Singing the Same Old Song of Songs (and different): Ritualized Sexuality in Medieval Kabbalah from Orthodoxy to Heterodoxy

The Song of Songs is, narratively, one of the best decorated books of the bible- it is intensively and dynamically interpreted in Jewish literature of all sorts, in the Midrash, the Talmud, and especially in Jewish mystical works. Indeed, the Song is key to articulating the sefirotic cosmology of the Zohar, its conceptions of the human body, its kinships, its varied relationships to the divine and the cosmos, and its capacity to act on both through ritualized sexuality. As the kabbalistic tradition develops between the 13th and 17th Centuries, we see real changes in the conception of the body, its ritual powers, and its relation to the law. We also see some constants in terms of the practices of discursive and ritual synthesis in mythologizing in and ritualizing. As time goes on, rituals of sacred sexuality become dematerialized, and increasingly dissociated from sex between human couples. As this happens, the power and the domain of the male practitioner’s body expands until he performs self- sexuality that grants him a redemptive power in breaking sexual taboos and laws of ritual purity. This is to say that over time, these kabbalistic interpretations of the Song of Songs are used to innovate ritual performances that push orthodox, nomian conceptions of the power of the body past its limits and into heterodox antinomian practices that led to widespread condemnation, litigation, and punishment of practitioners. At the same time, and by similar strategies, each iteration is grounded in its time and place and in dialogue with the discourses and practices of its neighbors. In this essay I examine these synthetic interpretations and ritual performances in kabbalistic texts from the 13th to the 17th Centuries, in the various layers of the Zohar (13th - 14th C Iberia), the writings of Moshe Cordovero (16th C Ottoman Palestine) and the pubic ritual performances of the antinomian mystic Shabbetai Tsevi (17th C Ottoman Empire) to show how they are all part of a cumulative orthodox tradition that leads to self-sexuality and heterodoxy. 

These kabbalistic sources show a clear trajectory in their imagination of messianic ritualized sexuality, moving from materialized to dematerialized practices. The earliest Jewish mystical sources use the Song of Songs to narrate the human observation of intra-divine sexuality, while medieval Zoharic sources imagine at least two different scenarios, the first in which material human sexuality allows participation in divine sexuality to alter divine and cosmic structures, and the second in which that first embodied participation enables a lone male practitioner to join in sexual union with aspects of the divine. Both of these serve reparative, salvific purposes, and both are articulated in dialogue with Christian and Muslim religious discourses on divine multiplicity and on mystical eroticism. 16th C Cordoverian sources begin in some ways with the lone male practitioner, who performs rituals of Gerushin (spiritual divorce or exile), separating from his wife and traveling into the countryside, where dead Zoharic saints are buried. There he engages erotically with their gravesites to become impregnated with their spirits. The practitioner aims to prophetically receive interpretive and ritual innovations to repair the individual soul, the cosmos and the divine, and these too are engaged with conceptions of spirit possession common to Muslim and Christian neighboring traditions. In the 17th Century, the antinomian kabbalist Shabbatai Tsevi extends these practices as he publicly performs rituals of self-sexuality and self-gestation, in which he alone performs his own marriage to the divine and then gestates himself as a messiah. His performances borrow Christian messianic symbols and narratives of immaculate conception. At these same performances he declares his identity as the messiah, and that the he will repair the cosmos by inverting rather than following the law. These public displays, among others, led to his banishment, accusations of sedition and eventual imprisonment in 1666. While it would be tempting to imagine these later antinomian rituals as a sudden break from orthodox kabbalistic sources, this could not be further from the truth. Instead, later sectarians come to their antinomian practices by familiar strategies: by ritual interpretation of Jewish canonical texts, by discursive and ritual synthesis, and by innovating new rituals based in these strategies. It is therefore possible to see antinomian practice as the logical extension of kabbalistic orthodoxy. Just as earlier sources did, heterodox practitioners arrive at their messianic, antinomian self- sexuality by synthesizing earlier kabbalistic discourses and ritual practices with Christian and Muslim ones. This is to say that these changes to ritual and legal practice were baked in from the start, and that we can see them in the interpretations and enactions of the Song of Songs in dialogue with surrounding traditions.