The Sefer Yetzirah

To continue the theme of last post, Rabbi Chareidi discusses the Sefer Yetzirah. Sefer Yetzirah is important because it is the earliest Kabbalistic work, predating the Gemara, provided that we accept that it is a book of Kaballah. The gemara (quoted by Chareidi) seems to say that it is, although it may be possible to make a chilluk between Sefer Yetzirah and Hilchos Yetzirah. That being said, there have been other interpretation of SY; if and when the time comes, we will explore Shadal's understanding of SY in his Vikuach. I found one attempt to interpret (and reconstruct) SY very amusing: In the Jewish Quarterly Review, Phineas Mordell attempts to demonstrate that SY is an extremely truncated grammar. (I may decide to comment on it later; if I do, then I will post it. If not, you can email me and I'll send it over.) In another article, Eliyahu Rosh-Pinnah says this theory was summarily rejected by the other kabbalogists.
But that's beside the point here. I wanted to point out an interesting inconsistency in the Analysis:

Because of the gemarah which indicates that SY is, in fact Kabbalistic, RC accepts a "core" which Hashem gave to Avraham Avinu. (This is not dissimilar to the rabbi he cites later, who maintains that the Zohar also must have a legitimate "core".) However, on the same page, he tries to downplay the kabbalisishkeit of the SY by naming commentators who held differently.

The Zohar

The first PDF to be featured here is also one of the first to hit the collection: An Analysis of the Authenticity of the Zohar by a Rabbi "Chareidi." To the best of my knowledge, it first made an appearence online on the "Godol Hador's" website. The website died, GH's subscription to wherever he kept the PDF file expired, and the file itself disappeared. I myself hadn't saved it anywhere immediately accesible: I had to hunt it down in one of my old computers. But I found it and reposted it online, so as far as I know, I've got the only public accessible copy.

The basic premise of the "work" is... well, I don't really know. Maybe if you, dear readers, read it you'll find one. A distinct theme that runs throughout the whole thing is that either the Zohar, Kaballah in general, or both, is bad.

The reading, as you can tell, is quite painful, even by Yeshivishe standards, but that's not such a big deal; the ikkar is not how he says something, but rather, what he says.

Let's go through this section by section.

1.1 is ok. I actually think I like his vertl on Reishis Chochmoh. OK.
1.2 is basically OK too. It's obvious that the author has an Ashkenazi superiority complex, which manifests itself in his contention that while the Sephardim were too stupid to call the Zohar for what it was, the Ashkenazim would have done it in a jiffy, if it were not so entrenched in their lives.

This is interesting too:

Ashkenazim too, while most attributed great holiness to it, felt themselves too removed from the mysterious text and too lowly and unworthy to study it - certainly en masse (hence, in my opinion the many important points of note in its context, that would undoubtedly have shocked some of them, evaded them, and the book rested safe enshrouded in mystery among the normally more critical Ashkenazim, and blindly accepted by the Sephardim until by the time of the Ari it became too late to challenge).

The description that he gives makes it seem that the Ashkenazim were not, in fact, the more critical of the two. They just believed their Sephardi brethren (despite the fact that they were ignorant and gullible), and didn't actually set out to learn it. The question of "Why not?" is interesting. I don't know when the first record of Ashkenazim learning the Zohar is, but I'd speculate that there was quite a gap.

The Zohar, for the record, was first published in the thirteenth century:

Meditation and Kabbalah

Why was there this gap?
That will have to wait till next time...

The First Post

Some people have blogs dedicated to their dogs.
Some people have blogs dedicated to their day-to-lives.
Some people have blogs dedicated to their belly buttons.
This blog is dedicated to my PDF collection.
You see, I've always been a bibliophile. When I was a teenager, any money that hit my grubby hand would go straight to buying a sefer of some sort. It literally burned a hole in my pocket. So since my bar mitzvah, I've accumulated a rather impressive collection, if I do say so myself. But books cost money, and as I slowly began to learn the value of money (I don't think you truly learn the value of money until you have bills to pay and kids to feed) my enthusiasm for bookbuying waned. I still can wander around a seforim store like a little kid in a candy shop, picking up this, looking at that, and reading the title page of the other (I always read the shaar blatt. Always.) And I still buy way too much, but not as much as I did before.
Then eventually I discovered the wealth of stuff on the internet, and it's Eichler's all over again. I first found Hebrewbooks, then Seforimonline, and then, like a Holy Grail, Halacha Brurah. Hours of fun.
Then I hit the journals, and that was a whole other story. I read stuff I wouldn't have deigned to look at elsewhere. I collected them. It was like seforim shopping, but free. Eventually, I accumulated a shamefully vast collection, more than I can hope to read in a hundred years.
This blog is dedicated to these seforim and articles. More specifically, it is dedicated to discussing and evaluating their ideas. Some of them are thought-provoking. Some of them are deadly boring. Some of them are flaming heresy. Some of them aren't sure. I hope to use this blog to express and preserve my ideas, and if I get readers who can contribute to their own knowledge or ideas, all the better.