Moses Cordovero

By the sixteenth century Kabbalah had three hundred years of accumulated material behind it, in the Zohar and in competing schools that used the same vocabulary to mean different things, and no orderly account of any of it. Cordovero, working at Safed, wrote one. The Orchard of Pomegranates, finished when he was twenty seven, takes the whole inheritance apart and reassembles it topic by topic, stating the positions, weighing them, and deciding.

The hardest question he took on is what the sefirot actually are. If the ten emanations are God, then God has parts and changes, which the philosophers had spent centuries denying. If they are not God, then Kabbalists are directing worship at something created, which is worse. Cordovero's answer is that they are vessels, and the divine light is what fills them: the vessel is not the light and the light is not the vessel, and yet what is in them is genuinely God, so that a person contemplating the sefirot is neither addressing an intermediary nor dividing the indivisible. He put it in a formula that later writers quoted constantly, that God is all reality but not all reality is God.

The book made Kabbalah teachable. It is the reason the Safed circle could train students rather than only initiates, and it is the systematic reference against which everything that came afterwards, including the system that displaced it, was measured.

Cordovero's other well known book is twenty pages long and does something the big system does not. The Palm Tree of Deborah takes the thirteen attributes of mercy, which Kabbalah reads as qualities of the divine, and turns each one into an instruction for conduct: since God bears insult and continues to sustain the one who insults him, so should you; since the divine attribute of judgement is always tempered, so should yours be. The logic is that a person is made in the image of the sefirot, and that ethics is therefore the practice of resembling them.

It is the first Jewish ethical work built on a Kabbalistic foundation rather than beside one, and it founded a genre. The musar literature of later centuries, and the whole Hasidic assumption that mystical doctrine issues in a way of behaving, run back through this short book.

He died in 1570. Isaac Luria had arrived in Safed shortly before, studied with him, and after his death produced a system so much more dramatic, with its shattering of the vessels and its scattered sparks awaiting repair, that within a generation it had taken the field. Cordovero was not refuted so much as overtaken, and the standard later view treated his account as the outer teaching and Luria's as the inner one. Historians of Kabbalah have since restored him, partly because his exposition is clear where Luria's is not, and partly because so much of what Luria assumes was settled here first.