1 For a general survey of the relations between medicine and religion, see, for example, Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). On these tensions in biblical religion, see, for example, Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (3 vols.; AB; New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001) 3:887–89; and more generally regarding both biblical and rabbinic cultures, the seminal, though somewhat dated, Julius Preuss, Biblical and Talmudic Medicine (trans. Uri Wirtzburger; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2012) esp. 29–37 [Hebrew]. In Latin culture, see Joseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) esp. 3–5; in Islamic culture, Fazlur Rahman, Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition: Change and Identity (Chicago: ABC International Group, 1998) 11–40; and more recently, Ahmed Ragab, Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam (New York: Routledge, 2018).

2 See, among many: Gershom G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965) esp. 118–57; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 156–99; Jonathan Garb, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005) [Hebrew]. For a preliminary critique of the use of the etic term theurgy to denote kabbalistic action, see Haviva Pedaya, Vision and Speech: Models of Revelatory Experience in Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2002) 6 [Hebrew]; Uri Safrai, “ ‘Worship of the Heart’ in the Kabbalah of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University, 2016) 20–22 [Hebrew].

3 Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941) 259.

4 For summaries of the Lurianic narrative, see ibid., 260–68; Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 124–49. Cf. Assaf Tamari, “The Body Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah” (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University, 2016) 10–17 [Hebrew].

5 Fine, Physician of the Soul, 9, following Yehuda Liebes, “New Directions in the Study of Kabbalah,” Pe’amim 50 (1992) 150–70, at 161 [Hebrew]. For studies analyzing in detail Lurianic practice, see especially: Safrai, “Worship of the Heart”; idem, “Intention and Ability in the Kabbalah of R. Hayyim Vital,” Daat 90 (2020) 323–58 [Hebrew]; Menachem Kallus, “The Theurgy of Prayer in the Lurianic Kabbalah” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University, 2002); Assaf Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics: Rereading Lurianic Practice,” JQR 112 (2022) 434–67; and Agata Paluch, “Intentionality and Kabbalistic Practices in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Aries 19 (2019) 83–111.

6 See Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics,” and Safrai, “Intention and Ability,” both addressing the fluctuations between optimism and pessimism within Vital’s self-understanding regarding this possibility.

7 On the Lurianic corpus and its immensely complex history of formation, see Joseph Avivi, Kabbala Luriana (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008) [Hebrew]; Ronit Meroz, “Ge’ula be-torat ha-Ari” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University, 1988) [Hebrew].

8 R. Hayyim Vital, Sefer Hape’ulot (Mod’in ’Illit: n.p., 2009) [Hebrew].

9 See Meir Benayahu, “Extracts from the Medicine and Properties Manuscript of Rabbi Hayyim Vital,” Korot 9.5/6 (1987) 3–17 [Hebrew]; Gerrit Bos, “Hayyim Vital’s ‘Practical Kabbalah and Alchemy’: A 17th Century Book of Secrets,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 4 (1994) 55–112; Yael Buchman, “Rabbi Hayyim Vital’s Notebook of Practical Advice,” Qatedrah 99 (2001) 37–64 [Hebrew]; Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 41–50, and there a detailed discussion of its genre and context.

10 Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 23–73.

11 Fine, Physician of the Soul.

12 R. Hayyim Vital, ’Olat Tamid (vol. 7 of Kitvey Ha’ari; Tel Aviv: n.p., 1964) 113a [Hebrew].

13 R. Hayyim Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh Vesha’ar Hagilgulim (vol. 11 of Kitvey Ha’ari; Tel Aviv: n.p., 1963) 14a [Hebrew]. On Luria as a soul physician, see Assaf Tamari, “ ‘Like the Proficient Physician’: The Long Tradition of Soul Physicians from Al-Kindī to Isaac Luria,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 27 (2022) 123–87 [Hebrew].

14 Tamari, “Body Discourse,” esp. 127–226.

15 R. Hayyim Vital, Sefer ’Ets Hayyim (Jerusalem: Yerid Hasfarim, 2013) 111a [Hebrew].

16 Ibid.

17 Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 127–42; Cf. Yehuda Liebes, “Myth vs. Symbol in the Zohar and in Lurianic Kabbalah,” in Essential Papers on Kabbalah (ed. Lawrence Fine; New York: NYU Press, 1995) 212–42.

