Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah

Sacred Names

There is the name that is sacred and the sanctity of names. The name that is sacred is the preordained Divine name of the kabbalist who grapples with its appearances both explicit and implicit in the cryptogram (20) of the Torah. The sanctity of names—which may in the final analysis extend to all names—lies in the surplus (Ricoeur) or the excess (Derrida) of meaning that they carry and hold in reserve. No definitive knowledge exhausts the name. Perhaps all names are ineffable especially when they point to a name behind or beyond the name. The problem of naming God extends to the difficulty in naming the human other or even the naming of anything. Thus the paradoxes of all names lead to the Name.

At work here is a twofold translation, as Düttmann remarks (in a discussion of Rosenzweig): “…it is not enough to translate theological terms into secular ones. The task of translating them again must be completed, the task of translating man’s problems into theological ones.”  (21)

As a book that directs us to “the pathway to the Names,” Gikatilla binds the questions of these Names to the intention of human beings who will “reach the place that you desire.” Names of God involve the transformation of the human subject and the human subject, in some way, along this path, changes in one’s knowledge of the Names and presumably in one’s knowledge of God. The relationship is found in the name—for names are always relational. So too, the relationship is altered by the name—opening and closing the circuit of the magical/technological—powers unveiled in the name to the one who knows the path with all of its gates.

Düttmann gives an example of what we may seize upon as a translation of the theological into the secular and the secular into the theological in the form of a comment on Heidegger where: “Thinking the path becomes unavoidable for Heidegger when he experiences a lack: the want of sacred names.” (23) Being (a well known translation for the Tetragramaton by the kabbalists) would seemingly function as one of Heidegger’s sacred names. The whole of the Heideggerian project could be cast as the profound “lack” felt in all attempts to name Being. Would not similar frustrations lurk around every corner of Gikatilla’s magnum opus?

At stake in the name is the critically examined notion of “presence” which wears a mask power. For Heidegger:

To name something—that is to call it by name. More fundamentally, to name is to call and clothe something with a word. What is so called, is then at the call of the word. What is called appears as what is present, and in its presence it is brought into the keeping, it is commanded, called into the calling word. So called by name, called into a presence, it in turn calls. (24)

As a presence that can be commanded, this property of the naming joins the knowledge of the name and the one the name names to the power in the name. Inasmuch as these are primarily Divine names for Gikatilla, we can detect in Heidegger’s statement the kernel truth that melds the theosophic to the theurgical. Presence captures both. Calling upon the name implies summoning both its knowledge and power. (25)

Filled with admonishment and cautionary statements, Gikatilla’s introduction instructs us to feel the weigh of learning the path of the names. Carried with them is so much more than what they name or appear to name. Once again, Düttmann has a fitting suggestion that holds for these as well as all names in general: “Is it conceivable that the name could be the archive of all memory? The name promises the hearer, the other, a knowledge that the bearer of the name has already forgotten: he must have forgotten it to become what he is, but also to respond and to be responsible.” (26)

Evoking names, sacred names, with the sanctity of names, directs us towards an awesome responsibility which is played out in the creative possibilities of language—possibilities of memory and possibilities of promise. These are possibilities that we will have to turn towards after first focusing our discussion on the topic of “foundations.”

²⁰ “Cryptogram” is a term that I borrow from Arthur Hertzberg’s introduction to the English translation of Gates of Light p.xiii.

²¹ The Gift of Language p.6.

²² Gates p.3

²³ The Gift of Language. P.8

²⁴ Heidegger. What is called Thinking? P.120.

²⁵ Here I am greatly indebted to Elliot Wolfson’s critique of Moshe Idel’s somewhat arbitrary distinction between the theosophic and theurgical modes of Kabbalah. Gikatilla’s Gates of Light is an excellent proof text for Wolfson’s position that the divider Idel erected quickly breaks down by force of the underlying unity of “names”. In the end, the two faces become one.

²⁶ The Gift of Language. p.74

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/memory-and-promise-part-4/

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