The Kabbalistic Tree

The Kabbalistic Tree is simply one of the most fascinating, eye-opening books I’ve ever seen. I can’t put it down, which is also good exercise. I love how you write not only for the specialist, but also for any intelligent lay reader with a little patience and a phone nearby to look up a word or a term here and there. What an immense treat and treasure!

J. H. Yossi Chajes’s “THE KABBALISTIC TREE” – – WOW!

Every once in a while, someone writes something that makes me see the world anew. When I first read Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” I had that experience. When I first read Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” I had that experience. When I first read James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” I had that experience. The first time I opened the Zohar, I had that experience (and continue to have it every time I open it 4 decades later). 

It’s been many years – – perhaps since Melila Hellner-Eshed’s “A River Flows from Eden” – – since I read a book on Kabbalah that is as transformative and simply jaw-dropping as J. H. Yossi Chajes’s new volume, “The Kabbalistic Tree.”

First, this is the single most beautiful scholarly volume of Kabbalah in history. Not joking, it’s the perfect Chanukah or Christmas gift for the Judaism/ Kabbalah/Qabbalah enthusiast in your life.

Second, the book demonstrates that there’s an entire genre of Kabbalistic artistic-textual production that has been almost completely ignored in scholarship: diagrammatic depictions of the Divine, written (until recently) on parchment, known as “llanot.” Trees, of course – – but more like matrices of the microcosm-macrocosm-Divine, scientific diagrams (Chajes analogizes them to Venn diagrams – I think they closely resemble circuit designs from engineering).

These documents, richly reproduced in this volume, circulated widely, but because they weren’t “books,” they didn’t get the scholarly attention of more traditional written texts. But these visual forms of knowledge and pedagogy are essential, Chajes shows, to the growth and dissemination of Kabbalah, especially Lurianic Kabbalah, which multiplied the baroque complexity of Jewish theosophy to a literally dizzying extent. Literally dizzying – one grows dizzy looking at these Ilanot.

Which for me is the third and maybe greatest revelation here: that this is a distinct form of mystical/ spiritual consciousness. Not, as Chajes notes, “mystical” in the sense of vague quasi-romantic feelings (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but in a different mode, a kind of nerdy-left-brain-ecstatic modality, like one might get from looking at the periodic table or engineering diagrams or a good data visualization or a map or other visual depictions of scientific reality and the relationships between all these component parts. There’s a distinct kind of intellectual-visual pleasure here, one that comes from contemplating Kabbalah’s esoteric secrets of the structure of the Divine (“ma’arechet ha’elohut”).

As Chajes writes, “Kabbalah has many secrets but little mystery.” Sinews, bones, pipes, channels, structures — these, not unitive experiences — are the stuff of this esoteric consciousness.

This experiential aspect is not the primary focus of “The Kabbalistic Tree,” though it is discussed somewhat. But I found it emerged for me in the contemplation of the book itself. Just as Hellner-Eshed transformed our understanding of the mystical experience of the Zohar, so “The Kabbalistic Tree” transforms our understanding of the ‘mystical’ experience of the contemplation of these diagrams of the Divine. As Boaz Huss has pointed out, the term ‘mystical’ can be very unhelpful because it imports various Christian assumptions of what the experience is supposed to be. Here is a uniquely non-mystical mysticism that, to me, proves that point. If we insist on seeing Kabbalah as “Jewish mysticism,” we miss what is often most distinctive, weird, and fascinating about it. Is this ‘mysticism’ in the classical sense? No, it’s something much more intriguing.

Read. This. Book.

This is an extraordinary accomplishment, the excavation and gorgeous representation of largely uncharted territory. J. H. Yossi Chajes has offered the world a book of remarkable beauty and theorization of the Kabbalistic Ilanot, the arboreal representations of Divinity that intertwine images and text to depict visually that which cannot be depicted. Well over 200 images, many (most?) of them in color, could have commanded a retail price far above that which the press is charging.

Look what just arrived! J. H. Yossi Chajes’s magisterial tome about the “tree of life.” It is simply spectacular! Here is my endorsement and I mean every word: “A tour de force! A brilliant analysis of an astonishing object. Dense with texts and drawings, these Kabbalistic scrolls finally receive the scholarly attention they so deserve. In his analysis of these cosmological visualizations, Chajes treats image and text as an inseparable totality. The result is a model for the analysis of ‘iconotexts’! A richly illustrated work of great erudition and intellectual imagination and a fascinating read.”