What is Kabbalah? Nothing short of an answer to the questions of our universe and the ages. More specifically, Kabbalah is the mystical, esoteric side of Judaism that delves into a deeper understanding of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) beyond its literal interpretation to provide us with information about the soul; the nature of God, Creation, and the spiritual world; and about our individual relationship to God and each other.
Kabbalah has received much attention in recent years, often in conjunction with the highly publicized spiritual journeys of celebrities or in magazine articles about hot topics and trendy movements. But despite the bantering about Kabbalah at cocktail parties and on talk shows, not many people know what it is.
Note on the language in the text: Although it is understood by Kabbalists that God is nongendered, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have used He and His to refer to God.
While from its recent popularity it might seem that Kabbalah is a fad, it has actually been around for centuries. The Hebrew word kabbalah (pronounced kah-bah-LAH) means, among other things, “that which has been received.” It refers specifically to secret teachings about the universe and Creation that Moses received from God on the summit of Mt. Sinai some 3,000 years ago. According to Kabbalists, what God revealed to Moses was not merely the Ten Commandments and the story of Creation (Jewish tradition holds that God dictated the five books of the Old Testament — from Genesis to Deuteronomy — to Moses on Mt. Sinai), but a hidden blueprint for the universe: a kind of map depicting the source and the forces of Creation, as well as an explanation about the relationship among human beings and everything else in the universe, all hidden within the text of the Bible. Thus, Kabbalah is a mystical belief system about the world and God that goes far beyond the traditional theological teachings about the divine being and Creation. And, given that Moses was the person who received this knowledge and passed it on to us, one could say that he was the original Kabbalist.
All the questions that have plagued civilizations for centuries (Who are we? How did we get here? Why are we here?) are detailed in the Bible, according to Kabbalists. The Bible, essentially, is a code of the universe. The bestselling book by Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code, which finds prophetic predictions buried within the text of the Bible, is a sensational distortion of the concept, but it touches on the basic Kabbalah belief that the Bible is in fact a coded text containing the keys to the universe. It is, one could say, the original hitchhiker's guide to the universe, which answers all the mysteries that have baffled scientists, philosophers, and theologians for generations, and also provides a how-to guide for living in the day-to-day world. For anyone who would lament that “life doesn't come with an instruction book,” the Kabbalists would say, “Look again.” The Bible contains all these secrets, as well as instructions for personal development and growth.
The tasks, then, are to decipher the code and unravel the esoteric message within and, with the understanding gained from this message, to apply it to daily practice. Luckily for us, the early Kabbalists have already accomplished this first task. There are dozens of core texts and teachings, written by Kabbalists between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, that are the basis for Kabbalah learning today. In these texts, the authors have detailed for us their understanding of the world and the forces of Creation based on their careful reading of the biblical texts.
In addition to kabbalah referring to the secrets received at Sinai, the word also means “tradition,” as in the customs, stories, and teachings that a people passes down through its generations. Therefore, when we use the word kabbalah, we mean not only the initial words or teachings that God gave to Moses, but all of the interpretations and practices that arose thereafter and were passed down over the ages from Kabbalah master to disciple in an attempt to decipher and comprehend the original teachings and achieve an understanding of God.
While the tradition of Kabbalah goes back for centuries, it has, for the most part, remained a relatively unknown and mysterious theosophy to outsiders. This has been due partly to the secretive nature of many of the original Kabbalists themselves, and, later on, to some mainstream Jewish leaders who alternately embraced and reviled Kabbalah over the years, regarding it as a slight embarrassment to Judaism — something akin to the Jews for Jesus movement — with all its unsettling talk of other worlds, God forces, and harnessing the powers of Creation.
For many years the study of Kabbalah was restricted to men over the age of forty. In some Jewish communities, other restrictions were added: Only forty-year-olds with rabbinical training could study it, or only forty-year-olds with rabbinical training who were also married. The Kabbalah was considered to be too sacred and important for mere dilettantes, too powerful and mind-boggling for the innocent and unschooled, and potentially too dangerous in the hands of the undeserving. Without the benefit of life experience and maturity, the masters believed, one could find oneself adrift in Kabbalah's mind-expanding concepts.
