Charles Mopsik

Picture by Marc Attali

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is an extract from Charles Mopsik’s foreword to his French translation of the original Hebrew of Rabbi Joseph Gikatila’s ‘The secret of David & Bathsheba’s Marriage‘, published by Editions de l’Eclat in 1994, re-issued 2003 and again in 2015  for the present third edition. Excerpted text runs from page 28 to 38. A Via-HYGEIA English translation from the original French.

The text we share here is at the heart of Charles Mospik’s authoritative presentation of Rabbi Gikatila’s peculiar work, ‘whose structure is much more than just the explanation of a obscure passage from the Talmud. It can be considered like a small treatise upon the very nature of marriage and about its anthropological and eschatological signification.’ (page 13, end of second paragraph). Rabbi Joseph Gikatila (1248-1325), one of the most important Spanish cabbalists of the 13th century, dwells in this treatise upon the secret of marriage, the predestination of souls, and the erasure of the original sin.

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The  Secret of the Couple

Far from being the result of pure luck, or of a serendipitous meeting, or of some random passions, successful couples are the fruit of the re-union between two halves of a single soul, which was split at the time of its arrival into our world. By re-uniting its original ‘androgynous form’, such a couple can only be well assorted, fertile and blissful.

Joseph Gikatila sets his attention back upon this central conception of his demonstration. He has based it essentially upon the biblical verses related to the creation of man and woman, and upon a rabbinical midrach that speaks about Adam’s androgyny. What these ancient texts tell us of the body of Adam and Eve, the cabbalist applies it to their progeny. As we were expected to understand the text from Genesis and its rabbinical interpretation in the figurative sense, the story holds the value of a parabola recounting in visual terms the birth of the human soul.

The first human couple therefore is the exemplary standard of all the well assorted couples. When Adam was created, his companion Eve was also, simultaneously. When the soul of a human being is produced at the heart of the divine pleroma, the soul of his companion is also. As the cabbalist says: ‘When a male is created, necessarily his feminine partner is created at the same time, because the pleroma does not produce half of a form, but only a complete one.’ This type of couple is the perfect couple, being the re-union of the two twins born of the same matrix. A rabbinical statement affirming that each of Jacob’s sons married the twin-sister that was born at the same time as he did, embodies for the cabbalist the secret of the pre-destined couple, whose initial unity of the soul of each of its members is restored by marriage. But, to find and marry one’s initial partner depends of his deeds. It is only if ‘a man puts his house in order and fulfils the holy commandments in such a manner that he con-joins Yesod & and Malkut (emulating perfect unity), then he rightly deserves to find his true partner: the other half of himself which is lacking. The virtuous deeds and the religious practices have the power to unite the masculine and feminine components of the divine world: the sephirot called Yesod (Foundation) and Malkhut (Kingship). By uniting the celestial couple, the just man is granted in return the ability to unite with his destined rightful partner-who is part of his spiritual being-before his birth on Earth. Fair retribution, being the projection into the inferior world of the union achieved in the superior realm.

Joseph Gikatila goes even further by establishing a relation of similitude and inter-dependence between the biblical term stating the unity of the couple constituting ‘a single flesh’ in Genesis 2:24 and ‘the ONE Lord’ in Deuteronomy 6:4. The unity of God and the unity of man are the fruit of human deeds. It is the reason why this situation of unity for both is not always achieved. The man that commits transgressions provokes a separation between the sephirot Yesod and Malkhut, and consequently he is himself split of his feminine predestined partner, who will marry another man with whom she will compose an ill-assorted couple, doomed encounter mis-fortune. This man cannot imitate the superior model by uniting to his alter-ego, if he has initiated by his deeds the dis-connection with this very model. As it is displayed in the Zohar, the imperious necessity of the imitation of the divine reality proceeds of the conception, uttered many times, according to which God created the world of below at the image of the world above. And man must develop and actively prolongate this very similitude, because as far as he is concerned, it is conditioned to his freedom. By his marriage, by the choice of a bride, he has the possibility to re-establish the unity of the form of his soul at the image and likelihood of the unity of the divine world. The opportunity to meet his authentic partner his given to him, if he incites by his deeds the couple from above to conjoin and to unite.

