“Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access” offers visitors the opportunity to undergo a unique experience –as is often the case with intricate texts and complex art. Its depth will depend on our own ability to accept a challenge and see, read, reason, understand, feel...

The core of this exhibit is a “book that is not just a book,” an open dialogue between image and text produced by Mirta Kupferminc and I, in a “trialogue” with Borges and other sources. Beginning in 2002, we began to weave “Borges” and “Kabbalah” through different modes of expression, to craft “something” that Mirta’s creativity was generating as we reread a book I published years ago ( Borges y la Cábala: la búsqueda del Verbo), and as I was writing new pages on images that were bridges to the still unknown. Since that first encounter in Mirta’s studio in Buenos Aires, time has not responded nor followed a strict timetable. Rather, it seems to have responded to what we now recognize as integral to the forces unleashed at the crossroads of art and literature; to what, for lack of rational or other reasonable explanations, we attribute to chance. What continues to be at play are those forces that affect our weaving of the tapestry of knowledge, the enrichment that is still to come from viewers-readers-participants willing to accept and engage in what we offer with a semblance of order.

In “A Vindication of the Kabbalah,” pondering how Judaism views the God-given Torah [the Pentateuch], Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1984) wrote: “A book impenetrable by contingency, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations that lie in wait, of superimposed lights... How could one not interrogate it to the level of the absurd, to numerical excess, as the Kabbalah has done?” And in a lecture he said that the Kabbalah is “sort of a metaphor of thought.”

When we consider Borges and Kabbalah, we must point out differences as crucial as those that separate the mystic who treads a metaphysical minefield —a road on which life and death, reason and madness, confront each other— from those who walk a path of literary gamesmanship. To speak of “Kabbalah” is to enter the sacred space of Jewish mysticism, rooted and codified in principles and ancient practices; it is to seek meaning in, and through, The Text, the Torah: the origin of the universe, words that (according to one tradition) may even predate creation, as well as a nation’s chronicle and guide, the key to a people’s history and the hidden secret that holds within its innermost chambers every version of every possible future.

In joining “Borges” and “Kabbalah,” it is imperative to recognize the distance that separates faith and theology from literature and art, as well as “the Kabbalist” from those who promote it as spiritual self-help and indulge in exercises that plainly mark the passage of time. When cognizant of the difference, when suitably and spiritually trained to cut through material barriers, then, and only then, will the true seeker be empowered to discover and unveil alternate views of the world, and make inroads into the sobering chronicles of the Diaspora, where many of the Kabbalistic texts were written. At that point, armed with its own irreverent heterodoxy, will that seeker perhaps be able to question, probe, provoke, see through falsehood, reveal truths, and point to open paths and future options that, in the end, may or may not be less atrocious –or less festive— than those we fear or await. As Borges’s “The Prayer” also stated: “The plans of the universe are unknown to us, but we do know that to reason lucidly and act justly is to contribute to those plans which will not be revealed to us.”

Borges knew and practiced in literature what for Kabbalists (and for other believers) is a guiding principle and article of faith: in a Divine Text, nothing is gratuitous and nothing is left to chance. Nothing can be deemed superfluous –a critical concept we also learned from Borges— even when what we read is just a literary artifice; even when all that remains is for us to acknowledge the limits of human prowess.

.........................................................................

“Borges and the Kabbalah: Seeking Access” has been designed as a conceptual journey of our book’s spirit. Through prints, texts, installations, lights and a video, visitors are invited to enter a world of appearances, of truths, and of veiled secrets. A labyrinth is usually a system designed to confuse and lose the daring in its midst; here it has an order (of several sequences) that is both complete and open to multiple options and interpretations. Borges through literature, and the Kabbalah through its sanctified multiplicity of subjects and objectives, lead us to paths of never ending journeys. This universe beckons the visitor to be open, to query every meaning and every feeling, to play, to bet and risk it all; to accept that “this,” what we know and live, cannot be all there is; that beyond our waking hours other versions of the real lurk about and incite us to search, to grasp what must be perceived, assimilated and named one more time. Just once again, even if only just one more time, once, again, as always.

To seek access means (may mean?) to have learned to read, decipher and, indeed, to see the tapestry’s hidden patterns; it means to understand and enjoy, beyond the ready-made levels of comprehension and pleasure, the intimacy of every letter, of every shape, of every line that slides down the skin to find its home. It is to discover it right here: in our shared space.

Saúl Sosnowski

On “the book that is not just a book”:

The doors that opened up in 2002, led to the publication of Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to The Word: images by Mirta Kupferminc, texts by Saúl Sosnowski, quotes from Jorge Luis Borges and from Kabbalistic sources.

This edition is limited to 25 copies printed on Archés 300 grams paper, and numbered in both Arabic numerals and Hebrew letters. The number of copies corresponds to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the period, comma, and the space between letters –an interstice that may hold other languages and innumerable options.

The 29 prints were created by Mirta Kupferminc and printed in her studio. The texts were composed and printed by Rubén Lapolla under Samuel César Palui’s supervision.