Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism 169

According to the Besht, then, by studying the Torah for the sake of the
“name” (namely, of the Tetragrammaton), the mystico-magical scholar is
conceived as if “he thereby takes the name, and he draws onto himself the
dwelling of the Divine Holy Presence.”30
One of the most important followers of the Besht was Rabbi Dov Baer,
known as the Great Maggid of Miedzirec (1704 – 1772). He seems to have
continued and elaborated his master’s assessment:

He [God] contracted Himself within the letters of the Torah, by means of

which He has created the world. . . . Th e Tz ad di k [the righteous man; also,

the leader of a Hasidic group], who studies the Torah for its own sake, in [a

state of ] holiness, draws the Creator, blessed be He, downward within the

letters of the Torah, just as in the moment of the creation. . . . By the pure

utterances, related to the study of the Torah, he draws down God within

the letters. 31

Here the Hasidic master elaborates on the concept of tzimtzum (contrac-
tion), a core notion in the kabbalah of the sixteenth-century Rabbi Isaac
Luria and his followers. According to Luria, to create the world, the infi nite
and boundless deity contracted Itself to make room for the world. Our Ha-
sidic text relates this concept to the notion of Torah we have been examin-
ing: the divine transcendence that characterized the deity before the mo-
ment of creation contracts into, or limits itself within, the particular letters
of the Torah, which serves as the paradigm for the subsequent creation of
the world. As a cosmogonical paradigm, those letters are also a reifi cation
of the divine in His contracted aspect. We may call this reifi cation “linguis-
tic immanence”: in the letters of the Torah, the infi nite and transcendent
becomes real and even concrete in this world.32 Th e Torah as revealed to
man, when studied by the mystic, serves as the tool for the re-creation of
cosmogony: the act of studying evokes and reproduces the fi rst constitutive
moments of the world by invoking the divinity into the letters. However,
as the quoted text explicitly states, it is not the written aspect of the letters
but their utterance aloud, namely, the individual performance of each of
the letters by the righteous, that eff ects this re-creation of the world’s fi rst
moments. Th us, the study aloud of the Torah is a case of what we may call
phonic talismanics: it is the sound of the Torah’s letters that have power
over creation and even in some sense over God. In other words, the sound
of the Torah’s letters can be used for magical purposes (they have power
over creation) and for theurgic purposes (they have power over God).