Published in: Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 33 (2006), eds. Margarete Schlüter and Annelies Kuyt, pp. 81-110.
Prophecy and Maggidism
In the Life and Writings of R. Joseph Karo
By
Mor Altshuler[(]
Among the principal sources from which Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488 – 1575), the celebrated author of the last codification of Jewish law, Shulhan Arukh, and a most prominent lawmaker known as Maran (our master), drew inspiration was a hidden entity, whose voice spoke from Karo’s mouth and throat. The voice identified itself as that of an emissary from the heavenly academy: “the Holy One Blessed Be He and all the members of the heavenly academy[1] have sent me to instruct you in the secret truth of the matter.”[2] The emissary’s mission was to reveal to Karo the mysteries of the Torah and of Creation; the hidden secrets of the future in this world and the world to come; and the secrets of the transmigration of souls, which are the mysteries of repair and redemption.[3] Revelations of the future pertained even to political and military developments, which were understood at the time as alluding to revelation of the End: “During the minhah [afternoon] prayer, while the leader was still reading from the Torah, he [the voice] said to me: ‘Know, dear and beloved Joseph that the Turkish king will triumph over Edom.’”[4] The date of the revelation “Sabbath day, 25 Adar II” could have fallen in the year 5293 (March 22, 1533) or 5296 (March 18, 1536), both of which were leap years on the Hebrew calendar that included a second month of Adar. Yet the former seems more likely: it occurred at the height of the war between “the Turkish king,” Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520 – 1566) and the kingdom of “Edom” – the Christian Hapsburg Empire led by Emperor Charles V and his brother Ferdinand, king of Spain. After Suleiman was repelled at the gates of Vienna, the Empire’s capital, in 1529, he decided to attack by land. In 1532, he led an army in the direction of Vienna but was stopped at the city gates of Guns (south of Vienna); in November 1532, he returned to Constantinople. In 1533, he decided to open another front in the east, against Persia, and therefore brought most of his army back to Constantinople, but the threat of land war did not abate until June 1533, when the Ottomans signed a ceasefire agreement with Ferdinand. The date and content of the revelation thus correspond to the belief, prevalent until the summer of 1533, that the Ottomans were about to defeat the kingdom of Edom.[5]
The Androgynous Angel as an Ideal Being
The motif of hearing prophecy from an angel, a divine messenger, goes back to the Bible, especially in connection with Zechariah, the latest of the prophets, and Daniel. With the end of prophecy, revelation came to be conveyed through other manifestations of the holy spirit, although the term “prophecy” appears in Geonic and medieval literature in order to denote contemporary visions.[6] The angel who spoke from Karo’s throat, however, was anonymous. At times, it assumed a masculine identity, called speech (dibbur),[7] or the voice (qol),[8] analogous to the terms used for Moses’ prophecy,[9] thus elevating the revelations to this unique degree. Occasionally, the voice was called the Maggid (sayer, speaker).[10] This term, which denotes a human messenger (Jer. 51:31), appears in Rashi’s commentary on Pesahim as the recipient of heavenly revelations.[11] Maggid is used in connection with a heavenly messenger in Sefer ha-Tamar, a medieval treatise on alchemy and astrology translated from the Arabic.[12] Despite the obscure wording of Sefer ha-Tamar, one can see that the term Maggid is tied to astrology, to foretelling the future through the influence of the stars, and it refers to the angel who connects the star to the one who gazes at the stars; alternatively, it is the astral sign of the person for whom the astrological map is cast.[13] Beginning in the sixteenth century, the term Maggid as a heavenly messenger begins to appear in the writings of kabbalists such as Abraham ha-Levi; according to Moshe Idel, the influence of Sefer ha-Meshiv is evident there.[14] It is also possible that Joseph Karo was influenced by the Maggid of R. Joseph Taitazak, but whether Taitazak had a Maggid and what connection it may have had to the revelations described in Sefer ha-Meshiv are questions that still do not have unambiguous answers.[15] Either way, it is quite clear that the title of Sefer ha-Meshiv that is literally “Book of the Responder” influenced the original title of Karo’s mystical diary, Sefer ha-Maggid, which is literally “Book of the Speaker.”