18 Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics,” 447–65.

19 On discourse analysis, in the Foucauldian tradition, see, e.g.: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); idem, The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Vintage Books, 2002). See also Frans Wijsen and Kocku Von Stuckrad, Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2016). On the “silent” formations of discourse more specifically, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. A. M. Sheridan; New York: Routledge, 2003) xi.

20 See Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 109–12; and, more generally, Biti Roi, Love of the Shekhinah: Mysticism and Poetics in Tiqqunei ha-Zohar (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2017) [Hebrew].

21 R. Moses Cordovero, Tomer Devorah (Venice: Di Gara, 1589) 12b–13a [Hebrew].

22 Fine, Physician of the Soul. Cf. Jonathan Garb, Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) 34.

23 See: Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics,” esp. 442–47.

24 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 14a–b.

25 Vital seems to conflate in this passage the arteries and the veins, contrary to accepted medical notions. For a discussion of his confusion, see Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 135.

26 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 14a–b.

27 Fine, Physician of the Soul, 164–66; Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 134–37. See summaries of these medical notions in Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) 109; Manfred Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978) 64–69.

28 Yoram Jacobson, From Lurianic Kabbalism to the Psychological Theosophy of Hasidism (Tel Aviv: Misrad ha-bitahon, 1984) 42–51 [Hebrew].

29 Siraisi, Medicine, 105–6.

30 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 14b.

31 Ibid.

32 Notably, the gender bias is in the original text. It is partially due to the place of the specifically male divine body in our context. However, this bias also reflects a basic implicit assumption that it is the Jewish male who is the subject of these theorizations.

33 R. Isaac Aroyo, Beyt Tefillah (Salonica: David Azoviv, 1582) 17a [Hebrew].

34 J. H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 83.

35 See the classic by Alexander Altmann, “ ‘Homo Imago Dei’ in Jewish and Christian Theology,” JR 48 (1968) 235–59.

36 On the roots of this connection in rabbinic thought, see especially Yair Lorberbaum, In God’s Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” HTR 87 (1994) 171–95.

37 Garb, Manifestations of Power, 113.

38 Moshe Idel, ‘‘Nishmat ‘Eloha: On the Divinity of the Soul in Nahmanides and His School,’’ in Life as a Midrash, Perspectives in Jewish Psychology (ed. S. Arzy, M. Fachler, and B. Kahana; Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2004) 338–80 [Hebrew].

39 See, e.g., Isaiah Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute Press, 1975) 2:260 [Hebrew].

40 See, especially, Patrick B. Koch, Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth-Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2015) esp. 78–103; Garb, Manifestations of Power, 29–33.

41 Liebes, “Myth vs. Symbol,” 212–42; Rachel Elior, “The Metaphorical Relation between God and Man and the Significance of the Visionary Reality in Lurianic Kabbalah,” Meḥkere Yerushalayim be-maḥshevet Yisra’el 10 (1992) 47–57, at 55–57 [Hebrew].

42 Liebes, “Myth vs. Symbol,” 203; Meroz, “Ge’ula,” 277–79; Fine, Physician of the Soul, 307–8; Garb, Yearnings of the Soul, 35–37; Assaf Tamari, “Human Sparks: Readings in the Lurianic Theory of Transmigration and Its Concept of the Human Subject” (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2009) 20–21, 27–28 [Hebrew].

43 Roni Weinstein, Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2011) 324, 326 [Hebrew].

44 Other explanatory trajectories are theosis, or incarnation of the divine in the human, and internalization of the divine in the human, or psychologization. See Shaul Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) 196–221; Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 190–260; Ron Margolin, The Human Temple: Religious Interiorization and the Structuring of Inner Life in Early Hasidism (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005) [Hebrew]; Garb, Yearnings of the Soul.

45 Literally, brains. See Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 149–52.

46 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 142a.

47 Ibid., 142b. For the origins of this notion, see Diana Lobel, “A Dwelling Place for the Shekhinah,” JQR 90 (1999) 103–25.

