Tree of Souls Read online

  For readers who may wonder whether this democratizing impulse edges towards cacophony—too much of a good thing—know that Schwartz’s keen gifts as an editor carry the day. He gives his work a strong thematic center, organizing texts around ten mythic categories that unfold across time and space. He is able to structure and sequence sources, to fashion mythic cycles. He deftly places texts in alignment with each other, or in apposition/opposition, creating a vibrant but coherent field of vision. What emerges therefore is an intriguing series of resonances and interrelations, a transhistorical Jewish mythology, if you will. If there are occasional bracing dissonances between myths, the whole approaches a symphony, a grand opus in ten chapters, ten movements.

  Not only are myths beautifully rendered here, but their meanings are variously elucidated, enriched and complexified through up-to-date scholarship. Schwartz appends a scholarly commentary to each myth. These mini-essays are models of concision and literary insight. He traces motifs and provides historical context: explicating perplexities, highlighting discrete traditionary strands and points of evolution. Nor are spiritual insights lacking in these essays. Multiple readers will thus be astounded and delighted; for through Schwartz’s tentacular reach our understanding of the Jewish and mythic imaginations is challenged and stretched. “This is Jewish?” some of us might be moved to ask. But Jewish it is! The sheer variety of mythemes found here supports Gershom Scholem’s contention that one cannot predict a priori—on the basis of earlier teachings—just what will be considered authentically Jewish in any given period.

  The centrality of the mythic imagination. In recent decades scholars have called renewed attention to the mythic element in successive strata of Jewish tradition4: to the mythic fragments, echoes and organizing themes found in the compositions of the Hebrew Bible; to the rabbinic rereadings of the newly-canonical Scripture5 in light of living myths of God’s deeds and personality; and the complex integrations of mythic images and themes in medieval kabbalah, none more daring than the rendering of the divine totality in terms of ten potencies or sefirot, each with its own personality and gendered associations. (Divine oneness, for example, is expressed as the loving union of the masculine and feminine aspects of God.) In the ensuing paragraphs, I wish to suggest several things, knowing that their full articulation is beyond the scope of this essay: (1) that there is a Grand Myth (or meta-narrative) that was shared by most Jews in the Rabbinic, premodern setting; (2) that this grand myth is rooted in (if not identical with) the foundational text of the Hebrew Bible; (3) that in interpreting the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbis developed a “Myth of myths” of signal importance, that of the multi-faceted Torah, whose manifold meanings could be successively uncovered but never exhausted; (4) that these three elements combined to support a sort of mythic consciousness enabling devotees to read their lives in terms of the Sacred Text and the Sacred Text in terms of their lives; and (5) that this mythic consciousness was rendered vital through storytelling and interpretation, as well as through the drama of ritual.

