Mystical Laws

Borges and Kabbalah

Virginia Gutiérrez Berner

State University of New York, Buffalo

The connection between Borges’s fiction and Kabbalah is not a

hard one to make, in the sense that Borges’s style and themes seem power-
fully indebted to Kabbalistic conceptions. The notion of an infinite book, of a
book that contains the universe, a book that is equal to the world, a text that
can magically operate in reality, and the possibility of endless interpretation
(an endless interpretation that deals with the world as text, as much as with
written texts) are all recurrent themes in Borges’s writings. These notions are
also among the best known aspects of Kabbalah.
Criticism has not ignored this link; Saúl Sosnowski declares in Borges
y Cábala that “This work attempts to show the connection between some
Borges texts, and Kabbalah, with regard to understanding the Verb as an
instrument for creation, and not merely as an arbitrary symbol to name the
elements of reality” (1976, 16–17, my translation). Similarly, although per-
forming a closer reading, Jaime Alazraki’s Borges and Kabbalah (1988) em-
phasizes the connections between Kabbalistic symbols and hermeneutical

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009, pp. 137–xxx, issn 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

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138 ● My stical L aw s

methods, and thematic and structural elements that abound in Borges’s

fiction. Also, Alazraki considers the interpretative approach of Kabbalah as
closely connected to literary criticism. Thus, he applies certain Kabbalistic
interpretative conceptions to Borges’s own work. Edna Aizenberg has also
studied Kabbalah and Borges; she devotes The Aleph Weaver (1984) first
to studying Borges’s biographical and intellectual links to Jewish culture
and then, like Alazraki and Sosnowski, to finding parallels between Borges’s
work and Kabbalistic conceptions. Also like Alazraki, Aizenberg points out
the connection between Kabbalah and contemporary criticism: “Borges’s
view of literature as the revisionist glossing of traditional texts, a view which
Bloom ultimately traces to a medieval model, the Kabbalah, has become the
dernier cri in critical thinking about actors and their texts” (106). Aizenberg
also quotes Claudia Hoffer Gosselin’s explanation of intertextuality theory to
explain that Hoffer Gosselin considers intertextuality as a recent, “profane
restatement of the Kabbalah’s literary theory” (107). Thus, contemporary
interpretation and Kabbalistic hermeneutics seem to meet in Borges’s work,
provoking interpretations that study the connection between Borges’s work
and Kabbalah, while also allowing such connection to shape the notion of
interpretation itself.
Borges wrote two nonfiction texts that explicitly deal with Kabbalah, “A
Defense of the Kabbalah” and “The Kabbalah.” Both state the Kabbalistic
dimensions in which Borges is interested, especially the notion of the Scrip-
tures as a text that demands endless interpretation because of its supernatu-
ral origin, which makes it impervious to error and accident. This interest can
be productively read in connection to his rewriting of Christian themes in
“The Gospel According to Mark” and “Three versions of Judas.” Rather than
dwelling on the similarities between Borges’s writing and Kabbalistic sym-
bols and interpretative methods, it is interesting to understand how Borges’s
view of Kabbalah (regardless of the accuracy of his understanding of its doc-
trine) shapes the interpretations of Christian history, law, and Messianism
that these two short stories entail. The fact that, according to Kabbalistic
hermeneutics and to Borges’s understanding of it, it is necessary to inter-
pret the Torah endlessly—including interpretations that differ, conflict, and
ultimately threaten to cancel one another—implies that all possible law has
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 139

room within the law of the Torah: that there is nothing outside the law, since
it becomes part of it from the moment it comes to exist. Conceiving Judas
as someone who fulfills the law rather than transgressing it, as in “Three
versions of Judas,” or rewriting the event of a contemporary crucifixion as an
extreme interpretation of the Gospel (thus playing with the idea of prophecy
and law in the event of Christ’s own crucifixion, as well as questioning the
very notion of misreading), as in “The Gospel According to Mark,” shapes and
undermines Christian history from the perspective of Kabbalistic interpreta-
tion. Everything that occurs determines the law, expands its limits, rewrites
it; and at the same time, everything is already in the law, operating within
it, and structured by it. Thus, the existence of transgression or outlaws is
impossible: Kabbalistic interpretation, as understood by Borges, implies that
everything that can be said was already part of the revelation, and thus even
what appears as heresy is nothing but an unraveling—necessary, true, and
lawful—of the law.
Borges begins “A Defense of the Kabbalah” by stating about this justifi-
cation of the Jewish mystical trend that

Neither the first time it has been attempted, nor the last time it will fail, this
defense is distinguished by two facts. One is my almost complete ignorance
of the Hebrew language: the other, my desire to defend not the doctrine but
rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it.

He then continues to describe them briefly:

These procedures, as is well known, include the vertical reading of sacred

texts, the reading referred to as boustrophedon (one line from left to right,
the following line from right to left), the methodical substitution of certain
letters of the alphabet for others, the sum of the numerical value of the letters,
etc. To ridicule such operations is simple; I prefer to attempt to understand
them (2000, 83)

Thus, he considers as properly Kabbalistic precisely the operations that,

according to Gershom Scholem in Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, are
140 ● My stical L aw s

not really characteristic of it, but rather are an influence of German Has-
sidism. Gematria, “the calculation of the numerical value of Hebrew words,”
and Temurah, the “interexchange of letters according to certain systematic
rules [cannot] be called Kabbalistic in the strict sense of the word. . . . What
really deserves to be called Kabbalism has very little to do with these ‘Kab-
balistic’ practices” (Scholem 1941, 99). Borges must have been aware of this,
since he himself mentions Scholem’s work—especially On the Kabbalah and
its Symbolism—as one of the main sources of his knowledge of Kabbalah.1
Thus, the goal of his essay is to understand Kabbalistic operations, which are
not strictly Kabbalistic but, as Scholem himself acknowledges, are popularly
considered as such. That such a form of textual analysis has the status of
truly Kabbalistic operation, or that it is only marginally Kabbalistic, does
not seem to be an issue for Borges; at least here, he seems interested only in
developing the implications of a doctrine that relies on such hermeneutical
procedures, precisely the more extreme, the easier to understand (and even
ridiculous, as he points out).
Perhaps that is not as relevant as the fact that Borges’s essay does not ac-
tually dwell at all on the details involved in Gematria, Temurah, or Notarikon
(the interpretation of the letters of a word as abbreviations or whole sen-
tences). In flagrant contradiction with his stated purpose, he instead begins
to explain what he considers to be the origin of such interpretative attempts.
The next paragraph considers the “mechanical inspiration” of the Bible as the
first antecedent of Kabbalistic operations; he speaks of a Catholic dogma, but
also about the Islamic conception of the origin of the Koran as one of God’s
attributes, and of Lutheran theologians who consider the Scriptures as “an
incarnation of the Spirit” (2000, 83).
Borges does not return to Kabbalistic hermeneutical methods later, ei-
ther. Rather, he briefly speaks of the Christian notion of the Holy Ghost as
the author of the Bible, to begin immediately to understand it as part of the
trinity, which he considers to be monstrous:

Imagined all at once, its concept of a father, a son, and a ghost, joined in a
single organism, seems like a case of intellectual teratology, a monster which
only the horror of a nightmare could spawn. This is what I believe, although
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 141

I try to bear in mind that every object whose end is unknown to us is provi-
sionally monstrous.

