The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition

by Peter Cole (Editor), Aminadav Dykman (Afterword)

The first ever English-language collection of poetry from the Kabbalistic tradition, masterfully translated by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole

This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry that emerges directly from the sublime and often startling world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem’s call to plumb the “tremendous poetic potential” concealed in the Kabbalistic tradition, Peter Cole provides dazzling renderings of work composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years.

In addition to the translations and the texts in their original languages, Cole supplies a lively and insightful introduction, along with accessible commentaries to the poems. Aminadav Dykman adds an elegant afterword that places the work in the context of world literature. As a whole, the collection brings readers into the fascinating force field of Kabbalistic verse, where the building blocks of both language and existence itself are unveiled.

Excerpts from The Poetry of Kabbalah have been featured in the Paris Review, Poetry, and Conjunctions.

Genres: Poetry, Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Mysticism

544 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Peter Cole has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and in 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Call To Nothing

All poetry strains language. The poetry of Kabbalah breaks language into pieces and reconstructs it. Kabbalah does this by treating language as holy, as an emanation of the divine, indeed as infinite variations of the Names of God. By using language properly, that is by allowing it to overwhelm oneself in abject submission, language breaks the bonds we place on it. Meanings are unmoored; words float about forming a new context; language no longer communicates, it removes itself and becomes angelic in order to reveal.

Cole claims (rightly I think) that Kabbalah is the real progenitor of modern literary techniques like deconstruction: “... long before Frenchified notions of trace and erasure took hold, a Kabbalistic poetics was drawing attention to aspects of language-in-action that slip readers into (as D. H. Lawrence put it in a wholly different context) a “dawn-kaleidoscopic” world of ramifying meaning where absence and presence evoke one another.” But these secular techniques are limited since they can only produce further interpretations and not glimpses of reality.

One way in which Kabbalah evokes reality is by hiding the Name of God within a poem (for example in the cumulative first letters of each line). The one who recites it is unaware, therefore, of his linguistic capture by the divine. Kabbalah also frequently uses litany towards the same end, as in the piece Windows of Worship:

“And Moses asked Metatron . . . What are these windows [of the first heaven]? And he said to him, These windows are:
Windows of worship
Windows of beckoning
Windows of weeping
Windows of joy
Windows of satiety
Windows of hunger
Windows of penury
Windows of wealth
Windows of peace
Windows of war
Windows of bearing
Windows of birth
and he saw—
windows without number and end”

Unlike typical Christian litanies, it may be noted that Kabbalah is not full of unremitting positivity. For example, the ‘windows’ above are of unpleasantness, even horrors, as well as of joyful things. Contraries and contradictions are embedded within almost everyone of these poems. This culminates in what Cole (and D.H. Lawrence) calls “theoeroticism,” the divine sex life in which the eternal masculine and feminine aspects of the divine are continually ‘at it’ creating the world.

Ultimately Kabbalah tells us what modern linguistic, philosophical and psychological research has only begun to understand, namely that we are trapped in the language that we thought we merely used. Cole quotes a fourth or fifth century text which is typical:

[The angel] Metatron said to me:
Come and I will show you
the letters by which heaven and earth were created;
the letters by which seas and rivers were created;
the letters by which mountains and hills were created;
the letters by which trees and grasses were created;
the letters by which stars and constellations were created . . .
the letters by which the throne of glory and the wheels of the chariot were created . . .
the letters by which wisdom and understanding, knowledge and intelligence, humility and rectitude were created, by which the whole world is sustained.”

The poetry of Kabbalah provides a sort of spiritual theory of the world, a theory which I find more inspiring as well as more accurate than the scientific theories of the Big Bang. In this spiritual theory, creation is shown to be what it has always been, a product of our ability to speak and write:

“He called to Nothing—which split;
to existence—pitched like a tent;
to the world—as it spread beneath sky.”
With desire’s span He established the heavens,
as His hand coupled the tent of the planets
with loops of skill,
weaving creation’s pavilion,
the links of His will
reaching the lowest
rung of creation—
the curtain
at the outermost edge of the spheres . . .
Who could make sense of creation’s secrets,
of your raising up over the ninth sphere
the circle of mind,
the sphere of the innermost chamber?
The tenth to the Lord is always sacred:
This is the highest ring,
transcending all elevation
and beyond all ideation.”

