a vast distance from the Torah’s innerness?
That Innerness is hidden from us, and our path to find it, the preacher insists, must bring us through the Torah’s surface meaning with all that is contained in it. There is no shortcut to a grasp of the Torah’s innerness. Building upon the biblical and rabbinic use of water as a metaphor for Torah, the master went on to read the verses concerning the division of waters as an allusion to those two dimensions of Torah.
In one respect, he subscribed to a consciousness anchored to the recognition of a higher and inner meaning of all that is written in the basic Jewish sacred text, while in another respect he remained fully loyal and insistent upon the importance of the tradition as a whole which developed around the written Torah-text. He viewed that necessary relationship with the Torah’s simple meaning, however, not as an end in itself, but rather as a means and as the keys with which to attain a sense of the Torah’s Innerness.
In this sense, he was, at one and the same time, both radical and conservative. He advised his fellows to study and direct their lives according to that surface-dimension of the Torah and its traditional rabbinic understanding, while also maintaining that through doing so, they might be able to reach that deeper, more sublime, and even mystic grasp of the Torah identified with its guarded innerness.
The dual-emphasis in this passage is sounded in any number of homilies in which the preacher continued to wrestle with a potential paradox in his understanding of the central Jewish sacred text.
A Longing Permeating All Existence22
When the thought of creating the worlds arose in God’s highest and most essential will, God contracted His Divinity from its heights and the worlds evolved and the blessed Light of Infinity glistened through all the worlds from the most sublime to this very lowest, physical world. The Light of Divinity could then be experienced in the higher realms of existence, while in the lower realms it appears hidden, even though there is no created object in the world in which the Light of the Infinite (ʾOr ʾein-sof ) does not glisten. This is noted in ʾOr ha-Ḥayyim, which explained the verse, “The heavens and the earth were finished and all their array” (Gen 2:1), reading the word, vaykhulu (literally, “were finished”) as conveying longing, as in the expression, kalta nafshi (“I long, I yearn . . . my soul longs,” Ps 84:3). This same interpretation is found also in the teachings of the Ar’i (Rabbi Isaac Luria) who understood plants’ growing upward from the ground as indicative of the ascent of the worlds (to their sublime Source).
The Midrash mentions that each blade of grass here below has an angel from above who strikes it and commands it to grow.23 [The midrashic source actually refers to a mazal, a star or constellation, striking the blade of grass, while the preacher refers instead to an angel, avoiding the astrological overtones of crediting a mazal.] This comment can be understood only with the realization that the blessed Holy One created all the worlds with the twenty-two letters of the Torah together with the Torah’s vowel-points and cantillation signs, through the combinations of names in a way that the Ineffable Name joins with every single letter. And if that is so, there is nothing in the world that does not have a part in some letter or vowel-point of the Torah (which in itself, on a more sublime level, is a manifestation of the Divine). And as every letter or vowel-point is a part of the Ineffable Name, all the plants and trees naturally seek to ascend to their Root.
The writings of the Ar’i refer to such combinations of letters as “an act of striking,” specifically striking one letter with another and joining one letter together with another. And it is in this light that we can grasp that each blade of grass has an angel from above who strikes it and tells it to grow, meaning that the angel illuminates the combination belonging to that specific blade of grass. Every single blade of grass has its own combination of letters by means of which it has a portion in the blessed Ineffable Name.
And how do they awaken to ascend to their Root? They awaken by means of the tzaddik (holy man) who studies Torah purely for its own sake to unite the blessed Holy One with the Sh’khinah (acting to unify the world of the s’firot which underlies and permeates all existence) and who attaches himself to the letters of the Torah and to the combinations of names and connects with the ʾEin sof (the infinite state of the Divine). In this way, such a person provides divine energy (ḥiyyut) and awakening to all created things, whether they be inert or plants or (zoological) living beings or humans (literally, having the gift of speech and language) to the end that they all long to ascend to their divine Root. For in the combinations and permutations of their names, all these have some part of the letters of the Torah.
And by means of the tzaddik’s awakening the lower world, he attaches himself to the holy patriarchs and draws down lovingkindness upon the community of Israel (Knesset Yisraʾel). [The image of “feminine waters” conveys an awakening initiated by action of the lower world which effects what is above.] In this light, Rashi explained the verse, “When no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted . . . and there was no man to till the soil” (Gen 2:5), in that these grew when a human emerged and prayed for the vegetation of the field. Everything depends upon the prayer of the tzaddik, and in particular upon his acts of unification (yiḥuddim) . . . .
From this we come to the explanation of the verse, “And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation . . .’” (Gen 1:11), meaning that the tzaddik will unite the lower worlds with the higher worlds. And via the tzaddik’s awakening, he is able to awaken the feminine waters (the lower worlds) and unify the worlds through bringing all created things to long to ascend to their Root . . . .
Comment: Like the earlier Hayyim ben-Attar, author of ʾOr ha-ḥayyim, also Kalonymus Kalman Epstein sensed in all of nature, including even inert nature, a longing for the divine Root of all existence. Everything created has within it a longing to ascend to its higher, divine Root and, furthermore, that longing which is, in turn, awakened by the longing of the tzaddik (holy man), serves to unite all the realms of being. This homily expresses a remarkable poetic intuition and opens for the reader an essential aspect of how the master and preacher, a city-dweller who nevertheless lived with a sense of cosmic longing, experienced the natural world.
He explained the source of such cosmic longing in the sense that everything that exists, even every blade of grass, shares in the Torah—which he grasped as much more than a conglomeration of words. And he went on to connect his sublime sense of the nature of being to what was for him the highest human ideal. A tzaddik, means literally, a “righteous person,” though the word came to suggest more essentially a holy man, and the same term, tzaddik, came to signify, more particularly, the holy man who served as the leader and center of a Hasidic community and who embodied its spiritual ethos. Here, the role of the tzaddik is defined as one of awakening such longing not only in one’s human associates but in all the cosmos. One might overhear in this conception an echo and reflection of sensitivities associated with European romanticism.
A glimpse into the homilist’s own consciousness is revealed in his interpreting the glistening which he experienced in the plant-world as a sign of connection with Divinity, a connection explained in that the letters of the Torah are stamped on each particular plant or blade of grass. Not only is each such specimen in the world of vegetation a living sign of the Divine, but he viewed each such specimen as a unique living sign of the Divine. The master’s sense of the uniqueness of each person, emphasized in various ways in this collection of homilies, is grounded in this broader vision of being which recognizes the uniqueness even of every single botanical specimen.
While the Kraków sage more often presented his interpretations within the framework of basic concepts of Lurianic Kabbalah, this homily might signify that his particular spiritual temperament is closer to that of Moses Cordovoro (the Rama”k) in granting greater importance to immanence and the experiential, a legacy of still earlier “ecstatic kabbalah.”
