LAUSR

Evil is the theological scandal that won’t go away. In Zohar scholarship, Isaiah Tishby’s twofold approach to the problem of evil has largely been a settled matter. Tishby proffered two options—the Neoplatonic and the dualistic (so-called gnostic) approaches—and argued that these two paths existed in tension on account of unresolved inclinations in the kabbalistic tradition. With literary verve, fresh readings, and compelling argumentation, Nathaniel Berman unsettles this familiar territory in his groundbreaking new book. The effectiveness of Berman’s approach, in the first book-length treatment of evil in Zoharic Kabbalah, derives from his operating on both the microlevel of literary style and the macrolevel of the Zohar’s mythical dualism. Berman applies two different methodological tacks that force a reconsideration of the Zohar’s thinking about evil. First, using the psychoanalytic framework of the constitution of subjectivity as articulated by Julia Kristeva, he reexamines the nature of the Divine Self. Second, he analyzes the distinctive rhetorical tropes that construct the Zohar’s descriptions of the binary dominions of holy and demonic. Wielding these two methods, Berman demonstrates how the iotas of indicatives, conjunctions, and prepositions problematize the erstwhile hoped-for perfection of Divinity. In reconsidering divine subjectivity in chapter 1, Berman employs Kristeva’s psychoanalytic conception of the processes of “ambivalence, splitting, and abjection” in the development of a child’s subjectivity. To construct her or his identity, a child must undertake the painful task of identifying the mother as an external entity and, ultimately, cast her as an Other that must be rejected on the path to identifying a coherent self. Applying this approach to the Godhead, Berman argues that in order for the bounded identity of the Holy Ancient One itself to emerge, a similar process of splitting of Self from Self occurs first: identifying and crystallizing the bounded Self that is holy and the bounded Self that is