Must One Believe That the Zohar Is Authoritative?

In the spring of 1914, around 125 Jerusalem Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jews (most of them presumably rabbis) signed a document containing violent curses aimed at unnamed individuals living in Yemen. At the same time, a handful of Jerusalem religious courts issued alternate versions of the curses.

Those documents are available online as part of a pamphlet published by the curses’ primary target: Rabbi Yihiya Kafah. In fact, the curses make up around half of the pamphlet’s total length, followed by R’ Kafah’s response.

What was R’ Kafah’s crime? He challenged the authenticity of the Zohar and modern kabbalistic writings. The full expression of his thinking can be found in his ספר מלחמות השם, which is a scholarly and comprehensive analysis of the distance between traditional Jewish belief and many of elements of modern kabbala.

Reasonable people can disagree on these matters. But what’s truly fascinating about the attacks from Jerusalem - even more than the nastiness - is the underlying assumptions. Or, to be more precise, the fact that the underlying assumptions are neither clearly expressed or defended. The closest they come is the expression: “ולמפורסמות אין צריך ראי'" - (“Matters of great fame don’t require proof”).

It’s also worth noting a few names that were conspicuously missing from the curses. Jerusalem of 1914 was a city rich in Torah scholars, but Rabbis Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, Yitzchak Yerucham Diskin, Yaakov Moshe Charlap, and Moshe Mordechai Epstein were especially prominent among them. Rabbis Yehuda Fatiyah and Shalom Hedaya were important leaders of the Sefardi and kabbalistic communities. Not one of them signed.

Is it possible that this isn’t a matter of quite such '“great fame” as the authors imagined? Is it possible that, when it comes to authority, our uninterrupted and intimate familiarity with the Talmud is qualitatively different from the authority of a manuscript that mysteriously appeared after being hidden for more than a thousand years? Is it possible that traditional kabbala was never meant to play any role in the daily lives of the vast majority of Jews?

The Maharsha (חידושי אגדות חגיגה יג. דה"מ תא אגמרך) famously thought so:

מכאן תשובה לאותן אנשים שבדור הזה שמבלים כל ימיהם בחכמת הקבלה גם בילדותם ואם החכמה ההיא חכמת הקבלה אינו נוגע במעשה מרכבה לא ידענא למה לא הוזכרה זו החכמה בשום מקום לא במשנה ולא בתלמוד ובתוספתא ובמכילתא ובספרא ובספרי ולפי הנראה שחכמה זו נוגעת בלמעלה ממעשה מרכבה ויותר ראוי להסתירה ולא לגלותה ובפ' י' יוחסין אמרתי בזה שיש למחות ביד הדורשים בחכמה זו ברבים גם בסוד השם ע"ש

“From here is an answer to those people in this generation who waste all their days in the wisdom of kabbala, even in their youth. And if this wisdom - the wisdom of kabbala - isn’t relevant to מעשה מרכבה I don’t know why it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in Mishna, Talmud, Tosefta, Mechilta, Sifra, or Sifri. And, as it seems, this wisdom is relevant to (topics higher than) מעשה מרכבה, it’s even more appropriate to hide it and not to reveal it. And in my commentary to Kiddushin, I ruled that one should rebuke those who teach this wisdom in public.”

So you’d think that elevating doubts about the provenance of Zohar to a core tenet of Jewish faith isn’t likely to find significant support in Torah circles. And asking honest questions about that provenance should certainly not inspire curses - and especially not curses like these:

אלקי הרוחות השמידם והאבידם והכניעם והשחיתם והכריתם מלאכי חבלה יפגעו בהם ארורים הם בכל אשר יפנו באסכרה תהיה מיתתם יכם ה'בשחפת ובקדחת

The curses’ authors were clearly not interested in education. If that had been their goal, they could have pasted pashkevillim around town explaining and supporting their opinions. Instead - and especially considering the violence of their language - I have to assume that they were out to convince God to torture and kill R’ Kafah.

So how did that work out for them?

Historical hindsight can sometimes reveal great irony. R’ Kafach far outlived contemporary life expectancy in Yemen - living until either 1932 or 1936 (dying at the age of either 82 or 86) - and seems to have died of natural causes associated with old age. Decades after the curses. The grandson he personally raised and educated - the great R’ Yosef Kafeh - grew to become a famous talmid chochom in Israel.

I think we can now safely assume that God wasn’t inclined to go along with the curses.