from the very beginning of creation.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and his School

[apenitentialprayer]

The method of basing meditation on a verse, known as gerushin, was used by the mystics of Safed in the sixteenth century. Although the method was used extensively, the texts provide few details. It appears that a number of ways were possible. [...] Besides bringing the meditator into a higher sense of consciousness, the purpose of this technique was to provide him with deeper insight into the verse itself. As he repeated the verse, it would eventually appear as if the verse itself were telling the initiate its meaning. Rather than studying or analyzing the verse, the meditator would then be communing with it.

Aryeh Kaplan (Jewish Meditation, pages 20, 56)

[blessedrestlessness]

[magica-pseudoacademica]

[In] 'ibbur, or impregnation ... one's own soul is joined by an additional soul, good or evil. In the mystical brother hood led by R. Isaac Luria ... positive 'ibburim (pl.) were regarded as a key component of spiritual growth, catalyzing the development of the host by awakening or boosting the powers of the soul stratum corresponding to the saintly impregnation. The positive 'ibbur, unlike its negative analogue, was taken as introducing a quiet guest whose presence could be noticed only by the clairvoyant; it coexisted peacefully with the soul of its host. A maggid, or speaking angel, on the other hand, was a revelatory agent lodged in its host's organs of speech - not quiet, but also able to coexist peacefully with its host. The host might then receive dictation from the maggid and engage in a sort of magical/automatic writing ... Possession phenomena were held sacred, because of the supposition that some form of divinity had descended into humans ...

J. H. Chajes, “He Said She Said: Hearing the Voices of Pneumatic Early Modern Jewish Women” in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (2005)

[silentambassadors]

תהא נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים, Isaac Luria.  Considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah, his school of thought, the Lurianic Kabbalah, gave a new interpretation of the nature of the Zohar, developed during the time, from roughly age 22 until his death on this date in 1572 in his mid-30s, that he lived the life of a recluse in a hut on the banks of the Nile.

Stamp details: Issued on: June 6, 1972 From: Tel Aviv, Israel MC #561

[ouroboros8ontology]

The first act, the act of Tsimtsum, in which God determines, and therefore limits, [Themself], is an act of Din [Gevurah] which reveals the roots of this quality in all that exists; these “roots of divine judgement” subsist in chaotic mixture with the residue of divine light which remained after the original retreat or withdrawal within the primary space of God’s creation. Then a second ray of light out of the essence of En-Sof brings order into chaos and sets the cosmic process in motion, by separating the hidden elements and moulding them into a new form. Throughout this process the two tendencies of perpetual ebb and flow—the Kabbalists speak of hithpashtuth, egression, and histalkuth, regression—continue to act and react upon each other. Just as the human organism exists through the double process of inhaling and exhaling and the one cannot be conceived without the other, so also the whole of Creation constitutes a gigantic process of divine inhalation and exhalation.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and his School