Literature & Theology, Vol. "
. No. ª, December Æ, pp.

–ª

TREE OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND
J A B È S ’ Y A Ë L
Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

Abstract
It is not uncommon for readers to situate the writing of Egyptian–French
Jewish writer Edmond Jabès (1912–1991) within post-structuralist currents.
However, it is the contention of this article that these critics overlook that
which makes him a prototype of the post-Shoah Jew rethinking the concept
of God through the ancient traditions (Talmudic, Kabbalistic and
philosophical traditions). Whereas in most of his writing the interpretation
of God’s presence as Sacred text originates from the Talmudic tradition,
the fourth of his seven Books of Questions, entitled Yaël, humanises God in
the form of the Shekhinah, one of the feminine emanations of God in the
Kabbalistic tradition. Through the sacred vision of his new Yaël-Shekhinah,
Jabès elevates his own writing to the dimension of a spiritual act.

I . I N T RO D U C T I O N

WHILE EDMOND JABEØS’ poetics are in part an articulation of Western

modernity’s pronunciation of the ‘death of God’, at the same time his
conceptualisation of God is thoroughly inscribed within Jewish thought and
shares some resemblance with the Jewish Kabbalah. In the poetics of Jabès,
God is figured. He is cited by name and by his mute speech in an address
that is ceaselessly interrogating. However, this divine (inter)locutor declines
the invitation to appear in the first three Books of Questions.1 Therefore, it is
out of this weighty silence that Jabès invents God’s face and lends him form
and voice. From an unfigurable God-Book present in the first series of books
that parallels the emergence of a Talmudic tradition, one begins to perceive
the figuration of a feminine God in the final four Books of Questions.2
This stunning conception of a personalised God stems from Jewish mysticism
in which God is disclosed anthropomorphically, while in the Talmudic
tradition God is understood as absolute absence or distance. The representa-
tion of God is therefore at stake in Jabès’ poetics.
I argue that in the book Yaël (fourth Book of Questions) the Shekhinah’s
shadow frequents the poet’s dwelling through the character of Yaël.
Literature & Theology "
/ª. # Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved.
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 389
Consisting of a simple circumlocution designating the Divine Presence in the
History of Israel, and used by the Talmudic sages to work around the
prohibited anthropomorphism of God, the Shekhinah is one of the feminine
dimensions of God in the Zohar,3 one of the major books of the Jewish
Kabbalah.4 Since the fourteenth century, the word ‘Kabbalah’ has generally
referred to Jewish mysticism from the Talmudic period to the contemporary
period (1st BCE–19th CE). Originally the Kabbalah did not contain any
mystical signification. It came to designate the esoteric tradition around
1200 (in southern France and Spain) when it broke off from other mystical
groups. It reached, then, a specific content grounded both on esoterism
and theosophy.5 A new way of reading the Bible and the midrashic
interpretations was born. As for the Zohar, the mystical book belonging
to the Jewish Kabbalah, it poeticises the epiphany of a personalised God
in its immediate experience with the divine. In order to describe the
diverse components of divine consciousness, the theosophy of the Zohar
distinguishes between the En-Sof, the infinite being of God hidden in Itself
whose mystery remains imperceptible, and the sefirot,6 the God revealed to the
mystics who unfolds Himself in ten divine dimensions and emanates from the
hidden source of the En-Sof. In the zoharic tradition, Shekhinah is the last sefira
within the ensemble of the ten sefirot which formed the ‘sefirotic Tree’ in which
divine activity is revealed.
Edmond Jabès, as a Jew, was expelled from Egypt in 1957 and settled in
France where he began his work in prose. His Jewish consciousness was born
from this rupture with Egypt. He experienced with bitterness the condition of
exile which led him to the vestiges of a lost tradition. Jabès confessed to Marcel
Cohen:

I believe I did find my way back to a certain tradition insofar as I immersed myself
completely in the Kabbalah and the Talmud. I also read much about those books,
as they are works one obviously cannot, at first, approach all alone. I also read, in
translation of course, most of the Jewish spiritual masters. Being neither a mystic
nor a gnostic, it is clearly not the letter of those texts that marked me, but the
shape of the thinking, their spiritual depth, particular logic and inventiveness—I
am thinking here of the Kabbalah. Those books were in complete harmony with
my preoccupations as a writer. Not only did they stimulate my own questioning,
they also seemed to prolong it into an immemorial past.7

Jabès points out clearly that he is not a mystic, therefore he did not attempt to
follow any kabbalistic precepts. Nevertheless it is as a Jewish writer that he
sought inspiration in these books which transmit an ‘immemorial past’. ‘Those
books were in complete harmony with’ his ‘preoccupations as a writer’, since
for Jabès the Jew and the writer ‘are only torments of an ancient word’.8 As a
390 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
Jew he was tormented by the illegible sacred word of the Thora (Jewish Bible)
which encloses the meaning of the world. As a writer he was struck by the
literary invention of the Kabbalah which convinced him to pursue its path
towards an innovative hermeneutic.9 Also, Jabès points out to Marcel Cohen
that his reading of the Kabbalah and the Talmud was intended at that time
to verify an ‘intuition regarding a certain Judaism’.10 The Books of Questions
are the books of memory, he himself tells us, a memory struggling against
oblivion whose imaginary characters are the beacons of recollection.
And yet, in my reading of the book of Yaël it is the notion of subversion
more than tradition which is at stake: Jabès, in immersing himself in the
Kabbalah and specifically in the Zohar, chooses the path of a subversive
interpretation. With its new way of thinking of God, the Zohar ‘represents
a forceful break’ and ‘purports not only to interpret God’s revealed words
and acts, but also to describe the inner workings of God’s mind. ( . . . )
To decipher a Zoharic text, then, the Western and modern reader must
suspend all presuppositions about the nature of God as a perfect, immobile
Being ( . . . )’.11 To the traditional theologian or Jewish philosopher the
idea of God’s consciousness is a subversive hermeneutic because it presents the
feminine dimension of an anthropomorphic God. But Jabès never completely
adheres to ‘the letter’ of the sacred texts (the Thora, the Talmud and the
Zohar), though he will retain ‘the shape of the thinking, their spiritual depth,
particular logic and inventiveness’. Some specific motifs deploying the
‘inventiveness’ of the Zohar are in fact inscribed subversively in Jabès’
fragmentary writing. Therefore he not only transgresses ‘normative’ Judaism—
the Talmudic tradition—in following the most subversive interpretation of the
Bible—the Zoharic tradition—but as we shall see he also gives voice to the
zoharic feminine God and rewrites the myths of Adam and Elishah Ben
Abuyah—the two dissidents against God’s Law. Therefore Jabès’ subversion is
a doubly articulated one. On the one hand his primary source of inspiration—
the Zohar—is already in itself an iconoclastic text which breaks with the
traditional currents of Jewish thought. Secondly Jabès’ writing works to
subvert certain tenets at the core of the Zohar itself.
In fictionalising certain symbolic aspects of the Shekhinah such as the zoharic
feminine divine,12 we shall see that Jabès strives to attenuate the oblivion and
to seek out the memory of God. By way of a return to the source of an
‘immemorial past’, his poetics blends the awakening of an ancient heritage
with the invention of a spiritual writing. Impacted by the creativity of Jewish
mysticism, he chances upon the traces of a new experience of the divine. God
is thus discovered as a nostalgic quest which grows in intensity throughout
the seven Books of Questions and reveals itself as the eponymous figure and
the embodied speech of the book Yaël. Through the character of Yaël, the
movement of the sefirotic Tree seems to flow like a divine inspiration : ‘God’s
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 391
13
knowledge is in the tree’ we are told, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil is another name which designates the zoharic Shekhinah. Under the
influence of the mystics who speak to him across centuries, Jabès undertakes
the invention of a ‘new’ poetic Shekhinah.