At other times, the voice of the heavenly messenger would appear as a feminine entity, identified as the Mishnah,[16] the Shekhinah[17] or the mother and lady (Matronita).[18] Again, it is clear that Joseph Karo adopted previous patterns of revelation, for the personification of the Torah, which appears to the student in the personalized form of a woman, can be found in Marganita de-Bei Rav: “Happy is one who hears words of Torah every day… I have come to teach you; I therefore set out to greet you, to receive you, and I have found you. Happy are you if you recall me; happy are you if you take me into your heart; happy are you if fulfill me; happy are you if you heed me. You should direct your attention to me daily, for through me will your days be many.”[19] Similar wording is heard from Karo’s Mishnah: “Behold, I set out to greet you, to receive you, and I have found you.”[20] Moreover, the voice refers to the Torah as marganita tovah (a goodly pearl)[21] and mentions the treatise Marganita de-Bei Rav as well.[22] However, in at least one revelation, the angel is simultaneously feminine – the Mishnah, and masculine – Jacob’s redeeming angel: “I, I am the Mishnah speaking through your mouth. I dried the sea and pierced Rahab.[23] I am the rebuking mother. I am the angel who redeems through the mystery of Jacob.”[24]
Androgynous angels are mentioned in philosophical and kabbalistic literature: According to Saadia Gaon, the archangel that was revealed to the prophets was defined with both the masculine attribute kavod and the feminine attribute Shekhinah: “It is a form nobler even than the angels, magnificent in character, resplendent with light, which is called kavod. It is this form… that the Sages characterized as Shekhina.”[25] In the interpretation of Moshe ben Nahman, Nahmanides, (1194-1270) a prominent commentator on the Torah and a leading Sephardic kabbalist, the patriarch Jacob’s “redeeming angel” is “also the Shekhinah, which accompanies Jacob as an angel. For we [The Israelites] do not have a guardian angel, but God himself guides us.”[26] In the Zohar as well, the Shekhinah is referred to as the “redeeming angel.”[27] Along with the literary aspects, we should note a parallel in Joseph Karo’s personal life: his second wife, whom he believed to possess within her a masculine soul, which had been that of the biblical Bezalel (architect of the Israelite’s desert tabernacle) in its first incarnation and that of the tanna Rabbi Tarfon in its second incarnation.[28] Hence the androgynous angel blends into his mystical diary’s cosmological image, comprising three layers reflected in one another, each of them containing an androgynous entity. At the lowest level is Karo’s terrestrial wife, possessed of an androgynous soul; at the middle level is the Maggid-Shekhinah, the link between the terrestrial and supernal worlds; and at the uppermost level are the divine realms, also comprising masculine and feminine Sefirot.[29] Opposing it is the world of the sitra ahra (the other side) – the forces of evil, also divided into male and female demons.[30] This cosmological picture does not differ in principle from the cosmology of medieval Kabbalah, which places the infinite (ein-sof) and the Sefirot at the pinnacle of existence, above the middle world, which ties the Sefirot to the physical world. It comprises the halls of paradise and the heavenly Temple, home to angels, holy beasts and the souls of the righteous, together with heavenly entities that have terrestrial realizations, such as the Sabbath, the Torah, and Jerusalem. Joseph Karo’s inspiration thus revives kabbalistic cosmology and turns it into a stage on which the drama of his life is played out, as the reviver of the myth is its hero.[31]
Male and Female – Halakhah and Kabbalah
The androgynous nature of the heavenly messenger is not entirely arbitrary; one may occasionally note a correspondence between the content of the revelation and the messenger’s gender identity. When the angel deals with halakhic matters, he identifies himself as male.[32] When the revelations draw their inspiration from the Zohar, however, the angel tends to assume feminine garb. In the Zohar itself, the relationship between Simeon bar Yohai and the Shekhinah is portrayed in erotic terms; and the Shekhinah likewise promises Joseph Karo, in the words of the Song of Songs, “that I will grant my love to you.”[33] The erotic aspect, however, is overcome by the maternal theme, sometimes as “the mother who rebukes a person”;[34] sometimes as the mother who comforts and assuages: “I kiss you neshiqin de-rahimu, I hug you, I place your head in the shelter of my wing.”[35] The expression neshiqin de-rahimu (kisses of love) creates a double entendre: kisses of pity (rahamim) or motherly love in Hebrew but erotic kisses in Aramaic, since the Aramaic verb rahim means “love.” The double meaning illuminates the perpetual move between motherly love and erotic love between male and female.[36]
