Preliminary Insights on Kabbalah

during and subsequent to the Shoah

 Jewish mysticism deals intensively with
questions of good and evil.
 There is always a balance between good and
evil (Sitra di’Keduasha vs. Sitra Ahra; Michael
(the Angel), Metatron etc. vs. Samael)
 The evil powers reflect a Divine will, and
therefore they are usually essential from an
educational point of view (Yissurim
Memarkim, Hamtakat Hadinim).
 The Jewish mystics tried to break away from the
tyranny of the Greek conceptual apparatus and, albeit
at times awkwardly and without being fully aware of
their own boldness, they developed ideas that in
crucial ways refused to evade the reality of evil.
 Their approach reveals both their strength and their
weakness. It shows their weakness because it led
them from the world of concepts back into the world
of symbols, which they were not yet capable of
translating back into concepts. It also shows their
strength, because they refused to go along with the
ostrichlike position of the philosophers who, when
confronted with the reality of evil, escaped into the
theoretical dialectics of matter and form.
 The evil Samael with all of the Divine armies
declared war on his creator, because God said (to
Man): "rule the fish of the sea and the birds of the
sky." Samael wondered: how can we cause man to
commit sins and to be expelled from God's
vicinity?
 He went down with all his armies and searched for
a partner like him, and found the snake […]
 God cast the evil Samael and his facion from His
holy place in the sky […] and Samael was
punished and thus became Minister of Esau the
wicked. In the future when God will uproot the
Kingdom of Edom he will first humiliate him
 Why did He create the world? for the Creator does not need the
created and has no benefit from them, so why did He create the
world? […] The truth is that God did not create the world for His
own sake, for He has no benefit from a worthless world, but He
said: "If I should create a world
 without the Evil Yetser (inclination) there will be no wonder if the
creatures will be as good as the Ministering Angels; and if I put
into them a strong Evil Yetser, they might be unable to overcome
this Yeser. Still, I might find two righteous people among them,
like David." He thus created worlds and destroyed them, for He
did not find righteous people like David […] and when He saw
that there were no such righteous as David, He destroyed them.
 He said: "The fact that there is not even one good person among
all these is because I created the Evil Yetser too strong in them
[…]”. |And the Creator said: "The reason why I created such a
strong Yetser in them is, that if two [righteous] are found, He
would be ungrateful if he did not create them. But he said: I
created it too strong, therefore there is no good in them; I shall
now create human beings with another Yetser, the Good Yetser.
 It is man’s duty to prevent evil
from ruling earth.
 It is man’s duty to allow the
Lord’s kingship to prevail.
 It is in man’s hands to conduct a
rectification of the world
(Tikkun).
 Since the seventeenth century, this theurgical conception of
the commandments was enhanced and reformulated by
the forceful idea of the tikkun in the Lurianic kabbalah. The
Zohar itself did present some connection between this
system and the achievement of final, messianic
redemption, but the Lurianic kabbalah made it its central
message, which was then embraced by Judaism as a whole.
The myth developed within the framework of Lurianic
teachings presented the tikkun as the process that will
redeem first and foremost the divine powers from the
results of the primordial catastrophe called the breaking of
the vessels […]
 The only weapons people have in the struggle against the
evil powers that dominate the universe are those of the
commandments and ethical behaviour.
We call them all sanctifiers of God's name,
because we have learned that every Jew that
was a victim of anti-Semitism, even if he was
not actually killed on the grounds of altruism,
is holy […] They were all holy and innocent,
and their only crime was their Jewish ethnicity
[…] They perished because their perpetrators
were anti-Semitic, descendents of Amalek […]
Therefore, there is no vindication to
question God's reticence, or his passive
permission for the killing of our holy
offspring […] this question is illegitimate
because (Exodus 17:16) "the Lord will have
war with Amalek from generation to
generation", and because Amalek are known
as (Deuteronomy 25:18) "he feared not
God“.
These words were written in 1941, when
despite the terrible horrors […] there were
still people that could lament and describe
the sorrow […]
The situation is different in summer 1942.
there is a total annihilation of all of the holy
congregations. Even the few individuals left
are sorrowful […] in terror and death. There
is nothing by which we can lament any more,
no one left to preach to, no heart to
encourage to worship and study […] and it
goes without saying that no one can weep for
the future […] only God will spare and
salvage us in a flash, and the rebuilding of
the ruins will occur only in the full redemption
and the revival of the dead, only He can
rebuild and heal!
 Reviewed by Prof. Moshe Hallamish:
 “The pamphlet does not introduce an innovative
method or novel ideas. Its uniqueness is the
startling coordination […] between numeric
calculations to popular ideas, utilized to strengthen
and ratify the truths of Kabbalah in a variety of
topics. The astonishing combination of difficult
calculations with the lack of sufficient paper, in a
state of minimal residential and environmental
conditions, is what amazes us most. Therefore, it is
more than likely that under normal conditions the
author would have succeeded in creating a
remarkable composition.”
 R. Yishmael said, that day R. Akiva and I were
studying with R. Nehunia ben Haqanah, and R.
Hananaiah ben Tradion was also there.
 I asked R. Nehunia and told him: “Rabbi! Show me the
honor of the King of the World, so that the idea of his
existence would br clear to me like all of his actions. He
responded: “Son of overbearing! Come and we shall
deal with the great chain that the skies are sealed by,
and its name is ARARITA, and in the chain of earth
which is AHU, and I shall show you everything. I
entered to the inner of inside in the outer holy temple,
and took out the book of R. Nehunia, entitled the book
of Heichalot.
 And so I found in the beginning of that
book:
 The mighty in the chambers of greatness,
sitting upon the wheels of his chariott,
signed AHYH who is AHYH, and in
mighty chains sealing the sky named
ARARITA, acronym of One, His Oneness
is First, His Uniqueness is First, There is
Only One of His Kind, and in chains
sealing the earth […] and what there is in
between is the thing spoken correctly ( ‫דבר‬
‫)דבור על אפניו‬.
 I found in the books of the kabbalists
that he who recites this holy name in
the Shome’a Tefilah section of his
prayer – his prayer will not be
overuled […] and in my humble
opinion (Hayyim) this name is
ARARITA, since it is an acronym of
[…] (the monotheistic phrase)
 What was once a vessel of achieving God’s
vicinity is now a vessel of God’s revelation
 Where there was once prayer there now exists
an eternal Divine emanation
 Man has no more power of Tikkun due to his
weakness and nullness
 God is totally responsible fir the world, its evil
and good