Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah

Correspondences and Constellations

—The name appears only in a constellation of concepts. (1)

—The name appears, but its apparition is inseparable from the dispersion that all constellations presuppose. And what if the apparition of the name were nothing other than the gift of language, the memory and the promise of that gift? What if the constellation were implicated in the very structure of the gift, thus transforming itself into a plural constellation, into a multiplicity of constellations whose number would not be limited beforehand by a horizon? (2)

Academic exercises usually require the formulation of a thesis. We are to take up some position with regard to our subject matter and then, through force of critical engagement, sew up a well dressed and fitted argument that proves the correctness of the stance that we have adopted. This task will prove somewhat self-defeating given the present subject matter—the medieval kabbalistic classic of Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla known as Gates of Light or Sha’are Orah.

Amongst the innumerable undercurrents of Gikatilla’s text, lies a “polemic” with the very methodology employed to gather and represent knowledge in academic arenas. A certain ‘displacement’ is in order. Finding a ‘place’, a stance, limits our investigation to the privileging of a point of view, which, unstable and at times only feigning singularity, produces a war-like atmosphere where winning is everything.

As we will hopefully demonstrate there are great unexplored possibilities offered in pursuing a method of analyzing Gikatilla’s work from a more kindred mode of interpretation, one that, far from being pointless seeks to configure a nuanced set of constellations. The invitation being sent, we can entertain the thought of writing from a pre-positional or non-positional space casting ourselves like a net to cover not a point but an open space, a field, with multi-positional relationships to the task at hand. The constellation works against the simple calculations of positioning ourselves and our object within full view.

Gates of Light functions on some level as a treatise on sacred names—Divine identities dispersed in a web of inter-textual and presumably, inter-experiential relationships. There are no mug shot here. Spiritual profiling has turned into an unmanageable knot of correspondences. Do we dare use the word ‘system’? Perhaps, but only with extreme caution. One might be nervous just throwing the word out there for fear that others will assume our confidence to map it.

In his exceptional work The Gift of Language, (a work, it should be noted which is woven in and around the present essay) Alexander Garcia Düttmann suggests that “by definition, a constellation entails the chance of an apparition. Something allows itself to be thought in a constellation.” (3) And what is a constellation if not a collection of diverse points whose distance from one another can never nor should never be closed. Retaining a positive tension certifies both the distinction of the various parts as well as the well integrated bond of the whole.

The entirely of Gikatilla’s book has the aura of one massive constellation stemming from the way in which each of the ten gates that serve as chapters express a different sacred name whose ordering derives from one of the most basic correspondences in kabbalistic literature—the bottom up unveiling of the channels of Divine revelation and energy known as the seferiot. Nonetheless consistent with this larger architectonic, each sub-division within the gates themselves, are microcosmic subsets exhibiting a similar construction.

In accordance with the discussion that will follow, we might highlight as a case example, the insertions of summary tables or lists of the key concepts or terms that serve as the points in the constellation discussed in each chapter. Omitted from the English translation of Avi Weinstein, but present in both of the first editions that appeared in Riva de Trento and Mantua (both printed in 1561) as well as subsequent editions of the Hebrew text, are the summations. They represent the break up of the sacred name under consideration in each of the respective gates. They are the distillation of the creative exegesis played out within the gate itself. Standing at the end of lengthy hermeneutical sessions, they emphasis the discreet ingredients needed to forge a mnemonic key required to open the gate and gain access to the name hiding within.

Whether these lists were compiled by the early printers who gleaned them from a thorough examination of the text or were the intent of the author is a secondary question in comparison to the inquiry into the rite of passage they suggest. As the reader, we must reconfigure our compass to direct us to all of these points simultaneously. Breaking off any one of these terms would presumably deform the body of the name that has no body.

In the second chapter that we will choose to focus on, the list consists of the inventory of qualities and substitute terms for the 9^th of the seferiotic potencies (channels of Divine self-expression) called Yesod or “foundation.” Examples from this list which, divested of the interpretative garments that enclothe them in the course of the main text, stand naked and unintelligible are “living God,” “God Almightily,” “Source of living waters,” “Righteous one,” “Foundation,” “Memory,” “Covent,” “Oath” and “Sign” amongst others. (4)

For Düttmann, whose philosophic insights are so useful in describing the essence of these appendages to Gikatilla’s chapters as deep structures once we recognize that:

If correspondence is communication, a sort of translation which creates the ‘magical community’ of things, denomination is the translation which transforms this community of ‘sensible correspondences’ into a community or ‘archive’ of non-sensible correspondences’. (5)

From here, it would appear that several levels of “denomination” have occurred. Gikatilla’s text names names or names the names of names. He creates a community of correspondences. He pens a written document that has been entered as archival evidence.

