Like his forebears, he was active in Egypt
before moving to Aleppo and then
Damascus in Syria (in 1375), yet he
still functioned as head of the Egyptian community at such a great
distance. His Syrian Library, one of
the very largest in the region, included
countless Islamic-Sufi manuscripts and it is not beyond reasonable conjecture
to suggest that this library may have been one of the channels through which
Sufi knowledge and descriptions of
contemplative practice reached the
Northern Galil— and may have thus been absorbed into later Safed kabbala.
In a letter from the Cairo Genizah, identified
and translated by Professor Paul B. Fenton, Rabbenu David makes it quite clear
that he admired and lauded the Islamic-Sufi understanding of True Knowledge, accessed
through solitude (khalwa) and through intuitive
and contemplative meditation. In the following extract, some might even
sense a veiled description of the way the “wine” of mystical union is produced
from the “grapes”of the Halakha.
The religious law can merely conduct you in a plain path unto God through allusions and hints, and will teach you noble virtues, prohibiting what will harm you and showing you what will bestow felicity in your religious and worldly pursuits, and will guide you with its merciful leads to a place where it will provide a welcome haven.
I have given
abundant hints to you about these notions, providing that you are someone who
can dive into an ocean, in whose depths pearls are to be found and on whose
shores are shells that are not merely encountered by chance.
Beware lest you learn from its words that philosophy or wisdom is derived from the Peripatetics or any other. Nay! I have in mind rather the adepts of spiritual training (riyada), who have discovered in their solitary devotions (khalwat)(that which leads) from the couch unto the Throne.
They have certain knowledge and are not niggardly
with it but instruct in the wayfaring of the path that leads to God. Your
knowledge of that is knowledge indeed, and all other knowledge deriving from
the famous philosophers is false.
(translation Professor Paul B.Fenton)
(from The Mitkarevim Chapter 13)
©nachmandavies
safed 2022