Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism 163detailed explanation of the manner in which someone may have a sense of
direct contact with divinity through the biblical text:
God gave us the entire Torah in perfect form, from [its opening words in
Genesis 1:1,] “In the beginning,” to [the last words of the Torah in Deuter-
onomy 34:12,] “in the eyes of all Israel.” Behold, how all the letters of the
Torah, by their shapes, are the shape of God, blessed be He: combined and
separated letters, . . . curved ones and crooked ones, superfl uous and el-
liptic ones, minute and large ones, and inverted ones, the calligraphy of the
letters, the paragraphs that begin on a new line and those that begin aft er
a blank space on the same line as the end of the previous paragraph . . . ,
all of them. 16 Th is is similar to, though incomparable with, something
someone paints using [several] kinds of colors; likewise the Torah, begin-
ning with the fi rst passage until the last one, is the shape of God, the Great
and Formidable, blessed be He, since if one letter be missing from a Torah
scroll, or if one is superfl uous, or if a paragraph that should begin aft er a
blank space on the same line as the previous paragraph were [written] at
the beginning of a new line, or if a paragraph that should begin on a new
line were [written so that it began] aft er a blank space on the same line
as the previous paragraph, then that scroll of Torah is unfi t [and, accord-
ing to rabbinic law, cannot be used for liturgical reading but must be re-
paired or buried in a cemetery], since it does not contain the shape of God,
blessed be He, the Great and Formidable, because of the change caused by
the shape. And you should understand this! And because it is incumbent
on each and every Jew to say that the world was created for him, 17 God
obliged each and every one of them to write a scroll of the Torah for him-
self, and the concealed secret is that he made God, blessed be He. 18According to this text, God is refl ected in the scroll of the Torah because
of the special rules in rabbinic law specifying how its words are spelled and
its letters formed. Further, this presence can be copied. Jews are obliged
to reproduce the scroll precisely because of this type of refl ection of the
divine within the text. For this author, the Torah is an icon, because the
Torah refl ects the divine form. Moreover, this author’s iconic vision as-
sumes the literal nature of the divine, given the fact that the forms of letters
constitute the divine shape. Th is formal correspondence between the lower
and higher, along with the anthropomorphic nature of the actual biblical
text, changes the basic approach toward the Bible from one deeply con-
cerned with the meaning of its words and sentences to an approach that is