Queer Hermeneutics and Redemption in the Cosmology of the Zohar

This chapter examines the cosmological significance of the performance of queer hermeneutical practices in the Zohar (The Book of Splendor). The Zohar is a thirteenth-century mystical compendium and the core text of Jewish mystical thought. It is a narrative theosophical work aimed at narrating the structure of the cosmos through the actions of its main characters. Some of their most important actions are reading and interpreting. This sort of reading is presented as redemptive, and in this, it emulates and acts upon the structure of the cosmos it describes. The Zohar describes an emanational and bigendered cosmos with elements that interact with one another sexually. In this model, gender is positionally based rather than essential, and it is therefore flexible. The characters act out the relations between cosmological elements in their reading practices. The Zohar argues that these practices are redemptive for both the reader and the cosmos. As such right reading, sexually conceived and flexibly gendered, reproduces the cosmological model of the Zohar and then alters it. This cosmological model and its attendant hermeneutic acts as a polemical response to the rationalist model articulated by Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed and to others like it.