The Old Man of Israel Who Carries the World's Mind

In the Lurianic Kabbalistic system, every level of the divine structure has a name, a function, and a relationship to every other level. The system is intricate to the point of appearing mechanical, but the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed (1534-1572 CE), taught that these relationships are not mechanical. They are alive. They describe how the infinite reaches the finite, how the root extends into the branch, how wisdom becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes action.

One of the most important and least discussed figures in this system is Israel Sabba, the Old Man of Israel. He is not a patriarch in the historical sense. He is a divine configuration, a Partzuf, an aspect of the upper structure. His name, which means literally the Elder or Ancient of Israel, places him above Zeir Anpin, the configuration that corresponds most directly to the world of human experience, and below Abba and Imma, the divine Father and Mother who represent the primary sources of Wisdom and Understanding.

The function of Israel Sabba and his feminine counterpart Tevunah is to enable the Mental Powers to extend until they reach their proper place. The teaching on Israel Sabba and true knowledge describes the sequence this way: when the overall light reaches the level to produce Chochmah, Binah, and Daat, the three mental faculties, in Zeir Anpin, the configuration that governs the actual government of the world, it can be said to have reached the stage of setting the governmental order on its proper foundation. But this transfer is not direct. Abba and Imma, the root of Wisdom and Understanding, are not themselves the level required for the actual government of the world. The actual transfer of the mental faculties to Zeir Anpin is accomplished by Israel Sabba and Tevunah.

This is the structural role of the elder: not to originate but to transmit. The root cannot reach the branch directly. There must be an intermediate level that participates in both the nature of the root and the nature of the branch. Israel Sabba is neither the source of wisdom nor its final destination. He is the extension of the root into the territory where the branch can receive it.

The second teaching preserved in this tradition is simpler and older, from the Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled around the 3rd century CE. When the people of Israel did what Moses commanded them in Egypt, the text notes laconically: "And they did so." The rabbis ask: what does this teach? It teaches the wisdom of Israel. They did not say, how can we turn back against our pursuers, so as not to frighten the women and children. They did not calculate the odds. They did what the son of Amram said, whether they liked it or not. The wisdom of Israel is the wisdom of a people that knows when to trust the transmission rather than waiting until they understand it fully.

This is the same wisdom that Israel Sabba embodies at the cosmic level. He does not withhold the mental powers because he has not yet resolved all the questions about how they will be received. He extends. He transmits. He enables the light to move from where it has gathered to where it needs to arrive. The Kabbalistic tradition, with its 3,588 texts, returns again and again to this problem: how does infinite wisdom reach finite minds without destroying them? The answer it develops over centuries is: through levels. Through the extension of the root into intermediate configurations that mediate between the source and the receiver.

Israel Sabba and Tevunah are not qualitatively different from Abba and Imma. They are an extension of Abba and Imma at a lower level. This is the key to understanding them. They do not introduce new content. They translate the same content into a form that Zeir Anpin can absorb. Sometimes the mental powers come from the root itself, from Abba and Imma directly. Sometimes they come from Israel Sabba and Tevunah, who carry the root's output one step further down. These are two different levels of the same transmission, producing two different qualities of understanding in the receiver.

The wisdom of the elder is always a wisdom of transmission. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as historical figures transmitted the covenant to their children. Israel Sabba as a cosmic configuration transmits the mental powers that make understanding possible to the configuration that governs the world. In both cases, the transmission is the work. The elder does not hoard what he has been given. He extends until it reaches its place.

This teaching also illuminates why the Mekhilta praises the wisdom of Israel in the phrase "and they did so." A people that acts without fully understanding, trusting the transmission from Moses because the transmission itself has been proven trustworthy over generations, is doing exactly what Israel Sabba does in the upper structure. It is not blind obedience. It is the recognition that the chain of transmission is more reliable than any individual's capacity to verify the destination before setting out. The elder has seen where the wisdom goes. The people trust the elder. The wisdom arrives.

In the Lurianic system as recorded in the writings of Rabbi Chaim Vital, who collected the Ari's teachings in the decades after Luria's death in 1572 CE, Israel Sabba and Tevunah appear throughout the discussion of how the worlds mature over time. The process of spiritual maturation in the upper worlds is not unlike the process of maturation in a human being: it moves through stages, each stage requiring the previous one to have been established, each stage providing what the next stage needs to begin. Israel Sabba's role in this process is never flashy. He does not originate and he does not conclude. He passes on. He is the elder who knows what the source holds and knows what the receiver needs, and who stands between them so that the distance does not become an obstacle.