Poetry Chaikhana Blog

Ivan M. Granger December 19th, 2008

The Face of God
by Hekhalot Hymns (Anonymous)

English version by T. Carmi

Lovely face, majestic face,
      face of beauty, face of flame,
the face of the Lord God of Israel
      when He sits upon His throne of glory,
      robed in praise upon His seat of splendour.
His beauty surpasses
      the beauty of the aged,
His splendour outshines
      the splendour of newly-weds
            in their bridal chamber.

Happy the King
      who has such servants,
and happy the servants
      who have such a King.
Happy the eye
      that sees
      and feeds
      upon this wondrous light –
            a wondrous vision
            and most strange!

— from The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, Edited by T. Carmi

/ Photo by PugnoM /

Hanukkah starts this Sunday at sundown. The light shines in the darkness…

This song inspired by the face of God strongly hearkens back to the Aaronic or Priestly Blessing from the Torah (Numbers 6:24 - 27):

The LORD bless you and keep you:
The LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you:
The LORD lift up his face upon you, and give you peace.

There are several strong images of Merkavah mysticism in this ancient song. We have a few references to the “wheel of the chariot.” The word Merkavah can be literally translated as “chariot” or “chariot of light.” It is the vehicle that mediates between the awareness of the devout mystic and the heavenly realms. This wheel imagery also evokes Ezekiel’s vision of a heavenly wheel, often seen as a fundamental vision of the Merkavah by Jewish mystics.

The Merkavah is sometimes also described as the shining “seat of the Most High.” Someone looking for yogic parallels might see the Merkavah as representing the scintillating crown chakra.

In Jewish and early Christian mysticism, we often get enigmatic references to the “bridal chamber.” The bridal chamber is the place of union between the king or bridegroom (God) and the servant or bride (purified individual consciousness). It is in the bridal chamber that the two become one as “newly-weds” and experience the bliss of union. The bridal chamber, in other words, is the holy of holies within the soul, the meeting ground between the Eternal and the individual.

I love the line, “Whoever looks at Him / immediately melts away.” According to a translator’s note, the literal phrase is something like “Whoever looks at him is emptied like a ladle.” What a beautiful metaphor for how, overcome with the vision of God, the ego-self pours into that vastness. It suggests release, emptiness, purification, while at the same time a merging with the immense vision of the Divine.

This is language that could just as easily have come to us from a Buddhist work.

The song continues with the lines:

Those who serve Him today
      no longer serve Him tomorrow;
those who serve Him tomorrow
      no longer serve Him afterwards;

It is not that mystics at this stage stop serving God; rather, that there is no separate individual left to do the serving. Their “faces are charred” — the separate identity is lost in the splendor of the vision. And when their “eyes grow dim,” it is not that they go blind in the literal sense; instead, the normal vision of multiplicity is lost. This radiant vision of oneness is described by many mystics as a sort of blindness. You may see the surface and form of things, but beneath it all is only the one radiance.

I’m also fascinated by the lines:

those on the right
      now stand again to the left,
those on the left
      now stand again to the right,
those in front
      now stand again in back,
those in back
      now stand again in front.

We’ve got a total reversal that also suggests a total unity. Opposites flip and become the other until no sense of polarity can remain. You find similar lines in the great Gnostic work the Gospel of Thomas. Everything is flipped, reversed, to be set back into proper order.

And near the end:

He who sees the one says,
      ‘That is the other’.
And he who sees the other says,
      ‘That is the one’.
For the visage of the one
      is like the visage of the other;
and the visage of the other
      is like the visage of the one.

These lines suggest to me the merging of the ego-self and the endless multiplicity of the universe into the divine unity, until the “other / is like the visage of the one.”

And continuously we return to the vision of mysterious, soul-nourishing light:

Happy the eye
      that sees
      and feeds
      upon this wondrous light –
            a wondrous vision
            and most strange!

The Hekhalot Hymns were composed by Jewish mystics.

The word “hekhalot” translates as “palaces” in reference to seven heavenly halls the Jewish mystic must safely pass through in order to approach the Merkavah (the divine throne or “chariot” — usually equated with the chariot of Ezekiel’s vision). The visionary who can make this sacred mystical journey is called a “descender to the chariot.”

Hekhalot mysticism also looks to the ascent of Moses up the mountain to receive the Torah from heaven as a template for the mystic’s journey to the Merkavah.

There are indications of early Hekhalot mysticism in the apocryphal Fourth Book of Ezra from around 100 CE:

“O Lord who inhabitest eternity, whose eyes are exalted and whose upper chambers [hekhaloth] are in the air, whose throne [merkavah] is beyond measure and whose glory is beyond comprehension, before whom the hosts of angels stand trembling and at whose command they are changed to wind and fire…”
– 4 Ezra 8:21-22a

Other passages in the Fourth Book of Ezra suggest that the hymns may have been dictated by mystics in deep states of ecstasy, while a scribe sat on either side and recorded the visionary utterances.

There is some disagreement among scholars when trying to date the Hekhalot Hymns, but the consensus is that they were composed sometime between 200 and 800 CE. The 4th century is a common date cited.

More poetry by Hekhalot Hymns (Anonymous)

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