'TheBoo~ of Vessels 273
the Talmud were not dissimilar to those of I Ching. Both sought
78
The Book of Vessels
by Howard Schwartz
There shall not be found among
you anyone that maketh his son
or his daughter to pass through
the fire, or that useth divination,
a soothsayer,enchanter,or a witch.
(Deut. 18:10)
Before Noah Talvi became a Sinologist, he had attended a
Yeshivah in Jerusalem. For a while he had believed his destiny
to be purely in the study of the Torah and the Talmud and the
other sacred Jewish texts. But he had changed his path. He had
left the Yeshivah for graduate ~chooJ. He had studied under
Richard Wilhelm in Berlin in the last years of his life and had let
him become his master, as the head of the Yeshivah had once
been. And like Wilhelm he had devoted himself to the mysteries
of the I Ching, the 4000 year old Chinese oracle.
Often Talvi would think to himself that the I Ching was in
many ways like the Talmud. Both were commentaries on an
earlier text. The I Ching was said to have evolved from an
oracle read from the cracks of a tortoise shell burned in fire.
Now it consisted of sixty-four oracles symbolic of all of the
possibilities of being. There were many layers of commentary.
The earliest attached meanings to the six broken and unbroken
\ lines, known as hexagrams, of which each of the oracles
consisted. These early commentaries were amplified in the
Confucian period, much as the Talmud, itself a commentary of
sorts on the Torah, combined two texts, the Mishnah and the
Gemara. In both cases there were strata of commentaries, like an
archeological dig.
Without a doubt, Talvi's Yeshivah training had prepared him
to be a fine scholar. Even the kinds of commentaries found in
272
to define and interpret life in this world; each drew upon the
wisdom of the greatest sages; and each approached the subject in
a methodical manner. And this was true despite the fact that the
Talmud is, on the surface, the most disorganized of books, the
compilation of the minutes of the debates of the rabbis, often
shifting from one subject to another. In the I Ching, on the other
hand, each oracle was highly focused on a specific phase in the
cycle of creation. This cycle ended in the 63rd oracle, Comple-
tion, and began again in the 64th, Before Completion. And the
commentaries were appended not only to the oracle as a whole,
but to each of the individual lines that made it up.
More than once, as he meditated upon the rich commentaries
of the I Ching, Talvi thought that Judaism lacked such a finely
crafted system of divination. Impossible as it might seem, Talvi
knew with certainty that the I Ching did indeed function as a
true oracle. And he did not question this, but gratefully accepted
it. Yet Judaism had explicitly rejected such an invaluable tool.
For it was clearly written in the Bible about diviners that
"because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive
them out from before thee." Diviners were in the same category
as witches, and the punishment for witches was clearly stated:
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And this even though
the high priests once read the future in the precious gems of their
breast-plates known as Urim and Thummin.
In time this thought became something of an obsession. The
truth was that Talvi was being called back to his Jewish roots,
i although he had not yet recognized this. He continued to
imagine the effect of young Jews meditating on the lines of the
Torah or Talmud the way those who contemplate the Chinese
I
I oracle do, knowing that their fate is written there, and trying to
decipher the full implications of its meaning. Perhaps it was
destined that he should decide to invent such a Jewish oracle, a
Jewish I Ching.
When the notion of creating such a book of divination out of
Jewish sources first occurred to him, Talvi quickly dismissed it.
The reason was obvious: it wouldn't work. The mystery of why
the I Ching served as a viable oracle had been obscured in the
4000 years since its creation. How it had been formed into such
a perfect vessel could not really be understood at all. And no
I amount of scholarship could pierce the veil of this truth. How
I could one man form another such perfect vessel?
I But one day the thought came to him that it is not theI Ching
..L.-
 274 Tales of Wisdom
itself that serves as the oracle, but a benevolent spirit that
animates it, which always makes its replies inevitable, and never
arbitrary. This spirit used the oracle as a vessel through which to
speak. All that this spirit required was a vessel. The more
perfect the vessel, the more accurate the reply. That is why the I
Ching worked: it was a perfect vessel.
At this point Talvi thought of the wonderful myth of the Ari,
as Rabbi Isaac Luria was known, about the Shattering of the
Vessels. According to this myth, at the time the world came into
being, vessels filled with light emanated from the essence of the
Holy One. For some reason-not even the Ari seemed to know
why-the vessels shattered and scattered sparks of that primordi-
al light all over the world. According to the Ari, this was the
reason the Jewish people had been brought into being-to gather
those scattered sparks wherever they had fallen. Finding one of
these sparks was, for the Ari, the same as performing a good
deed, or mitzvah. He called this part of his cosmology Gather-
ing the Sparks. Each spark raised up from where it was hidden
was a step towards restoring the shattered vessels. This notion of
scattered sparks had caught the fancy of Jews everywhere, who
finally saw a purpose in their wide dispersal around the world,
as well as a goal towards which to strive, the restoration of the
primordial world.
