For Moshe Idel Since the very inception of their discipline, scholars of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, have tried to define the object of their study based on its supposed relationship to myth. Gershom Scholem viewed the rise of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages as the return — with a vengeance — of myth. After having been repressed by Biblical and rabbinic traditions, it reemerged, cloaked in mystery and veiled in esotericism, to insinuate itself into the heart of Judaism, from which it would dictate the future of Jewish thought and history. Another school of thought, led by Moshe Idel and Yehuda Liebes, has denied that myth had ever been absent from Judaism, and has traced lines of continuity from the kabbalistic mythos to elements already present in the canonical texts of ancient Judaism. Whatever the precise relationship between myth and Kabbalah, medieval Jewish philosophy has been presented in no uncertain terms as Kabbalah’s nemesis. Under the influence of Maimonides, who defined much of its agenda, Jewish philosophy sought to purify God of any trace of anthropomorphism and to systematically eradicate any mythic elements from Jewish tradition. According to this account, then, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the rise of two movements with diametrically opposed relationships to myth: Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy. The kabbalists are said to have had the upper hand because they tapped into the primordial wellsprings of myth and irrigated every corner of Jewish existence from it, while the philosophers uprooted Judaism from its source of vitality and turned it into an alienated and abstract religious culture. Scholem conceived of this contest as a medieval precursor of the great cultural clash between Romanticism and the Enlightenment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conceptual framework that he used to analyze Kabbalah borrowed considerably from the way Romanticism imagined itself in relation to the Enlightenment — that is, as a more authentic and exciting alternative to the aridities of reason. In this way, a broad cultural conflict from modernity was projected backward onto medieval Judaism and considered to be the key to elucidating its driving forces. This historical account has become the dominant way of thinking about Kabbalah, even as the debate over the connection between kabbalistic myth and earlier strands of Jewish thought continues. There is no question that its broad outlines are well grounded in the sources and that it has contributed greatly to our understanding of Jewish intellectual and cultural history. But it is not the whole story. It seems to me worthwhile to present another way of thinking about these issues, an alternative conceptual framework that will help us get a fuller view of the Kabbalistic phenomenon itself, and will situate Kabbalah’s relationship to medieval Jewish philosophy in a different and added context. Indeed, the implications of this different view extend beyond the confines of Jewish religion to the more universal and fundamental question of how we may think about the nature of divinity itself. I would like to propose a contrast between two conceptions of the deity: God as a personality and God as a being. Each one provides utterly different ways of accounting for existence and for the religious posture. When categorizing the two medieval Jewish movements according to this criterion, a surprising result emerges: philosophy and Kabbalah, hitherto regarded as spiritual and intellectual opposites, turn out to be part of the same massive conceptual and religious shift. Together they reject the notion of God as a personality for that of God as being. To put it another way, they replace God with the Godhead. One may have personal relations with God, but not with the Godhead, which in Kabbalah is a multifaced and dynamic structure, a system of divine reality. 
In the biblical tradition, God is a relational subject who enters into a covenant with the Israelites. The history of this people, with all its ups and downs, is interpreted in terms of the straining and strengthening of a complicated relationship between the divine personality and Israel, which is marked by love and tested by betrayal. (The Biblical conception of God as a personality was most richly explored by the late Yohanan Muffs.) Similarly, for all its vastness and its multiplicity of genres, rabbinic literature everywhere exhibits the same basic perception of God as a personality entangled in a web of relationships with humans and the Jewish people. Not only does the biblical anthropomorphic conception of God not trouble the Sages, but they broaden and deepen it. A midrash in Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, an ancient collection of rabbinical commentaries on the Book of Exodus that was redacted in the third century CE, helps to highlight the monumental disparity between the concerns of the ancient rabbis and those of their medieval successors. It concerns verse twenty-one in chapter thirteen, “The Lord would go in front of them by day [in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire],” about which it remarks: Is it possible to say this? But it already says, “Do I not fill heaven and earth — declares the Lord” (Jer. 23:24); and it is written, “And one called to the other and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy [is the Lord of Hosts], His glory fills the entire earth’” (Isa. 6:3); and it says, “Behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east; and His voice was like the sound of many waters; and the earth was illuminated by His glory” (Ezek. 43:2). What is the meaning of “The Lord would go in front of them by day”? Rabbi [Yehuda Ha-Nasi, or Judah the Prince] said: Sometimes the Emperor Antoninus would hold court on the dais until it grew dark, and his sons would remain with him. After leaving the dais, he would hold the lantern and light the way for his sons. Imperial dignitaries would approach him and say, “Let us hold the lantern and light the way for your sons.” But he would say to them, “No. It’s
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