Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism 173

revealed Torah, . . . and the rank of the soul of the chosen few is from the

primordial Torah. 41

Unlike the more formalistic approaches discussed earlier, such as that of
Joseph of Hamadan (which presuppose some type of distance between the
isomorphic elements), Horowitz assumes a much more organic linkage.
Th ere is something congenital in the three elements mentioned in the pre-
ceding passage in that the entity that causes the impression still lingers in
the imprinted entity. Th is is why the study of the Torah involves perhaps
less a movement beyond a fallen plight than an actualization of a divine
aspect found in man. Following Horowitz (and others including Menahem
Azariah of Fano and Meir ibn Gabbai), Rabbi Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, a late
eighteenth-century Hasidic author, presents a Platonic process of ascent to
the supernal source, deemed possible by the means of the Torah:

Th e Torah is the impression of the divinity, and the world is the impression

of the Torah. . . . An enlightened person concentrates his heart, spirit and

soul to divest everything in the world from materiality, and cause the em-

bodiment of the spiritual form . . . by his comprehension of the embodi-

ment of the divinity, which dwells there, within the letters of the Torah,

which are embodied as well in the entirety of the world, which was created

with the Torah, and they animate everything. And this is the power of the

enlightened one that he can divest himself of the material form and be

clothed in the spiritual form. 42

Here the Torah serves as an intermediary between the creator and man.
Th e letters of the Torah represent what I termed earlier the linguistic im-
manence of the divine within the created world. Th e Hasidic mystic can
restrict his contemplation solely to letters of the Torah and attain the divine
source. Th e divine immanence or its extension in the Torah and hence in
the world is presented in a concrete, nonsymbolic manner, but here (as op-
posed to what we saw earlier in the texts by the Maggid of Miedzirec and
his disciple Shneor Zalman of Liady) the Torah serves as a scale of ascent to
the divine, rather than the divine’s descent toward man. Th e descent of the
divine via the letters of the Torah is an interesting kind of divine accom-
modation (though not a regular one which implies attuning the message
to the intellectual or moral level of the recipient). By means of linguistic
immanence, there is ontic accommodation involving the divine presence
in the mundane sphere, not only its symbolic representation.