This conception of the divine bi-unity and the bi-unity of the human soul which is its reflect is not the invention of Rabbi Joseph Gikatila. At the time when this author writes his booklet, it already had a long history at the very heart of Judaism. We cannot here develop further more this subject-what we are doing at the present time in a book in preparation. Let’s notice, however, that this conception of the cabbalist differs greatly from Plato’s views, as expressed in the ‘Symposium’, or more correctly, the conception Plato attributes to Aristophanes: besides the absence of couples composed of two parts of the same sex, the division of the androgyn is not the result of a revolt against the divinity and it is not the punishment that sanctions it in order to weaken the power of men like the platonic story tells in contrast. In the platonic dialog, the unity of the original man his bi-sexuality manifests suggests the idea of chaos and original undifferentiation. The ‘double being’ of the myth as told by Aristophanes are eager to abolish any distance between heaven and earth, the gods and mankind, as Luc Brisson points at, in a remarkable analysis of Plato’s text, of its Orphic sources and of its Classical parallels.

It seems that it is in the ‘Corpus Hermeticum’ that we can find some sort of similitudes with the tradition that Rabbi Joseph Gikatila develops together with other Castilian cabbalists. The reason may very well be the presence in those hermetic writings of elements originating from Judaism. The inter-weaving of many diverse influences in this ‘Corpus’, dated between 100 and 300 C.E. makes their distinctive analysis difficult. What remains is that a conceptual and cultural gap fundamentally separates the Jewish doctrine of the androgyn, as developed by the Castilian cabbalists, with the Greeks myths, as worked out by the Classical philosophers-and incidentally re-elaborated in Christianity by the ‘fathers of the Church’ and the theologians.

The idea of a division of the soul in a masculine part and in a feminine part is unthinkable in a Greek philosophical environment, as it considers the soul as being an indivisible reality, a spirit or a pure intellect, without any formal ressemblance with the body. The medieval cabbalists, rooted in a centuries-old culture, thought otherwise its relationship to the body. For them, the soul possesses a form that the body manifests in the sensible world. It is because the soul is of an anthropomorphic nature, and before its descent in the lower world, it is endowed with the androgenic form with which God shaped Adam. This bisexual form of the human soul is itself the image of the form of God, bisexual also. This form of God, for the cabbalists, is connected to the divine pleroma, to the totality of the sephirot or emanations.

The structure of the soul reflects God’s structure and both are reflected in the structure of the human body, being itself but the partial and incomplete reflection of this structure; it still does constitute a totality and does reflect this very structure, only if it is united to a woman. Therefore, the ideal human couple, alone, is able to possess a complete soul: by the union of the bodies the two split parts re-unite and overcome the state of division that its arrival on earth provoked. The physical bond of marriage, the corporeal relationship in its fulness re-establishes, as the soul is concerned, the ‘link’ Rabbi Joseph Gikatila speaks about at the beginning of his presentation; link that binds the masculine ‘effusion’ to the ‘receiving’ feminine to the totality of the degrees of the scale of being. The ‘corporeal’ and androgyn form of the soul sums up the ‘corporeal’ and androgyn form of the divine world, of which the cabbalist paints a dynamic and dense portrait from the very beginning of his treatise. Instead of the androgyn coming back to sexual neutrality through the abolition of a sexe by the other, as we can discover in the Greco-Roman literature and later, Christian, it ends up into the permanency of a sexe over the other. Permanency that  comes from the fact that it is not ‘a’ woman that man marries, but ‘his’-who is his other half from the beginning of time, when the souls were created. This is the case of David marrying Bathsheba, who was destined to him, ‘as early as the six days of the Genesis’, as states the Talmud. Of course, the concrete reality is rarely perfect from the beginning, and it is shown by the example of David, one needs sometimes some detours and diverse adventures more or less unfortunate, so to allow the two pre-destined partners to finally find and re-unite with each other.

