ABSTRACT
Among Jewish mystics mystical cleaving to God (devekut) in prayer is of fundamental importance. For the early kabbalists of Provence devekut was the goal of the mystical way. According to Isaac the Blind, the principal task of the mystics and of they who contemplate on his name is, ‘And you shall serve him and cleave to him’ (Deut. 13:4). This, he argued, is a central principle of the Torah and of prayer, and of blessings, to harmonize one’s thought above, to conjoin God in his letters and to link the ten sefirot to him. For the thirteenth-century philosopher and kabbalist Nahmanides, devekut is a state of mind in which one constantly remembers God and his love, to the point that when a person speaks with another, his heart is not with them at all but is still before God. In his view, whoever cleaves in this way to his creator becomes eligible to receive the Holy Spirit. For Nahmanides, the true hasid is able to attain such a spiritual state. Devekut does not completely eliminate the distance between God and human beings – it denotes rather a state of beatitude and intimate union between the soul and its source.
