Subject: Salinger and Kabbalah [was Re: Cheever and Salinger]
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 21 2002 - 21:00:34 EDT
Cecilia said:
<< . . . when I started looking into
the significance of the number six in the Jewish Kabbalah tradition, I
found the tradition that there are six levels of the Jewish soul.
[. . .]
I know there's a few bananafish who certainly know more on the subject of
Judaism than me. What do you think? >>
will said:
<< I am a Jew and think the kabbala is one of the most
interesting parts of the religion, but I don't think Salinger
explored Judiasm deeply and I've often wondered why. I wondered if he
ever mentioned the kabbala in print... >>
The connection between Kabbalah and Judaism is controversial. To some Jews,
Kabala is no more a part of Judaism than Meister Eckhart is to Christianity.
To most Jews, Kabbalah is somehow significant but falls short of
authoritative. And while I don't know with a great degree of certainty how
hard it would have been for Salinger to have accessed Kabbalah while he was
publishing, there's a chance, I think, that he never knew anything about it
because he never had the opportunity.
Kabbalah (the word means "reception" or "received" and so is taken also to
mean something like "tradition") is a tradition of Jewish mystics and it's
hard to define much better than that. The Kabbalists believe that the first
book of Kabbalah was given by God to Adam, that Abraham was the first to
write Kabbalah, that Moses received Kabbalah from God on Mount Sinai (and so
it is the oral counterpart to Torah) and so on. There is some small
evidence of emerging aspects of Kabbalah within rabbinical customs and
traditions late in the biblical era. There have been many Kabbalists and
many books of Kabbalah over the centuries, but when people talk about THE
Kabbalah, they are almost always talking about the book of Zohar, or
Splendor, which fills about as many volumes as a typical encyclopedia. The
Kabbalists hold that the Zohar was written in the second century to preserve
the oral Kabbalah handed down since Moses and before, but that it was kept
hidden due to political pressures, and discovered in the 13th century by a
Spanish Kabbalist. Others suggest that the Zohar was written by the 13th
century Spanish Kabbalist, on the evidence that there is no record of its
existence before the 13th century, there are no ancient manuscripts, and
there have been suggestions of bad Aramaic for the second century and even
traces of Spanish sentence patterns.
In any case, study of the Zohar and other Kabbalah was not very common
except within circles of mystics and occultists until the Kabbalah Centre
opened in Jerusalem in the 1920s, and then study was limited to Orthodox
Jewish men over 40 who were seriously involved in religious study and were
deemed worthy. The Kabbalah Centre didn't open its doors to everybody else
until the 1970s. I don't know when the Kabbalah Centre translated the Zohar
into English, but I think that it was fairly recently and that they are the
only ones to have ever done it. Traditionally, Jewish scholars have done
all of their studying in the original languages, which are taken to be
sacred -- especially Hebrew, which is, after all, the language God spoke.
Language and writing are so sacred within Jewish culture, in fact, that a
set of the Zohar in the original Aramaic is taken to be quite literally
magical, to protect your home while sitting on the shelf, and people who
can't even read the language are encouraged to "scan" the words (i.e., run
your eyes across like you ARE reading them) to yield great mystical
benefits, and groups of people all over the world have coördinated schedules
to be scanning the same passages at the same times day after day.
Most groups who have been dedicated to Kabbalah all along and who take it as
an authority (like the familiar Hasidim -- "pious ones" -- who originated in
Eastern Europe in the 18th century) have usually been taken by the
mainstream Jewish community with feelings ranging from suspicious
disapproval to outright scorn. They gained some acceptance, I think, with
the arrival of (and the threat of) the Reform movement, but even now, a lot
of Jews who think there really might be something TO this Kabbalah business
still suspect that they would probably be better to leave well enough alone
and stick to Torah and the rest of the Tanakh like every other red-blooded
Jew.
So I think that most people who have heard of Kabbalah -- and who aren't
mystics or serious students of the Jewish religion and history -- have heard
of it only since the '70s when it became a lot more accessible and even
began to acquire something of a hip reputation by hippies and proponents of
the New Age who will certainly dig a tradition that gets credibility by
association with a well-known and ancient religion but that also involves
crystals, numerology, and magical talismans. Hell, even Madonna has now
publicly endorsed study of Kabbalah. Most of this new group of amateur
Kabbalists, though, do not spend $500 on the English Zohar translation, but
buy a $12 Learning from the Kabbalah paperback and maybe take a class
through one of the Kabbalah Centre's local chapters.
So I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that it would have been
a lot easier for Salinger to study the Vedas in the '50s and '60s than to
study Kabbalah. It's possible, I think, that he hadn't even heard of it.
Had any of you who were around then heard anything about it before the '70s?
-robbie
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