Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes

Their cries serve both to bind them (the root DBK, as in dybbuk, is used here) to the souls of the dead and to rouse them to action on their behalf. The righteous dead then ascend to commune with the souls of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people—“those who sleep in Hebron,” in the Cave of Makhpelah—hoping to obtain their intervention.⁴² In his commentary on this passage, Cordovero is interested in exploring the means by which the living are able to cross the divide that separates them from the dead. How is it that an embodied soul can communicate and commingle with the disembodied souls of the dead? And embodiment is indeed taken to be the heart of the problem; coarse flesh suffices to obscure the refined spiritual form of the dead from the eyes of the living. A metamorphosis of this fleshy garment of the soul is indispensable. So writes Cordovero: “This matter will be apprehended and discovered in the secret of the Garment [levush] prior to Adam and the rest of worldly existence, before Adam’s sin, the secret ‘Garments of Light.’ For after the sin and the corporealization [of the Garment] as matter, it was said to him, you are dust, and shall return to dust.’”⁴³ The garment of skin (‘or) fashioned by God for Adam (Gen. 3: 21) was created first as light (or). Sin resulted in its corporealization, and with physicality came opacity and, tragically, perishability.⁴⁴ In other words, when Adam was first created, like the dead, he too was formed of a fine, diaphanous body of light, partaking of immortality.

      This original Garment of Light was removed from ordinary men as a consequence of Adam’s sin, yet remains available to the righteous, whose recovery of this ethereal body enables them to communicate with the souls of the dead. “This Garment and the existence of this subtle world is received by the righteous in the mystery of their soul, and is transmitted only to the refined of mind whose spiritual souls vanquish their corporeality, and who nullify their bodily desires. They then pass beyond the veil and threshold of the physical world and enter the World of Souls.”⁴⁵ Those who refine their intellects and strengthen their spirits, who manage to overcome their physicality, transmute their Garments of Skin. Attaining the Garments of Light, they become capable of commingling with the souls of the righteous dead. “[There] they apprehend according to the degree of their merit, to hear them [the souls] and sometimes actually to see them, as did R. Shimon and his comrades, as explicated in several places in the Zohar.”⁴⁶ Once they have exchanged their coarse flesh for ethereal bodies, the righteous find themselves in the world of souls. At this level of spiritual attainment they hear, if not see, the dead. The heroes of the Zohar, explains Cordovero, enjoyed such interaction with departed souls precisely through the process he has described. Yet hearing and even seeing are not enough; in times of crisis, the living righteous must bring about the adhesion of their souls to the souls of their dead predecessors, and arouse them to act on their behalf. This calls for the implementation of a more magical necromantic technique that takes the living ẓaddik to the grave of the dead ẓaddik whom he seeks to arouse. “This is the secret of the binding of one soul to another, which is given only to one located in this world, who is able to bind his embodied soul with the soul of the righteous. This is done through his pouring out of his soul upon the grave of the righteous, and he clings soul to soul and speaks with the soul of the righteous and informs him. This soul then awakens the other souls, and this is what is said: ‘Why? Because they make it their will to cling to them ….’”⁴⁷ It is the presumption of the Zohar that the presence of the lower soul (nefesh) of the ẓaddik remains at the grave; his spirit (ruaḥ) is taken to be in Gan Eden (paradise), his higher soul (neshamah) far beyond. It is the nefesh of the living that clings strictly to the nefesh of the righteous, which has remained in this world precisely to aid the living when the need arises.⁴⁸

      Cordovero’s closing remarks on this passage are particularly striking: “This matter was still done in Spain by great men who knew of it. They would dig a trench in the grave over the head of the dead. In it, they would pray for the benefit of the whole community, and they would cling, soul to soul, in solitary meditation.”⁴⁹ In Spain, the technique is said to have involved laying prone in a trench, head aligned with the head in the grave, the communion enhanced by proximity. A meditative engagement of the practioner’s soul with the soul of the dead would then culminate in a state of adhesion, soul to soul. According to Cordovero, then, the technique described by the Zohar was practiced not only by the Tannaitic saints whose exploits were so magnificently depicted in pseudoepigraphic style, but also by the great men of Spain, apparently in the recent past.⁵⁰ These men practiced a form of hishtatḥut, or gravesite prostration, that was to become extremely popular among the kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed.⁵¹ Indeed, in his paraphrase of Cordovero’s commentary, rather than concluding with the original’s recollections of Spanish practitioners, R. Abraham Azulai (1570–1644) substitutes, “And this matter has been verified among us, as this happened in our own times. Speakers of truth have testified to me that they saw this practiced by the AR”I [R. Isaac Luria]⁵² and his students, the comrades, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.”⁵³

      Not only did R. Isaac Luria practice these techniques, he broadened their applicability considerably. In his conception, hishtatḥut practices were to be undertaken to achieve a positive ‘ibbur in the practitioner, and not only in times of crisis. In his autobiographical dream diary Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot (Book of Visions), R. Ḥayyim Vital records that in 1571, Luria sent him to the burial cave of the talmudic sage Abaye so that the latter might penetrate him as a positive ‘ibbur. “In that year, my teacher, may his memory be a blessing, sent me to the cave of Abaye and taught me that yiḥud [unification]. I clung to his soul, and he spoke to me of the matters of which I wrote in the aforementioned tract.” yiḥudim (pl.) were the staples of Luria’s magico-mystical contemplative system. Scholem defined such yiḥudim as theurgic acts “based on mental concentration on the combinations of Sacred Names” that “contained … an element of magic.”⁵⁴ Vital’s own definition of yiḥudim makes it clear that he viewed them primarily as a means for cleaving to souls of the righteous, achieved through a circulation of energies initiated by the intender of the yiḥud. Early in the work Sha‘ar ha-yiḥudim (Gate of Unifications), Vital promises that he plans to

      explain the matter of yiḥudim, what they are and their nature, and how by means of this [practice] one attains revelations of the souls of the righteous. By this we will explain the matter of prostration on the graves of the righteous and cleavage to them, spirit to spirit….⁵⁵ For it is impossible for a person to awaken [the dead] without the yiḥudim, to ascend in the secret of Female Waters [mayyim nukvin]. In this they drawn down illumination below and illuminate the one engaged in the unification [ha-meyaḥed].⁵⁶

      The yiḥud is thus a meditative practice that promises to grant the practitioner clairvoyant contact with the dead and, moreover, to cleave to them in spiritual ecstasy. The yiḥud awakens the dead and allows the practitioner to ascend through the energy of his devotion while simultaneously drawing down enlightenment from above. The practitioner-driven devotion is characterized here by the kabbalistic term Female Waters, understood as the spiritual arousal and “lubrication” of the practitioner that stimulates the divine partner and calls forth the shower of divine effusion, itself called “Male Waters” in the literature.

      In this mystical circle, necromantic techniques such as graveside prostration were not always required to bring about the impregnation of the soul of a departed saint into the body of a living counterpart. Elsewhere in his mystical diary, Vital relates that there were times when he heard voices speaking to him, which he did not know with certainty to be those of visiting transmigrants. He even suspected the voices to be his own. In doubt, he consulted a Damascene sorcerer, who in turn summoned a demonic spirit to appear in a looking glass, in order to respond to Vital’s query. “He answered me,” writes Vital, “He [the ‘ibbur] is the speaker, and not me. For his soul enclothes itself in my heart, and from there he raises the sound of his words to my mouth and he speaks with my mouth, and then I hear.”⁵⁷

      Vital devoted much effort to clarifying the subject of transmigration in Luria’s thought.⁵⁸ In the Lurianic context, a kind of Gnostic structural parallelism between good