I I . T H E F I G U R A B L E N O M I N AT I O N 1 4

Who is closest to God? He who invents Him as he created man, or he who prays
for permission to approach Him?15
Jabès

In this epigraph, the question posed by Yukel, the God-seeking narrator

of the Book of Yukel (second Book of Questions), constitutes in my view one of
the foundations of Jabès’ spiritual writing. Through the conception of the
character of Yaël that I identify with the sacred Shekhinah, Yukel’s
interrogation not only remains in the background of Yaël but seems to find
an answer in this very same book : he who invents God ‘as he created man’,
as Jabès’ narrator created Yaël-Shekhinah, would be closer to God than he
‘who prays for permission to approach Him’. The verb ‘invent’ is essential
because Jabès was struck by the ‘inventiveness’ of the Kabbalah and he
similarly attempts the reinvention of what I call Yaël-Shekhinah out of the
zoharic Shekhinah.
Yaël, whose ephemeral apparition is tantamount to a violent passage,
extends Jabès’ book of memory inscribed in the first trilogy of the Books of
Questions and collects the dispersed, scattered voices of the other characters.
However, Yaël’s divine filiation deprives her of all the personal attributes
which lend ‘realism’ to traditional fictional characters. She is the ‘universal
word’ received by the anonymous narrator in a dream ‘across shadow and
light’ as a prophetic revelation:

Across shadow and light goes the way to Yaël to receive her word. For Yaël is
the universal word: signs, colors, sounds of earth and sky, the chance of a grain
of salt and the spiral silence of towers.16

In a mystic thirst in which sensuality accompanies spirituality, the narrator

struggles with words from whence a feminine God, a poetic Shekhinah, issues
forth in the night of his dream after a long gestation. He places speech in her
mouth and accords her a body. This God, whose only power is that granted by
the matrix of the book, arises figured from this privileged place. The narrator
of Yaël henceforth addresses directly this invented God, the one who had
392 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
resisted invocations, was formless in his infinity and parsimonious in speech in
the three first Books of Questions.
The character of Yaël belongs to ‘The Time of the Story’17 through which we
learn she is fighting with her past, obsessed with a still-born child named Elya,
and is courted by two anonymous suitors who are competing for her love. But
she is also part of ‘The Time before the Story which is its portion of dark, its prophetic
part’. In other words, Yaël’s story can be read on two different levels: at first
glance she is a feminine character with whom the anonymous narrator is
deeply in love. However, Yaël also belongs to the prophetic time, the time of
the narrator’s dream or ‘this time before time, this strange time of God’s
sleep’,18 which evokes God’s withdrawal after the creation ex-nihilo. That is
why Yaël is never the same, always under the influence of her mutations
which prevents the writer from having a complete control over his own
creation. Throughout the book Jabès’ narrator asks who is this creature who
escapes from his own invention:

Who are you, Yaël, to prefer your uncreated face to the one I am patiently
modeling? You are and you are not this woman whom her mirror drives back
to her longing to be. ( . . . ) Yaël, a feminine half of a being that does not say
where it is going.19

A fleeting figure who traverses surreptitiously the poetic space, ‘Yaël is passage
and use of God’.20 She seems to embody the mystery of the Shekhinah dear to
the mystics and defiantly present before the writer. This tenth sefira, endowed
with innumerable names such as Malkhut or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil, is at the heart of the long evolution of the Zohar, since she has the
function of being the sovereign of the world. Yaël moulded in Jabès’ hand
from the clay of words announces the coming of a silent God by the divine
origin of her name, comprised of the two signifiers for God: ‘Ya’ and ‘El’:

Only Yaël is named.[ . . . ] Her first name intrigued me from the moment I heard
it. [ . . . ] But it was a woman who bore it, and I realized I would love Yaël in the
lips of the black crater of her name. Countenance of God, O infinite effacing
of the Face.21

Beyond her name there is something else which bars her realisation: the
unnameable, unfigurable ‘countenance of God, O infinite effacing of the
Face’. For the face of God is invisible to human beings in the ‘normative’
Judaism—Talmudic tradition. But Jabès, inspired by the subversion of the
Zohar, violates the ‘prohibition of representation’ promulgated by the
Talmudic and Philosophic traditions. For the Kabbalists of the thirteenth
century, God’s names are generated through the secret combinations of divine
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 393
22
powers concentrated in the Tetragrammaton ‘YHWH’. This greatest of all
God’s names can be written but remains unpronounceable. And yet God is
specified by His name which escapes all designation since it is the key to a
mystery which nullifies the regime of interpretation. The entire creation itself
resides in this Name of which the Torah is the articulation.23 Each individual
letter issues forth from this Tetragrammaton and comprises the entire system
of the sefirot emanations,24 from Hesed to Shekhinah.
Regarding the first half of the name Yaël, ‘Ya’, one notices that it is formed
by the Hebrew consonant which begins the Tetragrammaton, the Yud:

[ . . . ] providential gesture and crystalline word which you named with one name
in two: Ya-El, a call more harrowing than a scream, a call from God to God [ . . . ]
You are called Yaël, and you try to sew together the pieces of your name.25

