God`s Names in Synagogues: Optical Aspects of Mystical Experience

The mystical practice of meditation while imagining the colored letters of the Tetragrammaton—alone or surrounded by concentric circles designating the sephirot–as if floating in front of the worshipper is traced back to the medieval Ashkenazi kabbalists. For example, Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi and his follower, a certain R. Tanhum, taught that a meditating mystic can achieve the prophetic state while imagining God`s name as a multicolored mirage appearing in his mind. To elucidate the instruction, some medieval kabbalistic manuscripts provide drawings outlining the mental picture to be imagined. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, similar concentric images focusing on the Tetragrammaton and containing other Divine names were crafted for synagogues in Europe and the Holy Land. The proposed paper will investigate these portrayals of mental visions in their historical and liturgical contexts.