Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem

Author:Gershom Scholem
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Kabbalah, Religion, Judaism, Mysticism
ISBN: 9780307791481
Publisher: Schocken
Published: 1929-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

11

If proper account is taken of all these facts, certain allusions in Moses de Leon’s writings to his mystical ‘sources’ appear no longer as anything but veiled references to his own authorship. Thus in 1290 he remarks in his “Book of the Rational Soul,” that “only recently the spring of mystery has begun to flow in the land”150—a plain allusion to the recent publication of some of the Zoharic writings. But the most remarkable hints of this genre are to be found in the Mishkan Ha-Eduth, written in 1293, from which I shall quote, as literally as possible, the most important passage, one which, like so much else, has escaped the notice of writers on the subject. In a passage where he discusses the theory of a two-fold Gehenna—a close parallel to the above-mentioned idea of a double Paradise—he prefaces his Zoharic variations on the subject by the following remarks:

“Concerning this matter there are hidden mysteries and secret things which are unknown to men. You will now see that I am revealing deep and secret mysteries which the holy sages regarded as sacred and hidden, profound matters which properly speaking are not fit for revelation so that they may not become a target for the wit of every idle person. These holy men of old have pondered all their lives over these things and have hidden them, and did not reveal them to every one, and now I have come to reveal them. Therefore keep them to yourself, unless it be that you encounter one who fears God and keeps His Commandments and the Torah … I looked at the ways of the children of the world and saw how in all that concerns these [theological] matters, they are enmeshed in foreign ideas and false, extraneous [or heretical] notions. One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the errors and falsehoods abide for ever. And no one sees and no one hears and no one awakens, for they are all asleep, for a deep sleep from God has fallen upon them, so that they do not question and do not read and do not search out. And when I saw all this I found myself constrained to write and to conceal and to ponder, in order to reveal it to all thinking men, and to make known all these things with which the holy sages of old concerned themselves all their lives. For they are scattered in the Talmud and in their [other] words and secret sayings, precious and hidden better even than pearls. And they [the sages] have closed and locked the door behind their words and hidden all their mystical books, because they saw that the time had not come to reveal and publish them. Even as the wise king has said to us: ‘Speak not in the ears of a fool.’ Yet I have come to recognize that it would be a meritorious deed to bring out to light what was in the dark and to make known the secret matters which they have hidden.

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