new certainties and new mysticism 397
Come, my Beloved, to greet the bride;
let us welcome the Sabbath.^26
The popularization of Lurianic kabbalah was not without unintended
consequences. One product of a growing belief in the transmigration of
souls was the idea that a living person or soul could be impregnated by
the spirit of a dead person which has been left disembodied because of
the sins of that person during life. Such a dibbuk – a Yiddish term first
found in the seventeenth century in eastern Europe – was believed to
talk through the mouth of the host body. By definition, it was likely to
be evil, and rites of exorcism were devised for the expulsion of an evil
spirit through the use of a yihud, a combination of divine names, con-
ceived as the intimate unification of the male and female manifestations
of the divine, as Hayim Vital recounted:
And following is the procedure, as personally tested by myself. For I would
grasp that man’s arm and put my hand on the pulse of his left or right arm,
since this is where the vestment of the soul is located, and therein it clads
itself. And I concentrate upon that soul, clad in the pulse, that he might
depart from there by the power of the yihud. And while clinging to his
hand at the pulse, I recite this verse, normally and backwards, and concen-
trate upon the following divine Names that issue from the text ...^27
Lurianic kabbalah, with its encouraging notion that everyone has a
role in redeeming the fallen sparks, became by the end of the early mod-
ern period much the most influential type of mysticism both for
specialists in kabbalah and for ordinary Jews attracted by the notion
that every commandment and every word of every prayer has a hidden
mystical meaning and that ‘repair of the world’ (tikkun olam ) is a cen-
tral aim of religious life. There is a correspondence between what is
above and what is below. Intensification of prayer was aimed at bring-
ing the redemption by creating harmony in the world of the sefirot.
Ritual became theurgy. There was also a direct link, as we shall see,
from the theology of Lurianic kabbalah to some of the theology devised
to support the claims of Sabbetai Zevi.
Sabbetai Zevi
In April 1665 a charming and learned kabbalist – originally from
Smyrna but, now nearly forty years old, for some time past a resident of