According to the Zohar, this Yud is precisely the original source of the divine
language by which other linguistic utterances are constituted.26 ‘Yah’ belongs
to the symbolically lettered universe since it is part of the Tetragrammaton
(YH). Also in Hebrew it signifies ‘the Eternal’, the name reserved for the
praise of God in the Bible.27 In the Zohar, ‘Yah’ is part of the sefirotic Tree
as God’s feminine form and it is applied to Shekhinah as well as Hokhmah
(representing the transcendent wisdom). As for ‘El’, the second syllable, it is
found specifically in the poetic books of the Bible.28 It is the generic term
which is not used as a proper name and designates the power of God. In the
Zoharic tradition, ‘El’ corresponds to Shekhinah as well as Hesed (fourth divine
and masculine dimension of the sefirotic Tree) representing charity, grace, and
unconditional love. But it refers also to Tiferet-Yesod (sixth and seventh of
God’s masculine dimensions, representing the center of divine consciousness).
Originally ‘Yah’ (Shekhinah) and ‘El’ (Tiferet) were joined and then split even
before the creation of the world. One might argue, then, that Jabès chose
symbolically the name ‘Yaël’ to resolve God’s inherent dualism. For only the
‘mystical union’ of Shekhinah (Yah) with Tiferet (El) can ward off Evil and
maintain the harmony of the sefirotic and human realms, since it is the source of
continuity. The name pieced together by ‘Ya-El’ underlines the divine alterity
inscribed in the unpronounceability of the Great Name. Though in its origin
the letter Yud symbolised the first Kabbalistic sefira, Keter, and comprised all
the sefirot without distinction, the masculine and feminine aspects of God were
separated out when it flowed within Hokhmah,29 the second masculine sefira
from which the sefirot unfold. From this zoharic point one could infer that
the scission of the name ‘Ya-El’ represents the division of the masculine and
feminine emanations of God. The ‘call from God to God’, from Ya to El, is the
inaudible cry of the original rupture of God’s being, and ‘the lips of the black
394 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
crater of her name’ accentuate Yaël-Shekhinah’s alterity: the non-coincidence
of identity and name.
Paralleling the divine root of her name, Yaël is also a biblical figure30 and
this confers upon her a historical–legendary dimension previously inscribed in
the sacred Book. She belongs to the time of the prophetess Deborah when
Israel, freed from the power of Jabin and from the ruthless Sisera, was liberated
by the hand of Jaël.31 She thus preexists the poet’s book and Jabès does not
ignore the pre-established connotations of this woman chosen by God to save
the Hebrews. From her divine origin to her destiny as a human being
designated by God and acting in his name, she opens the field of
interpretation.

I I I . T H E A DV E N T O F A F E M I N I N E G O D

Yaël, ushered into the fleetingness of the present moment, flows into the
narrator’s visionary dream. The ambiguity which constitutes her being
attributes multiple identities to her, transforming her into ‘saint or devil’.32
The book Yaël, under the sign of the dream, proclaims the theophany of
a mysterious divinity playing out its mutations.

God is female in His word, male in His gesture. [ . . . ]

Yaël is passage and use of God [ . . . ] God revealing Himself as a woman or Satan with
the clear eyes of God. The trees had brought her. The grass sighed under her feet.
[ . . . ].33

Yaël metamorphoses into God, woman, or Satan throughout the course of the
book and affirms herself through the ambivalence of her identities. And the
Shekhinah gathers together all these conflictual elements of divine conscious-
ness found in Yaël and makes use of them while acting upon the non-divine
world. Opposed to Tiferet (representing the Tree of Life and the principle of
divine stability), the Shekhinah as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
oscillates incessantly between the positive components of her consciousness,
such as Love, Mercy, and ‘Judgment of Justice’, and the negative aspects such
as ‘Judgment of Fury’ and Death.34 Her metamorphoses alter the hierarchy
established in the sefirotic world and can provoke a disorder in the created
worlds.35 In fact, the equilibrium of the created worlds depends on the
devotion of the Jew who, if his intentions are pure, sends positive energy to
Shekhinah, thus fostering her fusion with Tiferet. Though the Kabbalists resisted
employing a sexual symbolism to characterise the relationship between God
and man, they did not hesitate to do so to describe the figural relation of
God with himself. This ‘mystical marriage’ of God with his Shekhinah
symbolises the symbiosis of binary oppositions existing in God : the En-Sof
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 395
(divine infinitude) and its sefirot, the masculine and the feminine, the active
and the passive.
The conflictual dualism36 of Yaël, ‘saint or devil’ or ‘God revealing Himself
as a woman or Satan with the clear eyes of God’, is drawn out precisely from
the figurations of the Shekhinah:

O Yaël, how can you be the joy of the world in its abundance and at the same time the
scream of the waning abyss? [ . . . ]

Across shadow and light goes the way to Yaël to receive her word. [ . . . ]

O Yaël, priestess at the Temple threshold, will you die in the odor of sanctity, a victim
of the moon, a victim of your lucidity? [ . . . ]37

‘Joy of the world’ and ‘scream of the waning abyss’, Yaël appears ‘across shadow and
light’ at the light of the dream in the interstice of day and night. And so, as its
victim, she assumes the evil aspects of the moon and acquires from the sun the
eternal flame of the sacred divinity, ‘priestess at the Temple threshold’.
Like Yaël, the Shekhinah changes identity according to the relation she
entertains with the three distinct systems constituting the totality of universal
existence: the sefirotic system situated between heaven and earth, the system of
the terrestrial world, and the system of ‘husks’ designating the world of evil
(named Sitra ahra in the Zohar, representing the demonic ‘other side’ of the
divine). In her ‘intra-deical’38 dimension, as the very essence of God in the
sefirotic Kingdom, the Shekhinah represents the extreme limit of the divine
being. As pure receptivity, she absorbs the sacred light of all the sefirot, but
a subtle play emerges between her pure receptivity and her own creativity.
She embodies the feminine aspect of the mother or wife who receives and
then transmits to the Jewish people the divine influence descending from
the masculine forces of Tiferet and Yesod. From these masculine influences,
she acquires the Love and Judgment of strict justice. As Jabès writes, Yaël-
Shekhinah is then ‘God revealing Himself as a Woman’.
Within her ‘extra-deical’ dimension, the Shekhinah is the first emanation
by which God manifests himself in the human world. She symbolises the
threshold that the mystic crosses in beginning his ascension toward the divine
mystery. The Shekhinah is also identified with the community of Israel,
personified by Yaël whose letters are incorporated in the name ‘Yisrael’.39 She
thus becomes the mystic incarnation of the divine Presence in the book of
Jabès, where her speech of saintliness or evil flows. In fact, it is within this
‘extra-deical’ dimension that her inconsistency influences the human world.
If her powers of Judgment of strict justice40 are separated at the Source
(En-Sof ) in order to become united with the evil forces of the system of
the ‘husks’ (world of uncleanness), the Shekhinah disassociates herself from the
396 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
other sefirot and is transformed into a destructive power which produces the
Tree of Death.41
In a chapter of the book Aely called ‘Where the Words Answers to the
Name Yaël’, we find this quotation which is clearly the counterpart of the one
found in Yaël (‘God’s knowledge is in the tree’): ‘The tree of Knowledge’, he
added, ‘is, after all, the tree of Death’.42 The mystic Shekhinah who is the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil can also be the Tree of Death when she is separated
from the forces of holiness and unified with ‘the other side’. And Yaël, ‘recruit
and rival of God’,43 is for Jabès the reversible face of Good and Evil:

Who are you, Yaël, to cheat against yourself the person you want to be? What
insane god furled your senses so prematurely that you cannot stand the world
with its fogs and its colors? Night favors the alliance of Good and Evil with an
even coolness of the woods.44

The lunar and solar bodies attempt to rapture Yaël. Within her, light and
darkness struggle mercilessly; rivalry between day and night. Then as demonic
fury Yaël-Shekhinah appears with the features of ‘Satan with the clear eyes of
God’ in Jabès’ poetics.

I V. A S H AT T E R E D A P PA R I T I O N I N A N O C T U R N A L D R E A M

At the beginning of the book Yaël, a mystery is born from a ‘dream: a dreadful
smothering of the soul, then a lofty idea of death, then an ordinary note pad
where the day butts against the night’.45 The same dream recurs some pages
later when we learn more about Lilith and Eve:

On the 17th of March, last year, I had a dream which left me very upset.
A woman used my life for her own ends.
‘Lilith, Eve, Cressida? Which one? Gabriel will write me later.
(One man suggests that Eve was God’s first word of love; another, on the contrary,
that she was His last.
Eve betrayed God
and God created night.) [ . . . ].46

But Jabès tells us nothing about these dreams, since the stakes are the truth
of night, which must be forgotten at the coming of day. Only the trace of a
smothered cry remains on an ‘ordinary note pad’ of the book where the writer
tries in vain to reread the obscurity of the nocturnal dream by the light of day.
This exergue which precedes the prologue of Yaël designates the inception of
the text and its stakes. By way of the frightening vision of the dream, Jabès’
narrator-dreamer seizes upon ‘a lofty idea of death’. Does he identify himself
with Jacob who, in his encounter with the Unknown, hurls himself against its
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 397
power during the night of Peniel in the Procession of Jabbok? The dreamer
approaches the divine being of Yaël-Shekhinah ‘to receive her word. For Yaël
is the universal word: signs, colors, sounds of earth and sky’.47 But he who
beholds the face of God—Shekhinah—is subject to death. In the night of his
dream the narrator-dreamer hears the mute call of a presence in absentia. It is
during the course of drifting off to sleep that the memory of Yaël’s ‘passage
and use of God’ is awakened. From this memory of a presence arises a
shattered apparition in the book:

I find myself where I fell asleep. Yaël, waking bears your name. And your body is
a long shiver of amorous flights.48

The drifting into sleep of Jabès’ narrator in the garden49 is reminiscent of

Jacob, of a biblical episode which precedes that of the struggle with the
nocturnal Unknown. Jacob falls asleep, his head resting on stones. He dreams
that he sees an apparition of divine messengers climbing and descending a
ladder mounted on the earth, whose summit is at the Eternal Throne. The
voice of God renews his promises. Jacob awakens and exclaims, ‘God was in
this place and I, I did not know it’.50 Once awake, he shivers, becoming
conscious of the divine presence. Like the awakening of Jewish consciousness,
of Israel in Jacob, Jabès’ narrator awakens to the memory of God. He begins
a spiritual initiation. Approaching God means leaving behind the numbness
of sleep and being aware of the presence of the Other. The approaching
enigmatic presence leaves a trace at the heart of speech and body. This dream
makes of him a prototypical Jacob eager to awaken to the memory of God.
The song of man’s misery without God is broken in the name taken by
Yaël, therefore Jabès’ narrator seeks out Yaël-Shekhinah in the originary site
of the garden. The memory of God buttresses itself against the dereliction
for which Jabès’ work is invoked. He comes out of the dream in order to
accomplish by writing the exercise of a deferred awakening: to write the
book dedicated to Yaël, ‘this book of a time where our dreams find rest’.51
The demand to revive the divine creature of oblivion seizes him and poetic
invention cedes to the biblical injunction to listen, shemia,52 imposed on the
Jew by Law, and to remember, zekher,53 a mandate from God at the origin of
the Jewish vocation. It is Jabès’ narrator calling to bear witness to the forgotten
originary scene: the sacred Garden where divine harmony reigned and where
the union of Shekhinah and Tiferet occurred before the fall. At the heart
of poetic creation, the memory of all epochs sleeps in the anticipation of
the event capable of curing his amnesia: ‘Yaël, waking bears your name’.
Jabès’ dreamer contemplates the birth of the presence of Yaël-Shekhinah,
the tree planted in the middle of the garden.
398 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
V. T H E T R E E O F C O N S C I O U S N E S S I N T H E G A R D E N O F M E A N I N G

Tree, I watch you. Struck by your smallest trait. Every day I feel closer to you in
what you are not and what your name designates. Tree, I am growing with you,
with wanting to love your bark and leaves.54
Jabès