The next paragraph is a brief insight into the trinity’s role in Christian theol-
ogy, which Borges acknowledges as necessary for an effective salvation via
Christ’s sacrifice, even as he considers it as “an intellectual horror, a strangled,
specious infinity like facing mirrors” (2000, 84).That is, even after figuring out
the raison d’être of the “device” that is the trinity, and after understanding its
theological function, the trinity remains monstrous.
Borges then considers the notion of the Holy Ghost, stating that “the
Spirit . . . may be best defined as God’s intimacy with us, His immanence in
our breast,” and that “the third blind person of the entangled Trinity is the
recognized author of the Scriptures.” He also declares that of all the writings
attributed to the Holy Ghost, he is interested in Genesis, “the subject matter
of the Kabbakah.” He explains that “Kabbalists believed, as many Christian
do now, in the divinity of that story, in its deliberate writing by an infinite
intelligence.” He then proceeds to explain the element of chance in different
types of writing; news, for instance, communicates a fact in a straightforward
manner, and the sound and length of the text “are necessarily accidental”
(2000, 85). Opposite is the case of poetry, where what is arbitrary is the mean-
ing, which is subject to sound and rhythm.
Finally, there is a third type of writer, the intellectual one—here Borges
stops talking about the text itself, and considers the writer instead: “In his
handling of prose (Valery, De Quincey) or of verse, he has certainly not
eliminated chance, but he has denied it as much as possible, and restricted
its incalculable compliance.” In his desire to distance himself from chance
as much as he can, such a writer is remotely similar to God, “for Whom
the vague concept of chance holds no meaning,” and is one who knows
everything that happens, that could happen, and even what could never
happen (2000, 85). This God dictated the Scriptures word by word; this
fact “turns the Scriptures into an absolute text, where the collaboration of
chance is calculated at zero” (86). Thus, the ending of the essay is precisely
a justification of the doctrine that Borges had claimed he would not vindi-
cate: “Kabbalists believed . . . in the divinity of that story, in its deliberate
142 ● My stical L aw s

writing by an infinite intelligence” (85). That premise, Borges continues, is

at the heart of the desire of infinite interpretation: “A book impervious to
contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of
revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light . . . How could one not
study it to absurdity, to numerical excess, as did the Kabbalah?” (86). Thus,
“A Defense of the Kabbalah” is not about justifying the methods of Kabbalah
and their general hermeneutical value. Quite the opposite: Borges claims
that they only make sense—and they make a perfect, inevitable sense—
because of the sacred status of the Torah, because the book that inspires
such extreme forms of hermeneutics is a book dictated by God, an unerring,
infinite, and fatal book.
The dimension of Kabbalah that is attractive for Borges is, then, precisely
this connection between the text itself and the way of interpreting it. He does
not defend the hermeneutical methods, but rather argues that the herme-
neutical procedures cannot be isolated from the doctrine upon which they
have their origin: that of a book that is impervious to contingence, to chance.
Borges essay is, as a whole, a negation of its first paragraph: it is not possible
to reject or ignore the Kabbalistic doctrine and at the same time to justify
its methods. Every Kabbalistic operation of can be regarded as the logical,
necessary consequence of the doctrine that regards the book as one of the
attributes of God. Because it is written by God, and everything in it is inten-
tional, interpreting it endlessly makes sense. Perhaps what Borges means
by claiming to defend the hermeneutical methods rather than the doctrine
is simply to acknowledge disingenuously that the Kabbalistic interpretative
operations are equal to its doctrine.
What seems interesting here is something that Borges does not mention,
but that weighs heavily on this topic and on the operations of Kabbalah. A
sacred text could demand, rather than infinite interpretation and recom-
bination, the infinite desire to keep it unchanged, identical to itself. That is
what religious ritual entails—the fidelity to the identity of a repetition that
remains unchanged in repetition. This way, the religious text, or the religious
ritual, does not experience change or decay or improvement but remains
fixed. Thus, what it represented (as ritual) or meant (as text) is erased, oblit-
erated, hidden by the commemoration. Commemoration and repetition thus
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 143

acquire the authoritative status of the true event. The Catholic Church of the
Counter Reformation, to quote a famous example, favored such an approach
toward Sacred Scripture. Mistrusting the interpretative choices and eventual
changes that translation and interpretation entail, the Church controlled
Scriptural commentaries and translations to the vernacular by forbidding
them in the Valdes Index. That was as the negative dimension of the will to
control; a positive one was to institute the Vulgata as the official version of
the Bible, as the one to which quotes and sermons would refer.
The decision to invest in the Latin translation the authority of the original
speaks to the concern with orthodoxy; the sacredness of the text under-
goes one interpretation—that of the translation into Latin, blessed by the
Western Church, and thus intertwined with its power—and then remains
unchangeable, definite, as the ultimate authority. Of course, there is an ele-
ment of arbitrariness, of chance, in such an institution of the sacred text.
The concern seems to be, more than preserving the accuracy of an original,
the desire to institute, no matter by what means, a text that only after the
fact will be considered the original, divine expression, impervious to error or
change—and that, as such, will also guarantee the authority of the Church
that instituted it. But it also means that such text is self-sufficient, perfect,
the ultimate word of God; no change or interpretation is necessary, because
it is in itself all the interpretation that is required: it is the Sacred text and
its commentary at the same time. It is an original better than the true origi-
nal—it is, in fact, the interpretative fulfillment of the original, the fulfillment
of the promise implicit in the original. If the Torah is a promise of revelation,
then for the Catholic Church that promise is fulfilled and closed in one fixed
interpretation, one book, and one body of beliefs.
All of the above seem to indicate a complete and radical opposition
between the Christian Bible and the Torah according to Kabbalah; it seems
as if Kabbalah did not institute the Torah as an unchangeable text, but con-
sidered it as completely open to interpretation and susceptible to alteration,
combination, and permutations. Actually, it is more problematic—and more
paradoxical—than that.2 Gershom Scholem states in Major Trends of Jew-
ish Mysticism that for all Jewish mystics, “the Torah . . . does not consist
merely of chapters, phrases and words; rather it is to be regarded as the
144 ● My stical L aw s

living incarnation of the Divine wisdom which eternally sends out new rays
of light” (1941, 14). Scholem also points out that the mystics of all religions

continuously and bitterly complain of the utter inadequacy of words to ex-

press their true feeling, but, for all of that, they glory in them; they indulge
in rhetoric and never weary of trying to express the inexpressible through
words. . . . Jewish Mysticism is no exception, yet it is distinguished by two
unusual characteristics that may in some way be interrelated. What I have in
mind is, first of all, the striking restraint observed by the Kabbalists in refer-
ring to the supreme [mystical] experience; and secondly, their metaphysically
positive attitude towards language as God’s own instrument. . . . Language
in its purest form, that is, Hebrew, according to the Kabbalists, reflects the
fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other words, it has mystical
value. Speech reaches God because it comes from God. (1941, 15–17)