Now Talvi wondered if he might somehow create a vessel
through which the spirit might speak to his fellow Jews, alerting
them to every kind of danger, as the Chinese oracle was able to
do. The notion drew him on, even though he always recognized
that it was a mad project, or at least that it would be regarded as
such in the eyes of the world. What did the Jews want with a
book of divination? They had their books, and they had decided
long ago what to do with diviners.
At first Talvi did his best to put these thoughts out of his
mind. But having thought of the notion, Talvi's imagination
proceeded without his permission to conceive ways the oracle
might be brought into being. For example, the I Ching consists
of sixty-four oracles, known as hexagrams. And in the Kabbalah,
the texts of Jewish mysticism, there is frequent reference to the
Thirty-two Paths. At first Talvi considered creating an oracle of
thirty-two vessels, but then he considered the fact that the
process of the Ari's cosmology consists of two stages, the
Shattering of the Vessels and the Gathering of the Sparks. If he
retained the sixty-four oracles, he could divide half of them into
oracles of the broken vessels, while the other half would
TheBoo~of Vessels 275
constitute those in the process of being restored. This followed
as well the basic assumption of the I Ching, that change is the
primary law of the universe, and that there is a predictable
pattern to this change. The meaning was obvious: if the oracle
received was one of those of the broken vessels, the overall fate
revealed a condition of unravelling, a world under the sway of
the Fall; but if it fell into the second half, it revealed that the
process of repair had begun, and the oracle would delineate how
far it had progressed towards the restoration. This decision
greatly pleased Talvi, because it enabled him both to remain true
to the myth of the Ari and to the structure of tbe I Ching.
With this structure in mind, so similar to that he knew so
well, Talvi began to create his oracle in earnest. One of his first
major decisions was what to call it. It would not do to call it a
Jewish I Ching. No, he would give a title that echoed the
Kabbalistic treatises that so abounded in the Middle Ages, all of
which were called the Book of Something or Other. Talvi
considered several titles: The Book of Paths, after the Thirty-
11:1
two Paths; The Book of Facing, because whoever used it would
be facing his innermost self; and The Book of Vessels, since the
oracles would serve as a vessel through which the spirit might
communicate, and because of the teachings of the Ari. It was
this last title that he chose, in its Hebrew version, Sefer
ha-Kelim.
Now that he had a book with a title and a structure, Talvi
began to collect material that he might insert into the various
oracles. He intended to model the book fully on the I Ching. He
chose passages from the Bible as the primary judgments. These
were modified and explained by passages from later texts, such
as the other books of the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash and the
texts of Jewish mysticism. Soon Talvi found himself deeply
involved in reading Jewish texts, selecting passages that might
serve as the kind of commentaries required for an oracle.
As his work progressed, very slowly, Talvi began to consider
the futility of creating a sacred book in a secular age.. It might
well be regarded as nothing more than one man's invention. A
mere pastime. Who would have faith in it as an oracle? And
Talvi was certain that without this faith, the oracle would not
function. For the divine spirit only responds if its existence is
recognized. It was at this time that the thought first occurred to
him of presenting the book as if it had been a recently discovered
ancient text.
276 Tales of Wisdom
Over the ages many others had come to this difficult pass. In
the first few centuries after the books of the Bible were codified,
many books were written in the biblical mold in the hope that
they would be added to the sacred texts. But they were not.
These books were classified as Pseudeipigrapha, and included
The Book of Enoch, among others. Perhaps the most famous
case of such a literary fraud was that of Moshe de Leon, who
claimed in the 13th Century to have discovered a text written by
the 3rd Century sage Simeon bar Yohai. It was known that
Simeon had spent thirteen years in a cave, hiding from the
Romans, who had condemned him to death. What had he done
all that time? Moshe de Leon supplied the answer: he was
writing The Zohar. Remarkably, the hoax was accepted as
authentic, even though there were a great many suspicions at the
time that Moshe de Leon was the true author of the text. Even
his wife had confirmed these doubts, asserting that he had
composed the manuscript himself. Nevertheless, in a few centu-
ries The Zohar had become recognized as the central text of
Jewish mysticism.
Talvi began to explore the history of divination within Juda-
ism prior to its being forbidden and afterward. He found, to his
surprise, that not only had the High Priests of the Temple used
the stones of their breast-plates to divine, but divination was
widely practiced by the people in many ways. Not only by the
flight of birds and by singing, but also by fire, water, earth and
air, by dreams, by lots, by the staff or wand, by oil and by cups.
