I’m preparing some stuff on the doctrine of the soul in Kabbalah right now. The thing that astounds me about these boys is how intricate they’re willing to get. I tend to be of the type that gets more suspicious about a meatphysical concept the more complicated it is. Leaving aside even the question of is God 10 and how do we know which 10 God would be, exactly? and the usual bevvy of other questions that should be thrown at anyone playing with Neoplatonism…. Just sticking to the soul, how exactly could someone (one of the authors of the Zohar) be comfortable asserting that the soul has various parts and that when one dies, it gets split up and each part goes to a different destination (to hang out by the grave, to study Torah in Gan Eden, to melt into the Divine unity), and that we have those addresses? Or that (Luria) each soul has a root that comes from Cain, Abel, Shem, Ham or Yafet, and if you do the right voodoo and then lie at the grave of the right person, you can access the soul-chunk at the grave and hyperlink yourself to another piece of the soul, which is hanging out with God? It’s a lot of chutzpah to be running truth claims like that.

It’s not that there’s nothing a person could say about God, or the mystical encounter with said Deity, or what some of this stuff is or how it works. I’m all for mysticism, and all for mystical expeeriences of God and the belief that some things are damn hard to communicate without sounding like a loon, but, you know. Some things are also unknowable.

As an oft-quoted Zen story tells it:

“Master,” begins a student, “what happens when we die?”
“I don’t know,” the teacher replied.
“I thought you were a Zen master,” the student said.
“Maybe. But I’m not a dead one.”

I think part of doing responsible theology is knowing when to say, “I dunno.”