The Primordial Torah.

[John D. Brey]

In Professor Michael Fishbane's excellent, Sacred Attunement, he lays out argumentation for three Torahs. Needless to say, the third, i.e., the primordial Torah (which he also calls "Torah Kelulah": Torah of All-in-All), is the preeminent Torah of the three; the other two being the written Torah, and the oral Torah. As the preeminent Torah, the primordial Torah is naturally first. Which not only situates it in a strange place concerning the narrative found in the written Torah (which seems to assume the written Torah is given first, i.e., at Sinai), but it causes pause to dig deeper into the written text of the narrative in order to find elements of the primordial Torah that, though not discussed directly by Professor Fishbane in the noted book, are nevertheless parallel to many things Professor Fishbane has to say concerning the primordial Torah.



John

 

[Brickjectivity]

Found it: Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology|NOOK Book

 

[John D. Brey]

Found it: Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology|NOOK Book

Thank you for looking. It's a very good book by a very brilliant writer.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

In Professor Michael Fishbane's excellent, Sacred Attunement, he lays out argumentation for three Torahs. Needless to say, the third, i.e., the primordial Torah (which he also calls "Torah Kelulah": Torah of All-in-All), is the preeminent Torah of the three; the other two being the written Torah, and the oral Torah. As the preeminent Torah, the primordial Torah is naturally first. Which not only situates it in a strange place concerning the narrative found in the written Torah (which seems to assume the written Torah is given first, i.e., at Sinai), but it causes pause to dig deeper into the written text of the narrative in order to find elements of the primordial Torah that, though not discussed directly by Professor Fishbane in the noted book, are nevertheless parallel to many things Professor Fishbane has to say concerning the primordial Torah.

Speaking of this primordial Torah, Professor Fishbane says:

This divine reality precedes the Written Torah . . . and may be designated as the torah kelulah . . . whose reality throbs around the letters and words of the Torah from Sinai [i.e., the written Torah]. . . [The written Torah, as an] artifact may indeed be something like "the Torah which Moses placed before the Israelites" in a time long past (Deut. 4:44); but it is not God's primordial Torah . . . [which is] a holy hieroglyph ----a divine scripture . . . It is God's seal of truth stamped into our universe.

Sacred Attunement, p. 61 and 159.​

As noted in numerous recent threads, Moses, prior to bringing the children of Israel to Sinai (where the "written" Torah's first incarnation occurs, viz., the forging of the tablets of the law), tells Aaron to place a pot of manna before the Testimony, which, Testimony, in careful exegesis (and even not so careful exegesis), clearly represents the primordial, pre-written, or spoken, Torah. If this Testimony is the rod of Moses, as has been shown to be the case in those numerous recent threads, then Moses' rod is the branch, stump, root, that eventually bears the fruit grown on the Tree of Life, i.e., the Torah, which implies a juxtaposition of some kind between this pre-written, primordial, Torah testimony, versus the soon to come written Torah.

With that reality as our pre-supposition, we can almost reach into Professor Fishbane's pre, or sub, conscious, to connect the dots on his heart-felt attempt to imagine and manifest the most important Torah of All: the primordial Torah, which comes prior to the writing, the forging, of the stone tablets of the law.

To appreciate the relationship between Professor Fishbane's statements, as quoted above, and this primordial Torah that comes prior to the written Torah, we first need to know a few important nuances concerning the progressive revelation of the Torah itself, or Himself. For instance, we know that the sages claim the original tablets we're fundamentally different than what was revealed after the golden calf fiasco, whereby Moses broke the original tablets, and had to produce, and provide, a post-lapsarian document amenable to the children of Israel's new status as sinners par excellent:

"He arranged the letters in front of Him, according to the words describing death and the levirate and other issues. Without sin there would have been no death, and He would not have arranged the letters into words telling another issue. This is the reason the scroll of the Torah is neither vocalized nor divided into verses, nor does it have cantillation marks, thus hinting at the original state of the Torah, [consisting in] a heap of unarranged letters. And the purpose of His intention is that when the king messiah will come and death will be engulfed forever, there will be no room in the Torah for anything related to death, uncleanness, and the like, then the Holy One, blessed be He, will annul the words of the scroll of the Torah, and He will join a letter of one word to a letter of another word in order to create a word that will point to another matter. . . the Holy One, blessed be He, will teach its reading according to the arrangement of the measure of the letters that HE will be joining to each other to form one word, and He will teach us the [new] division and the joining of the words."

