How to Think Like The Zohar?
On Everyday Mysticism, Heidegger, and the Interpretive Life
The Zohar (the book after which I am named) teaches a principle that “God, Torah, and Israel are one.” Here are my particularist and universalist interpretations of this fundamental idea. Note: I think the particularist version can roughly translate across religious traditions:
Particularist Interpretation
If you want to understand and/or relate to God you can do so either by studying Torah or by contemplating Jewish history and experience, including your own contemporary Jewish life and community.
If you want to understand the Torah, realize that it’s as much a theological-spiritual parable as it is a specific narrative about specific events. Torah is also not just about God and the spiritual life, it’s also a book about interpretation itself. It has multiple levels.
If you want to understand what it means to be Jewish right now, to be an Israelite (God-wrestler), contemplate your own struggles and successes as a microcosm of God’s. Contemplate your own situation as a repetition-with-difference of Scripture. Scripture isn’t simply a book. You’re living it. And one day, the life you have led will be Scripture to your descendants, who will study your life, albeit mythologized, as you study the lives of your ancestors.
Universalist Interpretation
Heidegger writes in Being and Time that ontology, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, belong together. That is, the study of being (metaphysics), the study and practice of interpretation, and the first-person contemplation of one’s own experience are all intermixed—you can’t do one without the others. Let’s attempt to make this slightly more accessible:
Classically, philosophers thought they could engage in speculative questions about the nature of the universe without considering that their ideas were interpretations. They also thought that what was true of the cosmos stood independent of themselves and their own experience. Heidegger and other modernist and postmodernist thinkers grasped that the philosopher who contemplates the cosmos is part of the cosmos he studies. His interpretations say as much about him as they do about the world. If we weren’t interpretive beings we couldn’t speculate about what is. And if we weren’t beings who cared about what it means to exist, we would have no motivation to do so. Ontology is as much about the one doing it as the object being described. Or as Heidegger says, without Dasein (you and I, mortals) there could be neither (other) beings nor Being (meaning). Yes, there would be ants, algae, stones, etc. But there would be no concept of these things, no way in which these beings could appear as what they are (bold claim!)
How should we interpret the world? This isn’t a question we sit around asking ourselves, it’s something we’ve already answered, something implicit in all acts of perception. When we interpret anything (hermeneutics), be it a text, a social interaction, a starry sky, we demonstrate, at an angle, what we think about what is (ontology) and what it’s like to be us, experiencing ourselves in the world (phenomenology).
If you want to know what is, embrace—rather than eschew—your limitations; accept that knowledge is only possible on the basis of phenomenology (being a being who cares). Your limitations are what make it possible to have ideas. If you want to know yourself, interpret yourself. You can’t but do it, anyways. Your interpretation will be limited, the result of a specific mood, a specific history, a specific set of assumptions that can and will change. But it’s all you have. Embrace it. Self-knowledge isn’t an abstraction. It is not far away. As Deuteronomy says, “it is not in heaven.”
To recap—religiously speaking, you are a microcosm of God and your own singularity is the key to unlocking Scripture. Philosophically speaking, you are a microcosm of Being and your own singularity is they key to unlocking your interpretation of what is. In both cases, you are always already doing it. Creation and revelation are already underway. You already have a take, a provisional stand. But when you acknowledge this and embrace it, your life becomes extra luminous.
Is this untenable? Or have I made a good case for mysticism as a powerful, if ordinary life-orientation?
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