The Saba de-Mishpatim — The Old Man in the [Torah portion] Mishpatim — is one of the Zohar’s most famous narratives. At first, it looks like a colorful detour. But in fact, it is a meditation on how mystical insight actually enters the world.
The scene opens in a tower in Tyre. Two of the Zohar’s sages, Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Yose, are meeting, but Rabbi Yose is irritated. On his way to the tower, he was repeatedly accosted by an old donkey driver who insists on posing baffling riddles: Who is a serpent flying through the air with an ant in its mouth? Who is a beautiful maiden without eyes whose body is both hidden and revealed? Rabbi Yose dismisses these as “words of chaos.” The speaker, in his eyes, is an ignorant laborer, a nuisance who has wasted a scholar’s time. But Rabbi Hiyya hesitates: Empty vessels, he suggests, sometimes contain bells of gold.
When they call the Old Man over, he explains that he is no simpleton. He once belonged to the world of rabbinic learning himself, but he gave it up to earn money to support his son’s Torah education. He then rebukes the rabbis, who soon realize they have been speaking with a spiritual giant.
The Zohar is engaged here in an internal polemic. Yet its target is not ignorance of Kabbalah, but rather the spiritual hubris that can accompany insider status, the presumption of wisdom that comes from belonging to the right circle. That critique resonates uncomfortably wherever religious status gives rise to entitlement and immersion in sacred study is imagined to confer exemption from ordinary responsibility.
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What happens next offers a crucial window into how the Zohar understands Torah. In a series of dazzling interpretations, the Old Man reveals the secrets of body and soul, of the soul’s journey, and of reincarnation. He takes the biblical account of Moses entering a cloud on Mount Sinai and connects it to the rainbow that appears to Noah after the flood. Moses could not ascend the mountain in his physical flesh, so he stripped off his physical nature and clothed himself in a rainbow garment of light.
This is followed by the famous parable of the maiden. The Torah, the Old Man explains, is like a princess hidden within a palace, revealing herself to her lover in stages — a fleeting glimpse, a provocation, speech from behind a veil, and finally face-to-face disclosure. The relationship is dynamic and fragile, sustained by desire, patience and attentiveness. Revelation unfolds — or withdraws — in response to how one listens. Modern readers often misunderstand this. We assume that once the secret is uncovered, the surface can be discarded. The Zohar insists otherwise. The biblical story is not a wrapper hiding something more real beneath it. Rather, like a seal pressed into wax, the simple meaning of the Torah is a deeper Divine secret expressed in concrete form. Biblical stories do not point to secrets in the manner of allegories; they are the secrets.
The Old Man continues to tease out secrets from the laws of slavery found in Mishpatim. These he takes as a cipher for the plight of poor souls, including those who die childless. Reincarnation is here explored to an extent found nowhere else in the Zohar — and indeed, nowhere else in Jewish literature to that point. As one of the homiletical waves of his teaching crests, the Old Man explains the secret of levirate marriage, in which a man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow if the man died childless. Although earlier kabbalists had hinted that reincarnation explained this commandment, the Old Man is startlingly explicit that the child born of the levirate union is the reincarnation of the departed father. The image is unsettling — a man reborn as an infant, nursing from a woman who was once his wife but is now his mother.
The powerful flow of the unfolding teaching then breaks suddenly, in a moment of uncertainty and reflection.
Old man, old man! What have you done? Silence would have been better for you. Old man, old man. I told you that you have set to the great sea without ropes and without a sail. What will you do?
The Old Man is adrift in the great sea of Torah. How will he bring it all together? He has no idea: Like a climber near the peak who suddenly cannot see his next hold, he pauses, suspended between confidence and exposure. He has allowed himself to be carried where his ideas lead him, sharing them with his comrades without having worked them out in advance. As my late teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, would have put it, the Old Man opened his mouth without knowing what he was going to say. Rather than constitute an embarrassment, this approach is considered (by Carlebach as well as the Zohar) as the very art of “saying Torah.” After all, when you say what you already know, what you say is limited by what you know.
The Old Man’s teachings reveal the improvisatory character of the Zohar. The Zohar was not written to supply information; plenty of other works already catalogued the sefirot and mapped their relations. What sets it apart is not what it tells us, but what it does. The rabbis of the Zohar have minds so steeped in tradition that they can move beyond prepared formulations. They don’t discard the rules of biblical exegesis, but have so deeply assimilated them that they are invisible. Just as Bach did not compose fugues to demonstrate that he could pass a counterpoint examination, the interpretive craft on display in the Zohar is so absolute that it transcends the rules even as it impeccably fulfills them.
When the Old Man cries out that he has launched onto the great sea without ropes or sail, he is naming the moment when teaching becomes a live act. Torah here is not the repetition of stored knowledge, but an act of creativity that unfolds in real time, carrying the speaker somewhere he did not entirely foresee. This is not the mere transmission of content, but the modeling of presence.
It is this quality that led the Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Liebes to remark, provocatively, that “the Zohar is not a kabbalistic book.” He did not mean that it lacks kabbalistic material; few works are more saturated with it. He meant that it is not a manual; it does not aim to lay out a system with pedagogical clarity. The Zohar aspires to something riskier, turning mastery into performance. The result is beautiful — not because it conforms to a template, but because it makes the template disappear into living sound. The Saba de-Mishpatim thus trains its readers not in cosmological data but in a discipline of presence — attentiveness without presumption, immersion without the fantasy of control. Its warning is quiet but bracing: Sacred learning does not secure you. Torah, in the Zohar, happens at sea.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