Thus, in the case of Kabbalah, unlike other religions—especially Christi-

anity—language, and specifically the text of the Torah, is far from being an
obstacle or even an enabler of the mystical experience. It is radically more
relevant than that: it is, actually, the place where mysticism occurs.3 Ecstatic
experience is achieved by reflecting on the letters of the Torah, by combining
and permuting them, by visualizing them. Moshe Idel quotes in The Mystical
Experience of Abraham Abulafia the vision of Rabbi Isaac of Acre, who writes:

I woke up from my sleep and there suddenly came for me three Tetragrammata,
each one in its own vocalization and place in the secret of the ten sefirot in
the void, in the middle line, in which depends the entire mystery [of the four
worlds]. . . . And I rejoiced in them as one who has found a rare treasure.
(Idel 1988, 103)

Similarly, Scholem quotes at length the testimony of a student of the Talmud

who is instructed by a Kabbalist, and who after combining letters, sets out
“to take up the Great Name of God, consisting in seventy-two names, per-
muting and combining it. But when I had done this for a little while, behold,
the letters took on in my eyes the shape of great mountains . . . and it was
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 145

as if I were not in this world” (1941, 148). Thus, in this case and many others,
mystical revelation depends precisely upon experimenting with the order
and value of letters.
However, at the same time, Kabbalists are also adamant about how the
Torah is eternal and unchangeable. In On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism,
Scholem quotes a famous fragment by the scribe Rabbi Meir, who accounts
how Rabbi Ishmael admonished him: “My son, be careful in your work, be-
cause it is the work of God; if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too
many, you will destroy the whole world” (1965, 39). Scholem also explains
that for Nahmanides, this implied that “the scrolls of the Torah must be
observed with the utmost care. Every single letter counts” (38). Also, for Kab-
balists, the Torah is considered to preexist the world, to precede creation
(41). Yet, in spite of this, which seems to favor the conservation of a fixed,
unchanging tradition, one of Kabbalah’s most famous main features is not
only its openness to interpretation and recombination of letters, but also the
conception that a new Torah will be given. Scholem quotes Nahmanides’s
statement about the existence of “an authentic tradition showing that the
entire Torah consists of the names of God and that the words we read can
be divided in a very different way” (38).
Scholem also mentions that for the Kabbalistic book Ra’ya Mehemma,
“the Torah is an inexhaustible well, which no pitcher (kad) can ever empty.
The Hebrew word kad has the numerical value 24; to the author this means
that even the twenty-four books of the traditional Biblical canon cannot ex-
haust the mystical depth of the Torah” (1965, 60). In a very compelling image
dating back to “the height of the Talmudic era,” Scholem explains that “the
Holy Scriptures are like a large house with many, many rooms, and . . . outside
each room lies a key—but it is not the right one. To find the right keys that
will open those doors—that is the great and arduous task” (12). The most
important Kabbalistic book, the Zohar, includes the Kabbalistic notion of
the fourfold interpretation of the Scriptures. Similarly to Christian exegesis
in the Middle Ages, the Zohar considers the Torah to have a literal, allegori-
cal, Talmudic and Aggadic, and mystical meaning. However, the Zohar not
only contributed the fourfold reading of the Torah, but pushed interpretation
even further by bringing forward the notion that “every letter had seventy
146 ● My stical L aw s

aspects, or literally, ‘faces.’ . . . The meaning of the text cannot be exhausted in

any finite number of lights or interpretations, and the number seventy stands
here of course for the inexhaustible totality of the divine word” (62–63). This,
of course, opens the ground for reinterpretation in an extremely radical way.
Thus, there is ambivalence in the Kabbalistic attitude about the Torah: on
the one hand, it is sacred and unchangeable—to the point of its preceding
creation, and of its being somehow closer to an attribute of God than to one
of His creatures. On the other hand, it allows—more than that: it demands—
endless interpretation, to the point of problematizing its status of unchange-
ability, at least in theory. A conception that appears over and over again in
Kabbalistic texts is the idea that not even one letter of the Torah should
be altered; and at the same time, Kabbalists often quote, with a Messianic
intent, that a new Torah will be given—a new Torah will go forth from God
(Isaiah 51:4). How does this openness to radical interpretation manifest itself
in Kabbalistic mysticism, even while maintaining its fidelity to tradition?
Kabbalists solve the issue by connecting the Torah both to the fallen
history of humankind after Adam’s sin and to Messianism. They do this by
dividing the Torah into two, by considering that there are two Torahs that are
also, simultaneously, somehow one. The Torah that is available to the people
is not the only one. This can be more easily understood if one examines what
Scholem considers to be the principles underlying the Torah: the Torah as
God’s name, the Torah as a living organism, and the Torah as the “infinite
meaning of the divine word” (1965, 37). For Josef Gikatila, a thirteen-century
Kabbalist, “the Torah is not itself the name of God but the explication of the
name of God” (Scholem 1965, 42) in the sense that it is

a living texture, a “textus” in the literal sense of the word, into which the one
true name, the tetragrammaton, is woven in a secret, indirect way, but also
directly as a kind of leitmotiv. The nucleus in any case is the tetragrammaton.
If Gikatila had been asked exactly how this weaving was done, he wound
doubtless have answered with his teacher Abraham Abulafia that the basic
elements, the name YHWH, the other names of God, and the appellatives, or
kinnuyim, or rather, their consonants, went through several sets of permuta-
tions and combinations in accordance with the formulas set forth by the
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 147

Talmudists, until at length they took the form of the Hebrew sentences of
the Torah. (43)

Gikatila also claims that “the letters [of God’s name] are the mystical body of
God” (Scholem 1965, 44). The Torah “is a name, but this name is constructed
like a living organism” (45). In other words, the Torah, as the name of God, is
not simply a written representation, a means of communication. Rather, it is
alive—it is the living name of God. Moshe Idel quotes an even more radical
idea in Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation; for fourteenth-
century Kabbalist Recanati, “the Holy One, blessed He be, is nothing outside
the Torah, and the Torah is nothing that is outside Him” (Idel 2002, 122). Yet
this living organism, this mystical body of God that for some mystics is God,
is twofold: Scholem also quotes a Kabbalistic text that declares that there are
two Torahs: the written one and the oral one, where the latter is constituted
of the tradition and commentaries around the former. This Kabbalistic text
considers that “the form of the written Torah is that of the colors of white
fire, and the form of the oral Torah has colored forms as of black fire,” which
stem, significantly, from a Torah that was “not yet unfolded.” The black fire of
the oral Torah is like ink in a parchment, which renders the white fire of the
written Torah visible; without the former, the latter cannot be read (1965, 49).
Later on, in the sixteenth century, the Safed school of Kabbalists consid-
ered that there are 600,000 aspects and meanings of the Torah—one for each

soul of Israel who went out of Egypt and receive the Torah at Mount Sinai. . . .
With the help of the Zohar, the Safed Kabbalists developed the further idea
that the Torah, which in its visible form contains only some 3,400 letters, is,
in some mysterious way, made up of 600,000. Each individual in Israel pos-
sesses a letter in this mystical Torah, to which his soul is attached. (Scholem
1965, 65)

