160 M o s h e I d e l
of a human being. Th is concept usually appears together with the notion
of the Torah as a divine name, and in fact these are two aspects of a single
conception of Torah that the earliest kabbalists inherited from their pre-
decessors, the heikhalot mystics. (To be sure, the heikhalot texts that have
survived to the present day do not explicitly portray the Torah in anthro-
pomorphic form, but a description of this sort is likely to have been found
alongside these texts’ anthropomorphic depiction of God.) One example of
the notion of Torah as divine name appears in a commentary on the Song
of Songs by Ezra ben Solomon, a thirteenth-century kabbalist from Gerona
(a Spanish center of kabbalah located close to Provence.) Ezra writes,
All the Torah is spoken directly from the mouth of God, and it contains
not a single superfl uous letter or vowel, because all of it is a divine edifi ce
hewn from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He. . . . If a person were
to remove a single letter [from the Torah], it would be as if he destroyed a
whole [divine] name and a whole world . . . for the commandments are the
very body of purity and holiness. 9Th e connection between the Torah as divine name and as divine body
comes through more clearly in these passages from the work of another
thirteenth-century kabbalist from Gerona, Jacob ben Sheshet:
Whence do we know that His name is His body? From the verse [Proverbs
10:7], “A wicked man’s name will rot.” Is it really the case that a name can
rot? Rather, a body rots [and thus we learn that these two words are inter-
changeable, that the Hebrew word for “name” can also mean “body”]. Th is
is the reason that it is forbidden to utter [God’s] name in vain and for no
purpose. . . . Oaths [which are made “By the name of God”] are taken by
holding on to an object such as a Torah scroll, because the Torah is God’s
name. . . . We have learned that one who takes an oath by means of a Torah
has taken an oath by God’s name, and whoever takes up a Torah scroll is
mentioning His name. . . .
“Let us make humanity in our image” [Genesis 1:26]. Rashi explicated
“in our image” as meaning “according to a mold made from us.” One
can say: there was no mold in God’s presence [since the world had only
just been created] other than the Torah — that is, the 613 commandments
[found in the Torah]. Th ose [commandments] were the mold with which
He created humanity. 10