  Briefly then, (1) to be a Jew in the classical setting is to have a Story, a shared metanarrative. It is to hold that this world is created as an act of divine will; that one is the heir of Abraham and Sarah; of those who endure(d) Egyptian slavery and the gifts of Redemption, who stand at the pivot of Sinaitic revelation and its Covenant, who know the joys of homecoming and the enduring dislocations of exile.6 It is to hold that there will be a Messianic resolution to history, though the Messiah doth tarry. This broad myth binds its adherents in a web of faith and fate, memory and expectation, in a way that transcends the defining particulars of time and place. This grand story (whose bare bones I telegraph here) is rarely articulated in toto by its adherents: it is rather cited en passant, like one who hums a few bars of a well-known, deeply assimilated, song. The adherent carries this Story, or if you prefer, this Tune, but it also carries him or her. (2) The grid for this meta-Story is the foundational text, the Hebrew Bible, which reaches canonical status through its Rabbinic closure in the late first century. Yet (3) as one door is closed, another opens. As Gershom Scholem has eloquently shown, sacred Text was immediately reopened through the medium of interpretation: midrash, commentary, and sundry forms of storytelling. Or as Michael Fishbane would have it: Rabbinic mythmaking “begins where the Hebrew Bible closes, with the canon.”7 What emerges is a suite (sometimes a tangle) of images, arguments, readings and narratives, all rooted in the evolving Myth of the Multi-Tiered Torah. This master narrative assumes that the divine Word is pregnant with multiple meanings, whole families of mythemes. Thus we read “one God has spoken, two I have heard”; and the divine “word is fire,” [its manifold meanings released] “like a hammer striking the Rock”; and in a particularly telling rabbinic litany, ellu ve-ellu divrei elohim hayyim: both this interpretation and that one (the one that contradicts it) are the word of the living God.8 In its most lavish formulations—in mystical tradition—this becomes the Myth of Torah’s infinite, inexhaustible meaning: “The Torah has seventy faces,” nay “600,000 facets.” Or as various hasidic masters have it, not only do the black letters of text have meaning, but so too, the white spaces.9 We might grasp this multiplicity by way of a parable, which expresses its radical edge10: The great hasidic master Nachman of Bratslav has a dream within a dream. He wakes up from that inner dream. Still in visionary mode, he tries to interpret the inner dream, but its meaning eludes him. He sees a sage standing nearby, and asks him the meaning of his dream. The sage tugs at his beard and says: “this is my beard and This! [tugging again at the beard] is the meaning of your dream.” 11 Nachman responds: “but I don’t understand. “In that case,” the sage adds, “go to the next room.” Nachman repairs to the next room and finds an endless library filled with endless books. “And everywhere I looked,” he adds, “I found another comment on the meaning of this thing.” I ask, what is the deeper Truth: the transverbal immediacy of the tug, the Sage’s “This!” or the infinite play of interpretation? Perhaps the Torah is never so clear as when it is being unpacked, mined for its manifold truths. And this concludes our Myth about the necessary multiplication of Myths. In a sense, Howard Schwartz’s book is a more measured illustration of Nachman’s creative play.

  (4) Arthur Green has written: “The great happenings of Scripture should in the proper sense be seen as mythical, that is, as paradigms that help us encounter, explain and enrich by archaic association the deepest experiences of which we humans are capable…By retelling, grappling with, dramatizing, living in the light of these paradigms, devotees feel themselves touched by a transcendent presence that is made real in their lives through the retelling, the re-enactments.” To use the formulation of Clifford Geertz, myth both provides a model of reality, what is really real, and a model for reality, how one is to behave in its light.12

  There is a profound dialectic for those who live under the penumbra of the Sacred Text and its mythos: as devotees tend to read their life in terms of the orienting Text/Myth, and read the Text in terms of their life. Thus, some Jews during the Crusades saw themselves as Father Abrahams called upon to sacrifice their children for the sake of their faith; even as the press of historical events and other (possibly Christian-influenced) narratives may have led them to hold that the Biblical Isaac was actually sacrificed and resurrected.13 Over time, given myths expand and contract. New glosses to extant myths emerge as mythic fragments or images; sometimes these images coalesce into new stories, and sometimes into whole new mythic complexes or systems. Examples of System include the sefirotic theology in Zoharic Kabbalah with its Myth of the divine Androgyne, and the Lurianic mythos of Creation, Shattering, and Tikkun/Cosmic Restoration.

  Classically speaking, to be a Jew is to have access to—to assimilate/debate/relate—varying degrees of these extant fragments, stories, mythic cycles and mythologies.

  (5) As Howard Schwartz notes, myths are vitalized and absorbed not only through storytelling, but through the embodied mime of ritual performance (gen
erally linked with the pattern of mitzvot and the cycles of sacred time). To grasp this, let me give one extended example—the myth of Sinaitic Revelation, wherein divine Presence and Will were simultaneously disclosed.14 On one level, this was seen as a unique event that created a singular pivot in history. “God spoke these words ve-lo yasaf, and did not add any more.” (Deut. 5:19) After this event, all has changed, and nothing can match its water-shed import. To recall Sinai is to acknowledge that one-time transformation, and to live in light of its teachings.

