Class 2: The Nature of God in Mystical Conceptions of the Sabbath

From late-twelfth-century southern France to the present, kabbalah developed as a mode of spiritual thought and practice. One of the most important and foundational kabbalistic texts, the Zohar, seems to have been composed in the late thirteenth century, in Castile, Spain. 

In this class, we will read passages from the Zohar and from Baḥya ben Asher’s Commentary on Genesis 2:3. Baḥya, like Moses de León and Joseph of Hamadan, is now thought to have been one of the small group of kabbalists who made up a mystical fellowship circle and were likely involved in the writing of the Zohar.

God and the Sefirot

Zoharic kabbalah developed a distinctive, seemingly paradoxical theology. The one God was believed to be composed of ten apparently distinct dimensions known as sefirot (sing. sefirah). These were described as emanations coursing from the great well of Infinity (En-Sof), ten luminous “rivers” of divine energy. The sefirot were understood to be both the pulsing life-force of divinity, aspects of the One God, and the channels of ever-flowing, ever-dynamic divine energies. 

The ten sefirot are the following, in descending order: keter, ḥokhmah, binah, da‘at, ḥesed, gevurah/din, tif’eret, netsaḥ, hod, yesod, and malkhut/shekhinah.

These ten sefirot were described in various ways. 

The sefirot were said to contain, for example, an unfolding divine mind, made up of the upper sefirot, keter, ḥokhmah, and binah. 

The sefirot included elements of eros, male-female sexuality, and androgyny, since kabbalistic theology depicts a God who is made up of both masculine and feminine mythic forces—ḥokhmah and binah are the Upper Father and Upper Mother respectively. 

The sefirot encompass the romance and eros between the lower sefirot tiferet and malkhut. They contain mercy or love (ḥesed), judgment or severity (gevurah/din), balanced compassion (tif’eret), and much more.

The theology of the ten sefirot provided an experiential contemplative map for the mystic practitioner in their journey upward and inward in quest of spiritual enlightenment. 

The sefirot are a mystical construction of Jewish theology—that is, they represent an imaginative and mythically rich rendition of the divine Being. They also are an expression of the yearning for contemplative intimacy that lies at the heart of the mystical life. 

Thinking about God is a way for the kabbalist to encounter the mysteries of divinity. At the same time, the kabbalist seeks to uncover the divine meanings hidden in the everyday, in the human self, the natural world, and the Torah and its symbols and rituals—and in the Sabbath.

The Sabbath as Kabbalistic Focal Point

The Sabbath is a pillar of Jewish observance. The liturgy and prayers around it explicitly recall the creation of the world. For kabbalists, the Sabbath functioned as a frame through which they could articulate their theological mythology. They used this frame to explore the inner structure of God, a constantly flowing and emanating force of ultimate Oneness.

For kabbalists, the Sabbath has two aspects. In the earthly realm, it is an event of sacred time. It is also an inner dimension of the divine, one of the sefirot. The Sabbath is generally identified with the lowest sefirah, malkhut (royalty), also known as shekhinah (divine presence). It receives the flow of emanation from the six “days” that precede it (i.e., the middle six sefirot of the divine structure).

This conception of the nature of God through the symbolism of the Sabbath is reflected in various ways. In these texts, the emanational flow of the sefirot is depicted as an unfolding of a metaphorical stream of energy.

The Stream of Divine Energy

In the Zohar, a recurrent and prominent image is a river of divine energy flowing forth from Eden, alluding to a key verse, Genesis 2:10: “A river goes forth from Eden to water the garden.” This biblical line was used by the zoharic kabbalists to refer to the constantly emanating divine life-force, and, as scholar Melila Hellner-Eshed has shown (see her study, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar [Stanford University Press, 2009]), to awaken a state of contemplative attunement in the consciousness of the mystic.

The Shekhinah and the Sabbath

This imagery of flowing water culminates in the irrigation of the field/garden that is the lowest sefirah, the shekhinah. A stream of love symbolizes the erotic yearning of the male sefirah tif’eret for His beloved, the female shekhinah. And it is precisely on the Sabbath eve, on Friday night, that this mythic irrigation of the shekhinah as garden takes place. It represents the divine flow of energy in its state of ultimate perfection.

In a classic passage from Zohar 2:135b, the beginning of the holy Sabbath time, Friday eve at dusk, is understood to be the time when the shekhinah descends into the earthly realm to adorn the Jewish people with crowns of heavenly light and additional souls from above. 

The shekhinah is the lowest sefirah, a feminine dimension, and considered to be the Sabbath in the upper world—the Sabbath within the Divine Self. As the Zohar text articulates with great lyricism, the earthly Sabbath is the unique time when the part of God called shekhinah is freed from the darkness of the demonic side of the cosmos and liberated to dwell in harmony and with sparkling radiance upon the heads of the Jewish people.

In the text from Baḥya’s commentary, the flow of divine emanation is called “the well-spring of blessing” (note again the water-based symbolism and imagery). Simultaneously, it is described as the pathway of the soul, as the soul wanders from the “world of souls.” The world of souls is binah, the womb of being that bestows energy upon human souls, which are all originally born of the divine. 

Baḥya ben Asher evocatively remarks: “During the week, the soul may be likened to a wanderer without a home; but on the Sabbath, it is like a wanderer who has found one.” This depiction, much like the dynamic portrayed in the Zohar, refers to the descent of the soul from its place of origin, following the great river of divine emanation, into this lower world. At the same time, it refers to how the human soul only finds its true home on the Sabbath.