»Un Dieu Manqué«: Death, Sartrean Existentialism and Zoharic Myths of Human and Divine Souls

The self-proclaimed atheist Jean-Paul Sartre portrayed the human being as a Dieu manqué, a »wannabe God.« His understanding of God, however, was limited to the philosophical notion of a self-grounded being, an ens causa sui. Many Zoharic texts, by contrast, depict seemingly interminable intra-divine, as well as human, struggles for unification that converge with Sartrean portrayals. Such texts, particularly those concerned with the divine relation to death, may be viewed as portraying the divine itself as a Dieu manqué. The juxtaposition of these Zoharic texts about human and divine souls with the Sartrean depiction of »human reality« provides unexpected reciprocal illumination – even in the face of Scholem's strictures against »existentialism.«