  On the second level of mythic enactment, Sinai is seen as an event that is periodically reactualizable. For example, to study Torah is (in the Rabbinic context) to bask in the light of Sacred Time and its heroes. To read and interpret, to retell, is to move from being a dis temporary of the Biblical figures to becoming their (near) con temporaries.15 In a stronger sense, perhaps, to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot is to stand again at Sinai. In its kabbalistic formulation, especially, it is to enter the Covenant/Marriage with the Holy One, to feel the embrace of divine intimacy—not as memory of things past but as something wholly immediate. Here the sacred past flows into the present, or perhaps better: one re-enters that “past” which is not truly past so much as a transhistorical moment that is an eternal “present.”

  On the third level of signification, again found most strongly in kabbalistic tradition, Sinai is a paradigm for that which is, at bottom, always occuring. Here one comes to realize that the revelations of Shavuot are always present, if one could only maintain expanded awareness. Drawing on the Rabbinic pun “[At Sinai] God spoke these words, ve-lo yasaf: and did not add any more [i.e., Revelation is over] ff. Deut. 5:19, they read: ve-lo yasaf: and never ceased speaking.16 The Torah that had been summarily closed is thus reopened, its wellsprings unsealed: ma’ayan nove’a. As Nachmanides had it, from the large miracles (such as Revelation at Sinai) one comes to the sense of the small epiphanies. For divinity is always present and the Voice never ceases to flow. At this level of expanded awareness [mohin de-gadlut] God is, as the benediction has it, noten ha-torah, the one who ever gives Torah, each moment anew.17 At various points in his book Schwartz illumines the connection between myth and ritual, showing how story can become, in his words, “more than story.”

  To date, we have implied that it was through myth that Israel most commonly encountered, grappled with, assimilated and marked life’s pivotal moments. For myth addresses some of our fundamental existential questions, concerns that may shift over time but which tend to pervade different cultural settings. These questions include: how did the world come into being, and to what end; what may I/we hope for; what is the meaning of suffering and of joy, the co-existence of good and evil; is there a deeper purpose to history? What does it mean to be a Jew, to embrace Jewish practice? Who (rarely what) is God and how may I serve the One? what does it mean to be both an image of the divine and “dust and ashes”; what does it mean that I can both shatter and fix vessels and worlds? What is the meaning of gender—in humanity, in divinity? Or: what is the relation of work and rest, of depression and renewal? What is the significance of embodiment and ensoulment? And: what might unfold in other dimensions of existence, both high and low; to wit, what is the meaning of death, its sorrows and its sweet release, and how does one here live in its presence? In this foreword I simply pose the questions. In Tree of Souls these and other root questions are vividly addressed. It has been said that survival (and the production of meaning) comes in cultural inflections. The myths in this book give voice to a full array of Jewish inflections and dialects, creating olam u-melo’o, “a world replete with meanings”.

  Still each path has its pitfalls. It is to Howard Schwartz’s credit that his embrace of the mythic model does not blind him to the significant counter-impulses within Judaism: the various Rabbinic and philosophical critiques of certain myths, especially the graphic mythicizations of God found in aggadah and some strands of kabbalah. Second, even as Schwartz is aware of the profundities in his mythic sources, he is aware of their dangers too. For myths both articulate and absolutize (reify) our deepest visions. For an example see the Introduction, where Schwartz poignantly notes: “The intractable conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians derives from this belief in the sanctity of the Holy Land, especially of Jerusalem, shared by both Jews and Muslims. This serves as a compelling reminder of the enduring and sometimes destructive power of these myths, which are not always benign.” Or as James Young put it in a different context: a common site of memory is not necessarily a site of common memory.18

  Ways of reading this book. As noted, Tree of Souls maintains a dynamic tension between textual diversity and thematic focus through the centripetal force of its editor. Schwartz’s frequent weaving together of parallel sources into a unitary myth is an impressive achievement. Still, I confess that I often have trouble with this approach since it smooths out the edges, obscures specific voices and historical settings. But thanks to the commentaries, I was rarely perturbed by this. And the gain in narrative flow was measurable. The author has done a remarkable job in presenting the chain midrashim and the longer legends/myths (the Tzohar19 to restrict myself to one example.) I like the way Schwartz presented the hard unvarnished accounts found in some sources: the Zoharic text wherein the Holy One (masculine aspect of God) is mated not with Shekhinah as one would expect but with Lilith (the demonic realm in its feminine guise). Or the aggadah wherein the son of arch-demon Sammael is cannibalized by Eve (and Adam). This source was stunning in all senses of the term. In these and other texts, mind surprises heart, as the text reads in ways that run counter to expectations and hidden wishes. In still other texts, narrative reaches the status of mayse as defined by Abraham Joshua Heschel: a story in which heart surprises mind.20 Nachman’s fragmentary tale of “A Garment for the Moon” and the oral tale “The Cottage of Candles” are two such texts for me. Each reader will undoubtedly find his or her favorites: be they tales that edify or perplex, astonish or delight, be they myths that stick in the craw, force one to reconsider, or make the heart melt. For there are as many gates in this book as there are stories (and some would say, as there are readers).