48 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 143a.

49 R. Hayim Vital, Sha’ar Hakavvanot (vol. 9–10 Kitvey Ha’ari; Tel Aviv: n.p., 1962) 278a–b [Hebrew].

50 Safrai, “Worship of the Heart,” 269–321; Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 192–226.

51 R. Moses Cordovero, Tefillah Lemoshe (Przemyśl: Zupnik, Knoller & Hammerschmidt, 1892) 22a.

52 Vital, ’Olat Tamid, 113a–114b. On the medical grammar of the Lurianic penitentials, see Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics,” 443–47. On the recipe as an epistemic genre, see Gianna Pomata, “The Recipe and the Case: Epistemic Genres and the Dynamics of Cognitive Practices,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Geschichte des Wissens im Dialog—Connecting Science and Knowledge (ed. Hans Kaspar von Greyerz, Silvia Flubacher, and Philipp Senn; Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2013) 131–54.

53 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 50b.

54 Note that here tiqqun designates the Lurianic penitential formula rather than the general sense. On the history of the term and its uses, see Assaf Nabarro, “ ‘Tikkun’: From Lurianic Kabbalah to Popular Culture” (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University, 2006) esp. 15–35 [Hebrew].

55 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 42b–43a.

56 On the Lurianic “clinic,” see Tamari, “Soul Physicians,” 164–86.

57 Vital, ’Olat Tamid, 114a.

58 See Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 249–51.

59 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 197.

60 Weinstein, Kabbalah, 326.

61 See Scholem, Major Trends, and, most recently, Jonathan Garb, A History of Kabbalah: From the Early Modern Period to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 30–66.

62 On the nonreflective character of this Lurianic creativity, see Assaf Tamari, “The City of Kabbalists? Sixteenth-Century Safed as Center and as Periphery,” Zion 87 (2022) 505–48 at 541–47 [Hebrew].

63 See, most recently, Uri Safrai, “On the Figure and Status of R. Joseph Karo in the Lurianic Circles,” Sefunot 13 (2023) 189–250 [Hebrew].

64 Vital, ‘Olat Tamid, 114b. Here, too, it is not innovation in the modern “revolutionary” sense, but rather renewal of an ability that characterized the ancients, from R. Shimon bar-Yohay to Nahmanides, which was lost and now reappears. See ’Ets Hayyim, 7–8; Fine, Physician of the Soul, 105–10; Boaz Huss, “The Zoharic Communities of Safed,” in Shefa Tal: Studies in Jewish Thought and Culture (ed. Zeev Gries, Howard Kriesel, and Boaz Huss; Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2004) 150–53 [Hebrew].

65 See Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 26–126; idem, “City of the Kabbalists.”

66 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 14.

67 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xi.

68 Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 304–28.

69 See, as one example of many, Sha’ar Hakavvanot, 236a–237b.

70 See Safrai, “Worship of the Heart,” 273–300.

71 An important distinction in Vital’s writings. See his account in Sha’ar Hakavvanot, 14a–b.

72 Ibid., 236a and many other places.

73 Siraisi, Medicine, 120.

74 See, e.g., Amir Mazor, “Jewish Court Physicians in the Mamluk Sultanate during the First Half of the 8th/14th Century,” Medieval Encounters 20 (2014) 38–65; Miri Shefer, “Physicians in Mamluk and Ottoman Courts,” in Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter (ed. David J. Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon; London: Routledge, 2013) 114–22.

75 Scholem, Major Trends, 211.

76 Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 110.

77 Tamari, “Body Discourse,” 10–16; Assaf Tamari and Yael Fisch, “The Absence and Presence of ‘Myth’ as an Analytical Category in the Wissenschaft des Judentums and Beyond” (paper presented at the Conference “Grey Areas: Two Centuries of Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Hochschule fuer Juedische Studien, Heidelberg, 18 June 2019); Gil Anidjar, “Jewish Mysticism Alterable and Unalterable: On ‘Orienting’ Kabbalah Studies and the ‘Zohar of Christian Spain,’ ” JSS 3 (1996) 89–157. See more generally on the function of this category in modernity: Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) esp. 23; Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

78 See, among many, Amir Engel, “Gershom Scholems ‘Kabbala und Mythos’ jenseits deutsch-jüdischer Romantik,” in Gershom Scholem in Deutschland. Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit (ed. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok, and Matthias Morgenstern; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014) 203–17.

