“Four entered Paradise. One looked and died; one looked and went mad; one mutilated the young plants; one entered safely and came out safely.”
No, this isn’t a plot summary for James Hilton’s wildly popular novel Lost Horizon, turned by Frank Capra into a somewhat less popular film. It’s the opening of one of the most famously cryptic passages in all rabbinic literature, preserved in slightly different versions in a number of ancient Hebrew writings. And I cheated in my quotation. The Hebrew word pardes doesn’t really mean “Paradise.” But maybe it does.
I’ll explain in a minute. But first let’s listen as the ancient rabbis themselves decode their story:
“Ben Azzai looked and died. Of him it is written, ‘Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints’ [Psalm 116:15]. Ben Zoma looked and went mad. Of him it is written, ‘Hast thou found honey? Then eat only that which is sufficient for thee, lest thou become filled therewith, and vomit it’ [Proverbs 25:16]. The ‘Other One’ mutilated the young plants. Of him it is written, ‘Suffer not thy mouth to bring thy flesh into guilt’ [Ecclesiastes 5:5]. Rabbi Akiba entered safely and came out safely. Of him it is written, ‘Draw me, we will run after thee’ [Song of Songs 1:4].”
The four men named were rabbis of the early second century CE. The best known of them is Rabbi Akiba–scholar, martyr, possibly political activist–one of the great heroes of rabbinic Judaism. “The Other One” is a hushed designation for the man who was Akiba’s polar opposite: Elisha ben Abuyah, as learned as Akiba, but somehow gone bad–a notorious heretic, libertine, and blasphemer. Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma are more obscure. There’s a story, apparently relevant to this passage, about how another rabbi finds Ben Zoma sitting in what seems like a trance. To the rabbi’s question of what’s going on, Ben Zoma gives the distinctly spacy answer: “I beheld Creation, and between the upper and the lower waters there is only the space of a handbreadth.”
The kind of talk, in other words, that you’d expect from someone who’s gone insane.
As for the word pardes, it normally means “garden” or “orchard.” But the Persian word from which it’s taken is also the source of the Greek paradeisos, from which we get our word “paradise.” In the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of himself as having been “caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows … caught up into Paradise … heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” In this passage paradeisos is apparently the same as the third heaven, or maybe located in the third heaven. (And the Greek verb harpazein, which Paul uses twice, really means “seized,” “abducted.”) Maybe the four rabbis were believed to have had a similar experience, and their pardes was “paradise” after all. Some versions of the story, actually, say that Akiba “went up safely and descended safely,” which would suggest his pardes was envisioned as somewhere up above.
Now cut to Lost Horizon. The year is 1931. Four people are abducted in a hijacked airplane into a paradise called Shangri-La, somewhere in the Himalayas. The foursome is made up of three men and one woman, three British and one American; there are probably other 3+1 patterns if we look for them. Jungians out there will know what I’m driving at: the archetype of the quaternity. I’m assuming the basic story is archetypal, and that’s what accounts for its power. That’s what makes it possible to do a comparison between two imaginative creations from such different historical contexts.
The four abductees are Mallinson, a hot-blooded young English diplomat; Conway, a somewhat older and mellower diplomat; Miss Brinklow, a not quite stereotypic missionary lady; and an American who initially introduces himself as Barnard, which turns out not to be his real name. (He’s a wanted man–a high-finance swindler of the Bernie Madoff variety.) The story is told from Conway’s point of view, he being, like Rabbi Akiba, the only one of the four who’s survived, or at least who’s come back alive.
Originally, it seems, Conway lost his memory of his stay in Shangri-La. It comes back to him, though in fragmentary fashion; and he spends a night telling his story to a novelist named Rutherford, who writes it down (in third person) and subsequently gives the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. The story in between is that manuscript, which is to say, Rutherford’s recollection of what Conway told him. These details underscore the haziness of the story. We’re never quite sure how much to trust what Conway says–or, indeed, even if it is what Conway says, as opposed to Rutherford’s distorted memory of it.