Yet no well-structured book of divination had been created,
since the practice was forbidden by the rabbis, obeying the
biblical injunction. It was carried on by the people, though,
much as were many other superstitious practices.
The more Talvi tho\lght over the matter, the more it became
apparent to him that the only hope of the book's being accepted
as a sacred text was to attribute it to another, of an earlier age.
Since the book drew on texts through the 16th Century, Talvi
decided to attribute it to the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria, himself.
Talvi studied the teachings of the Ari and those of his disciples,
and in time it became apparent that rather than attribute the book
to the Ari, who left no writings of his own, it,would be better to
attribute it to the Ari's primary disciple, Hayim Vital. It was
while studying the career of Hayim Vital that Talvi discovered
the title of a lost book of his, and he could barely believe his
eyes: it was called Sefer ha-Kelim.
In this discovery Talvi read the hand of fate. He did not
'TheBoo~ of Vessels 277
imagine, of course, that his book was similar to that of Hayim
Vital, but the fact that a book had existed with that title, by that
author, and had been lost was perhaps too much of a coinci-
dence. Talvi began to believe that in preparing his oracle for the
world he was serving the intentions of the Divinity. It was at this
point that he cast the I Ching and asked if his oracle was
destined to be. The reply astounded him: "Ten pairs of tortoises
cannot oppose it. All oracles-including those read from the
shells of tortoises-are bound to concur in giving him favorable
signs."
With this reply Talvi's resolve was confirmed. He would
continue both in the creation of such a text, and in the effort to
offer it to the world as the work of Hayim Vital. Thus, while he
worked at a snail's pace in seeking out the sacred texts that
would serve his oracle, at the same time he became a scholar of
the school of the Ari and of his disciple, Hayim Vital, in
particular. He held with his own hands the existing manuscripts
written by Hayim Vital, and in the course of his readings he
came across something that truly amazed him. For in one
obscure kabbalistic text of the 17th Century it was noted that
some claimed that the lost book, Sefer ha-Kelim, had been used
as a book of divination. When Talvi first read this, a chill ran up
and down him. And that was the first time he began to think that
perhaps he was not inventing a book, as it had/appeared, but
rather restoring one that had disappeared, without any guidelines
but his own intuition.
~ This discovery and its implications greatly affected Talvi. For
one thing, it changed the emphasis of his wide research. From
that time on he limited the texts from which he drew his sources
to those mentioned in the writings of Hayim Vital or one of the
other disciples of the Ari. Of course this in. itself was a vast
library, but it was also a highly focused one. And from the time
this change in sources took place, a change also occurred in the
manner of his locating the proper passages for his oracle, Now
they seemed to leap out at him from the page. Soon he was able
to dispense with reading the whole text from beginning to end.
Instead he merely opened pages at random, selected in the same
way a line to read, and inevitably it was one that he required for
his work. So it was. that Talvi came to think of himself as
collaborating with a spirit, and in time this spirit became a very
specific one, none other than Hayim Vital himself.
At first it had appeared that Talvi's project was to take him
many years. He had estimated
, twenty. But all at once the pace of
278 Tales of Wisdom
his creation quickened far more than he had ever expected. The
lines that leapt forth each fell into the proper place. And Talvi
found that he was working with an assurance far greater than he
had ever known.
In the third year since he had conceived his strange project,
Noah Talvi completed it. With trembling hands he cast the
oracle for the fIrst time, and received for the reply one of the
very fIrst lines of Genesis: "And he looked upon His creation,
and He saw that it was good." And then Talvi knew that he had
indeed served as a vessel, as he had hoped.
Now the remaining task that confronted Talvi was to present
the text as a long-lost manuscript. This was the most difficult
part of all, because it went against all of Talvi's well-developed
scholarly instincts. He argued with himself over this, and even
raged. And in the end he concluded, as he had at the fIrst, that
this was the only way the book would be acceptable to the world
at large. For Talvi believed that he had truly created, or recreat-
ed, an oracle that could serve as well as the I Ching itself.
In his studies of the Ari and his circle, Talvi had learned that
the center for kabbalistic studies had moved in the next century
from Safed to Padua in Italy. Talvi had decided not to attempt to
write a manuscript in the handwriting of Hayim Vital, for that
could too easily be shown to be a forgery. Instead he planned to
present a manuscript which would claim to be a copy of Hayim
Vital's, deriving from the 17th Century.
Once he had made his decision, Talvi worked with the same
single-minded determination that he had to create the oracle in
the fIrst place. He was able to locate paper and inks dating from
the 17th Century, and he studied the handwriting of some of the
minor kabbalists in the circle of Luzzato. When he actually
wrote the text, Talvi felt inspired as he had never felt before,
and his hand moved as if the spirit of that obscure scribe had
taken possession of him. In less than a month the copy had been
made. Talvi even included several easily detectable errors, since
even the best copyists inevitably let a few errors slip through.
