Masturbation in the Kabbalah

According to the Ari

In the Kabbalah of the city of Safed, in the 16th century, the Zohar was treated as a canonical work. It was thus natural that the Zohar’s stringent approach to the sin of masturbation was reinforced and expanded in this city. The Ari saw in the flow of divine overflow into the world a parallel to the process of a man’s semen flowing. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the Ari conceived of all creation as essentially the ejaculate of the Divine. Within the mythological system He created, God shot a stream of light into a hollow that he cleared from His self. This is the well known process of “Emanation” that soon went wrong. Soon “The Breaking” occurred, scattering sparks of light amongst the husks of strict judgement, and leaving us (human beings) with the task of finding and raising those sparks back up to the Divine.

In the well-known Sefer He-Hayyim, the Ari’s senior student, R. Hayyim Vital, writes about the creation of the world, in which God came alone and was unable to couple with anyone:

The first “coupling” at the time of creation occurred through a miracle, through God’s blessed choice and simple will . . . Indeed, the first time, with the first couple, the male was aroused all on his own, without the stimulation of a female. The will and desire to couple rose in him even though there had never been in living form “feminine juices” [i.e. the female liquids which enable coitus], and therefore this initial coupling is deeply hidden . . . For there had not yet been created a female and thus someone with which to couple at the time of creation. Therefore the first coupling had been with the Higher Will, a thought of the Higher Brain, through the essence of the Higher Will which is entirely Male, in which there is no Female element. Understand this. (39:2)

That is to say, creation was a miracle, since there was fertilization without a female. God’s first act of creation was with his thought and will – which fits very nicely with the ancient idea that semen’s source was the brain, and that semen carries with it the man’s intelligence. But from here it emerges that God brought forth the world through an act of self-gratification, an act which which halacha sees as extremely problematic. Actually, perhaps it really is not so problematic, with this being the reason for the creation process not succeeding, but producing the horrible “Breaking of the Vessels.” Indeed, Vital compares the disaster of the Breaking to when the Biblical Joseph’s semen flowed out from between his hands (which happened, according to the Midrash, when he refrained from sleeping with Potiphar’s wife).

If so, the Breaking is a result of the divine attempt to reproduce without a female. Or better yet, of God’s struggle: he wanted to release his divine overflow, but there was no one with which to do so. God wanted to love, but there was no one there but him! In other words, the cosmic tragedy that stands at the heart of this world’s nebechness is the result of the unreceived ejaculation of the Divine semen, which is in fact a rather heart-rending attempt to emanate love without a lover! Since God had no choice but to try and create without a female, one could say that creation was destined from the start to failure. But it is also clear that, despite this, the effort was not for naught, for indeed the world was created.

But while God had no other option, we do, and thus our re-enactment of this divine sin is truly awful, for instead of trying to mend and improve it, we perpetuate this negative element in the creation process.

First of all, the sinful act of masturbation produces a parallel effect on the divine realms, such that we produce a “masturbation” in the upper realm. Thus:

“It is well known that every sin done down below causes a parallel effect up above, but we need to understand what it is that this causes above. In short, when the “small faces” (the middle sefirot, whose role it is to spread the divine overflow from the top sefirot down to the lowest, Malchut) desires a “Feminine” (that is, anything that can act as a receptor, receiving the overflow – e.g. Malchut, or the people of Israel) but does not find one in the upper, noble world – because she has descended into exile, down in the world of creation – then that soul will emerge out of a Male desire that found no Female receptor and, suddenly, we find a Dark Maidservant (in the vain of Prov 30:23: “when a maidservant inherits her mistress”) that snatches this very soul. Understand this well and grasp the severity of this transgression and what it causes to occur up above.” (49:2)

In other words, the Divine Light searches for a match but fails to find one, just as below (in masturbating) there is no match. What then occurs is the spawning of this “Maidservant”, i.e. impure forces. We see from here that just as in creation, when the Divine Overflow – after the Breaking of the Vessels – enters upon mere husks, so too in masturbation the semen which fails to be contained in a woman enters upon the Other Side, thus adding sustenance to the world of Impurity.

“We find that one who masturbates causes those soul-containing drops, which were destined to emerge as actual sons, to instead become entangled with the Other Side, and it is there where they receive bodily form – a body composed of the Dark Snake, the Whoring Spouse. We find that the potentially Holy is transformed and reversed into the Impure, and the Good into the Bad.” (Kavanoth, 7)

As is well-known, in Kabbalah the purpose of every mitzvah is the repair of our damaged world, and we now understand that the damage we speak of is itself the horrible consequence of that first Divine sin of masturbation. It is for this reason that the sexual realm is so very important, and that the proper repair would be kosher sex with a kosher woman. For in doing so, we recapture that stream of originally wasted seed, and use it to actually reproduce – that is, for good, and to continue to process of Creation.

