"Sefer Yesirah" and Its Contexts. Tzahi Weiss
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book is to demonstrate that the evolution of Sefer Yeṣirah and its reception have something in common: they point us to an alternative picture of the history of Jewish thought in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. I claim that Sefer Yeṣirah is a rare surviving Jewish treatise written and edited around the seventh century by Jews who were familiar with Syriac Christianity and were far from the main circles of rabbinic learning.9 Sefer Yeṣirah does not show strong awareness of the articulations, insights, or even the existence of the rabbinic world. Sefer Yeṣirah, to put it slightly differently, conveys much information about its intellectual world in terms of language, physiology, astrology, and cosmology. We have no reason to assume that the text tries to conceal its context; it is more reasonable to assume that our information about its world is limited. Sefer Yeṣirah is a unique, fascinating, and information-packed trace of another and unknown Jewish environment.10 Similarly, in the second part of the book, when we follow the mystical, magical, or mythical ways in which Sefer Yeṣirah was understood before the end of the twelfth century, a trace of another Jewish milieu beyond the scope of the medieval canon of familiar rabbinic figures comes into view. An investigative integration of the above hypotheses can help us outline the “margins of Jewish mysticism,” a Jewish mystical thought that was not included in the classical canon of Jewish thought, for various historical reasons, but that was very important for the development of a Jewish horizon of thought.
My conclusions, as with any scholarly work, are based on the work of other scholars, and references to their works are to be found throughout the book. I want to mention the works of four authors who particularly helped me reach my conclusions. Shlomo Pines’s paper on the similarities between the first chapter of Sefer Yeṣirah and the Pseudo-Clementine homilies brings important evidence to bear in support of the possibility of a Christian-Syriac context for Sefer Yeṣirah.11 Guy Stroumsa, in his article about a possible Zoroastrian origin to the perception of the sefirot in Sefer Yeṣirah, referred to the importance of the sixth-century treatise The Mysteries of the Greek Letters, which, as I will demonstrate, can be of much help in contextualizing Sefer Yeṣirah.12 Haggai Ben-Shammai’s article on the reception of Sefer Yeṣirah claims convincingly that Saadya’s aims in interpreting Sefer Yeṣirah were apologetic and probably a reaction to other Sefer Yeṣirah commentaries concerned with myth, mysticism, and magic.13 And in two articles, Klaus Herrmann discusses fragments of commentaries to Sefer Yeṣirah preserved in the Cairo Geniza, written between the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, in the spirit of Hekhalot literature. These fragments clearly demonstrate that there were other Jewish approaches to Sefer Yeṣirah before the end of the twelfth century, of which we know very little today.14 My work begins where these important studies leave off.
Sefer Yeṣirah: A Short Introduction
Sefer Yeṣirah opens with the following depiction of the creation of the world, from what it calls “thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom”:
[With] thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, YH, the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, the Living God, God Almighty, high and exalted, dwelling forever, and holy is his name (Isa. 57:15), created his universe with three books (sefarim): with a book (s.p/f.r) and a book (s.p/f.r) and a book (s.p/f.r).
Ten sefirot belimah and twenty-two foundation letters.
Ten sefirot belimah, the number of ten fingers, five opposite five, and the covenant of unity is exactly in the middle, by the word of tongue and mouth and the circumcision of the flesh.
Ten sefirot belimah, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven. Understand with wisdom, and be wise with understanding. Test them and investigate them. Know and ponder and form. Get the thing clearly worked out and restore the Creator to his place. And their measure is ten, for they have no limit.
Ten sefirot belimah, restrain your heart from thinking and restrain your mouth from speaking, and if your heart races, return to where you began, and remember that thus it is written: And the living creatures ran to and fro (Ezek. 1:14) and concerning this matter the covenant was made.15
Accordingly, the number thirty-two, constituting the paths of wisdom, comprises the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—the foundation letters—and the “ten sefirot belimah.” The meaning of belimah is unclear,16 and I think that the most reasonable meaning of the word sefirot is, as Yehuda Liebes suggests, “counting” (ספירה); therefore, the phrase refers to the decimal counting system.17 In the paragraphs that we have just quoted, the ten sefirot are joined to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet to constitute a new numerical formula of thirty-two, which it calls the “thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom.”18
Scrutinizing these passages, which discuss the role of the ten sefirot, it seems at first glance that Sefer Yeṣirah demands precision. The numbers are not to be read differently: “Ten sefirot belimah, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven.” It would seem that the numbers, in their precision, specify some kind of scientific or magical quality. Because of the numbers’ ontological and epistemological qualities, a reader of Sefer Yeṣirah is obliged to understand their role in the creation of the world and in the created world: “Understand with wisdom, and be wise with understanding. Test them and investigate them. Know and ponder and form. Get the thing clearly worked out.”
Along with its enthusiastic pathos about the obligation to investigate the world with numbers and letters, Sefer Yeṣirah warns readers about the very thing it counsels—thinking!: “Ten sefirot belimah, restrain your heart from thinking and restrain your mouth from speaking, and if your heart races, return to where you began.”
Regarding this gap between the obligation to investigate and the restriction on inquiry, Liebes has noted that it should be understood not only as a contradiction but also as an essential part of the dialectical path charted by Sefer Yeṣirah. According to Liebes, Sefer Yeṣirah is not merely a cosmogonic treatise; it would be more accurate to read it as a treatise about heavenly creativity and the human creativity inspired by the creation of the world. He says that Sefer Yeṣirah is actually a treatise of ars poetica that argues creativity’s need of both terms: one should understand the world and articulate one’s insights, while also making room for astonishment, for prediscursive and unarticulated phenomena—without investigating them.19
Poetic and surprising ideas, like the dual obligation/restriction of investigating the world, occur throughout Sefer Yeṣirah. Another example from the same chapter concerning the sefirot describes two unexpected dimensions alongside the familiar three spatial dimensions of the world: the moral dimension and the dimension of time: “Ten sefirot belimah, and their measure is ten, for they have no limit: dimension of beginning and dimension of end, dimension of good and dimension of evil, dimension of above and dimension of below, dimension of east and dimension of west, dimension of north and dimension of south. And the unique lord, a trustworthy divine king, rules over them all from his holy abode forever and ever.”20
Thus the treatise asserts that, as with the ten sefirot, there are ten, not six, directions in the world. In addition to the familiar six directions—north, south, west, east, above, and below—there are four other directions: the moral dimension, which comprises the directions of good and evil; and a dimension formed by the directions of the beginning and the end. Such an approach demonstrates why so many people were inspired by Sefer Yeṣirah.
The Letters
Following the first chapter, which is dedicated to discussions about the role of the ten sefirot, Sefer Yeṣirah discusses the role of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the creation of the world and in the created world. It divides the letters into three groups: the first group, comprising the letters alef, mem, and shin, is named immot, ummot, or ammot, a designation with no clear meaning in Hebrew. The second group, called the “double letters,” contains the six letters that can be pronounced doubly: bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe, and