Tract on Ecstasy. By Dobh Baer of Lubavitch. Translated from the Hebrew with an introduction and notes by Louis Jacobs. Vallentine, Mitchell. 25s.
Ecstasy, like death, is a private experience, whatever its company, and to communicate its nature by an intellectual process is impossible. Poetry, described, becomes prose, and transcendent joy, once defined, becomes a tract—even when it deals with the infinite. “The meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things. We murder to dissect.” The pure mystic doesn’t try to interpret his vision except through symbols. Indeed, the greatest apocalyptic “revelations” are those in which a recurrent image like the Throne of God is the focus of the visionary’s ecstasy.
Mysticism is more the province of poetry than of philosophy. Yet that hasn’t prevented many generations of Jewish mystics from trying to synthesise mysticism and philosophy, and we can only be grateful to Dr. Jacobs for his splendid translations and annotation of a classic of mysticism.
Metaphor
In “The Palm Tree of Deborah,” by Rabbi Moses Cordovero, also translated by Dr. Jacobs, the doctrine of the Ten Sephiroth or Attributes of God, central to the Cabala, is expressed in metaphor. Despite its logical structure, it is essentially a poem, remote from the exegesis of Dobh Baer. The interest of the “Tracts of Ecstasy,” on the other hand, seems to me to lie precisely in the constant Jewish attempt to harmonise experience and faith through reason.
Dr. Jacobs calls “Habad,” the Chasidic tendency fostered by Dobh Baer’s father, “an intellectual form of a movement highly charged with emotion.” As such it was attacked by the anti-Cabalists, and in our present day it will certainly be criticised for its arbitrary analysis of what Dobh calls the “twelve types of ecstasy,” ranging from the “external cry” to “heart ecstasy” and “mind ecstasy,” even though Dobh Baer’s system still has its adherents among Chasidim.
Yet even though one may cavil at the ratiocination, the Tract remains an absorbing study of the contemplative in the Jewish tradition. As Dr. Jacobs indicates, a remarkable aspect of Chasidic mysticism is that it flourished in a society of non-celibate artisans and small businessmen who, shaking off their prosaic environment after their work, searched for ecstasy in God through contemplation. In our own times, others may seek identification with the Universal through drugs like mescalin, short-circuiting the mystic’s slow approach to the circles of heaven.
Koestler has already pointed out that the mystic and the drug-taker are like two men who reach a peak—the one on foot, the other by cable-car. I am not sure, myself, that the simile, though neat, is true. From all accounts, the chemically induced ecstasy is a withering and ultimately destructive joy. The mystic’s ecstasy, even if one accepts that it is sometimes heightened by chemical changes brought on by fasting or prolonged incantation, seems to be an enduring one, a glory which can be set down if not communicated, a religious experience, in short, unlike the pleasures which produce “the external cry.”
Spiritual legacy
I hope that Dr. Jacobs will at some time produce a more general study of the Cabala (can we agree on a spelling? I don’t like his Qabbalah), similar to Rabbi ben Zion Bokser’s, but embracing its poetry and philosophy as well as its legends. Jewish history and letters didn’t stop at Massada and start again in 1948. The full, warm story of our ancestors in their 2,000 years’ journey has yet to be told by a contemporary scholar who will also reclaim for us a neglected spiritual legacy. Dr. Jacobs’s present work is part of that reclamation.