Squaring the Kabbala vs Halacha Circle

Is questioning Zohar's authenticity compatible with the historical halachic process?

When I’ve discussed the possibility that Zohar and other kabbalistic works might not be authentic or might contain errors and anachronisms, I’m invariably asked some variation of “How could R’ Yosef Karo and other great Torah scholars have accepted those texts?”

In fact, that’s a serious question. If we accept that authors of fundamental works of halacha could have been so badly mislead, why should we rely on their halachic rulings?

I don’t have a perfect answer to that question and, while I appreciate its importance, I don’t think it’s my job to have a strong opinion on the subject. However, I do have some thoughts that could reduce the “attack surface” the question creates.

Who said R’ Yosef Karo (and his colleagues) were deeply familiar with Zohar?

It’s obvious that R Yosef Karo was exposed to the Zohar, if only based on the fact that he quotes it from time to time. But that exposure could have been limited.

Think about it: the complete modern Zohar (which includes sections, like Ra’aya Meheimna, that were only included in later printings) consists of some 1.2 million words. That’s more than half the length of the Talmud Bavli. I think it’s safe to assume that many busy Torah scholars had neither the time nor the opportunity to carefully study the entire work.

If that’s the case, then it’s possible that people like R’ Yosef Karo and the Magen Avraham simply never saw many of the Zohar’s stranger passages. And even if they did, they might have assumed that they were missing some important context that existed somewhere they hadn’t yet read.

Great people could take such positions without harming their credibility in the slightest.

Do we know their precise thoughts about the authenticity of Zohar?

Ok. But what about those individuals (like the Ari) who made it their business to become expert in the complete work?

Well what do we actually know about the Ari’s relationship with Zohar? Strictly speaking, virtually nothing. The Ari published no writings during his lifetime. In fact, I’m aware of nothing coming directly from his pen that’s ever been identified and published.

Everything quoted in the name of the Ari is the product of one of a few sources:

• Some comments to the Zohar that survive in later copies.

• Representations of the Ari’s thoughts written in R’ Chaim Vital’s works. Although even those were, at best, initially recorded after the original transmission - and existing texts are based on posthumous copies.

• Heavily edited and expanded versions of R’ Vital’s works, often authored by R’ Vital’s son, R’ Shmuel Vital.

• Parallel versions of the Ari’s thoughts recorded by other students (Israel Sarug, Joseh ibn Tabul, etc). It should be noted that R’ Vital claimed to be the only authentic source for the Ari’s thoughts.

• Legends and external interpretations.

Modern kabbalists would probably prefer to minimize R’ Shmuel Vital’s contributions, given his deep personal involvement with the Cairo branch of Shabbetai Tzvi’s movement. Specifically, in 1664, while being supported in Cairo by his patron Raphael Joseph (himself a major early supporter and financier of the Sabbatean movement), R’ Shmuel Vital managed important activities within the movement under the direction of Nathan of Gaza.¹

So if we have no direct access to the thoughts of the Ari or perhaps even R’ Chaim Vital, then it’s possible they themselves had reservations about the text. Why didn’t they say anything about those reservations? Perhaps they did, but no record survived.

Could “authoritative” mean different things to different people?

Today many people assume that believing Zohar was “written”² by Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai in its complete modern form is somehow an article of faith. But who says the Ari and his followers saw it that way?

It’s possible that the Ari treated the Zohar less as a fixed historical document and more as a symbolic reservoir of truth.

That could explain how he is so often quoted overriding the Zohar text’s plain reading. It could also explain why so many rabbis prefer to think of difficult kabbalistic passages as allegorical. (Although, as I’ve written, doing so stretches the meaning of “allegory” way out of shape.)

I’m not suggesting that I have any compelling evidence supporting those possibilities. But the fact that they are possible makes it easier to balance otherwise contradictory ideas. Either way, R’ Yosef Karo was most certainly a great and foundational halachic authority even while being exposed at some level to Zohar and the Tzfat circle.

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Looking for more? Check out the complete set of posts on the topic of kabbala.

Image by CDD20> from Pixabay

1. See Gershon Scholem’s “Sabbatai Ṣevi : the mystical Messiah, 1626-1676”

2. Which, of course, would mean that Zohar was written down many centuries before even the Mishna and Gemara!