One of the most unsettling passages in the Talmud is only a few lines long. Chagigah 14b states: “Four entered the Pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Rabbi Akiva.” The Talmud then gives each man’s outcome, and the results are not encouraging. This short passage has shaped how the Kabbalistic tradition thinks about who may enter the hidden dimensions of the Torah, and how.
What the Talmud says
Pardes literally means “orchard.” In the Talmud’s account, it is the hidden study of the Divine, what the Mishnah (Chagigah 2:1) calls Maaseh Merkavah (the work of the Chariot). The four who entered fared as follows:
Ben Azzai gazed and died. The Talmud applies a verse to him: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His pious ones” (Tehillim 116:15).
Ben Zoma gazed and was harmed, which the Sages understand as losing his mind. His verse is: “Have you found honey? Eat only what you need, lest you be sated and vomit it” (Mishlei 25:16).
Acher (literally “the other,” the name given to Elisha ben Avuyah after he abandoned the Torah) “cut the plantings,” a phrase the tradition reads as turning away from faith.
Rabbi Akiva “entered in peace and left in peace.”
The warning of the marble stones
The Talmud adds a detail that is often overlooked. Rabbi Akiva told his companions: “When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say ‘Water, water!’ For it is said: ‘He who speaks falsehood shall not be established before My eyes'” (Chagigah 14b, quoting Tehillim 101:7).
Rashi explains the image. The pure marble, seen from a distance, shines like water. A person who calls it water has mistaken an appearance for the thing itself. One danger of the Pardes is the temptation to name what one sees before understanding it.
Why only one returned unharmed
The Sages do not say that Rabbi Akiva was more intelligent than the other three. All four were giants. The tradition points instead to preparation and humility. Rabbi Akiva was a man who began learning at forty and treated every letter of the Torah as holy, to the point that the Talmud says he derived laws from the crowns on the letters (Menachot 29b). His readiness for the hidden Torah came from a great deal of work on the revealed Torah.
This is why the Kabbalists insisted on a long foundation in Torah and mitzvot before the study of Kabbalah. The Ramban, the Arizal, and the Ben Ish Chai all place such limits. The study of the hidden is for a person who has the vessels to receive it.
Pardes as a map of Torah study
A later tradition reads the word PaRDeS as an acronym for the four levels of reading the Torah: Peshat (the plain meaning), Remez (allusion), Derash (homiletic interpretation) and Sod (the hidden meaning). On this reading, the story of the four Sages is also the story of the four levels, and the person who enters the Sod without the Peshat has no ground under him.
Where this leaves the reader
The passage sets conditions. A person who wants to study the hidden Torah should have a teacher, a daily commitment to the revealed Torah, and the willingness to say “I do not know” when the marble looks like water.
The conditions are developed further in The Importance of Sod and How to Actually Study Kabbalah. The question of what the Holy Spirit requires is taken up in the article on Ruach HaKodesh.
