Sefer Jetzira — Kabbala

Sefer Jetzira

Sefer Jetzira — Kabbala på Beth HaMidrash: den hebreiska texten och dess svenska översättning, med Raschi och de stora kommentatorerna. Gratis, på nätet.

בשלשים ושתים נתיבות פליאות חכמה חקק יה יהוה צבאות אלהי ישראל אלהים חיים ומלך עולם אל שדי רחום וחנון רם ונשא שוכן עד מרום וקדוש שמו וברא את עולמו בשלשה ספרים בספר וספר וספור:YAH, ADONAI of Hosts, God of Israel, Living God and King of the World, EL SHADDAI, Merciful and Gracious, High and Exalted, Dwelling Ever Above, Holy Is His Name—He carved 'Work of Creation' is not the abstract verb בָּרָא bara 'to create' used in [Genesis 1:1]. Instead, the SY prefers verbs relating to the processes of craftsman and artisans, in particular stonemasons: חָקַק chaqaq 'to carve, chisel', חָצַב chatzav 'to hew', שקל shaqal 'to weigh', יָסַד yasad 'to found',יָצַר yatzar 'to form, shape, fashion'—the latter providing the name of the book, סֵפֶר יְצִירָה Sefer Yetzirah, literally the 'Book of Forming' but conventionally rendered the 'Book of Creation'. and created His World 'and created His World' in this verse. In these versions, God simply חָקַק chaqaq 'carved', with no object expressed overtly. See also SY 5:4, where God simply יָסַד yasad 'founded', with no overt object. in Thirty-Two and 22 Letters of Foundation. Together these represent the mathematical-linguistic foundations of Creation; see notes on 1:2 below. Although the number 32 is not ruminated upon any further after SY 1:1, subsequent commentaries have associated it with the 32 occurrences of the name אֱלֹהִים Elohim in [Genesis 1]. In the Bahir, the Thirty-Two Ways are associated with the gematria value of לֵב lev ‘heart’ ([Bahir 63], [Bahir 95] inter alia cf. SY 6:1-3) and with the 32 tzitzit (fringes) of the tallit (prayer shawl) [Bahir 92]. Wondrous generally implies that which approaches or exceeds the limits of one's abilities, comprehension, or willingness, e.g. [II Samuel 13:2], [Deuteronomy 17:8], [Leviticus 27:2]. It tends to be used of things that are marvelous, miraculous, or otherwise supernatural and extraordinary, i.e. that which defies the human ability to do or understand and must therefore be divine, e.g. [Deuteronomy 28:59], [Psalm 118:23], [Psalm 139:6]. The appearance of this root in the SY’s introductory paragraph serves as a reminder that although we embark upon a text rich in vivid, grounded symbolism—even anthropomorphism—we should not hasten to take such symbolic language overly literally. See also SY 1:8 on the limits of knowledge. Ways 'path, way, pathway, (raised) road' appears mostly in the poetic sections of the Tanakh, very often as a synonym or parallelism of דֶּרֶךְ derekh 'road, way'. This particular phraseology is one of several hints that the SY may share a particular literary affiliation with the Sifre Emet, the poems of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. For details see Ronit Meroz (2007), "Between Sefer Yezirah and Wisdom Literature: Three Binitarian Approaches in Sefer Yezirah", in the Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 6(18), pp. 101-142. of Wisdom of Proverbs 1, 8, and 9, especially [Proverbs 8:22], a favorite verse of Jewish mystics. Meroz has argued that the SY envisions Wisdom [חָכְמָה Chochmah] as a co-participant with God in the Work of Creation. A similar view is reflected in the midrashicic and Kabbalistic literature, where Torah or Wisdom acts as a participant or instrument in the Work of Creation; see e.g. Midrash Tanchuma 1:5 on [Genesis 1:1], Zohar 1:3a inter alia. ’, I find that the alliteration of ‘Wondrous Ways of Wisdom’ neatly approximates the SY’s choice of poetic vocabulary. Throughout, I have made an effort to select alliterative or parallelistic translations wherever the happy coincidences of Hebrew and English reasonably permit, so as to replicate the SY’s seamless transitions between prose and poetry, an effect all too easily lost in translation., with three linguistic tools: with Counting, with Writing, and with Speech., and the SY’s general grammatical inventiveness. The text is intimately concerned with the role of language in the Work of Creation. It appears to conceive of language in three parts: counting or mathematics, i.e. the 10 Sefirot Belimah of SY 1 and the formulaic counting of the letters and the elements of creation throughout the text); writing, i.e. the 22 Letters of Foundation discussed in SY 2-5; and speech or pronunciation, i.e. SY 1:9, 2:3, 4:1. Hebrew has of course several verb roots relating to one or more of each of these three facets of language. However, only one, ספ״ר SPR, is capable of describing all three: counting (סָפַר safar 'he counted', מִסְפָּר mispar 'number, count'), writing (סֵפֶר sefer 'book, scroll'), and speaking (סִפֵּר sipper 'he told, accounted', סִפּוּר sippur 'telling, account'). The root ספ״ר is also utilized to coin the novel metaphysical term סְפִירוֹת Sefirot, on which see SY 1:2 below. For these reasons, I believe the first use of the root ספר SPR in SY 1:1, the plural ספרים SPR-im, does not refer to any specific noun at all, but rather the set of words derived from the abstract, idealized root ספ״ר SPR. This way of thinking about language imbues the Hebrew root itself with a certain metaphysical reality, an entity from which more concrete instantions of individual words may ontologically descend and ultimately crystallize into concrete speech or material reality. The root SPR thus holds unique metaphysical significance for the SY, alone representing the totality of language by which the world was created and is sustained. As each of the following three words derived from the root SPR are invoked as implements in the Work of Creation, I have translated the SPR-im as “linguistic tools”—an inelegant approximation of an elegant metalinguistic idea whose meaning is trapped within the particulars of Hebrew grammar. The three occurrences of the root SPR that follow, “with ספר SPR and ספר SPR and ספור SPWR”, are here interpreted respectively as סָפַר safar ‘to count’, representing counting/mahetmatics; סֵפר sefer ‘scroll, book’, representing writing; and סִפּוּר sippur, representing speech. The word סָפַר safar is technically a finite verb, and not a noun as the syntax requires. It may be vocalized also as the inifitive construct סְפֹר sefor, but given the grammatical playfulness of the SY in general, I see no reason why the text should not have delighted in the oblique transformation of a verb like safar into an abstract noun.