Also, an Italian Kabbalist considers that the Torah as it was engraved on the
original, broken tablets, had 600,000 letters, and that “only in the second
tablets did it assume its shorter form, which, however, thanks to a secret way
of combining letters, still indicates the original number of 600,000 letters
148 ● My stical L aw s

which form the mystical body of the Torah” (1965, 65). Many Kabbalistic
trends further developed these ideas in the direction that there is more than
one Torah: one is an emanation of God and precedes creation, whereas the
other one is created and wouldn’t have existed if humankind hadn’t sinned.
Many Kabbalists, including Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria, reflected
on the status that the Torah had before the Fall and on the status that it
will have in the Messianic age. According to them, and in general lines,
the Torah related to laws and to history came as a “garment” to the true,
spiritual Torah after Adam sinned. With the Messiah’s arrival, that garment
will no longer be necessary, and the spiritual Torah of before the Fall will
be restored. Scholem considers the most “outspoken” version of this notion
to be the one explained by Rabbi Elihayu Kohen in the eighteenth century.
The letters of the Torah were rearranged to contain “earthly things” such as
death and levirate marriage because of Adam’s sin (1965, 74). With the com-
ing of the Messiah, Eliyahu Kohen claims that “God will annul the present
combination of letters that form the words of our present Torah and will
compose the letters into new words. . . . Does this mean that the Torah is not
eternally valid? No, it means that the scroll of the Torah will be as it is now,
but that God will teach us to read in accordance to another arrangement of
letters” (Scholem 1965, 75). For the author of Sefer Ha-Temunah, the letters
of the Torah are rearranged in different cosmic cycles, depending upon the
dominant attribute of God at the time; “every shemittah [cosmic cycle] men
will read something differently in the Torah, because in each one the divine
wisdom of the primordial Torah appears under a different aspect” (Scholem
1965, 80). Also, Kabbalists of this school did “express the belief that in our
shemittah . . . a letter of the Torah is missing.” A radical view of this belief
states that “the complete Torah contained 23 letters, [and] it is only because
this letter is missing that we now read positive and negative ordinances in
the Torah” (80–81). Similarly, there is a Kabbalistic belief in invisible parts of
the Torah, which will be revealed in the Messianic age, and where the blanks,
the white of the Torah, will also be readable (82).
Thus, the linguistic optimism of Kabbalah mystics is paradoxical. It is
condemned never to suffice, to be subject to this particular shemittah and to
the current fallen condition of a creation that also affects the Torah, yet this
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 149

very same fact is what allows for endless interpretation, for the incredibly
powerful contemplation and combination of letters. It is rooted in the failure
of original sin, yet it also opens the future toward the coming of the Messiah,
and it opens combination and interpretation as preceding Messianic arrival.
It also, significantly, incorporates history into the body of the sacred text: it
connects its readability, its susceptibility to be interpreted, precisely to the
failure that human history, as marked by Adam’s sin, entails. Precisely be-
cause of this, at their core, Kabbalistic interpretations are the exact opposite
of the Christian reading of the Scriptures as explained above. Everything is
in the sacred text, yet such an “everything” is not immediately evident. It
does not depend upon the fixed quality of the text, on the impossibility to
interpret it, to contest other interpretations, to challenge them. Quite on
the contrary: the perfect text that is God and is the universe requires, in the
version allowed to people, an exhaustive interpretation, recombination, and
analysis. Only thus is the sacred text fulfilled, because for all of its perfection,
for all of the necessity of maintaining it as it is, it is not finished in itself and
by itself.
Thus, endless interpretation and the promise of revelation, rather than
revelation itself, seem to be the experience of the Torah that Kabbalists can
have. Scholem states that for Rabbi Mendel,

All that Israel heard was the aleph with which in the Hebrew text the first
command begins, the aleph of the word anokhi, “I.” This strikes me as a highly
remarkable statement, providing much food for thought. For in Hebrew the
consonant aleph represents nothing more than the position taken by the
larynx when a word begins with a vowel. Thus the aleph might be said to
denote the source of all articulate sound, and indeed the Kabbalists always
regarded it as the spiritual root of all letters. (1965, 30)

It is not, thus, the content as such that is the key to the Kabbalistic reading of
the Torah, but rather the event of revelation that sets in motion the possibil-
ity of interpretation. Scholem also mentions Franz Rosenzweig’s observation
about the delivering of the laws on Mount Sinai when he writes in a letter
to Martin Buber that “the only immediate content of revelation is revelation
150 ● My stical L aw s

itself ” (Scholem 1965, 30). The absence of specific meaning implies that the
Torah as we can read it is nothing but interpretation.
Paradoxically, the Torah is both perfect and imperfect, incomplete. And
yet, it is perfect precisely because it is not finished, because it is not read-
able in its entirety, and such unreadability speaks of Messianic hope. Its
diminished current perfection is directly related to its actual transcendent
perfection and to the possibility of glimpsing it mystically via combination
and interpretation. An extremely compelling point is made by Rabbi Eleazar,
according to Scholem: “The various sections of the Torah were not given in
their correct order. For if they had been given in their correct order, anyone
who read them would be able to wake the dead and perform miracles. For
this reason the correct order and arrangement of the Torah were hidden and
are known only to the Holy One” (1965, 37). Thus, the most perfect text (in
the sense of being given by God, and allowing both mystical experience and
magical operations) is coded, must be deciphered, and is lacking its correct,
proper structure. Moreover, and more significantly, its perfection depends
precisely on such a lack, such disarrangement, such coded status. This occurs
partly because, as Rabbi Eleazar hints, this is what links it to the “Holy One,”
who is the only one to know it as it should be, but also because it opens
the ground for the interpretations of the people of Israel to be necessary; in
Lurianic Kabbalah,

every word of the Torah has six thousand faces, that is, layers of meaning
or entrances, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of
Mount Sinai, each face is turned toward only one of them; he alone can see it
and deciphered it. Each man has his unique access to Revelation. Authority
no longer resides in a single unmistakable meaning of the divine communica-
tion, but in its infinite capacity of taking new forms. (13)

