Which for me is the third and maybe greatest revelation here: that this is a distinct form of mystical/ spiritual consciousness. Literally dizzying – one grows dizzy looking at these Ilanot. But these visual forms of knowledge and pedagogy are essential, Chajes shows, to the growth and dissemination of Kabbalah, especially Lurianic Kabbalah, which multiplied the baroque complexity of Jewish theosophy to a literally dizzying extent. These documents, richly reproduced in this volume, circulated widely, but because they weren’t “books,” they didn’t get the scholarly attention of more traditional written texts. Second, the book demonstrates that there’s an entire genre of Kabbalistic artistic-textual production that has been almost completely ignored in scholarship: diagrammatic depictions of the Divine, written (until recently) on parchment, known as “llanot.” Trees, of course – – but more like matrices of the microcosm-macrocosm-Divine, scientific diagrams (Chajes analogizes them to Venn diagrams – I think they closely resemble circuit designs from engineering). Not joking, it’s the perfect Chanukah or Christmas gift for the Judaism/ Kabbalah/Qabbalah enthusiast in your life. Yossi Chajes’s new volume, “The Kabbalistic Tree.”įirst, this is the single most beautiful scholarly volume of Kabbalah in history. It’s been many years – – perhaps since Melila Hellner-Eshed’s “A River Flows from Eden” – – since I read a book on Kabbalah that is as transformative and simply jaw-dropping as J.
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