The four end up at Shangri-La, a lamasery high up in a fertile, pleasant valley sheltered from the Himalayan cold. There they receive a magnificent welcome. Shangri-La might as well be a resort hotel, with central heating and modern plumbing, plus a stunning view of a conical mountain on the horizon called “Blue Moon.” But it’s also a center of learning, with a library rich in European as well as Asian classics. Conway is almost immediately drawn to the place. Young Mallinson, by contrast, can’t wait to leave. Boorishly he demands of their impeccably courteous Chinese host that porters be provided for them. When told it’ll be months before any are available, he rages like a child. Miss Brinklow and the American, meanwhile, make their own accommodations to life in Shangri-La. (Which, we slowly discover, will go on longer than any of them can possibly imagine–they’re never going to get away.) Like the four rabbis of old, each responds to this paradise in his or her individual way.
The High Lama of the place takes an interest in Conway, at first unexplained. In one of a series of private conversations, he confides to the Englishman that Shangri-La will be a refuge for human culture, preserving it through the new and worse Dark Ages that are coming. (Lost Horizon was published in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany.) Soon, says the Lama, there will be such a storm “as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos. … [T]he Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these.”
After speaking this prophecy, the High Lama dies. He leaves Conway as his successor, the new High Lama of Shangri-La. Almost immediately Conway has to face the restive Mallinson, who has his plan of escape all worked out–and a beautiful young Chinese girl from the lamasery ready to go with him, as his lover.
Except that lovely Lo-Tsen may not be so young. Shangri-La has secrets that Conway is beginning to understand, and Mallinson doesn’t.
Unless it’s the other way around.
by David Halperin
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I just read your essay on the four who entered Pardes. One of my all time favorite mystery stories. I take issue with your conclusion that PARDES is of Persian origin. I much prefer the Rabbinic notion that it works like this
P = P’shat, which means the simple meaning. Rashi is the best example of this type of discovery.
R = Remez, which means hints. Some of these come from looking at gematria, letter combinations, etc.
D = Derash, which means “inquiry”. This is where the Midrashim are used to point to deeper levels.
S = Sod, which means secret. This is the underground where the Zohar, Bahir and other texts point.
I consider this story of the four men to be a great mystery and in my view completely misunderstood at all levels. First, I would ask you to consider where they apparently went and if so, what it says about them as spiritual adepts. If it is true that they went to a paradise like place, often assumed to be one of the levels of Shamayim (heavens), then they would have done so through the agency of a meditation procedure, which would have entailed great preparation. This would have involved cleansing of mind and body for extended periods of time, probably including fasts. These Tanayim had access to meditation techniques that are largely lost to us today. These techniques are as ancient as the Torah and were taught verbally from master to someone he chose, based on the perception that this person was ready and serious.
The way I see the story, these four men used techniques to extend their awareness and consciousness to ascend up into realms far above the physical. The entire Kabbalistic literature is full of descriptions of such experiences. They would have ascended mentally, I would think, by directing their thoughts in a highly charged and very focused way, using formulas to help them go higher and higher. There is no indication that they all visited the higher realms all on the same night. What I take from this is that all four men were very familiar with this journey, and that it was not a one time event. They too had guides, some of those we know their names. The descriptions of their fates I think is all in code. What I think happened to them is that they were granted a vision and it was a disturbing one at best. In that realm, where they were ascending, it was a place where the “truth” about reality could shine so bright as to burn those who “looked”. There is much talk about “gazing” when ascending to these heights.
Elisha ben Abuyah gets painted as the black sheep, the rebel, the heretic, the bad one. But, what the story does not say and people do not ask, is who is the author of the story? No one knows. Elisha’s status as a great teacher was unchallenged before this event. His greatest student, Rabbi Meir, himself considered to be one of the greatest of all scholars, would not stop learning from him after his teacher supposedly went nuts. I think that all those stories about his heresies are codes and at worst, just outright slanders.