Under the mystical illumination of the sages of Safed, one can observe this
strange poetic tree spreading out its branches towards the cosmos in the garden
where Jabès’ narrator-passerby is steeped in revery. In this garden, he has a
vision: beneath the foliage are hidden the secret sheaves of creation where the
name of the Shekhinah is inscribed. For the Kabbalists of the Zohar, the tree
planted by God is the very image of God—Tiferet. ‘God’s knowledge is in the
tree’,55 writes Jabès, the sefirotic Tree of eternal life. The tree which symbolises
the ten dimensions of God grows before the eyes of the passerby-narrator in
the garden. Let us go back to the Zoharic sources: in the middle of the Garden
of Eden, kingdom of the sefirot, God planted the Tree of Life—Tiferet—heart of
his oneness.56 At the entrance to the Garden, God had likewise created the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—Shekhinah—which, united with the Tree of
Life, is protected from all.
As the guardian of the sefirot, the Shekhinah symbolises the first gateway to
the Garden open to divine mystery. This gate alone leads to the Tree of Life,
the secret text also named the ‘Torah of emanations’,57 but requires
meditation on the unity of divine transcendence. He who yearns only for
the Tree of Knowledge chooses by this gesture divine complexity and disrupts
the divine union.58 The secret is thus lodged in silence and the mystery
remains as such. The Tree of Knowledge, Shekhinah, is a text written to be
deciphered; it is in the enigmatic Garden where the very image of God is
reflected. The passage of the Shekhinah is an indispensable step in the mystic’s
process of decipherment. She designates the only visible part of the Tree of Life
given to man in his ordinary experience. She also represents the Judgement of
consciousness turned towards God and figures the birth of the critical human
mind. The awakening of the soul and its growing consciousness begin with
the Tree of Knowledge.
To approach this tree of consciousness, Jabès’ passerby (or narrator) must
open the first door of the sefirotic kingdom and listen in silence to the speech of
Yaël-Shekhinah, ‘priestess at the Temple threshold’,59 threshold of the book.
The encounter with the sacred text is an allegory for the encounter with God.
The narrator’s spiritual voyage in the symbolic Garden of timelessness is
achieved by a fragmentary writing which attempts to apprehend divine
essence. It is the moment where Yaël-Shekhinah is uncovered in the light of
her revelation. Let us follow the words retracing the dream:
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 399
The revery of the passerby in the garden wraps it in a silken melancholy which
is ruffled by cold as much as by the sun [ . . . ] Until night is unsealed by sleep.
O dream of dreams. The revery of the passerby in the garden turns into
brown spittle on the branches, into dew on the leaves. [ . . . ] The passerby
walking in the garden passed Yaël: God revealing Himself as a woman.60

‘The revery of the passerby’ brings us to the heart of the Kabbalistic secret, to
the Garden of the Torah’s multiple significations. In my view, Jabès’ narrator
borrows the initiating path of the four ancient Talmudic masters—Rabbi Ben
Azzai, Rabbi Ben Zoma, Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba—who
penetrated the place of wisdom where the Shekhinah, ‘Paradise of the Torah’,
is confined behind the letters of the book. The entry into the paradise of
signification, named ‘Pardes’ in Hebrew, becomes the very source of the
Jewish hermeneutic61 since it is the place of absolute revelation where the
meaning of the posited letter is realised. These four sages represent each of
the four exegetic approaches to the Torah constituted from the acronym of
the word ‘PaRDeS’.62 But the first three sages of the Pardes were disgraced
because they could not penetrate the mystery of knowledge. According to the
Zohar, they only crossed over the first stages of the divine emanation of the
sefirot and did not meditate on the transcendental unity of the sefirotic Tree.
In transgressing the interdiction against attaching oneself to the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil at the exclusion of all else, they, like the idolaters,
figuratively contributed to the disintegration of the ‘mystical union’. They
thus succumbed to the power of the sitra ahra, the demonic ‘other side’.63
Only Rabbi Akiba was able to contemplate the innermost soul of the Torah.
To write the book whose symbols must be deciphered—a book occupying
the half-way point between the vocation of Jew and writer—is the test that
Jabès imposes upon himself: ‘Wisdom of symbols. A book which makes us see
is a book of great wisdom’.64 His narrator undertakes his mystical adventure by
taking the path already followed by these four ancestral sages. His revery
carries him to their path and leads him to the secret where ‘God’s knowledge
is in the tree’. With his intuitive return to the beginnings in the sacred Pardes,
he returns to the timelessness of the creation of the tree. Which destiny will be
his: death, which struck Rabbi Azzai, madness, which attacked Rabbi Ben
Zoma; Rabbi Akiba’s peace or subversion, which condemned Rabbi Elisha
Ben Abuyah to alterity?
One is led to believe that the narrator follows the steps of Elisha Ben
Abuyah, the third banished renegade of the Pardes, who in his passage
devastated the foliage of the Garden and with this gesture altered the
foundations of normative Talmudic theology. However, though classified
amongst the heretics because he placed himself outside of the Sages’
community, Elisha remains at the origin of the drash,65 the meaning solicited
400 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
in order to be exegeted. He exits the Pardes and becomes the other, Aher,66
doubly transformed by his non-conformity to a religious tradition fixed
in certitude and by his alterity in attempting to reinvent himself outside of
the Jewish thought through a new reading of the Thora.

V I . T H E D E VA S TAT E D G A R D E N O F M E A N I N G

The opening of the drash’s exegetic method and Jabès’ subversion of a

normative theology lead his narrator to the path of Elisha Ben Abuyah.
In his imaginary garden, the elliptic speech of Yaël is housed in strangeness,
still unsaid and yet already expiring. Yaël-Shekhinah will not speak. She will
envelope herself in her own muteness, will take leave of the book.

Yaël embodies the principle of life. In her, the world dies with man wherever the book
is written.67
O Yaël, word free of God,
In vain your voice where nothing moves.68

Having joined the subversive Rabbis, the narrator-dreamer, cleaving to Yaël-

Shekhinah, unleashes the subversion of the sefirotic world and separates
irredeemably Shekhinah from Tiferet. Forced to leave the divine kingdom
represented in the chapter of the book Yaël called ‘The Garden’, he
symbolically unites with the evil forces of Yaël-Shekhinah and succumbs to
the power of the sitra ahra, the other side of the sefirotic Tree. In crossing
the threshold of timelessness, Jabès has returned to the origins of evil.
He rewrites the sin of Adam in the earthly paradise:

Thinking about the terrestrial paradise leads us to a reflection on the garden.