עשר ספירות בלי מה ועשרים ושתים אותיות יסוד שלש אמות ושבע כפולות ושתים עשרה פשוטות:Ten SEFIROT BELIMAH is very difficult. The SY is the first place in all of Jewish literature where to word sefirot appears, and though this term is now familiar to readers through the works of the medieval Kabbalists and later, the use of the term in the SY differs significantly from later texts̄. It never appears on its own in the SY, being found only in the fixed expression Sefirot Belimah. The word sefirot by itself is the plural action noun of סָפַר safar 'to count', thus meaning literally 'countings'. It should probably be understood on one level as a reference to the ten digits of the decimal numeral system, though as we shall see, these Sefirot Belimah are imbued with metaphysical significance beyond mere numerals. The expression בְּלִי[]מָה beli[-]mah can be understood as either one word or two, with both readings being plausible and perhaps intended, and manuscripts commonly varying between the one- and two-word renditions. If it is read as one word, it must be the action noun of בָּלַם balam 'to restrain, withhold, keep (from)'; see SY 1:8. The ‘Ten Sefirot Belimah’ would then be the ‘Ten Numbers of Restraint’. In this interpretation, they are ten elemental entities or properties which bind or restrain primordial תֹּהוּ tohu, 'chaos, void, waste(land)' [Genesis 1:2], allowing structure and order to exist in creation. On the other hand, if בְּלִי מָה is to be read as two words, it represents the expression beli mah, literally 'without what'. This enigmatic expression appears only once in the Tanakh, in [Job 26:7], where in a harkening back to [Genesis 1:2] it serves as a parallelism of primarial tohu. It might best be calqued as 'whatlessness', meaning 'having no essence', and thus the ‘Ten Sefirot Belimah’ would be the ‘Ten Essenceless/Whatless Numbers'. The SY is fond of this sort of grammatical playfulness, as already seen above in the peculiar use of the three roots of spr in SY 1:1 and as will be seen later in playful expressions like וְעָשָׂה אֵינוֹ יֶשְׁנוֹ ve'asa eino yeshno 'and He made isn't-ness into is-ness' (SY 2:6). Later interpretors have, of course, explicitly linked the Ten Sefirot Belimah with the now-familiar Ten Sefirot found in later texts like the Bahir and Zohar, but I have generally refrained from alluding to them, as it is not at all clear that the SY ascribes the same symbolic significance to the Ten Sefirot Belimah as latter Kabbalistic texts do. and Twenty-Two Letters of Foundation 'letters of foundation' to the Greek term στοιχεῖα stoikheîa 'elemental letters' found in Plato's Timaeus (Scholem 1995, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, trans. Robert Alter, p. 77 n. 129). Certain translators have preferred to render otyot yesod as 'elemental letters' by analogy with the Greek term. Still, I much prefer 'Letters of Foundation', because the term יְסוֹד yesod can imply both 'foundation' in the sense of an origin site and 'foundation' in the sense of an ongoing support or sustainer, which harmonizes well with the SY's description of the letters as involved in both the creation and sustaining of the world.: Three Mothers, Seven Pairs, and Twelve Simple Letters. 'Mothers', based on the parallel אָבוֹת avot 'fathers' of SY 3:2 and 6:1. However, this is grammatically peculiar, as immot is usually only the construct plural of אֵם em 'mother', whose absolute plural is rather אִמָּהוֹת immahot. There are other problems with the interpretation ‘mothers’. In usual Hebrew grammatical terminology, the term ‘mothers’ is reserved for the אִמּוֹת קְרִיאָה immot qeriʼah, ‘mothers of reading’ (whence Latin matres lectionis), the letters אהו״י Alef-Heh-Waw-Yod which can serve to represent either consonants or vowels. Additionally, in SY 5:3 we appear to have a case where immot acts as antecedent to the pronoun הֵם hem, which is specifically used for masculine plurals, although the form of the numeral shalosh 'three' in shalosh immot is specific to feminine nouns. There exist alternative traditions where this term in the SY is vocalized instead as אַמּוֹת ammot 'cubits' or אֻמּוֹת ummot 'nations'. What the word actually means is thus far from clear, and Peter Hayman has avoided these ambiguities entirely by translating immot as “primary letters.” (See Peter Hayman (2004), Sefer Yeṣira.)

