Judaism to (1800)

In the context of Judaism, order refers to a sequel of homogenous signs, events, or actions whose knowledge and enactments have meanings beyond their immanent one.

Biblical and rabbinic literatures.

In the biblical and rabbinic literatures, three types of order are discernible: the ritual, the literary, and the historical. The ritual order, which is the most important, is shared by the two bodies of literatures. The assumption is not only that the Jewish rites are quintessential from the religious point of view, but also that their performance has wider implications, like the descent of rains, according to the biblical view, or the enhancement of the divine power according to the rabbinic view. However, it is not clear how precisely the affinities between performance and wider effects are related. The absence of detailed and systematic explanatory discussions is characteristic of the apodictic propensity of rabbinic writings.

The literary order—which refers to the intense and repeated study of the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud—became a central preoccupation among Jews, and even God was imagined to participate in it. Torah, the Hebrew language, and divine names were conceived of as perfect beings that were used in order to create reality and that might also be used by man in order to impact reality. Though the biblical texts and, later on, the rabbinic ones embody both ritual and literary order, the literary order has a specific dimension, that of dense textuality. This means that not only the messages but also the precise details of the document that conveys them, are of paramount importance.

The common denominator of these types of order is the centrality of human action and fate in the universe, that is, the historical order. Objective structures that are not primarily oriented toward the well-being of man—like the invisible Platonic Ideas or the Aristotelian God as intellect—cannot be considered quintessential from the religious point of view. Furthermore, while the Greek conceptions of the cosmos were basically static, gravitating around concepts of perfections, the Jewish orders, which have human fate as the main topic, are much more dynamic.

Speculative literatures.

The nature of intermediary structures—like divine attributes, known as middot, the divine Glory, decadic structures, or angelic structures—and their specific orders play only secondary roles in the biblical and rabbinic literatures, but they are manifest in literatures that were, for the rabbinic authors, secondary, like the Heikhalot literature, or some forms of Jewish magic from late antiquity, like Sefer ha-Razim (Book of the mysteries). These forms of order are basically nonconstellated, that is, they operate without substantial speculative superstructures or orders.

Most of the Kabbalists were religious figures whose conservative propensities were amply testified in their literary activity and sometimes in the records of their lives. They contributed to the emergence of types of ontological concatenations (linkages or chains) between various aspects of reality in manners unknown to or marginal to rabbinic Judaism. The concatenation of supernal orders and rites created structures similar to myth-and-ritual views, although the supernal orders do not uniformly assume the form of mythical narrative.

Jewish speculative literatures that emerged in the Middle Ages, including works on Hebrew grammar and on poetics, and first accounts of scientific thought in Judaism, were in a constant search for comprehensive forms of order. This was also true of philosophical works, including the first systematic descriptions of the divine realm, of human psychology, and of the concept of nature. Attempting to organize the various views on some of those topics found in early Jewish literatures, medieval Jewish thinkers used categories previously absent from Judaism. Words for theology, metaphysics, psychology, nature, and science, did not exist in the Hebrew and Aramaic of biblical and rabbinic literatures, so the use of these categories of thought necessitated linguistic innovation. Some Jewish thinkers had to attenuate the more personalistic, voluntaristic forms of order. Different as the various forms of Jewish philosophy, grammar, science, or kabbalistic literatures are, they share nevertheless a pathos for stable forms of order operating not only in the realm of objective nature, but also in the structure of language and of the human psyche, and in the realm of religious activities.

The idea of sympathetic affinities between the different levels of order created modes of integration that were new to Judaism. Not only was the world conceived of as an organized universe, a cosmos, but also even God was attracted within this integrated system and was conceived of as a part of it. This was already obvious in the Greek systems in which God or gods were not only generative but also paradigmatic concepts: Aristotle's metaphysics, which describes God as an intellect, created an axiology in which the human act of intellection becomes paramount. Sympathetic magic of Neoplatonic and Hermetic extraction, which relates human acts to astral processes, is another example of an integrated system. Both modes of integrated thought were adopted in some forms of medieval Judaism, including by different forms of Kabbalah.

The pathos for integrated orders also generated more specifically Jewish expressions. The most widespread is the assumption, found in the theosophical-theurgical school of Kabbalah, that human actions, the commandments or the mitzvot, correspond to the divine structure, designated as a system of ten sefirot (or creative forces). This dynamic correlation presupposes the possibility of the impact of human acts in the lower realm on the higher entities, that is, a theurgical impact. In another example, each of the supernal divine attributes was conceived of as governing a corresponding celestial sphere, a theory I call theo-astrology.

The Kabbalists thought they possessed knowledge of forms of order unknown to, or hidden from the eyes of, other Jewish masters, and that this knowledge, and the use of it were part of their superiority as religious persons. Unlike the rabbinic treatment of the mitzvot as basically nonconstellated by metaphysical structures, most Kabbalists subordinated them to supernal entities and processes, thus creating more comprehensive frames. This tendency to create hierarchies and ontological chains of being by connecting in an active manner between analogical levels of reality is especially evident in the philosophical and kabbalistic resort to the concept of hishtalshelut, or shalshelet, terms pointing to intradivine chains of emanation. Many of the Kabbalists created an imaginaire of the universe permeated by many concatenations, analogies, occult affinities, detailed sympathies, intricate subordinations, and hierarchies, most of which are absent from the rabbinic literatures. What is characteristic of many of these emanational chains is their flexibility—that is, their dependence on human religious acts below—and thus their vulnerability. Unlike the idea of the great chain of being (described in Arthur Lovejoy's classic study), which is characterized by its static nature—that is, its total independence of human acts—many of the kabbalistic descriptions assume mutual influence between the performance of the ritual and the supernal constellations that govern that performance.

The transition between the biblical and rabbinic literatures and the medieval speculative literatures, thus, is characterized by the transformation from a nonconstellated to a constellated approach. The different speculative constellations constitute different forms of attributing meaning to modes of religiosity that were more concerned with shaping a religious modus operandi than with establishing systematic worldviews. These creations of meaning were attained by constructing narratives that confer on ritualistic acts and on mystical techniques the possibility of transcending the situation of relative disorder in the external world, in the human psyche, or within divinity, thus attaining a superior order. Far from avoiding the strictures of the rabbinic life, most Kabbalists actually added customs and demanded a more intense performance of all the religious precepts understood as being fraught with special mystical valences. This effort of attributing special import to human religious deeds has much to do with the process of creating new systems of affinities evident in the voluminous kabbalistic literature dealing with the rationales of the commandments.