Zohar

The Zohar is the mystical text at the center of Chaim Lerner’s early lesson with Judah Loeb at the Western Wall. More than a sacred volume carried into a study circle, it supplies a language for treating theology as inquiry. Through its readings, Lerner presents God not as an answer that closes thought but as a question that keeps suffering, creation, and moral responsibility open. The book therefore links ritual study to Lerner’s larger struggle with grief, the Holocaust, and the limits of religious certainty.

The Book and Its Setting

The Zohar appears first as a physical object within the highly charged setting of the Kotel Tunnel. Lerner brings a pile of books to the meeting and later hands the sacred volumes to Judah to carry. The tunneled chamber is small, damp, bare, and crowded with folding chairs, yet it functions as an elite place of study: senior political and financial figures sit among the black-hatted men, while Rabbi Kaplowitz arrives with two younger haredim and additional stacks of books. The material presence of the volumes helps establish the meeting’s authority, even as the discussion itself depends on questioning and dispute rather than passive reverence.

The study begins with short readings in Aramaic followed by explanations, arguments, questions, digressions, and jokes in Hebrew. Judah understands neither the Aramaic nor much of the Hebrew, so the book initially appears as an inaccessible code. Lerner’s explanation changes that relationship. He does not require Judah to master the languages before entering the text; instead, he translates its interpretive procedure into an argument Judah can follow. The Zohar becomes legible through the play of words, the movement from grammar to theology, and the willingness to make a question itself sacred.

Divine Names as Questions

Lerner explains a Zoharic reading of the verse about looking at the sky and asking who created the stars. The Hebrew word for “who,” Mi, is treated as a name of God. Under this interpretation, “Who created these?” is not merely a request for information but a declaration that God, whose name is Who, created the universe. The grammatical question becomes a theological name, and invoking God means continuing to search rather than possessing a final explanation.

The same method is applied to grief. The Zohar turns the question of what can comfort a person who has lost everything into another divine name: Mah, meaning “what.” A question that ordinarily implies the absence of comfort is transformed into a way of approaching God. Lerner distinguishes the two names by their direction of attention. Mi refers to the remote aspect of God, faintly sensed through the stars and the natural world; Mah refers to the aspect close to the heart and soul, discovered through inward exploration.

This distinction gives the book’s wordplay a practical ethical force. Lerner says that when a person suffers, the divine part already within that person rises to the rescue, untouched by pain and capable of beginning healing. The Zohar thus supplies him with a theology in which recovery does not depend on an external miracle alone. Questioning becomes an active spiritual discipline: by asking, the sufferer discovers an inner divine capacity that pain has not destroyed.

Study as Disputation

The Zohar also governs the social form of the lesson. The meeting grows loud and confrontational when Lerner asks his question, and Rabbi Kaplowitz’s students respond with insults, laughter, clenched intensity, and a shouted command for silence. Yet the participants eventually stand, shake hands, smile, and leave as though the intellectual combat had been contained within a recognized ritual. Lerner calls this kind of disagreement a makhloket, a disagreement for the sake of heaven.

For Lerner, argument is not evidence that the study has failed. It is the proper mode of engagement with a text whose subject is divine mystery. The Zohar invites interpretation, and interpretation produces disagreement; the disagreement can remain religious when it is directed toward understanding rather than personal victory. Lerner believes the others exaggerate their offense for the sake of playacting, although Judah’s observation of the room makes the hostility seem more than theatrical. That tension preserves the scene’s ambiguity: the dispute is both ritualized scholarship and a real encounter with the limits of what the group will tolerate.

Rabbi Kaplowitz’s role intensifies this tension. He is both Lerner’s revered teacher and the authority whose seminar Lerner may eventually be forbidden to attend because of his theological provocations. The Zohar is therefore not a neutral backdrop to their relationship. It is the shared text through which Lerner honors tradition, challenges its guardians, and tests whether inherited religious language can survive questions that tradition would prefer to silence.

The Question of Why

Lerner’s most consequential intervention comes when he asks whether Why should also be one of God’s names. If Who names the question of creation and What names the question of suffering, then Why names the demand for an explanation. He insists that approaching God requires asking why, extending the Zohar’s linguistic game into a direct confrontation with the problem of evil.

Judah recognizes the danger of the question because Lerner has already taught him the sentence “Here there is no why,” the phrase associated with the Nazi guard at Auschwitz. In that earlier context, the prohibition against asking Why represented the nihilistic power of the camp: suffering was imposed without explanation, and the victim’s demand for meaning was rejected in advance. Lerner’s proposed divine name therefore reverses the logic of Auschwitz. The question forbidden by the guard becomes the question that must be brought before God.

The Zohar’s importance in the narrative lies in this reversal. Its mystical wordplay does not erase the historical fact of suffering, nor does it produce a simple answer to why human beings endure catastrophe. Instead, it makes questioning itself a form of spiritual resistance. Mi, Mah, and Why mark three movements of thought—from the universe, to inward healing, to the moral demand for explanation. The book gives Lerner a vocabulary with which to hold wonder, grief, and accusation together without pretending that they can be reconciled into a single final doctrine.

Lerner’s Larger Use of the Text

The Zohar also foreshadows the contradictions surrounding Lerner’s public theology. He is remembered as an optimistic theologian and the author of Our Imperfect God, yet his relatives describe depressive periods and his final days as marked by subtle signs of an approaching darkness. His physical pain, the death of his mother, disappointing reviews of his major work, and possible disillusion with Israel and Zionism all press against the healing theology he articulates in the study chamber.

Against that background, the Zohar’s teaching about the divine element within the sufferer carries both consolation and strain. It offers a model of healing through inquiry, but it cannot guarantee that inquiry will yield endurance. Lerner’s question about Why remains especially severe because his own life appears to move toward an unanswered question: whether his death was suicide, the culmination of pain and disillusion, or something obscured by the conflicting accounts around it. The Zohar does not solve that uncertainty. It gives the uncertainty a sacred form.

As an object, the book is carried from an ancient wall into a modern political and psychological crisis. As a concept, it turns names into questions and questions into a mode of religious life. Its pages permit Lerner to argue with Rabbi Kaplowitz, to teach Judah, and to connect mystical interpretation with the memory of Auschwitz. The Zohar’s enduring narrative function is therefore not to deliver an answer, but to preserve the right to ask—Who, What, and, against every command to stop, Why.