Thus, the disaster of history also has a positive side: the people of Israel be-
come necessary for the rereading and interpretation of the Torah. This settles
the relevance of the community of Israel; the plurality of interpretation is not
exclusively within the realm of the Torah, but includes the people of Israel; or
rather, the Torah, in its condition as a living organism, is rooted in the people
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 151

whose history has determined its letter, its visible form. Community, sacred
text, and Messianism are thus united.
It is extremely relevant to underline the connection between the end-
less interpretation that the Torah demands, and Borges’s fascination for it,
because, of course—as he underlines in “A Defense of the Kabbalah” and in
very similar words in “The Kabbalah”—“the Holy Ghost condescended to
literature, and wrote a book. Nothing in that book can be casual” (1989–1996,
3:269, my translation). But there is also another key element of Kabbalah that
is extremely interesting for Borges: the aforementioned connection between
plurality of meaning and the fallen condition of history that changed the
letters of the current Torah. If every interpretation is allowed, if the Torah
changed to include even that which was not supposed to happen, the disaster
of history that followed Adam’s sin, then arguably everything can be included
in this endless interpretation. The law by definition—the Torah—thus exists,
paradoxically, to include and regulate precisely that which is outside the law;
or, more precisely, there is nothing outside the law, since the law exists as
lawlessness appears.
Thus, and significantly, Borges speaks of the preoccupation of Kabbalah
with evil; he states that for both Gnostics and Kabbalists, the solution to
the problem of evil is not, as for most philosophers, to consider it as purely
negative (a solution that Borges qualifies as obviously false).4 According to
Borges, for both Kabbalists and Gnostics, the world is the creation of an
imperfect godhead, one “whose fraction of divinity tends to zero” (3:273,
my translation). This seems to speak of Gnosticism more than of Kabbalah.
However, there is truth to the idea that Kabbalah considers the root of evil
to be in God himself. Scholem explains that, according to the doctrine of
the Zohar,

the wrath of God is symbolized by His left hand. . . . The quality of stern
judgment represents the great fire of wrath which burns in God but is always
tempered by His mercy. When it ceases to be tempered, when in its measure-
less hypertrophical outbreak it tears itself loose from the quality of mercy,
then it breaks away from God altogether and is transformed into the radically
evil, into Gehenna and the dark world of Satan. (1941, 232)
152 ● My stical L aw s

The Lurianic Kabbalah has a similar point of view. The root of evil, present
in God as the realm of strict judgment unfettered by compassion, was split
from God and acquired its own separate existence when creation occurred—
which resulted from the breaking of the vessels that contained the Sefira.
Borges seems to be fascinated with a similar notion: the paradox of a
law that contains its own negation, its own annulment, as law. Evidently,
Borges is fascinated by outlaws throughout his writing: the outlaws of the
pampa—the malevo, gaucho, or compadre—who live out of the norms of
society and whose violence is physical, excessive, and pointless.5 Yet there
are other outlaws in Borges’s writing, who seem to be equally compelling
for him: those whose outlaw condition is ambivalent, who linger right on
the border between lawfulness and marginality, or more precisely, who are
secretly and mysteriously lawful. For instance, he mentions in a short story/
poem the Jewish legend of the thirty-six righteous men, who ignore both
their own righteousness and the fact that it is because they ignore it, the
universe does not come to an end. There is also the strange behavior of Irish
hero Kilpatrick in “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” who is a traitor
to the cause of independence. When discovered, he plots for his betrayal
to remain hidden so that the very same cause that he has betrayed will not
be damaged by his conduct—thus paradoxically inscribing one act into its
opposite. Another example, perhaps more significant, is Judas as conceived
by theologian Runeberg in “Three versions of Judas.” According to Runeberg,
Judas, and not Jesus, is the Messiah. However, his Messianic condition re-
mains a secret, because structurally, his Messianic fate is precisely to not be
acknowledged as such.
Such characters create a secret, esoteric, and surprising version of or-
thodoxy where transgression opens the door to the Messianic; where the
law, in order to be complete, includes everything—even, and paradoxically,
that which is outside the law. The outlaws and heresiarchs are thus revealed
to be secretly the best of men and the most orthodox, without giving up the
fascination that they exert as outlaws, because their righteousness is still se-
cret, esoteric, and mysterious. They do not contribute to build the nation, to
institute an identity that is public or recognizable, that can structure society
or religion—or if they do, it is precisely as if they appear to undermine it.
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 153

Therefore, there is no breaking the law, because the law—mysterious,

invisible, impossible to understand or know—is already a transgression of
itself, already presupposes its own defeat. Like the Torah, which must be
endlessly interpreted and recombined, law is not complete as law if it does
not include its own cancellation, its own violation.
Thus, paradoxically, Borges’s outlaws are cancelled as outlaws as they
join a narrative of necessity, which in turn grows to the point of including
everything—even their own transgression. I will focus here on two stories
that present such an outlaw—both of them versions of New Testamentary,
Christian narratives. “Three versions of Judas” tells the story of Swedish
theologian Nils Runeberg, who progressively reaches more and more radi-
cal interpretations of Judas’s betrayal of Christ as part of the divine plot for
salvation. The first one considers Judas as an accomplice of Christ, who takes
upon himself the obligation to mirror and match God’s sacrifice, who “had
stooped to become mortal” (Borges 1998, 164). By becoming a traitor, Judas
sacrifices himself in the place of humankind. Later, Nils Runeberg further
refines his argument, proposing that asceticism and a humility so great that
it led Judas to think of himself as unworthy of both happiness and goodness,
were the keys of Judas’s life. Judas “labored with titanic humility; he believed
himself unworthy of being good” (165).
Finally, Runeberg arrives at a more radical interpretation of Judas’s al-
leged betrayal, one that considers him the true Messiah—a Messiah that is
willing to sacrifice even his own eternal salvation to redeem humanity: “God
was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of
reprobation and the Abyss” (166). Runeberg himself shares this paradoxical
condition of humility and exaltation, as he reflects that the rejection toward
his doctrine results from God’s will to have his secret doctrine spread upon
the earth, and that he himself is outside of God’s will. “He felt that ancient,
divine curses were met in him. . . . Drunk with sleeplessness and his diz-
zying dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Malmö, crying out
for a blessing—that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer”
(167). Thus, paradoxically, because of unveiling God’s plot, Runeberg feels
condemned. Moreover, he begs to be admitted in Hell as a gift, as grace, as
a reward. If understanding God’s purpose equals condemnation, if Hell can
154 ● My stical L aw s

