R' Ashlag Ch. 60 (part 1)

Chapter Sixty:

Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag's "Introduction to the Zohar"

-- as translated and commented on by Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

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60.


1.

"All I can say from my own experience is that from the day that G-d’s Holy Light accorded me the merit to begin mulling over this holy book it hadn’t ever occurred to me to question its origin. And that’s for one simple reason: because its contents have always evoked the rare qualities of the Tanna Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai to my mind far more so than that of any other Tanna."
-- Though it’s not often spoken of, there’s a distinct level of tonality -- of subtle hues, cadences, and lyricism -- in Torah literature that’s unique to each author and every Torah work. Torah doesn’t sing when it’s read as prose and exposition, but it most certainly does when it’s read as mystery solved and as truth laid out whole and in full, fertile measure.
-- An excellent reader, Rabbi Ashlag affirms that he’d never adduced anyone else’s tones in the Zohar other than Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s. For he never found the sort of off-rhyme there or fault in meter that one might expect every once in a while in a lesser kabbalists work.

(c) 2006 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

(Feel free to contact me at feldman@torah.org )

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