The Age of Night (1650-2000), Part 4
From the Safed Kabbalists to Sabbatai Zvi
Coffee and Night Emerge in the Jewish World
“The introduction of coffee brought with it, beyond the mere availability of a new stimulant, the emergence of a new perception of the night in which the hours of darkness could be shaped and manipulated by human initiative rather than condemn man to passive repose.” Horowitz
Thus spake Elliot Horowitz in his fascinating article, Coffee, Coffeehouses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry. The time period he is discussing is actually the 16th century, about a century before the time when English coffeehouses open and Zvi would declare himself the messiah. However, in Safed at this time, as Horowitz explains, Lurianic kabbalists were beginning to reinvigorate the tradition of midnight prayers with the aid of coffee. This rite was called tikkun hazot or “midnight rectification.”
Horowitz notes that the breakdown of distinctions between day and night in the Islamic world, together with the introduction of coffee to Safed, created perfect conditions for the
revival of [tikkun hazot], a “half forgotten observance,” to use Scholem’s phrase, which required nocturnal wakefulness and which, under Zoharic influence, focused upon the hour of midnight, an hour which had otherwise lost almost all significance in positive Judaism…
Here he again places coffee carefully in the context of new developments in late 16th century Jewish life:
Only in late-sixteenth-century Palestine did Tikkun Hazot suddenly take off and become a mass rite, spreading from there to other countries in the Near East and the Mediterranean basin. Its popularization was, of course, part of the wider diffusion of kabbalistic rites during this period and their penetration into daily life, but it can hardly be divorced from the increasing availability, by day and night, of a stimulant such as coffee.
I’m keeping this short, but those interested should read the original article for more fascinating details, important caveats and subtle analysis.
After Midnight
Night, as a metaphor and a reality, had powerful important meanings to the pre-Sabbatean Safed Jews, but it wasn’t a blank slate. In particular, amongst the Safedians, night was associated with mystical revelation, “arousal” and a spiritual attitude towards the female. Obviously, these would all continue into the heretical movements of the 17th and 18th century.
…those exercises [the new Safed created nocturnal rituals]… were mainly oriented toward the attainment of mystical knowledge…
Let us take as an example the ritual of the midnight vigil, to which the texts presented in this volume make frequent reference. One of the most popular themes of the Zohar is the mystical importance attached to rising at night, especially midnight, in order to study the Torah. Midnight was considered to be a time of divine favor and arousal, during which the forces of strict judgment were quieted and the powers of mercy and compassion brought forth. According to this theme, God visits the righteous in Paradise at midnight and the pious arise to sing His praise. In addition, mid-night was held to be the time at which the Shekhinah sings songs and hymns to Her Husband (Tiferet), and according to some sources, the hour at which the two join one another in love. Fine, Safed Spirituality
Fine goes on to detail that, as Horowitz noted, the Lurianists shaped night to their spiritual aims. Notice also the feminine themes:
Drawing their inspiration from these Zoharic themes some of which themselves go back to still older rabbinic literature- the mystics of Safed fashioned a dramatic ritual in which pious adepts arose every night for the purpose of study, praising God, mourning the destruction of the Temple, and lamenting their sins. Although this practice is frequently mentioned in the earlier Safed sources, it was under the guidance of Isaac Luria that it assumed a far more elaborate form. It consisted of three parts, the "rite for Rachel," the "rite for Leah," and the "rite for the soul." Fine, Safed Spirituality 1
Finally, any discussion of “after midnight” must contain the giggly stuff, and here we are:
While the earlier Kabbalah was quite prepared to describe the relationship within the sefirotic realm in stark sexual terms, the older Kabbalists were generally more reticent to depict the relationship between an individual and God in explicitly erotic images" Not so with Safed mystics, as illustrated by these words of Elijah de Vidas:
A man would not delay making love to his wife when he feels passion for her, even if he were given all the money in the world. In a similar manner, it is proper that he feel passionate about carrying out the commandments since, through their performance, he makes love to the King's Daughter, that is, the Sbekhinah."
De Vidas goes so far as to argue that an individual who has never experienced love for a woman is unprepared to love God since "as a result of the feeling of longing for a woman, one learns to cultivate longing for God." Just as a person rises at night to love his wife out of his intense passion, so should one rise in the middle of the night out of his great love for God.
Elsewhere it was suggested that marital relations should be held off until, you guessed it, directly after midnight (they didn’t have clocks, midnight was considered “halfway” through the night.)
