Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar by Melila Hellner-Eshed

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar by Melila Hellner-Eshed Nathaniel Berman Melila Hellner-Eshed. Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar. Translated by Raphael Dascalu. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 480 pp. “It is time to act for God; they have violated your Torah” (Ps 119:126). It is with this verse’s urgent exhortation that the Zoharic sage Shimon bar Yoḥai announces the project of the Idra Rabba, the “Great Assembly”—the subject of Hellner-Eshed’s magnificent book. This project is nothing less than the tikkun, the “configuration,” of the divine personae. The psalmist’s exhortation, probably intended as a plea for God to act, becomes the Zoharic theurgist’s aspiration to act upon the divine realm. Moreover, Hellner-Eshed asserts, it is only through such a theurgical project that “religion” itself can be “healed” (4)—in our own time, as much as in the thirteenth century of the Zoharic writers. The Idra Rabba is perhaps the most influential composition of the Zoharic literature, largely through its impact on the sixteenth-century Lurianic revision of Kabbalah. Yet its extravagant anthropomorphism has also rendered it inaccessible for many, especially for those under the sway of Maimonideanism. Undaunted, Hellner-Eshed seeks to do more than merely make this composition legible to modern readers. Rather, she seeks to reveal its spiritual depth, imaginative power, and narrative virtuosity—and to enable us to experience, or at least glimpse, its vital stakes. Hellner-Eshed is a renowned teacher and scholar of the Zoharic literature. Her skill in bringing to life the most recondite texts is evident on every page. Indeed, the experiential dimension was central to her own methodology. The Idra [End Page 185] required her “to experience different states of consciousness,” as well as to “internalize a mythic language with a unique syntax, grammar, and inner landscapes” (5). Only thus, she suggests, can a reader engage fully with this strange text. In “configuring” the divine personae, the Idra elaborately depicts their eyes, noses, hair, beards, brains, torsos, sexual organs, and so on. A “surreal—even psychedelic” (4) atmosphere emerges as the text engages in both minute examination of anatomical details and hyperbolic magnification of fantastical dimensions—the latter exemplified by the “120 million worlds” dwelling within the “skull” of the divine persona called ʿAttiqa Qaddisha, the Holy Ancient One. The Idra interweaves these descriptions with theosophical symbolism, midrashic allusions, and biblical verses. “Configuration” is a translation of tikkun particularly apt for Hellner-Eshed’s approach—for the malaise which requires “healing” is what we can call the “disfiguration” of the divine. This disfiguration takes two principal forms. The first is the denial that the divine has a “face” in any sense but the most allegorical. Maimonides’s “profound influence in articulating a radically abstract theology” provoked the Idra’s “bold refutation,” with “personal and fantastical accounts of the Divine” (43). The second is the constriction of the divine face to an exclusively male, nationally specific potentate, the “King of the cosmos and the God of Israel” (69). For Hellner-Eshed, the Idra is impelled by the need to “heal” (22) this constricted divine face, that of Zeʿeir Anpin, the “Small Countenance” or “Short-Tempered One”—as well as the Judaism associated with it, “devoted to its dualistic, legal, systematic, and ethical aspects” (69). Zeʿeir is both the “omnipotent God of the Hebrew Bible” and a “distressed figure, a deficient and diminished deity” (52–53). Nevertheless, the Idra does not reject this deity but seeks to integrate him into a richer divine life. This “reconfiguration” requires bringing Zeʿeir in relation to two other divine personae: ʿAttiqa Qaddisha, “the divine as a primordial and undifferentiated being” (69), and “the Queen,” a female divine persona. Zeʿeir is a lesser progeny of ʿAttiqa, the latter also called the “Elongated Countenance” or “Patient One.” Standing alone, Zeʿeir possesses a “dualistic consciousness” and an excess of judgment (76). By contrast, ʿAttiqa is a “non-dual Divinity” (6) of pure compassion. ʿAttiqa has the power to “heal” his progeny, particularly through his...