That tenth ring is there but always just out of reach, always the object of search, but never attained. It is after all Nothing, Ein Sof, the Void - more commonly known as Reality. Nevertheless, the call to nothing gets a generally better response in literature than in science.*

* I realise that it an overstatement. Nevertheless it is frequently the case that scientists do not recognise the ultimate hopelessness of their purported task to ‘find reality.’ The Spanish-American philosopher Miguel de Unamuno summarised the situation metaphorically for mathematics: “I believe that if the geometrician were to be conscious of this hopeless and desperate striving of the hyperbola to unite with its asymptotes, he would represent the hyperbola to us as a living being and a tragic one!” This appears to me to be the universal human tragedy, the very Original Sin wherein, according to biblical sources, God allowed mankind the power of language which He did not create.

[Ivan Granger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally we have a truly excellent collection of sacred Jewish poetry. While T. Carmi's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse is more comprehensive, Cole's The Poetry of Kabbalah has more of a poet's sense of language and even catches of few sparks from the mystic's fire. This is poetry that startles and transports. The Poetry of Kabbalah has become my favorite source for Jewish mystical poetry in English. Very highly recommended.

[Adriel K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read most of these over Yom Kippur and really enjoyed them. Thank you Adam. It’s sure to join the rotation of books… On Sacrifice, Zachor, Lewis, Berkovitz... and it is more or less devotional and keeps the mind in a prayerful space.

I read Windows (p23) a few times and it brought to mind scenes from Miyazakis or the Matrix or I don't know what. There is something ahead of its time here, as Cole notes. Translating “ana bekoach” as “release, please” is so magnificent that I had to read it, then sing it, and see how it felt different in my palette, think about it felt different in Kaballat Shabbat, just one of those wonderful moments that gives you another angle that was obviously there all along (p34.) I loved True life (p70) and Cole is obviously a talented poet himself and channels that power to catch sparks of inspiration from these poems: “But why should I speak, or even aspire / Lord, before you is all my desire” (p74.)

But my favorite was “I love you” (p61) and yes, it’s also because it was Adam’s favorite and he shared it with me. Here it is, I dutifully copy it here

I love you

I love you with the love a man
has for his only son –
with his heart and his soul and his might.
And I take great pleasure in your mind
As you take the mystery on
Of the Lord’s act in creation –
Though the issue is distant and deep,
And who could approach its foundation?

But I’ll tell you something I’ve heard
And let you dwell on its strangeness:
Sages have said that the secret
Of being owes all
To the all who has all in his hand:
He longs to give form to the formless
As a lover longs for his friend*
And this is, maybe, what the prophets
Meant when they said He worked
All for His own exaltation

I’ve offered you these words –
Now show me how you’ll raise them.

(*note: the original Hebrew is Dod, so translate as friend/beloved as you will)

[Stephen Hoffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well put together selection of Kabbalah poetry and written history of the beautiful, holy, diverse and spiritual history of Kabbalah poetry.

The poems chosen I largely enjoyed reading, trying to unravel their mysteries and understand their meaning. For me part of the joys of poetry and through engaging with my Jewish soul is finding out stuff I didn't know, as well as finding new meanings and ideas, which open up a whole new world of ideas and ways of looking at things.

The explanations of each era of Kabbalah poetry and the lives of the poets in these times are very well done and highly informative. They don't just tell you about the lives of the poets, but why they wrote what they did and in a certain style, but also how they were effected by the era they lived in. The explanations before you start reading the poetry help you peel away the onion layer, so you get to see what it is inside and thus understand the heart of the poem.

I enjoyed most of the poems, though I must admit there were a few I didn't understand or couldn't connect with. Overall for the whole poetry section of the book I would give 4.5 stars.

However there are then extended notes going line by line each poem. Whilst this was interesting, it went on for far too long and could have been half or even a quarter of the length it was. It just was too dense. Nonetheless I did find large parts of interesting and you could see the work which went on to it. I didn't have a problem with their being a section like this, but it should have been far more precise to keep the attention of the reader.

I enjoyed learning and reading Kabbalah poems and its history. Despite the overly long notes section which did detract slightly from the book as a whole, I would definitely recommend this book for those who love poetry and want to explore Judaism and Jewish mysticism.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it on my iPad which is a tough go for poetry, but doable. Beautiful prayers and translations and rich background info. I will be purchasing the book.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, fascinating, makes me want to read more and write more. Love it. Should come back and reread, and I now have a longer reading list.

[Elijah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life changing.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is good; it's not GREAT. Cole's introduction and notes between sections are very interesting. But the selections of poetry themselves are incredibly repetitive, and from a purely poetic perspective, rather banal. You can find more mysticism in Whitman; you can find more JEWISH mysticism in Ginsberg or Dylan; and best of all, you can find more poetic and inspiring Kabbalistic passages in other places…either in their original sources or in Norman Lamm's fabulous The Religious Thought of Hasidism (though not POETRY by name, the passages ARE poetic in impact).