Photo by Asher Crispe 2012

Chromatic Mysteries

Our range of visual experience is immeasurably enriched when we can look upon the same object in either black and white or in color or perhaps rapidly alternating between the two. As we previously explained, the black and white image has the pretense of objective perspective while our colored world addresses a subjective perspective. Another way of stating this would be to assert that the black and white reality represents ‘mind’ while the colored reality represents ‘heart.’ Both mind and heart have their respective importance. They need to be paired.

Another crucial benefit from rendering the world in black and white is that it brings out and accentuates structure. By centering our attention on the structural features of an object we are less likely to think of that object as discreet but rather view it as a system of relationships (relationships between the object of focus and its neighbors, as well as relationships within the object that are consummated within itself.) For example, I am attentive to the fact that a cube can be defined within itself as one block having six sides, outlined with twelve lines joined by eight points. Furthermore, this cube’s size can only be assessed in relation to other objects in its immediate surroundings to gauge its scale (small, medium or large).

When we employ color however, structure is de-emphasized resulting in a general obfuscation of the object or set of the object’s relationships. We get a feeling for the color from the color. The strength of this feeling creates an overall fuzziness in the thinking about the object, distracting our attention away from its ‘ratio-rational’ but nonetheless boasting its experiential richness. For instance, in the literary circles colorful writing rescues us from the prosaicness of prose and launches us into the poiesis of poetry.

Lucidity gives way to ambiguity. Think of a coloring book that starts out as a black and white outline that needs to be colored in. Crayons in the hand of a child quickly color outside the bounds (just like there is an experiential overflow that cannot be contained within the ‘lines’ of reason) or they go over and over the lines in the sense of blurring the boundaries. Our imagination may run wild. Free associations can obscure the original set of relationships and borders.

Plugging all of this back into Kabbalah reveals some extremely interesting aspects of the  ‘evolution’ of kabbalistic teachings. One of the central historical concerns with the straight up undiluted approach to the study of Kabbalah was the unrelenting abstraction of its terminology. The uninitiated in particular could easily get lost in this technical jungle. When both the concepts and the jargon are perceived to be totally detached from any experiential framework, when a student feels stripped of his or her senses and jumps into an axiomatic system which like mathematics can seem to be its own universe, then the potential pitfalls become obvious. Amateur technicians of Kabbalah may be able to rattle off the schematics of the piping or wiring of concepts but the attending experience, the soul of those concepts, remains absent. I may possess a tool externally but I cannot internalize it if I cannot place it within me giving it a psychological voice. So while it may maintain a certain ‘formal’ elegance and fascination, kabbalistic concepts and modes of inquiry still remain impoverished if they lack color.

Adding color into the equation could be thought of as the process in which ‘I’ am situated within the black and white contours of the concept and the concept is situated within me. Everything is then personalized. The foreignness of the content of study quickly evaporates and ‘I’ soak up the wellsprings that have now taken on an extreme relevance to me as an individual. No longer is it about the rote memorization of mechanical formulas but rather the seeking out of the meaning of self and other, God and world, along an individualized path of purpose and understanding.

This quandary is addressed in the tradition of Chassidut as follows: While on some level Chassidic philosophy is an extension of Kabbalah or even a form of inspirational Kabbalah, this movement starting with the Ba’al Shem Tov really represents the emergence of a new dimension that is added onto all levels of prior Torah study–Kabbalah included. The idea of ‘personalized’ education that would be the wave of the future (a notion that has become increasingly popular even amongst mainstream academics today) was of paramount importance to the founder of Chassidism. We need to translate all that we learn into the realm of the personal, the experiential and the practical.

To that end, it was initially a wonder to outside observers, who were expositors of Kabbalah themselves, why the Chassidic masters would rely on the Kabbalah of the Remak (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero who was said to represent the summation of all kabblistic knowledge from the times of the Talmud and the Zohar until his passing in 1570) in addition to the later strata of teachings of the Arizal.  While he played the part of redactor, systemizer and expositor to this early period in the revelation and development of Kabbalah, Lurianic Kabbalah seems to supplant it entirely.

Once Rabbi Yizchak Luria (better known as the Arizal) arrived on the scene, there was an overwhelming consensus that his ‘complexified’  system of kabbalistic teaching were the new ‘Copernican revolution’.  The Remakian system was superseded in the eyes of many at the time as having insufficiently defined the complex web of relationships in Divine cosmology. To remedy this, the Lurianic school introduced massively networked constellations of ‘personified’ ideas making the writings of the Remak seem simple by comparison.

Yet this assessment, according to the Chassidic masters and in particular the Chabad school, is predicated on a false assumption. Lurianic Kabbalah may be the ultimate exercise in map making (somewhat akin to the contemporary quest to reverse engineer the human brain in science), but it only highlights structural relationships. Nowhere in the writings of the Arizal does he define any of his terms in and of themselves–at least not in comparison to the Remak for whom generating a user friendly lexicon is of prime importance. For the Arizal we are already up and running using the language of worlds, sefiriotic channels, and Hebrew letters that we gleaned from the Remak and all those who came before him. So instead of forging ahead with the Remak’s task of defining the terminology in and of itself so that we can have a feeling for what the words mean in isolation, the Arizal is more interested in demonstrating the manifold relationships that can be configured with those terms. In other words, the Remak is all about color. While the Arizal reflects the kabbalistic universe in black and white.

Chassidut want to incorporate the best of both worlds. There is a time for exploring everything in black and white but it has to come both after learning about color (just as the Arizal’s revelations came after the Remak). Once we’ve gained a grip on the personal meaning of the terms, dwelling with them poetically, we can start to navigate the nexus of relationships beginning with their next of kin and then perhaps expand in time to the whole global genealogy.

In practice, our learning demands that we investigate an object of study in and of itself (to know the color of experiencing it directly) and to think of it as part of greater and greater wholes–thus continually redefining it in relation to all else.

In Part Sixteen our conversation on kabbalistic chromatics continues.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/inspiring-interior-design-part-16/

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