79 See especially, Yehuda Liebes, “Zohar and Eros,” Alpayyim 9 (1994) 67–115 [Hebrew]; Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

80 Weinstein, Kabbalah, 118–20.

81 Ibid., 112–13.

82 Elior, “The Metaphorical Relation,” 47.

83 Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications (trans. Jackie Feldman; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) 14.

84 Ibid., 13–27.

85 Melila Hellner-Eshed, Seekers of the Face: The Secrets of the Idra-Rabba (the Great Assembly) of the Zohar (Rishon Letsion: Miskal, 2017) 67–78 [Hebrew].

86 Ibid., 69.

87 Fine, Physician of the Soul, 9, 105–10, 156–67.

88 Vital, ’Ets Hayyim, 8.

89 Ibid., 10.

90 A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) 287–90.

91 See, e.g., Vital, Sha’ar Hakavvanot, 359b; idem, ’Ets Hayyim, 29a.

92 See, e.g., R. Hayyim Vital, Sha’ar Hamitsvot (vol. 8 of Kitvey Ha’ari; Tel Aviv: n.p., 1962) 102b; Safrai, “Worship of the Heart,” 343–46.

93 Vital, Sha’ar Hamitsvot, 89a; Fine, Physician of the Soul, 234.

94 See, for instance, his visit to a Muslim “expert in healing ailments originating in demons” in Damascus in 1604, due to his eye problems: Jewish Mystical Autobiographies: Book of Visions and Book of Secrets (trans. Morris M. Faierstein; New York: Paulist, 1999) 51 (translation altered).

95 See Tamari, “Medicalizing Magic and Ethics,” 443–44.

96 Cf. another occasion recounted by Vital in which a man came to Luria with a strong pain in his shoulder, and Luria “observed him (venistakel bo)” and immediately told him the cause of his pain, rooted in a minor breach of the halakah. See Vital, Sha’ar Hamitsvot, 106b.

97 Vital, ’Olat Tamid, 114a.

98 Fine, Physician of the Soul, 153–64.

99 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 17a–b.

100 Ibid.

101 This reading distances Luria’s healing activities from the—surely significant—confessional climate of Safed, emphasized by both Fine, Physician of the Soul, 186, and, more broadly, Weinstein, Kabbalah, 407–77.

102 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xviii.

103 “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze” (ibid., ix).

104 See in The Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter; London: Routledge, 2013) 27–28, 1186–87, and the literature cited there.

105 Mira Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority, Medical Rhetoric, and Body Hermeneutics in Mishnah Nega’im,” AJSR 35 (2011) 323–46 at 327, following Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) 33; Tamsyn Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 150–51; Susan P. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 149–56; Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 2002) 142–72.

106 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 108 (italics in original).

107 Vital, Sha’ar Ruah Haqodesh, 16b.

108 “The residence of truth in the dark center of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light” (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xiii–xiv).

109 Fine, Physician of the Soul, 88–122; Moshe Idel, “On Mobility, Individuals and Groups: Prolegomenon for a Sociological Approach to Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah,” Kabbalah 3 (1998) 161–65; Huss, “Zoharic Communities”; Jonathan Garb, “The Cult of the Saints in Lurianic Kabbalah,” JQR 98 (2008) 203–29; Liebes, “New Directions,” 162–63; Weinstein, Kabbalah, 193–99. Cf. Safrai, “Karo.”

110 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 107.

111 Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority,” 330.

112 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 89.

113 See the analytic account of this formation in Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (New York: Zone Books, 2005) esp. 65–83. See also Foucault, Archaeology; as well as Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation in his On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (trans. G. M. Goshgarian; London: Verso, 2014).

114 Ophir, Order of Evils, 65.

115 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, xiv.

116 Ibid., 9.

117 On the significance of the two meanings of the term subject to the politics of subjectivity, see Etienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject (ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy; New York: Routledge, 1991) 33–57.

118 Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).