Still Running Off at the Keyboard

PASSAGES FROM SCHOLEM'S BOOKS

On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem, translated by Ralph Manheim, Schocken Books, 1965:

In the esoteric tradition of the Kabbalah, the highly ramified mystical tendencies in Judaism developed and left their historical record. The Kabbalah was not, as is still sometimes suposed, a unified system of mystical and specifically theosophical thinking. There is no such thing as 'THE doctrine of the Kabbalists.' Actually, we encounter widely diversified and often contradictory motivations, crystallized in very different systems or quasi-systems. Fed by subterranean currents probably emanating from the Orient, Kabbalism first came to light in those parts of southern France, where among non-Jews the Catharist, or Neo-Manichean, movement was at its height. In thirteenth-century Spain it quickly attained its fullest development, culminating in the pseudoepigraphic ZOHAR of Rabbi Moses de Leon, which became a kind of Bible to the Kabbalists and for centuries enjoyed an unquestioned position as a sacred and authoritative text. In sixteenth-century Palestine, Kabbalism knew a second flowering, in the course of which it became a central historical and spiritual current in Judaism; for it supplied an answer to the question of the meaning of exile, a question which had taken on a new urgency with the catastrophe of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Fired with Messianic fervor in the seventeenth century, Kabbalism became an explosive force in the great Messianic movement centering round Sabbatai Zevi, which even in its collapse provoked a mystical heresy, a heretical Kabbalah, whose impulses and developments, paradoxically enough, played a significant part--long overlooked and becoming clear to us only today--in the rise of modern Judaism.

(p. 89-90)

How does one interpret the enthusiasm for Judaism of John Paul II and now Benedict XIV in the light of that passage?

How does one see von B's commendation of MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT in the light of that passage, associated as Tarot is with Kabbalah? Albert Pike discusses Kabbalah extensively in MORALS AND DOGMA. Freemasonry has been condemned by numerous Popes starting just 21 years after the first masonic lodge was convened.

Scholem devotes considerable space to the Messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi in MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM, Schocken Books, Inc., 1946. This comment is striking in light of the above passage:

Moses Hagiz distinguishes between two forms of the Sabbatian heresy: "The way of the one sect is to regard every impure person who defiles himself by lighter or heavier transgressions as a saint. They say that what we see with our eyes, how they eat on the days of fast, is not a corporeal but a spiritual meal, and that when they defile themselves before the eyes of the world, that is not an impurity but an act through which they come in contact with the spirits of holiness. And of every evil action which we see them commit, not only in thought but also in reality, they say that this is precisely how it must be, and that there is a mystery in the matter, and a Tikkun and a salvaging of holiness from he (sic) Kelipoth. And thus they are agreed that whoever commits a sin and does evil is good and honest in the eyes of God. But another sect among them turns the heresy to a different purpose. It is their custom to argue that with the arrival of Sabbatai Zevi the sin of Adam has already been corrected and the good selected out of the evil and the 'dross.' Since that time, according to them, a new Torah has become law under which all manner of things formerly prohibited are now permitted, not least the categories of sexual intercourse hitherto prohibited. For since everything is pure, there is no sin or harm in these things. And if before our eyes they nevertheless adhere to the Jewish law, they do so only because it is written: "Do not forsake altogether the Torah of thy mother." (p. 316)

Mysticism has a nasty habit of confusing good with evil. MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT attempts to reconcile these two sides of mysticism. Is that wise?

Mysticism cannot be decoupled from doctrine, yet that is the very purpose of interreligious dialogue that resorts to mysticism as a means to a syncretistic end.

MEDITATIONS is a dangerous book, yet no one in the Catholic press addresses these problems. Meanwhile the monastic interreligious dialogue moves ahead full-speed, seemingly with the blessings of Rome. The Assisi events complete the picture. Will Benedict put on the brakes? Or will he contribute to the morphing of Catholicism into anonymous spirituality and ultimately mystical nihilism?

Our Lady of Fatima, intercede for us!