HYDA quoted in Professor Moshe Idel's, Absorbing Perfections.
​

John

 

[John D. Brey]

To appreciate the relationship between Professor Fishbane's statements, as quoted above, and this primordial Torah that comes prior to the written Torah, we first need to know a few important nuances concerning the progressive revelation of the Torah itself, or Himself. For instance, we know that the sages claim the original tablets we're fundamentally different than what was revealed after the golden calf fiasco, whereby Moses broke the original tablets, and had to produce, and provide, a post-lapsarian document amenable to the children of Israel's new status as sinners par excellent:

"He arranged the letters in front of Him, according to the words describing death and the levirate and other issues. Without sin there would have been no death, and He would not have arranged the letters into words telling another issue. This is the reason the scroll of the Torah is neither vocalized nor divided into verses, nor does it have cantillation marks, thus hinting at the original state of the Torah, [consisting in] a heap of unarranged letters. And the purpose of His intention is that when the king messiah will come and death will be engulfed forever, there will be no room in the Torah for anything related to death, uncleanness, and the like, then the Holy One, blessed be He, will annul the words of the scroll of the Torah, and He will join a letter of one word to a letter of another word in order to create a word that will point to another matter. . . the Holy One, blessed be He, will teach its reading according to the arrangement of the measure of the letters that HE will be joining to each other to form one word, and He will teach us the [new] division and the joining of the words."

HYDA quoted in Professor Moshe Idel's, Absorbing Perfections.
​

Much midrashim revolves around the fact that the revelation of Torah, i.e., of God, first given to Moses on Sinai, is not the revelation of Torah associated with the second set of tablets, which are reflected in the modern-day Torah scroll, which comes from the second set of tablets. And yet this presents something of a problem if the revelation of Torah codified on the first set of tablets is lost to posterity by their having been broken by Moses at the foot of Sinai? Since the first set of tablets are broken, and the second set aren't a mirror reflection of the first set, either the first revelation is lost forever, or else, either God, or perhaps Moses (as noted earlier), devised a way to protect the original revelation from the ravages of sin that caused their breakage.

This divine reality precedes the Written Torah . . . and may be designated as the torah kelulah . . . whose reality throbs around the letters and words of the Torah from Sinai [i.e., the written Torah].

Sacred Attunement, p. 61.​

There's more to the statement above than meets the eye or the ear since in Professor Fishbane's parlance, Moses' casting the original hieroglyphs of the law in bronze (prior to breaking the original cast of characters) thereby allows the fiery שרף bronze נחש to throb around the original cast of characters (of the law) that the divine amanuenses originally released from the stone where they resided.

If this "fiery bronze" that's throbbing around the original cast of characters (cast in stone) is indeed a fundamental part of the primordial Torah, Moses' rod, the Testimony, mentioned in Exodus 16:34, in other words if Moses really does nail this "fiery bronze" casting of the original characters of the law to the rod he's had all along, thereby forming a nachash-tannin (a fiery bronze serpent-rod), Nehushtan, then though that's saying a mouthful, nevertheless it seem merely the mezuzah on the doorway or passage into even deeper living streams come from the original cast of characters from the original law?



John

 

[John D. Brey]

If this "fiery bronze" that's throbbing around the original cast of characters (cast in stone) is indeed a fundamental part of the primordial Torah, Moses' rod, the Testimony, mentioned in Exodus 16:34, in other words if Moses really does nail this "fiery bronze" casting of the original characters of the law to the rod he's had all along, thereby forming a nachash-tannin (a fiery bronze serpent-rod), Nehushtan, then though that's saying a mouthful, nevertheless it seem merely the mezuzah on the doorway or passage into even deeper living streams come from the original cast of characters from the original law?

You open the prophets and your eyes are able to see nothing but the letters. But what can the letters say? They are the black bars of the prison where the spirit strangles itself with screaming. Between the letter and the lines, and all around the blank margins, the spirit circulates freely; and I circulate with it and bring you this great message.

Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, 101-102.​

Nikos Kazantzakis sounds positively like Professor Fishbane: the burning bronze throbs in and all around the sacred-glyphs, except that there's something fundamentally different going on here, since there's reason to believe the divine amanuensis isn't actually producing the words on the first set of tablets so much as revealing them. As noted in various essays and exegetical examinations in the past, there's reason to suspect that this divine amanuensis doesn't even know how to read beneath the sacred-glyphs he himself frees from their earthen covering (1 Peter 1:12).

The fact that Moses breaks the original tablets, where the original revelation of God existed, unwritten, merely uncovered by the stylus of the divine priest, means the burning bronze that Moses makes to throb in and around each and every one of these original hieroglyphs becomes the living spirit not of the law of death, and the Levitical priesthood, and such, all of which are part and parcel of the second set of tablets contaminated by sin, but rather, this burning bronze mediates for the original revelation of God.

Since it's eventually nailed to Moses' serpent-rod, Nehushtan, that emblem, Nehushtan, represents the primordial Torah par excellent: the original, pre-sin, revelation of God, hidden from the face of the very seraphim, cherubim, and Israelite men, all of whom, in their misplaced desire to serve and protect, inadvertently, though verdantly (as the case turns out to be) destroy the primordial Torah which they're completely unaware is the face, and mouth, of God, situated, by Moses, between the cherubim, on the throne, above the ark of the covenant.

Someone came. Surely it was God, God . . . or was it the devil? Who can tell them apart? They exchange faces; God sometimes becomes all darkness, the devil all light, and the mind of man is left in the muddle.

Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, 15.
​

John