In at least one instance, however, the angel takes on male identity and describes the Shekhinah – that is, his female identity – in the third person:
All your sins and faults will be purged by fire so that you will rise from here like pure wool. All the righteous ones in the Garden of Eden, the Shekhina at their head, will come out to meet you, welcoming you with many songs and praises. They will lead you like a groom who walks in front and they will accompany you to your canopy.[37]
The passage speaks of Joseph Karo’s death and the ascent of his soul to the Garden of Eden for a celestial wedding ritual in which he is the groom and the Shekhinah is the bride; it follows that the angel is describing his own wedding in his feminine form. But such divisions had no effect on Joseph Karo’s erotic attitude, demonstrated both from the masculine side of the Holy One, Blessed be He and the feminine side of the Shekhinah: “By this merit, the Holy One, Blessed be He will love you. And when you arise to pray and recite when He is delighting in the righteous ones in the Garden of Eden, that is, at midnight, He will delight in you and extend to you a touch of kindness, and He will kiss you with neshiqin de-rahimu and hug you, and the Shekhinah will be speaking with you.”[38]
The reflective character of the revelations influenced the account of the world of prophecy as a circle ending where it begins, as a cyclical movement from the prophet, to which the Sefirot are joined, forming a circle that unites the upper and lower realms.[39] The circle, known also as olam ha-shem (the world of God or the world of God’s name) encompasses the concept of a hook, which resembles a heavenly serpent or dragon “whose head is good and whose tail is evil”; it is the intermediate world “between the world of unity and the world of separation.” This androgynous world, whose protagonist is Metatron-Shekhinah, guides the world of separation; on its account, Elisha ben Abuyah erred and concluded there were two cosmic powers.[40] Thus, the redeeming angel-Shekhinah is identified with Metatron,[41] and that identification transforms the trinity of Mishnah-Shekhinah-Metatron into the basic model for Joseph Karo’s theory of prophecy. That model, comprising a sacred text and a celestial being with two aspects, conveys the equal weight assigned to the two components of the scriptural religions’ underlying structural model – prophetic revelation and sacred texts.[42] It follows that the tension between, on the one hand, the aspiration to unmediated revelation and, on the other, the sanctity of the text was resolved in Joseph Karo’s case through a harmonizing approach that renewed prophecy by reviving the text rather than casting it aside. It seems fair to assume that the Mishnah’s participation in the prophecy welling up within Karo resolved for him the conflict between halakhic continuity and prophetic innovation, just as the prophecy’s manifestation as voice rather than as vision solved the problem of anthropomorphism that has always beset Jewish thinkers.
The reflective quality of the revelations is expressed as well in the circular relationship between the grantor and the recipient; that is, between the angel and Karo’s soul: “I, it is I who speak with you; your soul (neshamah) – not life (nefesh), not spirit (ruah), but the soul (neshamah) itself.”[43] Neshamah is an anagram of Mishnah
((משנה = נשמה and that nexus shows that the content of the revelations reflects the intellectual world of the recipient, or – as the Maggid puts it – it is “a lyre playing of itself.”[44] Accordingly, when the Maggid errs in citing a verse, Karo himself is the source of the error, and it is he who must resolve the difficulties thereby raised: “Even if I occasionally offer an interpretation of an inaccurately transcribed verse, I am nevertheless speaking in accord with your will…what a person is shown is in accord with what he wills…as it is written, ‘by the prophets have I been envisaged’…not from Him do I ‘multiply visions’ but from what arises in the prophets’ imaginative faculties.”[45] It is important to stress that the Maggid directs Karo to resolve the difficulty exegetically rather than resting content with noting an erroneous citation. That directive casts an ironic light on R. Jacob Emden’s comment in the name of his father that “the rabbi [author of] Beit Yosef was more learned than his Maggid.”[46]