constitute a reward, then there is nothing outside religious laws; mysteri-

ously, evil and good concur and intertwine.
In a similar manner, another story, “The Gospel According to Mark,” is
in itself a retelling of the biblical plot (understood here both as a narrative
structure and as an intrigue with unlawful ends) of that Gospel, which implies
both an interpretation of it and a declaration of its necessity as much as a
trivialization of it. Less than five pages long, “The Gospel According to Mark”
seems to require a summary similar to Borges’s map of the Empire, a map that
was the same size as the Empire itself, and coincided with it in everything. The
protagonist, thirty-three-year-old Baltasar Espinosa, visits his cousin in the
countryside. After his cousin leaves for business, Espinoza ends up isolated in
the house because of a flood. His only company are the Gutres (two men and
one woman), who work there. Espinoza finds an English Bible and translates
the Gospel according to Mark aloud for their entertainment. As the reading
advances, and Espinoza’s attitude changes to fit the reading, the peasants
begin to behave with increasing respect toward him. At some point, Espinoza
sleeps with the only woman of the group, a virgin girl “of uncertain paternity”
(1998, 398). By the end of the story, Espinoza is about to be crucified by his
listeners, who seem to believe this is the way to achieve redemption.
When reading the Gospel from the English Bible aloud in Spanish, Espi-
noza not only delivers a linguistic translation of the text, but he also provides
the basis for a translation from the imaginary of Christianity into a highly
theatrical milieu of the real. He actually is Christ-like in his rejection of the
“dead letter,” in favoring the actual enactment of it by his performance, which
includes a long beard, the healing of a lamb (which seems magical to the
peasants), and the use of oratory strategies when explaining the parables.
All of this serves to turn him into the Messiah that he impersonates when
narrating. And by acquiring the status of a Messiah, he becomes the giver
of the original text for the Gutres: he cancels the original text through
repetition. The transparency that Walter Benjamin deemed necessary for
translation (that is, that which does not block the light of the original) is
not maintained, since the reading/translation by Espinoza is understood by
the Gutres precisely as an authoritative original. No error, nor any creative
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 155

choice of words in the translation, will be either an error or an improvement,

nor will it complete and fulfill other translations and versions. Rather, any
mistake or improvement in translation will enter their theology, be repeated,
and thus become fatal, necessary, and orthodox.
It is interesting to think here how the fidelity to such a text works. Ritual
orthodoxy—the fidelity involved in enacting a sacred text or event (a law
given by God or an event that shows God’s action)—consists of keeping the
ritual as similar to itself as possible to maintain the effectiveness of its super-
natural aspect. What is sacred in the ritual must be repeated and invoked.
But since there is no way to know what is sacred and essential, and what is,
to the contrary, unimportant, those who perform the ritual must assume that
everything is equally relevant. In this sense, the words of the priest are as
important as the color of his clothes or the tone of his voice. The ritual stops
being the repetition of the holy event or divine instruction and becomes
a repetition of itself: everything that has been done before should remain
identical, in order not to risk losing whatever is sacred in it. The Christian
Eucharist, for instance, does not merely perform a repetition of the Last
Supper but rather repeats previous rituals; it repeats the transubstantiation,
the transforming of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of
Christ’s body and blood, and not his encounter with the apostles, not the
supper itself. And at the heart of the ritual, there is the impossibility of dis-
tinguishing between representation and that which is being represented,
between what is accidental and what is substantial, between the intelligible
reality and its sensible appearance. The sensible, visible term is so closely
identified with the meaning it refers to that it actually comes to be it. Thus,
the possibility of interpretation, of a plurality of meanings, of ambiguity is
cancelled. The Communion must repeat previous Communions; the actual
Last Supper is not really a matter of concern, or—more precisely—it is
shaped by the structure of Communion, which gives it its “real” sense and
form, its plenitude.
In this context, the Gutres’ actions make sense. They have listened to
a narrative that they do not understand as a symbol, but rather, as Brett
Levinson has pointed out, as a “manual of salvation”:
156 ● My stical L aw s

The Gutres are enthralled with the Gospel, in fact, precisely because they re-
ceive the text in this manner: as a manual of salvation, an instruction booklet
on how to save themselves, and possibly mankind, from the death to which
all are exposed during the flood. The desire to listen to one Gospel over and
over again, indeed, is rooted less in a childish pleasure than in a yearning to
get a handle on this ‘instructions.’” (2009, 111)

The necessity for iteration is thus understood by Levinson as a way of making

sure they understand how to achieve the redemption. Once they feel certain
of their knowledge, they reenact the story that they have heard repeated,
incorporating into their Gospel all of the details of Espinoza’s character (his
gestures when translating the parables, his beard, the healing of the lamb) as
relevant signs, giving them the same status as the words themselves. Their
understanding, then, is not orthodox: it does not acknowledge itself as a con-
tinuation of previous rituals, as the repetition of a repetition, a willful effort
to make the repetition just like the previous one. Rather, it is magical: they
actually intend to perform an operation in reality. By performing the Gospel,
they attempt to achieve their own redemption. But one of the implications
of such a strategy is that it problematizes the status of the original that they
have heard, which is not sufficient in itself but needs to be fulfilled. And
in this sense, their performance has something in common with the ritual:
they do not accept their textual referent as an original, but as something to
be perfected in its enactment. They understand the narrative of the Gospel
as a law directed to them, or as a prophecy that is also a commandment.
The Gutres seek to delete, continue, and sublate (Aufhebung) the original by
making the repetition meaningful as the first time of fulfillment of a given
word. They bring the text to life by translating it from the symbolic realm of
language into the realm of the real. The sacred text, performed by Espinoza,
becomes, then, not a telling but the living, present, performative word.
In “The Secret of Biblical Narrative Form,” Franz Rosenzweig claims that,
whereas storytelling holds the desire to remove the reader or listener from
“his actual present” and set him “within an illusory present,” the narratives of
the Bible work in the opposite way: “The heard narrative must not transport
the hearer from his own moment to a place beneath the shadow of the Sinai;
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 157

what brings Sinai within the hearer’s immediate notice must be the hearer’s
active obedience—the law, that is, and not the story” (1994, 132). By pointing
out what the narratives of the Bible are not supposed to do, Rosenzweig is
also denouncing what they are at risk of doing: the hearer risks thinking that
the voice of God is not directed to the characters within the narrative but
to himself. This is precisely what happens here. Espinoza does not set the
Gutres in the illusory present of narrative, as regular narratives would do, nor
does he give them “the law and not the story,” as biblical narratives should
do. Rather, he gives the Gutres the story, in its literalness and theatricality, as
law. The difference between the two is cancelled. The story becomes the law
and in that way erases itself as story, and becomes a commandment directed
to the listener. Just like Kabbalah embraces history by considering that the
letters of the Torah were rearranged to mirror the history as it should not
have occurred, in the manner that it developed after the fall, thus the Gutres
incorporate the quirks of Espinoza’s narrative as law.
It is relevant to point out that it is not clear at exactly what point in the
story the Gutres begin to think that what they are witnessing is not simply
a reading by the cousin of their boss but the self-prophecy of the Messiah.
Espinoza realizes (consciously) what is going on only when he is being taken
outside to be crucified, but the Gutres’ perspective had shifted earlier in
the story. It is impossible to say exactly when, because no insight to their
thoughts is given. This impossibility is meaningful because it reveals the
uncertainty about when they start working actively toward the fulfillment
of the prophecy: we cannot point out an exact moment of revelation, but
this revelation appears as an effect of their obedience to the law. Only when
the crucifixion is about to occur does the reader understand that a plotting
had been taking place all along. Thus, in the narrative, the obedience of the
Gutres precedes the acknowledgement of the revelation and the law this
revelation conveys. One could also say that no law or revelation of it appears
in a narrative prior to the act of obedience to it—an obedience that exists as a
fulfillment of the law, without which the narrative of the law is not complete
(without which it would not provide a model), but that does not belong to
the text of the law itself. In this sense, the obedience of the Gutres to what
they have understood not only creates the text as law and revelation, but also
158 ● My stical L aw s