Then he traveled to Italy, taking the manuscript with him, and on
his return he announced that he had purchased it there.
In the world of scholarship news does not travel very fast,
except in rare instances. But the discovery of a text attributed to
Hayim Vital that was intended as a book of divination was quite
remarkable, and the discovery was announced and discussed not
only in obscure scholarly journals, but even in the newspapers of
the world that found room for such strange tales. After all, the
L
'The Book.of Vessels 279
practice of divination had clearly been forbidden to the Jews,
and yet here was a manuscript that seemed to demonstrate that
divination had indeed taken root among the People of the Book.
As might be expected, the scholarly debate over the val-
idity of the book was heated. Those scholars who were certain
that the injunction against divination had been obeyed by the
rabbis wrote seething attacks on its validity, while those scholars
who had long suspected the kabbalists of having moved beyond
the usual borders of mainstream Judaism claimed that they
were not surprised, and tended to. accept the authenticity of
the book.
But it was not in the scholarly world, surprisingly, that the
book had its greatest impact. In a short. time it had been
published by a small press in Jerusalem, and to the amazement
of everyone, it went through half a dozen printings within weeks
of publication. A brief article to this effect in The Jerusalem Post
caught the eye of a visiting editor in Israel, and he quickly
purchased the translation rights. Within a year the book had
been published in English, French, and Spanish editions, and it
soon became apparent that it was not being read as a scholarly
discovery,but being used as an active oracle. I
Noah Talvi, who viewed all this activity with considerable
amazement, began to feel that he had restored to the world
something that it had badly needed. But now that his work was
complete he felt strangely empty, uninspired, and unwilling to
undertake anything else. Although he received many invitations
to speak on the manuscript he had discovered, and many
requests for interviews, he rejected all of these, and added
nothing to the ongoing debate..
The discussions among scholars are often intense, but they are
rarely violent. Yet the debates about the authenticity of The Book
of Vessels, as it was known in English, became most heated
among the most religious Jews. By and large, these ]ews angrily
denounced the book as a forgery, since the penalty for diviners
was clearly demarked in the Bible. Yet there was a small group
of modem kabbalists among them who were able to recognize
the logic of such a book among the disciples of the Ari. After
all, the Ari had been able to divine mysteries from a flock of
sparrows or in the trembling of the leaves of a tree. Nothing
escaped him--he under:stood every sign.
These kabbalists began to use The Book of Vessels as it was
intended-as an oracle-much to the chagrin of the others.
Attempts were made at excommunication of those using the
280 Tales of Wisdom
book in this fashion, and several bookstores were broken into,
and all copies of the book taken away.
The opponents of the book would have preferred, of course,
to bum it. But that option was not available to them, as one of
their most honored rabbis was quick to rule. After all, the book
consisted entirely of texts taken from sacred books, and sacred
books could never be burned. Instead, all the copies of the book
that were collected were treated like worn out holy books and
hidden away in a secret Geniza. This action, however, outraged
those who had come to strongly believe in the power of the
book, and led to the first raid by Jews on a Geniza in Jewish
history, in which all of the stolen copies of the book were stolen
back. In this fashion the battle raged on.
During this time Noah Talvi was very restless, for he had not
expected the book to create such a divisive controversy. To see
for himself that the antagonism against the book was as great as
claimed in the newspapers, he attended ~ rally against the book
in Mea Shaarim in Jerusalem. Standing at the back of the crowd
along with several other curious onlookers, Talvi was suddenly
recognized by one of the religious opponents of the book, who
had seen his picture in a newspaper. He screamed his discovery
to the others, and all at once, as hysteria descended on the
crowd, Talvi suddenly realized that his life was in danger.
Only a few seconds later the first stone struck him sharply in
the head, and he lost consciousness. It was followed by a myriad
of others, for all of those present wanted to share the guilt for
that murder, since they regarded it as simply obeying the Law of
God. Talvi's murder was reported around the world, and for a
short time was much discussed, but before long it was dismissed
as a strange convulsion such as sometimes occurs among the
most fervid believers and was soon forgotten. Noone was ever
brought to trial.
Seven years later, in Safed, a Geniza dating from the 16th
Century was discovered beneath the foundation of one of the
synagogues of the Ari that was being restored. A handful of new
manuscripts were discovered, inCluding two written by disciples
of the Ari. Among them was the lost book Seier ha-Kelim of
Hayim Vital. To the amazement of the scholars who found and
confirmed this, the manuscript, written in the hand of Hayim
Vital himself, was identical, word for word, with that published
by the late Noah Talvi, except for a very few errors that had
crept into Talvi's copy.