Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: The "Other Side" of Kabbalah by Nathaniel Berman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: The "Other Side" of Kabbalah by Nathaniel Berman Joel Hecker Nathaniel Berman. Divine and Demonic in the Poetic Mythology of the Zohar: The "Other Side" of Kabbalah. Leiden: Brill, 2018. xiv + 312 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000240 Evil is the theological scandal that won't go away. In Zohar scholarship, Isaiah Tishby's twofold approach to the problem of evil has largely been a settled matter. Tishby proffered two options—the Neoplatonic and the dualistic (so-called gnostic) approaches—and argued that these two paths existed in tension on account of unresolved inclinations in the kabbalistic tradition. With literary verve, fresh readings, and compelling argumentation, Nathaniel Berman unsettles this familiar territory in his groundbreaking new book. The effectiveness of Berman's approach, in the first book-length treatment of evil in Zoharic Kabbalah, derives from his operating on both the microlevel of literary style and the macrolevel of the Zohar's mythical dualism. Berman applies two different methodological tacks that force a reconsideration of the Zohar's thinking about evil. First, using the psychoanalytic framework of the constitution of subjectivity as articulated by Julia Kristeva, he reexamines the nature of the Divine Self. Second, he analyzes the distinctive rhetorical tropes that construct the Zohar's descriptions of the binary dominions of holy and demonic. Wielding these two methods, Berman demonstrates how the iotas of indicatives, conjunctions, and prepositions problematize the erstwhile hoped-for perfection of Divinity. In reconsidering divine subjectivity in chapter 1, Berman employs Kristeva's psychoanalytic conception of the processes of "ambivalence, splitting, and abjection" in the development of a child's subjectivity. To construct her or his identity, a child must undertake the painful task of identifying the mother as an external entity and, ultimately, cast her as an Other that must be rejected on the path to identifying a coherent self. Applying this approach to the Godhead, Berman argues that in order for the bounded identity of the Holy Ancient One itself to emerge, a similar process of splitting of Self from Self occurs first: identifying and crystallizing the bounded Self that is holy and the bounded Self that is demonic. [End Page 437] Lower reaches of Divinity can then emanate from the contours of a stable, now-perfected Deity. In chapter 2, using the tools of rhetorical analysis, Berman shows how the Zoharic authorship expresses ambivalence about the realms of the holy even before the texts settle into the binaries that allow for more clearly demarcated identities of the holy and demonic domains. As a result, the literary expressions of the text itself construct the Zohar's dialectical vision of demonic and holy realms. One key device that Berman exposes is "anaphora," namely, "the production of a textual effect through repetition of the first word or phrase in contiguous sentences or clauses" (76). Throughout the Zohar this device appears as the viral meme "There is x … and there is x." Berman trains our gaze upon the rhetorical parallelism, and thus the near identity of the two terms—holy and demonic—under comparison. To be sure, another reader might contend that these orderly patterns communicate a message to its pious audience; every step is fraught with the potential for holy or wicked behavior. Thus, where Berman emphasizes the epistemological potential for confusion, one might also see the pietistic concern with moral and religious slippage. Where Tishby had used the descriptor "catharsis" to describe Divinity's first acts of expelling dross, Berman contends that the Zohar denies the presupposition of a demarcated subject performing the expulsion, and that indeed, the unnamed subject is nameless precisely because it is still in formation. This is his explanation of Divinity's self-creating narratives that begin with actions that have no subjects. Berman views the dualistic ontology constructed through techniques of rhetorical parallelism as an act of "splitting," in which a protosubject that has traits from both sides of the nascent divide produces a demonic Other through the "crystallization of elements that the subject finds incompatible with a coherent self and that become dissociated from, and antagonistic to, that self" (39). In chapter 3, Berman explores the ways...