Abstract
The semantic difficulty of the Sefer Yetsirah (SY) is widely attested by its varied commentary tradition. The diverse body of commentarial literature demonstrates the difficulty of establishing the meaning of the work. As discussed in chapter 2, the tenth-century commentaries do not appear in a vacuum. Instead they already dispute previous, unnamed interpretive traditions that posit magical functions for the work. This chapter endeavors to explain why. In order to do so, it is necessary to look differently at the SY to try to understand the way it generates meaning. Because the work is complex in both its semantic meaning and its reception, this chapter will examine its structure. A structural approach to the text is useful in two ways: first, a better interpretation of the SY sheds light upon the worldview of its readers, and second, understanding the worldview of the readers allows insight into its ritual uses and their meanings. The ritual uses are articulated in the text of the SY, its commentaries, and the diagrams. Therefore, the relationship between structure and function can pave the way for understanding the relationship between word, image, practice, and meaning.
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Notes
A. Peter Hayman, ed., Sefer Yesira: Edition, Translation and Text-Critical Commentary. Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2004, MS K, 59.
Fritz Stahl, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26 (1979): 2–22.
David Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 132–162.
Hans H. Penner, “Language, Ritual and Meaning,” Numen 32, no. 1 (1985): 4 [1–16].
In 1922, the Vienna Circle decided on the threefold division. In Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Charles W. Morris defined semiotics as “the triad of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 366.
For example, Ruth Kempson writes in her book, Semantic Theory, “our semantic theory must be able to assign to each word and sentence the meaning or mean ings associated with it in that language.” Ruth Kempson, Semantics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2.
Lévi-Strauss explores this in “The Story of Asdiwal,” in Structural Anthropology, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1976): 165.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken, 1995).
On the relationship between compositional structure and memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22. Carruthers speaks of memoria as a locational memory that “cultivates the making of mental images for the mind to work with, as a fundamental procedure of human thinking because crafting memories also involved crafting the images in which those memories were carried and conducted, the artifice of memory was also, necessarily, an art of making various sorts of pictures; pictures in the mind, to be sure, but with close, symbiotic relationships to actual images and actual words that someone had read or heard or smelled or tasted or touched, for all the senses, as we will observe, were cultivated in the monastic craft of remembering” (Craft of Thought, 10). Carruthers’s work can be used here to point out that the sort of visual thought demanded of the reader or the audience of the ring composition was a creative mnemonics—it was a way of visually recalling and recollecting fact and experience to innovate a new structure of thought and to act. On the relationship between memory and invention,
see Mary Carruthers, “Inventional Mnemonics and the Ornaments of Style: The Case of Etymology” Connotations 2, no. 2 (1992): 103–114. She writes that “Memory, not imagination, is the inventional faculty, both for antiquity and for the Middle Ages. That is how invention was taught in school and practiced in life. The imagination makes images, but memory both puts them away and hauls them out again, not as random ‘objects’ but as parts of a construction, a network, a web, a texture of associations.” Elsewhere she writes that, “Memory is a machine for performing the tasks of invention.” [Emphasis in original.]
Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–7.
Benedek Lang, “Outdated Cipher-Systems in Magic Texts,” an unpublished conference paper delivered at the 45th International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI, on May 16, 2010.
Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 31–42.
For a good survey of the uses of this approach, see The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap division of Harvard University Press, 1987).
Gary Rendsburg, The Redaction of Genesis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). In this book he argues that the editor(s) of Genesis used chiastic and parallel structures to organize their material. Throughout the analysis, Rendsburg defines symmetrical units through shared vocabulary and theme. He notes that catchwords often effect a smooth transition between consecutive units. This is also true of the SY.
Glenn W. Most, The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar’s Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1985 [series: Hypomnemata 83]), 235. Most argues that, “Much of the trouble is that scholars of poetry have manufactured problems through their traditional habits and concerns (and limitations, it may be added). Difficulties and methodology go hand in hand, and methodology has been generally the same since the time of the scholiasts: texts are fragmented for inspection into units of a phrase or a word rather than seen as wholes, single definitive explanations are sought for each unit, and particular elements of a fragmented text are seen to hold the key to understanding of the entirety.” Thus Most argues that we have focused on the semantic mode of generating meaning to the exclusion of the syntactic.
Steve Reece, “The Three Circuits of the Suitors: A Ring Composition in Odyssey 17–22,” Oral Traditions 10, no. 1 (1995): 207–229.
Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), 28.
Robert Allen, “Bursting Bubbles: ‘Soap Opera’s Audiences and the Limits of Genre,” in Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth (London: Routledge, 1989), 44–55.
See also Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric, (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994). Allen writes: “A reader must encounter sufficient examples of a genre in order to recognize the shared features that characterize it” (52).
Alastair Fowler, “Genre,” in International Encyclopedia of Communications, vol. 2, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York: Oxford University Press: 1989), 215 [215–217].
Moshe Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim. trans. Fabrizio Lanza (Columbo, Italy: Providence University, 2007).
Most recently Ronit Meroz has characterized the introduction as an editor’s preface of sorts. She writes: “It is my view that Sefer Yezirah presents several different answers to the question of the meaning of these claims [about the nature of the sefirot]: alternative solutions whose conceptual worlds are close to one another, yet nevertheless differ in several significant aspects. The opening of the book may therefore be read as presenting a shared, common claim or, alternatively, as posing the question presented for discussion. By the nature of things, such a presentation is done by one who knows and is familiar with the possible solutions—namely, the editor of the text.” Ronit Meroz, “Between Sefer Yezirah and Wisdom Literature: Three Binitarian Approaches in Sefer Yezirah,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 6, no. 18 (2007): 106.
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© 2012 Marla Segol
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Segol, M. (2012). Genre as Argument in the Sefer Yetsirah: A New Look at Its Literary Structure. In: Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137043139_3
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