As previously mentioned, the Ari understood these ideas in very material terms, such that actual semen– not just some symbolic meaning thereof – became the principal subject of these ideas. Thus, it wasn’t just semen from masturbating or wet dreams which went over to the Impure side, but even drops which remain from a kosher sex act:

“You need to know that during sex, which is a beastly act and one that arouses lusty desires, Lilith appears and gathers any drops from the Holy Organ that remain on the sheets and makes Demons from them.” (Likutei Torah, Breishit, 39)

To protect the couple from Lilith’s apparent presence in the bedroom, the Ari suggests reciting a special whispered chant, known as the Atipha D’ketapha. (For those who are interested, it goes as follows: ????? ????? ?????? ???? ???? ?? ???? ??? ????? ?? ???? ??? ?????. ??? ??? ??? ??????? ?????? ??? ????. ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ????? ???????) He also rules that the man must keep himself inside the woman for as long as necessary during ejaculation (ed: so that none spills out?), and that any who doesn’t do so is called wicked. (Pardes Rimon, 366)

Really?! If it hadn’t been written here, we would be forbidden from suggesting it! But what can we do?

The mighty and holy Ari, who is considered the greatest Kabbalist of all time, spills his energies into these bizarre discussions. Is it any surprise that the Vilna Gaon never quite believed that most of the Ari’s writings were anything other than speculations on far too intimate things? Is it any surprise that two hundred fifty years later, the Hasidim came along and neutralized the material element of his teachings? But people love when you tell them all sorts of fairy tales about God, such that the legacy of the Ari still shines bright today. I’d prefer to place him in that rare category of man: those gifted with such a ripe power of imagination that, coupled with an unfettered vision and fiery and divine set of inspirations, was capable of producing entire worlds of thought – with their own internal logics – that now play a deep role in the human mind. In other words, he was a fantasist, like the writers Tolkien and Asimov, or theologians Rudolph Steiner and Joachim of Fiore.

To This Day

Under the Ari, the sin of masturbation took on almost mythical proportions, but the real problem is how this position has continued to affect the generations that followed. For but one example, R. Moshe Graff (who lived in the 1600’s and prophesied that the redemption would arrive in 1720) recorded that the sin of masturbation was the sole problem preventing the Messiah’s imminent arrival. Indeed, he believed that the entire course of history had been permanently set by this one terrible sin. As Prof. Pechter writes:

“R. Graff painted a complete historical picture where practically everything was based on the sin of masturbation. The Generation of the Flood sinned in this way; Abraham and Sarah repaired souls that were created out masturbation; Er and Onan’s spilling of seed caused the souls of the Davidic house and of the Messiah to became encased in spiritual husks, this in turn allowed the enemy nations of Moab and Ammon find protection; Joseph was tested through this sin but overcame it; the Israelites journeying down to Egypt was itself a “spilling of the seed,” with the exile in Egypt was meant to filter out the “sparks” that were created as a result; the entire essence of Balak flowed from this prohibition; the Babylonian exile derived from it, as did the current one. Graff’s massive compilation of sources transformed this one behavior, in a way that had never been seen before, into an extremely significant element in the history of the Jewish people.” (p. 230)

Unbelievable. It’s all because of masturbation! But is there anything left to complete this picture? The Holocaust, but of course. Indeed, we can find at least one prominent rabbi who thought that a key cause of the deaths of those six million was, that’s right, masturbation. R. Aharon Rotta, founder of the Toldos Aharon branch of Hassidut (who passed away two years after the end of the Second World War) writes in his book,Taharat Hakodesh, that:

“There was a great increase in sinners, those who rebelled against God and who destroyed their own seed – God have mercy. . . until, in our great sins, the angelic Accusor rose up against us and we were given into the hands of the cursed Amalekites (may their names be erased) to be killed and destroyed and wiped out . . . for all of holy Israel is collectively responsible for each other. But were holy Israel to observe this most fundamental thing [that is, guard against masturbating] than no people in the world could possibly hold power over them! (1:14)

Wild, no? We really could have done without the whole Winograd Commission. After all, now we finally know why the Second Lebanon War was such a failure.