Sárospataki Füzetek 20. (2016)
2016 / 2. szám - ARTICLES / STUDIEN - György Kustár: Ont he Slopes of Sinai - Some Hermeneutical Questions in Light of the Kabbalistic and Historical Critical Exegesis
György Kustár spiritual preparation reveals its deepest secrets about the hidden processes of the divine essence to the knowledgeable mystic. As we have seen so far, the narrative flow per se is not the basic concern of the Kabbalist interpretation. It only functions as a point of departure, a texture that is woven back and forth by hidden threads, a body or a garment that contains the soul and the essential substance.19 Likewise, in the exodus narrative, the summit of the mountain corresponds to heavens,20 the Torah to the Primordial revelation that was God’s contemplative device for Creation, and his innermost thought and map of the Universe. The tablets of the Ten Words were subject to lengthy expositions concerning their material as being the work of God.21 Similarly, the Torah as the unique self-revelation of God and the mediating role it plays between the divine and human gave birth to intricate explanations about its innermost nature.22 a) Mystical History? As we will contrast this hermeneutical attitude to the historical method, we should take a glance at the concept of history in Jewish mystical thought. Those historical questions that occupied most of the studies after the Enlightenment were out of focus for the mystics. The surface layer of the narratives, the so called historical or literal sense (peshat) was assumed to correspond to real events, and the narrative sequence and its historical reference were unproblematically united with the factual occurrences they reported.23 If we examine the historical references in the zoharic interpretation of the date of arrival in Ex 19:1, we find no explicit treatment of historic)graphical issues. The importance of emphasizing the absence of the factuality problem24 but not the absence of historical statements is that while we do not find discussions about the exactness of the date determination, we do find speculations about the celestial constellations according to the indicated arrival date. This speculation doesn’t mean a critical approach in a modern sense, neither does it mean a complete ignoring of historical details. The date of arrival of Israel to the mountain is an external and determining sign of a more meaningful constellation of cosmological factors. The actual historical happening thus becomes significant as a pulsing 19 This interpretation is form the note in Ex 32:18, that the stones were the work of God. Cf. also Green: A Guide to theZohar, 123. 20 Cf. I del: op. at, 30-31. 21 The Zohor, 84a b, 347. 22 See the discussion in the first chapter. 23 See the discussions in the second chapter. 26ff. 24 The factuality problem requires the existence of two distinct realms of historical present and past, and a profound sense of discontinuity with the past events. In a certain way, the problem of exploring the past is a historiographic issue, as the emphasis is on the best method to connect the past to the present. Cf. Dawes, Gregory W.: The Historical Jesus Question - The Challenge of History to Religious Authority, Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, 2f., Thiselton, Anthony C: The Two Horizons, New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description, Grand Rapids, Eerdmanns, 1980), 51 ff. 34 Sárospataki Füzetek 20. évfolyam 2016-2