I think that the Pardes story is a revelation of some crisis that impacted the lives of four men. The mystery to me is what did they really see when up in the heavens that drove them to such extreme reactions? Rabbi Akiva is depicted as the most mentally stable here in this story and in other stories as well. That apparently was what he was like. It is a great story but one that I think has suffered from censorship a long time ago. One that we still have not yet fully understood.
BTW, Ben Zoma’s answer is completely Kabbalistic. It is as hard to grasp as reading the Zohar…..these people were trying to put into gross words perceptions they had of the most sublime worlds. Basically impossible to do.
Kind regards,
Fred
Fred, thank you so much for your very thoughtful comment!
Your remark about Elisha ben Abuyah reminds me: I really need to post about him. Indeed “the rebel, the heretic, the bad one”–yet an object of abiding fascination. I believe that the Talmudic stories of this “rabbi gone bad” are among the most psychologically profound in all rabbinic literature.
You speak of the ancient merkavah mysticism, the “techniques to extend their awareness and consciousness to ascend up into realms far above the physical.” This is another fascinating subject. It’s doubly interesting for me, in that the starting point of the merkavah mysticism was the vision of the divine merkavah (chariot) in Ezekiel chapter 1, which now many people say was a UFO. And merkavah mysticism and UFO abductions have a lot in common. I plan to post on this also.
Do you know when PARDES starts to be explained as the initials of P’shat, Remez, Derash and Sod? I’d be inclined to see this as a later explanation of a word that was originally a simple everyday word of foreign (Persian) origin. If it really derived from the four levels of Scripture interpretation, I’d expect it to be PADRES instead of PARDES, since Derash is logically the second level of interpretation, above P’shat but below Remez.
Again–I’m very grateful to you for commenting!
Hi David. I find Elisha ben Abuyah to be more interesting than just about any other Rabbi of his time. However, another great mystic, Rabbi Nehuniah ben Hakanah, from whom it is tradition that we have received certain formulaic prayers that I think the Ari Zal helped incorporated into the modern prayer book forms (there are several forms)….the “Ana B’Koach” being the most famous of the mystics prayers. That prayer, which is particularly powerful, incorporates a technique that he did not invent. It involves selecting certain letters found in consecutive words and those letters are then either verbalized or scanned with the eyes and meditated upon. This is a Kaballistic hermeneutic formula. Apparently very little is known of ben Hakahan except that the greatest of the top mystic rabbis of the time, Akiba and bar Yochai, sat at his feet and drank in the deepest mystical teachings. The Kabalistic work “The Bahir” is attributed to ben Hakanah. These two rabbis are of great interest to me.
When does PARDES show up as I described? Not sure but I would assume it was already a known philosophy in the age of the Tannaim. I will look into that. I am not certain that the Rabbis I have been speaking of were heavily influenced by Persian religious philosophies. This is the domain of Ahura Mazda and would be seen as Avodah Zorah by the rabbis.
Yes, the Merkavah meditation was derived from the Ezekial text and no, I do not believe that the Prophet was relating a close encounter. Sounds good on paper and in the movies but I think that his “nevuah”, a prophecy, had nothing to do with stuff from the material world. The merkava meditation turned out to be so dangerous that it was suppressed to some extent, with only the most adept and strongest minds being taught how to use it. All techniques that take ones attention and awareness to foreign and strange places are dangerous and the individual runs the risk of finding their roots, their feet, not as firmly planted on the ground as they thought. That is why there are so many initial preparations and endless cautions. Only the foolish rush towards experiences of the subtle divine and without the correct attitude and approach one is setting up a short circuit. This “might” possibly explain the Pardes visitation, but I am not certain. The use of the word “improper” in the Bible is fraught with weight. Aaron’s two sons gave “improper” fire and were doomed to be zapped by celestial fire and have their souls extracted. What was so improper? Open to deep biblical commentaries.