Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah

Correspondences and Constellations

While these preliminaries refer to phenomena that run through the text, our objective at this stage is merely to lead us up to the text and to circumnavigate it from perspectives that may seem better ascribed to a remote future. The methodological assumptions invested here would require as separate essay to properly justify all the licensing of exotic philosophic equipment employed in this study. Such practices are not without precedent and certain prearranged agreements can be found in many of the scholarly works of Elliot Wolfson and others who have followed in his course of kabbalistic decryption.

Summoning Adorno once again, Düttman further investigates the relationship between language and the concept defined within language. Essential to Gikatilla and other Kabbalists is the speaking beyond what one says, writing more than one writes and tracing a series of representations whose portrayal can be surmised from the following account in The Gift of Language:

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno says that language is more than a system of signs at the disposal of cognitive functions. Where it is essentially language, before or beyond the system and the sign, it becomes presentation or representation (Darstellung) and does not define its concepts. This does not mean that the thinking which Adorno calls negative dialectics, the intent of which is precisely not to be without language (‘Hegelian dialectics was a dialectic without a language’), renounces definition, quite the opposite: ‘A thought which in its own unfolding would not be capable of defining its object, a thought which would not let the thing itself appear intermittently by using the most concise language, would probably be as sterile as a thought gorged with verbal definitions.’ Darstellung is language as a constellation or configuration. (13)

Darstellung as representation or depiction or form of expression bears within it the word stellung or stel/lung signifying place and position. Thus re-presentation serves to re-position or to bring into position, to let appear. (14) Moreover, as Düttmann has pointed out Darstellung means constellation—“with stars”; the very fiber of language, in the way words hang together with magical and mysterious forces of attraction already implies this configuration.

Resistant to the reductionism of isolated definitions that radiate a single point of light, our star clusters shine upon us as polysemic kaleidoscopes of meaning that celebrate the positive tension mounted by conflicting forces. Emerson, whose honey glazed words of adoration for nature captures the sense of our walking beneath the stars above in a manner that may well be appropriated for their new role as the ‘emblem’ of all linguistic organization:  “The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.” (15) Transposed into our discussion of Darstellung, we might entertain the notion that all meaning is “present” through the medium of language and yet “inaccessible.” This paradoxical state, when left unresolved, achieves the greatest impact.

Who will take of the collection? Are we all to be gatherers? As José Faur contends “One of the designations for sages in rabbinic tradition is ba’ale asupot ‘the authors of aggregate [knowledge]’, that is the type of wisdom that is essentially integrative.” (16) This is certainly a plausible meaning of language as a constellation. Applied to the task of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light where the objective is announce in the opening of his introduction as to the effect that “You, my brother and soul mate, have asked me to show you the pathway to the Names of the Ever-Blessed God so you may derive what you will from them and reach the place that you desire.” (17)

These paths and the gates that access them, demand a ‘language as constellation’ consciousness to grow organically in and around the “Names of the Ever-Blessed God” that we would like to encounter. Taking our queue once again from Düttmann who continues to serve well as an unconventional commentator on Gikatilla:

Thought is unable to name except by placing itself in a constellation, by traveling the path that separates it from the name. This path is the path of Darstellung. In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno denounces (philosophical) language which denies the constellation and tries to name the name in an unthinkable immediacy. (Philosophical) language becomes jargon when it claims to be able to denominate without division. A definition takes the name’s place and marks the distance between the name and the concept. The constellation, the necessity of a Darstellung which neither refuses definition nor reduces itself to a definition, is a sign of loss: the unity of the name and knowledge, knowledge through the name, the cognizing name that Benjamin speaks of, have been lost. (18)

Thus, our relation to the names, to the Divine and Sacred names and perhaps to all names that may be nothing more than the camouflage for the traditional ‘Names of the Ever-Blessed God,’ challenges a once assumed unity. Knowledge of the name will forever be mystical knowledge. As the knowing subjects, we can only work at what Adorno calls “The subjectively created context—the “constellation”—[which] becomes readable as [a] sign of objectivity: of the spiritual substance.” (19)

¹³ The Gift of Language p.1.

¹⁴ Also of interest but far beyond parameters of this current essay are the speculative questions concerning etymological relationships of stellung and the word stellar in English. Some such as Isaac Mozeson have suggested that their may even be some common thread linking the German back through the Latin to the Hebrew origins of this word. As he writes in The Word: The Dictionary that Reveals the Hebrew Source of English under the entry for the word sidere(al)(latin sidere-us, French sidus or star+al for a constellation or star) [SDR] which he links to SiDeR in Hebrew: “Roots: SUTURE is the line on which sewing is done; סדר/SADTER is a row or arrangement. SUTRA is a thread in Sanskrit, and is the term used for the scriptural narratives in Buddhism. Aramaic סדרא/ SIDTRA is a series, and סדרא/SIDRA means a portion in the Hebrew scriptural narrative. Considering the S-DT-R terms above, SIDEREAL (of the stars or constellations) would suggest Latin sideris (star) is a constellation, arrangement or row (of stars). For further proof that sideris infers constellation and not an individual star, note the IE root for SIDEREAL. Although some define IE sweid as “shine,” the derivatives CONSIDER [emphasis mine] (which meant to “observe stars carefully”) and desire (which meant “to await from the stars” according to the AHD [American Heritage Dictionary]) have astrological connotations. Astrological CONSIDERATIONS involve סדור/SEDTOOR (order, arrangement) of stars, clusters and their סדיר/ SADER(regular, orderly) STELLAR movements.” P.155.

¹⁵ The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay “Nature” p.5.

¹⁶ See José Faur, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. p.x where he refers to this designation from Sifre [ed. Louis Finklestein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969.par.41,86.] In his context, the connotation of collected knowledge implies the sense by which Torah gathers together and inter-relates all of the arts and sciences—the sum total of earthly wisdom, fusing them in the course of its discussion. Here, we are turning this idea slightly so that it exemplifies the gathering of diverse meaning in constellations to embed in their use of language that which I think the inter-textual weave of Talmudic and Midrashic exegesis also testify.

¹⁷ Gates. P.3.

¹⁸ The Gift of Language. p.1-2.

¹⁹ Negative Dialectics p.165.

 http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/memory-and-promise-part-3/ 

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