עשר ספירות בלימה מספר עשר אצבעות חמש כנגד חמש וברית יחיד מכוונת באמצע כמלת הלשון וכמילת מעור:Ten SEFIROT BELIMAH—The count of ten fingers, five against five, with the Covenant of the Unique One established in the center, like a word of the tongue and circumcision of the genitals. ‘word’ and מִילַת milat ‘circumcision’. Both items refer to anatomical hiddenness: the word emerging from the tongue, hidden in the mouth, and circumcision of the genitals, the concealed lower organs revealed during circumcision. A connection is thus made between the act of speech and the act of circumcision, being two forms of creation and transformation according to the SY’s thought. Another association between language, mouth, and genitals, though the connection (if any) with the SY is unclear, is found in the idiom עָרְלַת שְׂפָתַיִם ʽorlat sefatayim ‘uncircumcised of lips’, probably meaning one who is unskilled in speech, e.g. [Exodus 6:12]. There is also a spatial-anatomical parallelism between the terms employed by the SY: the tongue concealed above, the genitals concealed below. Elsewhere in the SY, the ‘tongue’ (or ‘wedge’) appears as the symbol of a central balance between two extremities, e.g. SY 2:1, 3:1, so it is interesting that in this verse the tongue is rather portrayed as one of two binary poles. See also SY 6:3 where the tongue is one of the שְׁלֹשָׁה שׂוֹנְאִים Sheloshah Sonʼim ‘Three Foes’, probably a reference to לָשׁוֹן הָרָע Lashon Haraʽ ‘the Evil Tongue’, the vice of gossip or slander.

עשר ספירות בלימה עשר ולא תשע, עשר ולא אחת עשרה, הבן בחכמה וחכם בבינה, בחון בהם וחקור מהם והעמד דבר על בוריו והשב יוצר על מכונו:Ten SEFIROT BELIMAH—Ten and not nine, ten and not eleven. Understand with Wisdom and become wise with Understanding; test with them and probe of them. Make a thing stand in assembly before its Creators; return the Maker to His Site.

עשר ספירות בלי מה מדתן עשר שאין להם סוף עומק ראשית ועומק אחרית עומק טוב ועומק רע עומק רום ועומק תחת עומק מזרח ועומק מערב עומק צפון ועומק דרום אדון יחיד אל מלך נאמן מושל בכולם ממעון קדשו ועד עדי עד:Ten SEFIROT BELIMAH—Their measure is ten; they have no edge. Depth ‘depth’ here is based on the metaphor of עֲמֻקָּה ʽamuqqah ‘deepness’ as a symbol of divine mystery, as found in Biblical poetry, ex. [Job 11:8], [Psalms 64:7], [Ecclesiastes 7:24]. It could perhaps be understood in the SY as meaning 'dimension', 'mystery', or 'mystical dimension'. of Beginning, Depth of End; Depth of Good, Depth of Evil; Depth of Above, Depth of Below; Depth of East, Depth of West; Depth of North, Depth of South. The Unique Lord EL, the faithful king, governs them all from His Holy Abode, forever and ever and ever.

Sefer Yetzirah 1