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 that makes multiple entries possible implies that “there is no final exhaustion of what lies in a work of art.”88 Since every single entry induces change in the active observer, every entry starts from a different position. This hermeneutical theory is strikingly similar to the understanding of the Kabbalists. Though the mystics assumed the historical character of the text, they perceived its components as lenses to the infinite. They built on the richness of the text, believing in the possibility that through elaborate hermeneutical attempts they can get access to the innermost realm of the divine. Such access would then uncover the governing code of the universe that is all contained in the infinite Torah. For them also, the textual reality was an ontological reality that mediated ontological truths in its very function as mediator. The text as a conveyor and a reflection of the divine “body” and “thought” was the place of encounter between divine and human. However, significant discrepancy lies between the two hermeneutical theories concerning the role of interpreter, and the understanding of the hermeneutical process. Kabbalists had a more active perception of the reader than the narrative theory. The particular exposure of the mystical meaning was supported by the assumption that the interpretative process is basically a technical enterprise, not presupposing any discrepancy between the textual reality and the readers own world.89 Consequently, the hermeneutical approaches used interpretative tools to extract the meaning and transform the texts in ways that seems arbitrary from our perspective. Except this basic difference that lies in the nature of the hermeneutical approach, the theory of text as an esthetic medium that discloses itself and its truth to the active recipient shows the contemporary character of the Kabbalist hermeneutics. The famous phrase that the “Torah is God and God is the Torah” transforms to a strikingly relevant truth, if we agree that the encounter with the text discloses the onthos, the divine. In Kabbalah, as we have seen, the astute interpretative techniques many times abuse the text to the extent of total reconfiguration. Aggressive and revolutionary, the interpretation of texts for Kabbalists exceeded the limits of our concept of exegesis by changing the conceptual identity of the Scriptures.90 For them, multiple entries into the texts are made possible not so much by the ever changing repositioning of the observer, but by the ever changing refiguration of the text. The immutable layer of the text is the point of departure into the mystical realm that is behind the solid stratum and is not identical with the grammatical-literal structure. Radical forms of exegesis like gematria, notaricon, tserufei otiyyot and temurah served the deconstruction of the grammatical form of the text in order to reconstruct the divine Torah and find the mystical names of YHWH. Nevertheless, as Idel concludes, in many cases the semantic destruction 88 Gadamer: Truth and Method, 89. 89 As Gadamer's detailed study showed, the distinction between the reader's world and the world of the actual piece of art is first recognized by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Cf. Gadamer: Truth and Method, especially Chapter II. 90 Idel: Absorbing Perfections, 18. 48 Sárospataki Füzetek 20. évfolyam 2016 - 2