as plot (narrative and murderous intrigue). And yet they cancel it as mere
narrative by obeying it as law. Thus “Evangelio” seems to be the opposite case
of what Rosenzweig proposes: law and narrative are intertwined. Law cannot
be deduced from narrative and separated by it; rather they generate each
other: both the verisimilitude of the law and its contingency depend upon
their capability of being narrated.
The Gutres’ reasons for repeating the text by enacting it seem clear:
they wish to be saved. But why does Espinoza participate as actively as he
does? If we pay heed to his conversation with Gutre, the father, right before
the crucifixion, we can see how Espinoza leaves aside his own set of beliefs
and speaks as he acts, keeping himself faithful to the logic of the text he
translated. “[T]he father spoke to Espinosa to ask whether Christ had al-
lowed himself to be killed in order to save all mankind. Espinosa, who was
a freethinker like his father but felt obligated to defend what he had read
them, paused. ‘Yes,’ he finally replied. ‘To save all mankind from hell’” (1998,
401). It could be argued that by speaking in this way, he has allowed himself
to participate in the text, or more precisely, he does this by his performance
of it, by his status as translator of the text. He is not Espinoza anymore, but
the one he became through his reading, and therefore he does not answer in
his own words, but in those of the text he has read. He is the medium of the
foreign text instead of the speaker of his own thoughts. The fact that he has
translated it becomes relevant: Patricio Marchant claims in “Sobre árboles y
madres” that, starting from the act of translating from a foreign and strange
language, Espinoza renders strange and foreign his own language, and thus
allows his unconscious to appear (1986, 20). In this way, he contributes to
the plotting of his own death—the death that is his own precisely because
he has changed, following the logic of the text, the reading, and the foreign-
ness that translation causes to appear in him. Perhaps there is here a form
of self-betrayal, which would account for the absence of Judas in this plot.
No Judas is necessary in salvation itself; at the beginning of “Three versions
of Judas,” Runeberg underlines that such a traitor is unnecessary because
Christ, as a public preacher, was easy to recognize without the participation
of one of his followers.
One could add that the structure of Judas’s action does not even
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 159

correspond to that of betrayal, because betrayal cannot be announced: by

definition, it is supposed to appear in an unexpected way. It is precisely what
you cannot predict, count on, or calculate. Judas’s betrayal is suspicious pre-
cisely because it was announced with too much clarity. Betrayal does not
change Christ’s plans, but is incorporated in them: it is needed not as treach-
ery, but for the dramatic, theatrical mis-en-scène of his own death. Judas’s
guilt maintains the innocence of Christ. It absolves Christ of any blame for
his own death, it dispels any suspicion of a desire for self-destruction: “The
son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him, but woe to the man by
whom the son of man is betrayed!” (Mark 14:13). Thus, the danger of the idea
of a god who plots against himself—namely, a God that exists as a model for
self-destruction instead of self-sacrifice—is prevented.
But in Borges’s Evangelio there is no Judas, and if there is a betrayal, it
is that of Espinoza of himself—a self-betrayal that remains secret while it
is plotting the end of the story. (Espinoza does not seem to be aware of his
participation, of how his healing of the lamb and growing his beard are in-
terpreted by the Gutres). Espinoza’s action—the self-betrayal that allows the
plot to be consummated—mirrors that of the Kabbalist Messiah Sabbatai
Zevi; this is, perhaps, the key to understand this story. During the seven-
teenth century, Sabbatai Zevi led a Kabbalistic Messianic movement that
made a great number of people “believe in perfect simplicity that a new era
of history had begun and that they themselves had already begun to inhabit
a new and redeemed world” (Scholem 1972, 86). Prior to Zevi’s movement,
Kabbalist Isaac de Luria and his school had speculated a new dimension of
the Messiah: “the redemptive process was now no longer conceived of as
simply a working out of Israel’s temporal emancipation from the yoke of the
Gentiles, but rather as a fundamental transformation of the entire Creation,
affecting material and spiritual worlds alike” (87). Scholem argues that this
conception of redemption and its emphasis on inner renewal prepared the
soil for the acceptation of Zevi’s Messianic claims. A strong feeling that the
times were ready for the appearance of the Messiah, that “the earthly pres-
ence of God had risen from the dust” (88), was prevalent at the time. Sab-
batai Zevi’s Messianic claims gained him many followers, but his unexpected
conversion to Islam threatened to shatter the movement.
160 ● My stical L aw s

Although it seems almost impossible that Zevi’s claims would survive

such an event, he actually maintained and radicalized his Messianic status.
Followers were not willing to accept that the widespread belief of an im-
minent Messianic event was wrong; Scholem states that the feeling can be
synthesized as “it is inconceivable that all of God’s people should inwardly
err, and so, if their vital experience was contradicted by the facts, it is the
facts that stand in need of explanation” (1972, 88). The explanation given by
some of his followers was to interpret his conversion as the most radical
manner of fulfilling the Jewish destiny of exile: to do it by adhering to another
faith, thus giving up even the consolation of identity and tradition in a more
radical way than ever could have been conceived before. Moderate Sabba-
tians considered that it was the fate and duty of the Messiah, and the Messiah
alone, to transgress the Torah, to violate the Law, and thus mysteriously to
fulfill it. Extreme Sabbatians argued that Zevi’s violation of the Torah set the
model for his followers: a true believer “should not appear as he really is”
(126)—which, historically, sets a way to orthodoxy for marranos.
Considering Sabbatai Zevi’s actions as lawful instead of unlawful is per-
fectly consistent with an extreme view of the aforementioned Kabbalistic
interpretation of the Torah as subject to history, as that of having a fallen
condition. Interpretations of Zevi’s conversion to Islam taken to their most
extreme conclusion—and yet their most perfectly logical conclusion—form
the doctrine of the shemittah. Zevi’s actions, unacceptable and sinful under
this cosmic cycle, dictate what is good for the cycle to come. As Scholem
states, Zevi’s actions might be regarded as transgressing the Torah under
the current shemittah, but when this one ends, another will start when all of
Zevi’s actions will be deemed righteous. Thus, Sabbatai Zevi’s betrayal of the
Torah is neutralized as betrayal when incorporated as law into a narrative of
salvation that depends upon the paradox of plotting against itself: Scholem
states that extreme Sabbatianism considers that “the violation of the Torah
is now its true fulfillment” (1972, 110).
Similarly, Espinoza’s Christ-like death may be a way of achieving meaning
through a self-betrayal whose redemptive quality is given by the narrative
frame. He participated in the events that led to his death, but doing so is not
pointless; rather, it means to become part of a narrative of redemption. It is
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 161

