Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein

not even learned to read until he was a grown and married man. He had married above himself, a rich man’s daughter, and she had agreed to marry him only if he became a scholar. He and his son learned to read at the same time. (I remember learning this in kindergarten, when it had a special enchantment.) He died as a martyr at the hands of the Romans, by legend being flayed to death at the age of ninety. The traditional tale is that Simeon bar Yohai hid from the Romans in a cave near the Dead Sea, fed for years on a spring of freshwater and the fruit of a carob tree that sprang up in his hiding place, and it was there, in the miraculous hiding place, that the mystical form of Midrash, or Torah interpretation, is said to have been inspired, though Rabbi Akiva, too, had possessed esoteric knowledge.
    The Spanish kabbalists traced their ideas back to this ancient tradition, but some new spring was flowing into their thoughts as well, and this new spring, too, was very ancient, only it wasn’t Jewish. It was Greek. It was the thinking of Plato, most especially as it had found expression in the Neoplatonists.
    The Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–c. 1057) was a Neoplatonist living in Gerona. He presented his metaphysics in his major work Mekor Hayyim (The Source of Life), which was written in Arabic. (The Arabic version is no longer extant, but a medieval Latin translation, Fons vitae , exists.) It is written in dialogue form, as Plato had written, and the only authority who is ever mentioned by him is Plato. Although Ibn Gabirol was an undeniably Jewish thinker whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, Mekor Hayyim is rigorously nonsectarian. As the Encyclopedia Judaica puts it succinctly, “ Mekor Hayyim is unique in the body of Jewish philosophical-religious literature of the Middle Ages, because it expounds a complete philosophical-religious system wholly lacking in specifically Jewish content and terminology. The author does not mention biblical persons or events and does not quote the Bible, Talmud, or Midrash. To some extent this feature of the work determined its unusual destiny.” 5 Part of its unusual destiny is that its ideas and even its terminology found their way into Spanish kabbalah.
    Kabbalah, in contrast to mainstream Jewish thinking, which concentrates almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputation, speculates heavily on metaphysical questions, especially those concerning the beginning of all things. Why, as philosophers are wont to put it, is there something rather than nothing? Why did God—referred to in kabbalistic terminology as the Ein Sof , That Without End—have to create the world? What is the relationship between the Ein Sof , existing outside of time, and the created temporal world? How does, how can , eternality interact with temporality?
    According to kabbalistic thinking, the Ein Sof is beyond our understanding, beyond all our words and concepts. But there are what the kabbalists referred to as the Sefirot , the emanations of His infinite power, in which the divine attributes are turned into acts of creation, and Sefirot can be grasped by the human understanding; they can be gleaned from the structure of being. The Ein Sof is unrevealed, non-manifest, and unknowable. Only the emanations of his power (the Sefirot ) transform the Ein Sof into the Creator-God and a personal God.
    As the kabbalistic tradition meditates on the beginning of all things, so, too, it ponders the awful mystery of suffering, most poignantly, most bafflingly, represented by the example of children who suffer, children who die. The Zohar says of children “who still as sucklings are taken from their mother’s breast” that “the whole world weeps; the tears that come from these babes have no equal, their tears issue from the innermost and farthest places of the hearts, and the entire world is perplexed: … [I]s it needful that these unhappy infants should die, who are without sin