Opening to the Mystery
EITAN P. FISHBANE
SHMA.COM
If, as Plato and Aristotle suggested, human ature is characterized fundamentally by the ability to reason, by the rational processes
that distinguish us from other animals, it is
equally true that we are a species blessed with
the ability to intuit a dimension that lies beyond
rationality, beyond the arguments that the logical
mind can assert. For in addition to our remarkable ability to solve the puzzles and problems of
empirical reality, to employ our rational faculties
in the service of human understanding, and in
pursuit of the good — we are also filled with a
sense of the mysterious character of life and
Being, with an awareness that there is so much
that eludes our capable rational minds. This
powerful sensation vibrates in the soul of the visual artist, the poet, and the musician. And the
immediacy of this intuition beats in the heart of
the mystic, irrespective of his or her religious tradition and affiliation. It is an eruption of
Presence — divine, otherworldly. It is a moment
of spiritual revelation, when the overwhelming
power of the ungraspable rushes into the terrain
of an everyday moment, transforming the ordinary into a sanctuary of wonder.
This sense of mystery is captured by Walt
Whitman in one of the greatest paeans to nature
in all of American verse. A lyric celebration of the
grass and the earth (situated within his song of
individuality, of sensuality), Leaves of Grass is the
poet’s reflection on the power of an encounter
with the natural world to evoke that palpable
awe, that awareness that there are certain deep
elements of our experience that resist our ability
to explain and to quantify; these elements stand
before us instead as markers of the transcendent
located radiantly in the domain of the here-and-now. In Whitman’s description of the touch of
grass, the feel and sensuality of the natural world
opens the heart of the innocent; it mystifies the
poet who comes before the wonders of the earth
as a supplicant in religious devotion. The object
of experience is elusive, unknown, and impenetrable; it awakens love in the embrace of the naturalist, it suggests the ethereal presence of
Divinity someway in the corners. The poet stands
in the radiant temple of grass and soil with hands
opened in prayer, with a mind alert to the world’s
majesty and a quest for the sacred.
The mystic shares in the perception of the
poet, in the intuition of the artist, and in the in-
spiration received by the maker of music. Across
the spectrum of religious traditions, and within
Judaism in particular, the mystic approaches the
world as a reality charged with concealed meaning and purpose — life as we know it is just the
outer surface of Being, so much more glows beneath the rim of first glances, beyond the edge of
our rational minds. Every element of the world
holds a trace of Divinity, serves as a marker for
the sublime and the transcendent. The spiritual
seeker enters through these doors of perception,
these portals into a transformed state of consciousness; from the forms and things of this
earth we are led to the upper chambers of Divine
light. Mi-besari ehezeh elohah, says Job. “From
my flesh I will see God.” The physical is the
opening into the metaphysical; through this
world and its embodied nature we come to understand the spiritual depth that lies within.
The Zohar and other kabbalistic texts frequently represent
the moments of mystical experience and insight as a flash
of lightening, as a blinding radiance that consumes the
present, and then, in an instant, is gone.
This is one of the core meanings of the kabbalistic use of the word sod (secret), and of its
Aramaic rendering as raza in the pages of the
Zohar. To the mystic, the world is wrapped in a
garment of mystery: from out of the darkness of
an infinite expanse there comes the spark of illumination, the promise of ultimate perception.
The words of the Torah, the life of mitzvot, the
rhythms and shapes of the natural domain —
these vibrate with the force of Divinity, veils of
otherworldly incandescence. And we who
come before the mystery of the All, aware of a
depth beyond our grasp — we stand in the
open field of a new twilight air that streams into
us with the rush of solar birth. We can feel the
immensity of Being on our shoulders — the
weight of the past, the present at once sublime
and tragic, the hope for a future, some unseen
redemption. In this fragile and mortal body
there is a mystery almost unspeakable; it is the
realization that our time is fleeting and soon
gone, that many have walked this path before
us, only to return to the absorbing oneness of
the earth — mute, perhaps remembered, and
then speaking to us in the texts that survive.
Dr. Eitan P. Fishbane is
assistant professor of Jewish
Thought at The Jewish
Theological Seminary in New
York. He is the author of As
Light Before Dawn: The Inner
World of a Medieval Kabbalist
(Stanford University Press).