the coincidence with the biblical Gospel that saves his death from mean-
inglessness: by mirroring its narrative, it participates in its law and in the
necessity of its fulfillment. This happens only after the events themselves,
but thus it gives them a teleological condition that they did not have before.
Judas’s actions as explained by Runeberg can be understood similarly.
Just like Zevi’s actions will supposedly be understood differently in a differ-
ent time, under a different shemittah, the only reason we cannot see the
righteousness of Judas’s actions is because the world is not yet ready for such
revelation: “Runeberg realized that the hour had not yet come” of spreading
the truth of God’s plan (Borges 1998, 167). That it is not yet time for spreading
the word means that eventually that time will come. Thus, however secretly,
Judas is saved—not from meaningless death like Spinoza, but from trans-
gression of the law.
At the heart of these two stories, and of the Kabbalistic beliefs that allows
the understanding of them, there is a tension. Both stories pose the problem
of misinterpretation as heresy, and in both of them such misinterpretation
depends upon the fact that religion is visible as narrative and only as narra-
tive: there is nothing but the Scriptures to render visible the laws of God and,
more importantly, the kind of response that those laws demand. Both stories
solve this tension by recurring to the idea that whatever becomes part of the
narrative, no matter what it is, also becomes intertwined in the law, becomes
part of it, and fulfills it. Paradoxically, and as in Kabbalah, it is not possible
to exist outside of the law. Rewriting, contradicting, and cancelling the law
become part if it nevertheless. What is now understood as unlawful is what
actually dictated the righteousness of a different cosmic cycle. This reveals
the law as its aporia. Everything that goes against the law is part of the law:
violating it is fulfilling it, extending it outside of its realm is mysteriously
obeying it. Its failure is perhaps its success, written in the white, unreadable
Torah that will be possible to read in the Messianic age.
It is also relevant that these two stories, which can be productively
read in the light of Borges’s interest in Kabbalah, are Christian ones. Borges
famously stated once that Christianity was but a successful Jewish heresy.
Strictly speaking, there cannot be such a thing as heresy; when Kabbalistic
beliefs are pushed to their limit, as in Sabbatianism, when the negation of the
162 ● My stical L aw s

Torah is the fulfillment of the Torah, even heresy is part of the law. Infinite
interpretation, and the infinite flexibility of the sacred text to accommodate
history, implies that there is no writing outside of the law. Everything that
can be written has always been there since the moment it was written, just
as Borges states that everything that can be interpreted from the Torah was
already in it—just as Kabbalists affirm that all of the Talmud was already in
the revelation given to Moses at Mount Sinai. The undermining of Judaism
that Christianity entails might be already in the Torah, just like all books are
already in the library of Babel.

notes
1. He declares in The Kabbalah, “I believe that [The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism] is the
most clear book on the subject” (1989–1996, 3:274, my translation). Borges also rhymes
“Scholem” and “Golem”—perhaps the most ridiculous rhyme in the history of poetry—
in his poem “El golem.”
2. Gershom Scholem, the most influential scholar on Kabbalah, states in Major Trends of
Jewish Mysticism that “Kabbalah . . . is not the name of a certain dogma or system, but
rather the general term applied to a whole religious movement. . . . Within this move-
ment there exists a considerable variety of religious experience” (1941, 19). He insists
more emphatically in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism: “There is no such thing as
the doctrine of the Kabbalists” (1965, 89). Nevertheless, Scholem himself considers that
certain features are present in every Kabbalistic trend; among them, a particular con-
ception of the principles behind the Torah and linguistic optimism—that is, a sense that
language, rather than being an impediment for the mystic’s direct experience of God’s
presence, is actually the means of such relationship, the means of mystical experience.
3. Christian mystics underline the impossibility to express adequately the experience they
have had of God’s gifts, struggle to communicate it nevertheless, consider the text to be
a failure, and turn such failure precisely into a proof of the transcendence of their ex-
perience, following the logic that the insufficiency of language to express the testimony
bears witness to the excess of such experience. What fails as communication succeeds
as transcendence. The silence of the text, the failure of the text speaks as a validation of
the experience it fails to describe. It is sacred because it is incommunicable; it is ecstatic
because it cannot be thoroughly explained. It is true because it cannot be told; it speaks
because it cannot speak. Thus, excess is made visible, paradoxically, by its absence.
4. “The classic defense of theologians . . . states that evil is negative, and that to say ‘evil’ is
simply to say ‘absence of good,’ which is false for any sensitive man. Any given physical
 Virginia Gutiérrez Berner ● 163

pain is as real as pleasure, or even more so” (1989–1996, 2:272, my translation).

5. In Reading Borges after Benjamin, Kate Jenckes points out that the outlaw is “a figure
that would fascinate Borges all of his life,” as she analyzes Evaristo Carriego. Borges
states that his fascination with outlaws arises from the fact that their doings have no
purpose, obey no economy—other than perhaps, as Borges hints in “Historia del Tango,”
that of the carnival and of excess: “tango and milongas express directly . . . that fighting
can be celebratory [una fiesta]” (1989–1996, 1:161, my translation). Jenckes explains it this
way:

This peculiar conception of violence involves a procreative or generative force

that is not connected to the production and reproduction of life. Like Georges
Bataille’s economy of excess, also linked to play and orgiastic energy, it rebels
against any closed economy. It also recalls Benjamin’s distinction between the
Latin terms potesta or power, which involves control and repression, and vis
or violentia, implying a vital destructive force, a violence or force that is part
of life itself (2007, 59).

“For Borges the compadres and gauchos represent not heroes on which the value of the
nation can be based, but a kind of violence that interrupts just such idealization. Theirs,
he says, is a ‘pure’ violence, because it does not work in the service of a cause, perhaps
not even their own names” (62).

references
Aizenberg, Edna. 1984. The Aleph Weaver: Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges.
Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica.
Alazraki, Jaime. 1988. Borges and the Kabbalah. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1989–96. Complete Works, 4 vols. Barcelona: Emecé Editores.
———. 1998. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin.
———.2000. Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weineberg. Trans. Allen, Esther, Suzanne Jill Levine
and Eliot Weinberg. New York: Penguin.
Idel, Moshe. 1988. The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia. Trans. Jonathan Chipman.
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———. 2002. Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University
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Marchant, Patricio. 1986. Sobre árboles y madres. Santiago: Ediciones Gato Murr
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Fox. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scholem, Gershom. 1941. Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism. Jerusalem: Schocken Publishing
House.
———. 1965. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken
Books.
———. 1972. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. Trans. Hillel Halkin. New York Schocken Books.
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