Before they had a landscape, man and woman had a park cultivated by the Lord.
Tree would have come into being before the animals if the latter had not been sure
of a body even while still absent.69

According to the Zohar,70 the prohibition of eating from the Tree of Knowledge
translates into the prohibition against cleaving to Shekhinah with the intention
of destroying the divine union. As a result of his fixation on the Shekhinah,
Adam banished her from the Garden and thus provoked the gravest of
alterations: the subversion of the sefirotic hierarchy. He separated Knowledge
from Life and the Tree of Knowledge was led into its own inner moral duality,
divided between good and evil. The kingdom of the shaken sefirot engenders
the fall of man, mortality and inaccessible knowledge. But in Jabès books this
tragic event also brought about the corruption of language. When Adam
transgressed the very first commandment of God, the legibility of the sacred
letter became altered and the reading of the divine Word forbidden.
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL 401
71
In the linguistic symbolism of the Zohar, the separation of the divine
dimensions signifies the absolute rupture between discourse and the voice of
God. The mystery of the divine enunciation proceeds from the emanations of
the sefirot, designating the gradual unfolding of God’s consciousness into God’s
discourse. The secret thought unfolds in the sefira Hokhmah; from this feminine
dimension a combination of secret letters is crystallised by the emanation of
the sefira Binah. Then the secret thought flows in the other sefirot until it opens
out in an audible voice in the sefira Tiferet. However, this voice remains
internal to the sefirotic Kingdom. God, in his supreme revelation, finds the
expression of his plenitude in the final sefira Shekhinah, the stage of the
manifestation of the divine word articulated in discourse. Thus a movement
in God occurs, a passage from ‘nothingness’ (Ayin) to ‘I’ (Ani), the Shekhinah.
But God’s own achievement of self-conscious identity is realised through
interaction with human beings when they can also say ‘I’. The birth of the
divine self (Shekhinah) unfolding its consciousness stage by stage is reflected
in the lower world of the human self. In fact, the realisation of divine
individuation depends on human partners. In other words, the revelation of
Shekhinah means that ‘man’ becomes aware of the presence of God in reaching
the deepest comprehension of his own self.72

God is female in His words, male in His gestures.73

In the night of his dream, seduced like his ancestor Adam by Yaël-Shekhinah in
the sacred Garden, Jabès’ narrator has broken the ‘mystical union’ and segre-
gated the feminine from the masculine dimensions of God. He has separated
the voice—Tiferet—from its audible articulation—Shekhinah. The interruption
of the flow of the sefirot provokes the absolute muteness of Yaël and the
dumbness of his own Jewish consciousness. Yaël exits the dream and
becomes again the character loved by the narrator who must confront his
own solitude:

In the garden, I do not have my tree. I have neither familiar bench nor flower,
no man or woman for company.
I have nothing.74

In rupturing the ‘mystical union’, does he observe the divine prohibition

against making the voice speak directly? Is it not in silence that one can hear
Yaël: ‘Will I one day speak in your silence, Yaël?’.75 The prohibition
against figuration is that of incarnation, one of the injunctions of
Jewish Law. The voice has to persist in the strangeness demanded by alterity.
However writing the night of his dream, Jabès’ narrator has accorded Yaël
a divine face and has placed an indirect embodied speech in her mouth. But
402 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
like Shekhinah, she is the ‘countenance of God, the infinite effacing of the
Face’.76 Only the letters of her name can figure the countenance which
cannot be reduced to representation. Any attempt to esthetise or create a visual
image becomes a transgression. Is this what the narrator’s union with the evil
forces of Yaël-Shekhinah signifies, the transgression of representation similar to
idolatry? The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil symbolises in its ambiguity the
limitation of the human language. The writer, like the Jew, is condemned
to write an impious book founded on fragmentary words inscribed in sand
whereas the sacred Book is engraved in stone.

The tree of knowledge bore wormy fruit. Did God Know this?
Adam ate the apple with its acid taste of defiance.
Henceforth he would live and die by fighting against God, by relentlessly struggling
with himself.77

The desire to reach God’s consciousness, the unknown secret voice, leads
Jabès’ narrator-dreamer to Yaël-Shekhinah. However he cleaves to the Tree of
Knowledge which ‘bore wormy fruit’—a defective and corrupted language—by
an act of defiance and a concupiscent desire for absolute knowledge. And
in his transgression of God’s prohibition he goes so far as to doubt God’s
knowledge, provoking the eternal struggle with the unknown of the night.
Like his ancestor Adam, the narrator has to be expelled from the sacred
Garden where he felt asleep, unable to read the Tree of Life. The exile of
Yaël-Shekhinah, seen in its displacement as the wandering of language, begins
and Jabès’ narrator pursues her in a state of dis-grace, in the place of perfidy
of the sitra ahra. She then reveals herself in all her alterity. ‘Saint or devil’,
she becomes the Tree of Death.

