David Prashker's Book Of Days: August 5

1572

The death, today, and not on July 25th as Wikipedia would have you believe, of Isaac ben Solomon Ashkenazi, Isaac Luria as he is best known, or ha-Ari, the Lion, the Holy Lion of Safed, that beautiful, mystical, light-flooded colony of artists and Cabbalists in the hills of Korazim, a crow's-nest above Galilee and the lake Kinneret.

Elie Wiesel has called him "one of the most mysterious, complex and popular masters of Kabbala" and I will disagree only with his spelling of Cabbala, though the point is really moot. He taught all his life, inspirationally, but like the Biblical prophets he left behind no writings, only the notes, dictations and memoriae of his disciples, in particular Chaim Vital. Born in Jerusalem, Luria lived most of his life in Cairo, and died in Safed (Zefat in Hebrew) at the age of only 38.

What denotes greatness, significance, in the world of ideas? It can only, surely, be the inception of new ideas which take hold deeply enough that they become taken for granted and no one can even imagine that they had a discoverer, let alone name him or her. Who first thought of Time, Love, Justice? Someone must have done, yet they are as intrinsic to our universe as grass or fish or music (and just as absent, alas, in some parts of that universe). Luria uncovered (I use the term deliberately, for in the realm of Cabbala nothing is discovered but only uncovered, because everything was created by God in the beginning; however, some things were held back for later revelation, including the revelation – another deliberate term – of this parenthesis)… Luria uncovered no less than three such great ideas, of which one took hold only within the mystic circles of the Cabbala, while the other two encircled the entire universe (yes, another piece of deliberate phrasing, which the ideas of Luria will now explain).

The first, the least, was known in Hebrew as "Shevirat Ha Kelim" or "the breaking of the vessels" of Primary Light whose sparks, even in the infernal regions, give birth to the cosmos. I have said that this idea of the mystical sources of Creation is restricted to Cabbala; I am using Cabbala in its broadest sense, incorporating both physics and metaphysics, which are its lesser branches; in this sense the concept of the "Big Bang" may be seen as an infantile popularisation of Luria's much bigger idea.

Far more significant were Luria's concepts of "Tikkun" and "Zimzum". The former is the gathering-in of the sparks that flew off in the Shevirat Ha Kelim, the bridging of the gaps they have left in Creation, the restoration of the whole: "repairing the Universe" is the term used in Reform Judaism, and "tackling global warming" is one example in the secular world, but Luria's construct was much larger. He took it for granted that there is a finite end of the universe towards which all life aspires and tends, and whose culmination, or whose prevention, he represented as the Messiah-in-chains awaiting the redemption of our words and deeds.

Between Shevirat Ha Kelim and the fulfillment of Tikkun, lies Zimzum, an alternative to "Histir Panav", the Jewish explanation for the existence of evil in the world. Rather than "turning his face aside" (or "turning a blind eye" as we might say; but this is the meaning of "Histir Panav"), Luria argued that God, after the 7th day, withdrew into himself, leaving the stage clear for Mankind to strut and fret his hour upon. God creates; Mankind takes charge – and tries but fails to hold the fragments of Creation together; the Messiah rectifies.

The above barely does justice to so pivotal a figure. Those wishing to know more should turn to the essays of Gershom Scholem. In one of them ("Isaac Luria and his School", in "Jewish Mysticism", Shocken, 1961) he quotes Luria's extraordinary retort to a disciple who asked why he did not write his teachings down.

"It is impossible, because all things are inter-related. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book?"

To convert the living flow of ideas into the tombstone stasis of a written page – this is what all writers and thinkers are obliged to do. To trap a pearl inside an oyster shell – this is what all writers and thinkers are obliged to do. To imprison the sparks of Primary Light inside a cell of paper – this is what all writers and thinkers are obliged to do. On this one point, Rav Luria, I beg to disagree with you.

Amber pages

a page about Isaac Luria, followed by the dates of some very different luminaries, seems to me as good a place as any to note, as per The Physics Hypertextbook, that "Colour is a function of the human visual system, and is not an intrinsic property. Objects don't 'have' colour, they give off light that 'appears' to be a colour. Spectral power distributions exist in the physical world, but colour exists only in the mind of the beholder." As, one has to assume, does the concept of "the mind" as well.

Guy de Maupassant, French short story writer, born today in 1850

Neil Armstrong, the first human (as far as we know) to set foot on the moon, born today in 1930 (but who cares? this should be on the date of his doing the foot-setting: 02:56 GMT on 21 July 1969

Marilyn Monroe, or Norma Jean Mortenson, or later Baker, and later still Miller, found dead, probably murdered, probably on the orders of the Kennedy brothers, today in 1962

I would include, simply because it is an example of a very different kind of luminary, a very different kind of Colour Board, a very different kind of Shevirat Ha Kelim: 1914, first US traffic light installed (Euclid and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio); but the world's first was already working years before, and I have marked that event on January 2; and so this one will remain stuck permanently on amber.