ABSTRACT
Ascending to heaven, as the mystics sought to do in Merkavah mysticism, was not a bodiless experience. This article explores both the dangers to the human body in the ascension process and encounters with angels on the one hand, and the dangers which the impure human body, replete with smells and impurity, posed to the heavenly realms on the other. In the early Jewish mystical texts known as the Hekhalot literature, even the angels must purify themselves from the pollution of human bodies (especially female bodies) when they ascend to the highest level of heaven. Similar purity requirements normally entirely prohibited women from approaching God in heaven or the angels when they descend to earth. Despite this tendency, one midrashic text, the Midrash of Shem˙azai and Azael, which is found in the collection Bereshit Rabbati by the eleventh-century R. Moses ha-Darshan from Narbonne, offers one instance of a female ascending to heaven using the techniques of Hekhalot. However, in this Midrash, the woman ascends to escape lustful, fallen angels; she does not encounter or command pure ones. Men, by contrast, are permitted to ascend to the Merkabah (the divine throne-chariot which is the mystic’s goal in the Hekhalot literature), or to invoke angels to descend to earth, but only on the condition that they refrain from any contact with impurity, either that generated by their own bodies or by contact with women. This article explores how Hekhalot literature constructs the ideal human (male) body in such a way as to permit certain men to enter the divine world, even as the female body is constructed as antithetical to the divine in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