Vanderbilt University
n.debrau@vanderbilt.edu

REFERENCES
1
E. Jabès, The Book of Questions, The Book of
Yukel, The Return to the Book, trans. from
French by R. Waldrop (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan, 1976). Those three books (vo-
lumes I, II, II of Le Livre des Questions) were
originally published by Editions Gallimard,
in 1963, 1964, and 1965 respectively.
2
E. Jabès, Yaël, Elya, Aely, .El, or the Last
Book, trans. R. Waldrop (Middeltown, CT:
Wesleyan, 1983). Volumes IV, V, VI and
VII of Le Livre des Questions were originally
published by Editions Gallimard, in 1967,
1969, 1972 and 1973. I will refer to this
translation in the text with occasional
corrections. These seven Books of Questions
do not constitute a whole as such but rather
a collection of fragmented writing. Neither
a novel, an essay or a poem strictly
speaking, The Book of Questions is a
combination of fragments, Rabbis’ aphor-
isms, dialogues, songs, prayers and com-
mentaries that weave labyrinthically around
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL
the question of the book, writing, language,
the Shoah, Jewish identity, God, exile,
death, love, the desert, absence, silence,
6
void, nothingness. This mosaic of literary
forms is written in a poetic prose that
undermines the traditional narrative of a
novel with a specific plot and characters.
Though at the core of the first three Books
of Questions, the story of two young lovers,
Sarah and Yukel, separated in a concentra-
tion camp during the Shoah is told in an
oblique way, the last four Books of Questions
present disembodied voices with anagram-
matic names—Yaël, Elya, Aely, El—and an
anonymous narrator who is in some
undefined way related to these voices.
Regarding the last four Books of Questions
see also n. 17.
3
Regarding the Shekhinah, see G. Scholem,
On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. R.
Manheim (London: Routledge, 1965). The
Zohar: ‘Book of Splendor’, written at the
end of the thirteenth century by Moses Ben
Shem Tov of León (1240?–1305) is a major
book of the Spanish Kabbalah. It is a
mystical Midrash (interpretation) of the
Torah (five books of Moses). The sacred
7
authority of the Zohar is classified among
the Jewish canon such as the Tanakh and
the Talmud. See G. Scholem, Major Trends
in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken
8
Books (Foreword by R. Alter), 1945–95),
9
pp. 205–44; Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 11–41.
4
The Kabbalah gave birth to a vast literature
such as: the Sefer Yetsirah (III–IV CE), the
Sefer ha-Bahir (XII CE), the Sefer ha-Zohar
(XIII CE, the first kabbalistic text). See The
Encyclopedia of Judaism (Jerusalem Publish-
ing, 1989). See also Scholem, Major Trends
and Kabbalah.
5
‘Theosophy signifies a mystical doctrine, or
school of thought, which purports to
perceive and to describe the mysterious
workings of the Divinity, perhaps also
believing it possible to become absorbed
in its contemplation. Theosophy postulates
a kind of divine emanation whereby God,
abandoning his self-contained repose, awa-
kens to mysterious life; further, it maintains
403
that the mysteries of creation reflect the
pulsation of this divine life.’ Scholem, Major
Trends, p. 206.
The word sefirot comes from the Sefer
Yetsirah (III–VI CE), the most ancient
Hebraic treatise of cosmology and cosmog-
ony describing the vision of the divine
world. In the Sefer ha-Bahir (XII CE), the
sefirot designated the ten dimensions by
which God manifests himself. Cf. Diction-
naire Encyclopédique du Judaı̈sme (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1993). In the Zohar,
‘the sefirot are known by several names and
sets of symbols such as Keter representing
transcendent royalty, Hokhmah: transcen-
dent wisdom, Binah: intuitive understand-
ing, Gevurah: transcendent power, Hesed:
transcendent grace, Tiferet: active royalty,
Nesah: active grace, Hod: active power,
Yesod: righteous power, Malkhut: engaged
royalty, named also Shekhinah: presence
and face of God’. D.R. Blumenthal, Under-
standing Jewish Mysticism: The Merkabah
Tradition and the Zoharic Tradition
(New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978) Vol.
I, pp. 113–57. See also Scholem, Kabbalah,
pp. 117–26.
Jabès, From the Desert to the Book,
Dialogues with Marcel Cohen, trans.
P. Joris (New York: Station Hill, 1990), p.
76.
Jabès, The Return to the Book, p. 195.
In the summer 1998, I had the opportunity
to meet one of Jabès’ two daughters,
Viviane Jabès-Crasson, in Paris. During
our meeting I was able to verify my
assertion regarding Jabès relationship to
the Jewish Kabbalah and the Talmud
checking his personal library. Though Jabès
lost part of his books when he fled Egypt,
and some of his remaining books were held
by the other daughter, a few books were
left with Viviane Jabès-Crasson such as: Le
Zohar, 3 vols. (Paris: Verdier, 1981); Gershom
Scholem’s books such as La kabbale et sa
Symbolique (Paris: Payot, 1966); Le Talmud de
Jérusalem (traduction Moı̈se Schwab); Ouvrage
collectif sur Rachi (Manès Spenber); Henri
Serouya, La Kabbale (Paris: Grasset, 1947);
404 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
David Malki, Le Talmud et ses Maı̂tres, 3 vols.
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1880).
10
From the Desert to the Book, pp. 106–7. To
the question asked by Marcel Cohen:
‘How did you discover the Talmud?’ Jabès
answered: ‘My father kept the eleven
bound volumes of the Jerusalem Talmud
in the Schwab translation on his desk. He
had the books from his father and, like
him, often immersed himself in them. I
believe his Cartesian mind found reason
for profound jubilation in the Talmud.
( . . . ) My father made me a present of
these books—they are among the rare
ones I was able to save—a few years before
my departure from Egypt. I immersed
myself in them only after having started
the composition of the first Book of
Questions, as if wanting to check the in-
tuition I had regarding a certain Judaism.’
11
Blumenthal, Understanding, p. 113.
12
The different aspects of the subversive
representation of God are at stake in my
reading and at the core of Jabès’s writing.
In the Talmud and in the Midrashim there is
no allusion that the Shekhinah represents a
feminine element in God. Only the Zohar
introduces this radical innovation of the
Kabbalah. Therefore in the thirteenth
century for the strict Talmudists or even
for the philosophers this new conception
of the Shekhinah as the feminine element
in God was one of the main stumbling-
blocks in the Kabbalistic system. See
Scholem, Major Trends, p. 229.
13
Yaël, p. 53.
14
In the Jewish traditions and specifically in
the Talmudic and philosophic traditions,
the ‘Prohibition against representation’ of
any image of God is stipulated by God
in the Thora. However, in the Zoharic
tradition, God is personalised through the
emanations of his ten sefirot. Therefore
Yaël, as the incarnation of the Shekhinah—
one of the feminine dimension of God in
the Zohar—is already figured through her
divine name, ‘Yah’ and ‘El’.
15
E. Jabès’ Le Livre de Yukel (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), pp. 140–1, my translation.
16
Yaël, 25.
17
Ibid., p. 41. Jabès himself establishes these
important differences between the two
times of the ‘narration’. In the table of
contents in the book of Yaël, the first part
of the book is called The Time before the
Story and the second part (which is written
as a journal) is called The Story. See also n.
2 regarding the question of ‘narration’ and
‘character’.
