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...
7 comments:
It definitely is interesting to read a modern 'traditional' attack on the Zohar!
It seems primarily based on the Mitpachas Sefarim, which is not RYE's best work...
I wonder what drove the author to write this.
I suspect he did it because he (thought) he could. It's interesting that out of the myriad kashyes he could ask on the Zohar, he focused on the weaker ones.
By the way, I can't rig up Haloscan because I'm on blogger-beta. I'm gonna have to use this till b-b supports hs.
I don't know what you mean by him doing it because he thought he could (that is, up to the task).
I meant what motivated him to take on the Zohar in the first place?
Could be he's a Litvak stuck in a Chassidshe yeshiva. Could be he heard something, got ahold of the Mitpachas somehow (I'd love to know how) and came out convinced. Like I said, he doesn't seem to have read much of Sholem or Shadal, et al, though his lack of sources seems very Sholemesque.
The link to "An Analysis of the Authenticity of the Zohar" leads to a page that states "User Account Exceeded Bandwidth" along with an ad portraying some immodestly dressed women...
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