A few days ago I found a quartz stone on my way home. I began to look at it—among the Japanese, looking at stones is an art called suiseki—I put it in my pocket, and when I got to my desk I drew the letter aleph on one of its faces. It was the typical pedantic gesture that is, deep down, modest—or the other way around. The stone had very ancient curves and gleams, and I used to collect quartz as a child, so it allowed me to move from a point to the whole, and from the present to old times.
Why aleph and not alpha, or one, or zero? Because of Borges? Because aleph is also x and x is the initial of my name? According to the Zohar, the Jewish book of splendor, “the world was not created until the Holy One, blessed be He, took a stone called even shetiyah, the foundation stone, and cast it into the abyss. Once it fell, it settled below, and from it the world was founded. It became the axial point of creation… an abyssal stone composed of fire, water, and air. At times water emerges from it and fills the depths. It is placed as a sign at the center of the world.”
The stone-aleph, the abyssal quartz, has become my favorite paperweight. When I feel depressed, I look at it. When I need to keep a book open, I place it along the spine of the pages. When I smoke, it is the first object the spirals of tobacco strike against. It is, as the Zohar says, the foundation of my world.
I drew aleph because Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, combinatorics, Kafka, Scholem, the golem—an entire world made not of images—never of images—but of letters and pulsations of letters, along with the blank space on which they are written—all of that, I say, I drew because the writer immediately sees in Kabbalah a device akin to his own. As a writer, Kabbalah—like the I Ching or the tarot—helps me think.
Kabbalah means tradition, a specific mystical tradition. It is not a method of divination, even though dictionaries say it is a superstitious calculation to foretell something. No Kabbalist is a fortune teller, nor does he need to predict the future, but rather to break down the present. Kabbalah emerged around the 12th century in medieval Occitania and spread throughout the Mediterranean world and northern Europe.
Borges would say that writers hardly have the right to speak of this, but the mind of a writer has a mathematical flexibility that brings it close to the Kabbalist. Both understand the structural power of the alphabet. Both seek an infinite truth in the permutations of words. Not even a philologist or a physicist is as close to a Kabbalist as a writer is.
To avoid disappointments and frauds, the best thing a reader who wishes to truly understand Kabbalah can do is turn to Gershom Scholem. Born in Berlin in 1897, he first studied mathematics and then the Hebrew mystical tradition (“my son devotes himself only to arts that do not put food on the table,” his father used to say). He died in Jerusalem in 1982.
Much of Scholem’s work is available in Spanish (published by Siruela and Trotta), and in his finest essays—if one can accept the algebraic style that George Steiner reproached him for—Kabbalah appears as he conceived it: a unified doctrine in its complexity.
With Scholem as a guide and through direct reading of the classical texts of Kabbalah (Zohar, Sefer ha-Bahir, Sefer Yetzirah), I want to summarize the fundamental notions of Kabbalah that have reshaped my relationship with language and narrative structure. There are few ideas, but endowed with such radical power that they have made me question not only my way of writing, but also of living, seeing, and speaking. Kabbalah is an interpretation of oneself and of the world.
To this identity between art and the infinite, Steiner in fact dedicates his essay Real Presences. For Steiner, the Kabbalist is a reader who creates upon the Law, opposed to the traditional Jewish reader—the rabbi—who comments on the Law. Is this heresy? Sometimes, because mystical reason slips out of control and philosophizes freely. Spinoza, who was not unfamiliar with the Kabbalistic legacy, was nearly assassinated several times.
What text does the Kabbalist read? The Torah, fundamentally—the first books of the Hebrew Bible. For a Jew, the Torah is many things. First, it is the word of God, but also the daughter or the work of God. Ultimately, it is God. In a world where divinity creates through words spoken over the abyss, all writing is sacred and delivered from above. The first consequence of this fatality—as Borges called it—is that we are obliged to believe that the words of the Torah are arranged not by chance, not by human choice, but because God encoded in them the secret texture of reality.
They are not metaphors, or at least not for the Kabbalist. Those twenty-two primordial letters and their combinatorics shape the cosmos, and the Torah—like my stone-aleph—is the model or miniature of the entire universe.
According to Scholem, Jews came to see the Torah as an organism, a kind of verbal fabric that entangles itself in every object of the world. The readable beginning of that thread is the word bereshit, the first word of Genesis; but there is also a kind of password, the Name of God, composed of four letters—YHWH—an unpronounceable riddle that the burning bush presents to Moses on Sinai.
The tremendous power of this name is the reason why the Torah, according to the rabbis, does not appear to us in the correct order. There is another Torah—a kind of monstrous anagram, or infinite anagrams hidden in the white space of the parchment—that only God knows, and if someone were to arrange the letters as God intended, they could recreate the world. The idea is catastrophic.
Scribes were warned not to add anything—not even a comma, not even the letter yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the initial of God’s name—to the text, because they might destroy reality. On the other hand, the student of the Torah was promised that YHWH, through visions and intuitions, would reveal to him something of the truth.
By writing the letter aleph on the quartz, I wanted a little of that truth. Aleph, the portentous aleph—as Scholem says—a letter without sound, a mere gentle breath or movement of the larynx before pronouncing the first word, a true breath, was the key to entering that secret world.
It was necessary to begin, like YHWH, with that stone-letter found along the way. In a famous Hasidic story, a rabbi and his disciple are suddenly transported into a confused dimension of reality. They cannot remember anything. They cannot get out. How do they break the spell? By reciting the only thing they remember: aleph, beth, gimel… the twenty-two letters. That is all Kabbalah truly offers us, to be honest: aleph, beth, gimel.