From Midnight to Heresy
This melding of coffee and kabbalah that began in Safed and spread throughout the Mediterranean basin, as Horowitz notes, pops up in the origin story of the Sabbatean heresies a few generations later. Nathan of Gaza, Zvi’s “manager” of sorts, recognized the new messianic age during two nocturnal spiritual possessions. One happened around 1663, “the spirit came over me, my hair stood on end and my knees shook and I beheld the merkabah, and I saw visions of God all day long and all night…” The second was solely nocturnal: This happened to Nathan of Gaza about two years later and begins, “When the holiday of Shavu’ot arrived, Rabbi Nathan called to the scholars of Gaza to study Torah with him the entire night…” Long story short, Nathan ends up possessed by a maggid, strips down to his undies and declares Zvi the messiah. (see page 64 of Goldish for the full account, Horowitz also discusses shavuos).2
Amazingly, these two scholars, Goldish and Horowitz, both point out the important role of night in the 16th and 17th century Judaism, but miss something the other focuses on- Horowitz leaves out the Sabbateans (besides one meager footnote on Nathan) and Goldish leaves out the coffee. For those raising a doubtful eyebrow about the role of coffee in all this, go read Horowitz, where the coffee ritual in Lurianic and Shavu’ot nocturnal rituals is explicit and then read Goldish, where the influence of Sufi ritual, which explicitly featured coffee as a key part of its nocturnal services, is spelled out.3 Nathan’s revelations seem bizarre to us, but seen in the context of the religiously-tinged nocturnal practices that preceded him, they seem almost predictable.
Conclusion
The Sabbateans would continue their nocturnal shenanigans, including mystical, musical and sexual practices happening “at the end of the night.” Zvi was known to sing hymns “all night long” and Nathan continued to host students who studied through the night. To me, these feel very much like a continuation of the Lurianic practices detailed above. But as the movement became more controversial, night also became a place of danger, transgression and secrecy.
The important thing here is to note, as Horowitz does, that night became something that could be shaped, it became a new space for new types of thoughts and feelings. As we’ll see in the end of this series, we shouldn’t take that for granted, as it likely ended in our own age.
Aside: For those who really want to dive off the deep end, check out Moshe Idel’s Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism, which makes some really wild connections between the planet Saturn, the sabbath, witches, melancholy, Sabbatai Zvi and night!! I don’t really understand it, but I feel like his connections of all this with night should be considered.
…images related to black - night, ravens, black birds -… are symbols of impurity, namely the demonic dimension of reality.
After Zvi, night remains as part of the heretical context. By the time Jacob Frank is involved, we find night emerge again, this time spilling into the public world:
The only mention of the Lanckoronie affair in [Frank’s] The Words of the Lord is even more cursory: "When I came to Lanckoronie and you were singing songs, having covered the windows during the night, I went out and opened the window so that everything would inevitably be heard." Again, the only thing we know about the character of the ceremony is that the participants sang songs. However, the text does present an interesting and important piece of information: the disclosure of the secret ritual was an intentional provocation on Frank's part, and the Sabbatians were revealed because he opened the windows to let the town's inhabitants hear them singing during the night. Maciejko, Mixed Multitude
The heretical Jewish movements eventually burnt out and thus closed a chapter that began with the Lurianic night. What came next? The Hasids would keep the new nocturnal but put the kabbalah stuff under strict lock and key. The enlightened rational haskalah folks would ditch it all as medievalism, but enjoy the new enlightened night of democracies, coffee shops and print culture. Eventually night would re-emerge in secular circles, along with vague traces from its Sufi ancestors, as European Romanticism. Not surprisingly, coffee would play a role. Next, From Heresy to Romanticism
For those interested, the quote continues, “During the first part of the night] during which the rite for Rachel takes place, an individual laments the exile of the Shekhinah by engaging in acts of mourning: removal of shoes, weeping, placing ashes on one's forehead, and rubbing one's eyes in the dust on the ground in order to symbolize the Shekhinah, who lies in the dust Herself. The adept then recites Psalm 137, which recalls the Babylonian exile, Psalm 79, the final chapter of the book of Lamentations, and other songs of lament. This is followed by the rite for Leah, in which attention shifts to the theme of redemption. During this part of the ritual hymns that look forward to the coming of the Messiah are sung.
Finally, the rite for the soul is celebrated, in which one contemplatively seeks to restore the unity of Tiferet and Shekinah. In this remarkable ritual, then, an individual is called on to reenact, night after night, the "history of the world" so to speak. It is a history that recalls the fate of a dispersed people and the parallel suffering of God; yet it also looks forward to a future time when both will be restored to a state of unity and perfection. More than a rite of memory and hope, however, the midnight vigil served as a contemplative action whereby the adept actively contributed to the restitutive process….”
These visions have a strong sufi context to them and the whole maggid thing, Goldish says, can be traced back to Muslim notions. See page 62 of his The Sabbatean Prophets
Conjecture: One minor note about the Sufi influence, whose use of coffee for nocturnal purposes predates the Jewish use. Coffee, which was etymologically associated with wine was seen as the more permissible alternative. Even though it was prohibited severely at times (see earlier posts in this series), its status was always ambiguous, as opposed to wine. However, students of Sufi poetry will note that drinkers of coffee may have been predisposed to its spiritual effects by the spiritual importance of wine, a phenomenon which predates the use of coffee.