This conception of the androgyny as negation of the sexual difference has been developed earlier by Philo of Alexandria in his ‘De Opicio Mundi’ (paragraph 46), then adapted by Paul to Christology (Galatian 3:18) and later re-used by Meister Eckart in his ‘Treatises & Sermons’ (page 261 and page 436, GF, 1993). Michel Tardieu in his ‘Three gnostic myths’ (Etudes Augustiniennes, Paris, 1974-Page 105 to 10) declares: ‘The juxtaposition of the two sexes in a single being means also the refusal of any sexuality. Androgyny is essentially an a-sexuality. To have both sexes, is to have neither one or the other, or, being just ‘one or the same’ because there is no ‘other‘.

A wide and detailed literature, in the footsteps of Rabbi Joseph Gikatila, will measure itself with the thousand questions that this doctrine of the perfect couple rises. Even though, when a boy is born, his feminine partner is also born to life at the same time like him, ready to become his terrestrial wife at the given time; but his bad behavior can prevent definitely the happy re-union. The means and the strategies to find one’s true unknown partner will get a generation of cabbalists busy. The question of the choice of the spouse takes a more dramatic form, when it is no more than to guaranty fulness, therefore, the very salvation of the soul.

Man is not alone ontologically. It proceeds from a couple, and his vocation is to reconstitute this couple. But his transit in this world may very well be a tough trial of solitude if he does not strive to act towards the aim to provoke the union of the masculine and the feminine aspects of the divine reality. This union depends on him and himself depends of this union for the sake of his soul as a bi-sexual form, trustful to God’s image.

The conception of the soul developed by Rabbi Joseph Gikatila (and the Castilian cabalists of the Zoharic School) may seem very strange when compared to Aristotelian or Platonic philosophy or even to Christian and Jewish medieval theologies. It is not a reason for us to just look down on it or to judge it un-worthy to have a designated place in the concert of doctrines & currents of thought of the medieval world. It has known numerous developments in the following centuries. The perception of marriage and of the choice of the bride had acquired such a crucial and distressing character, that it generated some re-interpretations, of which some did dim-down its core brutality. This is why, according to the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria-the great figure of the Safed Cabbala of the XVI th century-even if a man marries a woman who is not his other half, the religious act of marriage (the kiddouchin or consecrations) operate the union of the souls and allows them to  overcome, at least in part, their initial disparity. This optimistic ‘correction‘ of the remedy-less determinism of the Castilian cabbala was further-on largely accepted. It was a probable response to the imperious social and family-wise need to embed into the life of the couple an eschatological restoration capacity.

The conception of the couple as exposed by Rabbi Joseph Gikatila may seem also in contradiction with polygamy, dully allowed by the Torah, which was a common practice during his life-time in the Spanish Jewish communities he knew and lived in. The complete absence of this difficulty in the text of Rabbi Joseph Gikatila, as well in the Zohar, may signify probably that the writings that have reached us only reflect a part of the cabbalistic doctrine, of which other aspects may very well have been transmitted orally. Or, we ought to guess from these cabbalists a veiled opposition (…still very unlikely) to the perfectly legitimate practice of polygamy, and perhaps to see there the subtle influence of the neighboring Christian culture. It is, eventually, possible to reconstitute the great lines of what such conciliating attempts may have been. Even though a man can marry several women-alike what David did-only one is his true half who will complete his soul and make of him a perfect man, being both masculine & feminine: in the actual image of God. The role of the other wives in this economy of personal salvation and of collective redemption, is not clearly defined. These wives seem to fulfil what Rabbi Joseph Gikatila calls ‘dealing with the bitter inclination‘ of King David; their function may have consisted into ‘receiving the excessive force of the carnal pulsion‘ that, from time to time, overwhelms the essential affinity between two souls…or two half-souls.

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