The Kavvanoth of Prayer in Early Hasidism

Summary

The mind of the Cabbalist at prayer confronts not the God of traditional religion, but the whole Sefirotic universe. As he progresses through the fixed prayers, the utterance of each and every word or phrase is expected to cause a particular zone on the Sefirotic map to flash into his contemplative consciousness. Moreover, this system of Kavvanoth, particularly in its Lurianic version, has a strong magical flavor arising from the assumption that human contemplative recollection of Sefirotic processes taking place in the Divine realm is capable of contributing to, and is indeed instrumental in, activating the very same Divine processes.

The Cabbalist's contemplative journey through the zones in the Sefirotic world is not left to the wanton choice of the contemplative traveller but requires extreme discipline and follows clearly charted routes. The strict progression of the Kavvanoth is the very opposite of religious anarchism. The mystic's contemplative thought is not allowed to float indiscriminately or in an irresponsible, arbitrary and capricious way, but is supposed to follow an exact chart directing every movement of the contemplative mind during prayer.

From the situation described a problem inevitably arises: The fixed texts of the traditional Jewish prayers reflect the religious world of Judaism in the first centuries C.E., the time of their formulation. They were left unchanged by the Cabbalists, along with all other Jews, in deference to the well-known conservative tendencies of jewish mystics. Nevertheless, while the Cabbalist uttered the prayers in their traditional wording, his contemplative mind would be at large in an entirely different religious landscape. He had to reinterpret all the elements of a religious conception he had left behind in terms of his Cabbalistic piety revolving round the Sefirotic system and its emanative or copulative intricacies. In other words: it is not the original concern of the petitionary prayer that was at the forefront of his contemplative interest, but the new religious fascination of Sefiroth; their emanations and re-emanations, the descent and ascent of the “upper worlds” or the holy copulation between the male and female aspects of the Sefirotic universe.

But the Cabbalist had to pay a high price for the retention of the traditional formulations of his prayers. It was the price of a certain divorce between the text of the prayer he was uttering and its contemplative meaning.