  This book deserves a wide and varied audience. It will speak to storytellers of all stripes, spur the analogical and aesthetic imagination of artists. Students of myth and theology (Jewish and comparative) and spiritual seekers, those thirsty for the presence of the One, will have much to contemplate and absorb. Some readers may wish to focus on one tale at a time, to even memorize a passage or write it down and place it in pocket or purse for periodic examination and reflection. To learn by heart. Other readers may wish to explore a mythic cycle systematically, concordances in hand. Still others will want to make use of Schwartz’s extensive notation of primary sources to engage in historical analysis. Through these notations and through the references to cutting-edge scholarship the reader is given tools to continue and deepen his or her readings. One need not agree with all of Schwartz’s contentions in order to be edified and inspired by this book. He is a conversation partner of the highest order, a generous and deeply schooled barp’lugta. Still, not all is heavy in this book. As the midrash21 has it panim tzohakot la-aggadah. “The Aggadah—the narrative imagination—has a laughing face.” For reasons both playful and profound, this is a book to read and reread, to grow old with.

  The anthological imagination and its resonances. Tree of Souls is a latter-day exemplar of the Jewish anthological imagination, that combinatory art. Indeed, anthology is one of the oldest forms of Jewish literary creativity, found in various Biblical books such as Psalms and, many would hold, the Pentateuch itself (if one accepts the documentary hypothesis). Many of the canonical and sacred works of the Rabbinic imagination were anthologies of texts, some even anthologies of anthologies.22 In the modern period we have been blessed with encyclopedic anthologies of signal import, including Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer ha-Aggadah (in Hebrew) and Louis Ginzberg’s magisterial Legends of th
e Jews. Tree of Souls builds on these works in many ways, recasting the thematic thrust of Sefer ha-Aggadah and revisioning the synthetic narrative of Ginzberg. Still, Schwartz extends our scope by drawing on heretofore marginalized texts as well as post-medieval and modern texts not included in the earlier works.23 Indeed, this book could only have been written at this historical moment. For it draws on works that had been lost to earlier generations, such as the piyyutim of Yannai and the Dead Sea Scrolls; oral narratives collected in recent decades; women’s prayers that have just now re-entered public (and scholarly) purview; as well as mystical manuscripts and “minor” midrashim that were previously known only to yehidei segullah, the precious few. In this book, our collective memory is dusted off, expanded and vitalized.

  By way of conclusion or as entree into the book itself, a parable about this volume and the Anthological Imagination. The word anthology etymologically implies a collection of flowers, the artful forming of a bouquet. The hasidic rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, himself a great mythopoet and storyteller, likened the act of prayer to this anthological art—the assembling of bouquets for the Holy One. Each letter, he teaches, is like a flower of the field, and from these letters one forms words, themselves bouquets. From these words one forms prayers, and from individual prayers, whole services of worship—elaborate bouquets, garlands of blessing. Nachman then explains that each word—each flower—has a special resonance, an inner music. Its music hangs in the air, combining and harmonizing with the other words and prayers that follow, in a kind of Deep Song. Nachman concludes: “When you rise and speak the final words of the service, let the first letter of the first word still reverberate.”24 The book in your hands is a work of enormous resonance. The careful reader of Tree of Souls cannot but marvel at the consistent power, the occasional bracing oddness, and the enduring beauty of this anthology. It is a testament to its power that many of the early stories resonate with later ones, and that one continues to hear something of this book’s “inner music”—its soul-stirring niggun—long after one has closed its pages.