Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah

In Pursuit of Names

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

Let us not forget that Gikatilla’s work is a guide and key to the names—the Divine names and have boosted profane names to a new level. The difficultly in naming, not as identification or beginning with identity, but with difference, has hindered the quest for all names. (69)

All names have perhaps acquired some sanctity—something unspecified and held in reserve that lifts them to unique status. In reading this text, we get the sense that Düttmann writes about, that “Names carry memory, even if we have never heard them before. Because of this, names promise and can be taken as promises: after the name appears, we are waiting for something.” (70) So too, we can follow him in asserting the question: “Memory and promise—can we think them without experiencing the name?” (71)

The name would seem to wed and consecrate the union of memory and promise inscribing the space of their time. The name, the phenomenon of the names, when meditated upon at length, reveals itself to be most mystical. As a mystical experience, we could borrow another passage from Düttmann to summarize our experience of approaching the name in Gikatilla’s text:

As soon as we start to be, to be named, as soon as we are called to appear, we hide, we try to escape from the revelatory force, the memory, the truth of the name. The possibility of survival, of another memory and another promise, thus depends on certain unreadability: but an essential and not accidental unreadability. The name must be essentially unreadable. We can save ourselves or be saved only if something in the name remains unreadable. The name remains unreadable in so far as it is a promise; but for the name to be a promise and to carry memory it has to be given, it has to appear as a gift. (72)

And what extraordinary gifts we receive especially when we consider how: “the promise is inscribed in memory and memory is inscribed in the promise. Memory and promise give themselves to be read in a double inscription….” (73)

Circumcision marks that inscription. Granting the gift of the name and all the good that it bestows can be best addressed in one of the touchstone verses that Gikatilla quotes:

“…in every place I cause you to maZCHiR (mention, remember) My Name, I will bless you.” (Exodus 20:21) (74)

This certainly, is a promise to look forward to (and is plainly said as a promise from God): “A promise [that] demands from thought the impossible faithfulness of its memory.” (75)

⁶⁹ This reversal of traditional notions of difference and identity is worked out in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

⁷⁰ The Gift of Language. P.74.

⁷¹ Ibid. p.73.

⁷² Ibid. p.74.

⁷³ Ibid. p.74.

⁷⁴ Quoted in Gates of Light. p.69.

⁷⁵ The Gift of Language. p.83-84.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Düttmann, Alexander Garcia. The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig. Translated by Arline Lyons. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Faur, José. Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Translated by Peter Fenves. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, Volume Four “Nihilism”. Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Levin, David Michael. The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism. London: Routledge, 2003.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990.

Mozeson, Isaac E. The Word: The Dictionary that Reveals the Hebrew Source of English. New York: SPI Books, 2000.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wolfson, Elliot R. Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Wolfson, Elliot R. “The Cut that Binds: Time, Memory and the Ascetic Impulse.” In God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism, edited by Shaul Magid, 103-154. Albany; State University of New York Press, 2002.

Editions of the Primary Text—Gates of Light:

Gikatilla, Joseph. Gates of Light: Sha’are Orah. Translated by Avi Weinstein. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1994.

Gikatilla, Joseph. Sha’re Orah (in Hebrew). With the commentary of Michael

Bornstein “Beit Sha’re”. Jerusalem, Chemed, 2005.

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