The Will To Live On: This is Our Heritage by Wouk Herman

Author:Wouk, Herman [Wouk, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Open and Hidden: Talmud and Kabbalah

For reasons outside the scope of this book, I was self-marooned with my family for years on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, a bustling green rock in the azure sea, where a Hasidic rabbi on a fund-raising swing through the Caribbean once paid me a visit. Pathetically glad to hear a Yiddish word, I made him very welcome. “What are you learning?” he asked almost at once, for that is how old-time Jews greet each other. I mentioned the Talmud tractate on property law, Baba Basra. “Oh, that’s Nigleh,” he said with a dismissive hand wave. “What about Nistor?” Nigleh means open, clear. Nistor means esoteric, hidden. He was referring to Kabbalah. I admitted I was not much up on Nistor, and though my donation pleased him, I obviously sank in his regard.

The difference between Talmud and Kabbalah is not too unlike that between Proverbs and Daniel, between pragmatic wisdom and transcendental visions, although to be sure the Talmud has its mystical passages, and Kabbalah its inner logical coherence. At any rate, my visitor was reacting in character, for modern Hasidism starts with a revealing of the “hidden” by the eighteenth-century saints of the movement, primarily the Master of the Good Name, the Baal Shem Tov. (More about that in the chapter that follows.) Kabbalah is today an open study among Hasidim, called “Nistor” mainly to set it off from Talmud, “Nigleh.” My grandfather told me to let Kabbalah alone until I was forty, and concentrate on Talmud. So I did. Since my Caribbean years I have learned something about Kabbalah, an undeniably powerful element of the Heritage, which I treat later in this book.

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