Organizationally, this suggests that there can be no bifurcation between the theosophic and the theurgical as some scholars of Kabbalah, such as Moshe Idel, would have it. The “magic” is precisely in the miraculous nature of language, with the coincidence of words and things rooming together in communal spirit. Reverberations of the same sway can be felt in another of Düttmann’s remarks dwelling on the idea of “magical community” in the thought of Walter Benjamin where: “The idea of a ‘magical community’ seems very close to that of a nature or cosmos determined by a set of ‘correspondences’….” (6)

Due to the mystical quality of the names introduced in Gikatilla’s tract, one might be tempted to judge him as naming the unnamable. As though each term treated in a give chapter could apply for candidacy to be named in the next election as the name of the whole chapter that will administrate and govern all the other names who, as runners up, are dealt by consolation advisor portfolios of various rank.  Whatever the circumstance, it stands to reason that these designations need each other.

Adding further fuel to the fire, we can add from Düttmann that “If the thing is already caught up in a network of ‘correspondences’ we never experience a thing without experiencing another thing, something else. So ‘correspondences’ – ‘natural correspondences’ – create a ‘community’: a ‘community’ without a name, without knowledge, without voice.” (7)

So subtle in their construction that these ‘natural correspondences’ (which in our context are elevated to a supernal heights) cannot afford to be reduced any further in the course of applying some outside description. Labels don’t stick. Left in the dark, the community shuns probes into its composition, shutting off all unnatural lights and avenues of expression. The visa of thought is revoked. The only phenomenon we are left with is where, as Adorno aptly puts it, “the constellation illuminates the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden.” (8) Moreover, he maintains that: “By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being.” (9)

Therein lies the mystery of this and many other texts of Jewish mysticism—the downfall of the concept particularly in its standard modes of production and prideful claims of pretension. Adorno and others have introduced a kind of philosophic mysticism, ushering in a secret society of the constellation to act out elaborate rituals with the concept. While most are barred admittance there nevertheless remains an attraction, the allure of the unseen spectacle.

Here, for Adorno, the “Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.” (10)

In the end, with Adorno (and perhaps for Gikatilla) we can settle for a reality in which “Definitions are not the be-all and end-all of cognition, as popular scientivism holds; but neither are they to be banished.” (11) This notion of definition possesses striking parallels to the general project of Kabbalah most notably with Lurianic texts where, as the reader, we already find ourselves using a system of terms with out having first methodically defined them. (12) Rather, and this is true of Gikatilla as well, the technical terminology becomes cast and recast, defined and redefined along the way.

As free floating signifiers, kabbalistic terminology enjoys its own “incessant interruption” to borrow an expression of Maurice Blanchot. Fearless even while adrift at sea, the science of correspondences that underlies kabbalistic exegesis, welcomes the destabilizing of ridged logical formalizisms that offer comfort as the “idols of the mind” in Francis Bacon’s locution.

Irrupting onto the scene, the throwing together of new collections of terms that need to constantly renegotiate their relationships to one and other, imparts a sense of the “creative hermeneutics” that Eliade has famously described. Our lexicon can never be complete. Kabbalah, flowing in multiple directions at once, insists on being regarded as a work in progress. We are faced with defining the indefinable and un-defining the defined.

¹ The Gift of Language p.1

² Ibid. p.2.

³ Ibid. p.1

⁴ See for example Sha’are Orah 25a from the Riva Di Trento (1561) edition for the full list which we will have to leave for a more extensive treatment in another work. In this essay we will only address a few of the terms on this list.

⁵ The Gift of Language p.44.

⁶ Ibid. p.39.

⁷ Ibid. p.39.

⁸ Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics p.162.

⁹ Ibid. p.162.

¹⁰ Ibid. p.163.

¹¹ Ibid. p.165.

¹² The informal thinking of the constellation in Gikatilla’s thought and in other medieval kabbalistic texts would seem to serve as the precursor for the formalization of partzufim (facial figures that structurally carry each of the ten seferiotic potencies with the particular seferah under discussion) as the central mode of presentation in Lurianic Kabbalah. It may be that the best translation of partzuf is constellation.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/memory-and-promise-part-2/

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