18
Ibid., p. 21.
19
Ibid., pp. 85–6, 105.
20
Ibid., p. 16.
21
Ibid., pp. 28, 67.
22
G. Scholem, ‘The Name of God and the
Linguistic Theory of Kabbala’, Diogenes
(1972) 77–80.
23
F. Lachower and I. Tishby (eds), trans.
from Hebrew by D. Goldstein, The
Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of
Texts (Oxford, 1989) Vol. III, p. 1080.
24
The sefirot emanation goes beyond the
concept of ‘hypostases’ and ‘intellects’
issued from the neo-Platonism of Plotinus.
In fact, the kabbalistic theosophies adapted
it according to Jewish monotheism. The
emanation is a process of exteriorisation of
the En-Sof (God) which takes place inside
the En-Sof, without implying then the
diminution of the emanator and his sep-
aration from the ten emanated dimensions.
25
Yaël, pp. 38, 74.
26
Scholem, ‘Name of God’, p. 170.
27
Exodus 17:18 in Tanakh, A New Transla-
tion of the Holy Scriptures According to
the Traditional Hebrew Text (Phila-
delphia, Jerusalem: Jewish Publication
Society, 1985). In writing Yah þ el with
a ‘hey’ in the middle, Jabès is creating a
‘double entente’. Since the ‘ayin’ (Ya’el)
is not pronounced in Hebrew except by
strict sefardim and could not be written in
French, both meanings are inherent in the
French ‘Yaël’.
28
All the divine nominations created from
the word ‘El’ inscribe the divine alterity
such as: El elyon (The Mighty God), El
olam (The Eternal God), El shaddaı̈ (God
of the Mountains).
 SHEKHINAH IN EDMOND JABÈS’ YAËL
29
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, 347. Although
‘Yud’ usually symbolises Hokhmah, it can
occasionally signify Keter.
30
Judges 4. Jaël of Judges is spelled differently
in Hebrew: Ya’el with a ‘ayin’ in the
middle.
31
L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans.
H. Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1909), Vol. I, p. 3.
32
Aely, p. 314.
33
Yaël, pp. 40, 16, 59, 105.
34
Blumenthal, Understanding, Vol. I, pp.
143–5. See also the Zohar 1:221b in
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, pp. 372–5.
35
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, p. 371.
36
The concept of ‘dualism’ is the most
important innovation of the Zohar and
therefore the most subversive, for nowhere
in Judaism the same idea of the Shekhinah,
as the feminine dimension of God, is
opposed to the Holy One, as the mascu-
line dimension of God. See Scholem,
Major Trends, p. 229.
37
Yaël, pp. 25, 113.
38
Words used by Blumenthal describing the
sefirotic world in Understanding Jewish Mysti-
cism, Vol. I, p. 114.
39
Name given to Jacob after his struggling
with the Unknown of the night, Genesis
32:39.
40
According to its relationship with ‘the
other side’ (sitra ahra), the activity of the
Shekhinah as the attribute of Judgement
reveals itself in three different stages: if
the Shekhinah is unified with Tiferet, she
manifests herself as the righteous judge and
the forces of ‘the other side’ act as its
henchmen. But if the world of Holiness is
threatened by the world of ‘uncleanness’,
she unleashes her ‘Judgement of Ven-
geance’ to protect Herself. In the last
stage, if she is joined to the system of the
‘husks’ because of the sins of the world,
she becomes the ‘Judgment of Fury’. See
Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 125. See also
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, p. 378.
41
‘The Tree of Knowledge contains the
death-force, which is not revealed while it
remains united with the Tree of Life; but
405
once Knowledge is divorced from Life, the
Tree of Knowledge becomes the Tree of
Death. This is the mystery of death, which
is decreed for the world at the instigation
of the serpent. ( . . . ) The symbol of the
Tree of Death is used in two different
senses. In one sense, death signifies the
kindling of the fire of Judgement, and the
dominant power of anger, in the Shekhi-
nah. ( . . . ) The Tree of Death symbolises,
in another sense, the complete separation
of the Shekhinah from the forces of
holiness, and her union with ‘‘the other
side’’, which by its very nature seeks to act
as a force of death and destruction.’
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, p. 375.
42
Aely, p. 242.
43
Elya, p. 178.
44
Yaël, p. 84.
45
Ibid., p. 5.
46
Ibid., p. 12.
47
Ibid., p. 25.
48
Ibid., p. 57.
49
The garden is not only the place where
Jabès’ dreamer falls asleep but it is also
the name of the chapter: ‘The Garden’ that
I interpret as the PaRDes, the Garden of the
meaning of the Scripture as we shall see.
50
Genesis 28:10–17.
51
Yaël, p. 4.
52
‘Shema Israel’: ‘Hear, O Israel’ is the
Jewish profession of faith recited twice a
day; see Deuteronomy 6:4.
53
‘Zakhor’: ‘Remember!’ The covenant
between God and His people is based on
a reciprocal remembrance. See Psalm 78.
54
Yaël, p. 52.
55
Ibid., p. 53.
56
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, pp. 356–8. See
also the Zohar 1:35a.
57
Tiferet represents the ‘Tree of Life’ which is
the Oral Torah (Torah of emanation), the
hidden God’s internal word not to be
found in this world. Shekhinah represents
the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ which is the
Written Torah (Torah of creation), God’s
full and articulated word found in the
Commandments. However this distinction
can be reversed according to the different
406 NATHALIE DEBRAUWERE-MILLER
66
parts of the Zohar, and to the mystical Deuteronomy 22:6–7 and Talmud of
conceptions of the three Torah: Pre- Babylon: Hagigah 2:1.
67
existent, Oral and Written Thora. See Yaël, p. 41.
68
Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 108–11. See also Elya, p. 140.
69
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. I, p. 295; Vol. III, Yaël, p. 54.
70
pp. 1077–121. Zohar 1:26a/26b. Genesis 2:16–17: ‘Of every tree of the
58
Blumenthal, Understanding, Vol. I, p. 145. garden you are free to eat; but as for the
59
Yaël, p. 113. tree of good and bad, you must not eat of
60
Yaël, pp. 54–5, my translation. it; for as soon as you eat of it, you
61
Talmud of Babylon: Hagigah 14b/15a. See shall die.’ Zohar 1:53b, interpretation of
also the Zohar 1:26a/26b. Genesis 3:23–4. See also Blumenthal,
62
Scholem, Kabbalahe, pp. 71–7. See also Understanding, Vol. I, pp. 144–5.
71
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. III, pp. 1077–112. Zohar 1:35a/36a.
72
PaRDeS: a mnemonic for the four methods ‘God in the most deeply hidden of His
of interpreting scripture: Peshat (literal) manifestations [ . . . ] is called He. God in
represented by Rabbi Ben Azzai’s method, the complete unfolding of his being, [ . . . ]
Remez (allegorical) represented by Rabbi is called You. But God in His supreme
Ben Zoma, Derash (homiletical) symbolised manifestation [ . . . ] is called ‘I’. This is the
by Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuyah, Sod (anago- stage of true individuation in which God
gical, mystical) represented by Rabbi Akiba. as a person says ‘I’ to ‘Himself’. Scholem,
63
Tishby, Wisdom, Vol. III, pp. 1091–416. Major Trends, p. 216. See Tishby, Wisdom,
64
Yaël, p. 53. Vol. I, p. 293. See also M.E. Lodahl,
65
‘Midrash’ comes from the word Drash, a Shekhinah Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish
method of rabbinical exegesis which and Christian Religion (New York: Stimulus
authorises the unusual meeting between Book, 1992).
73
tradition and innovation. Following this Yaël, p. 40.
74
method, the text can be interrogated Ibid., p. 58.
75
without limits. See M.A. Ouaknin, Le Ibid., p. 42.
76
Livre Brûlé: Philosophie du Talmud (Paris: Ibid., p. 67.
77
Lieu Commun, 1986), p. 112. Ibid., p. 60.