Kabbalah is not a straightforward system like the Ten Commandments, which tell us succinctly to “Do this” and “Don't do that.” It's a convoluted system of interconnecting parts similar to the universe itself. The ideas expressed in it weave and spin around each other, and it's easy to get lost in all the concepts that it encompasses. The structure of Kabbalah has often been compared to that of an onion. On the outside, you have the surface skin — the simple story of Creation, presented in a linear fashion. But as you delve deeper, you discover more and more layers beneath the narrative, until you see that it is actually composed of many complex parts and meanings. The story of the seven days of Creation and the Garden of Eden is the starting point. But from there, Kabbalah takes off to touch on everything in the universe — from vegetarianism to subatomic particles; from love and human relations to the union of God.
An attempt to maneuver through the maze of Kabbalah alone and without proper training, the sages believed, could lead to madness. The dangers of getting lost in Kabbalah can be seen in a famous story from the Talmud about four sages who went out to the Pardes (literally “orchard,” but figuratively it refers to Kabbalah and the realm of the divine): One of the sages gazed at the divine and went mad, another one gazed and died, the third one became an apostate, and only one — Rabbi Akiva — emerged the wiser and more experienced; actually, it says, he “departed in peace.”
Furthermore, to embark on a spiritual journey, to go in search of the soul without grounding or a guide, could make it hard for one to return and function in the everyday world. Therefore, a family and extensive training in traditional Jewish practice were believed to keep the feet of the Kabbalist on the ground. Groundedness is essential to Kabbalah, because there is no glory in getting lost in oneself, in taking flight in the spiritual world and leaving the physical one behind. Unlike some religious practices, Kabbalah does not denigrate the physical realm and urge followers to reject the pleasures of this world; rather it teaches that true elevation to the spiritual can only occur in the physical world. Paradise doesn't exist in the hereafter or in a far-off time and place; it exists here and now. Spiritual development occurs when we elevate the physical to the spiritual level by experiencing the presence of God in the world He has given us.
Another important factor in restricting the study of Kabbalah was the belief that the code of the Bible essentially revealed the workings of the forces of nature. Genesis, the Kabbalists believed, provided a recipe for Creation. Theoretically, anyone who studied the words closely could find knowledge of how to create life forms. In the wrong hands, such a recipe could be used for evil purposes, to manipulate the forces of nature or to manipulate other people. Indeed, at least one misguided soul by the name of Shabbetai Zvi, also known as the false messiah, did distort the ideas of Kabbalah in the seventeenth century, and thereafter he and some of his followers contributed to the cloak of distrust that was woven around Kabbalah, which has only recently begun to be thrown off.
At a time when life seems to overwhelm us and we feel little control over the events that mark and direct our lives; when the scope of what we don't know about the world only seems to widen with every new discovery we make; when we conquer one disease, end one war, overcome one natural disaster, only to be faced with others, it is only natural that we would begin to question our most basic principles about existence and wonder why we are here.
In the last thirty years, many people in the West have been turning to the East for answers to these questions. In fact, many of the spiritual concepts and Eastern practices that people have embraced in this quest can be found in Kabbalah. Kabbalah's ancient and esoteric message rings surprisingly true in our universal age of searching and contains many of the beliefs that have been part of our understanding of the universe for years — beliefs about the existence of other levels of consciousness and reality, about the soul and the spiritual world, and about the presence of God in every person. Within the teachings of Kabbalah, we find aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, the I Ching, and Tantric yoga; we find teachings that touch on meditation practices, breathing exercises, numerology, astrology, reincarnation and resurrection, the energy system of chakras, and even the Zen art of experiencing the moment and finding awe in the everyday. But Kabbalah's concepts aren't limited to spiritual practices. Kabbalah has had a symbiotic relationship with philosophers such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Derrida; indeed, as scholars like Gershom Scholem have pointed out, much of the cosmology of Kabbalah has been borrowed from Aristotelian and Neoplatonic principles. Traces of Kabbalist ideas can also be found in the works of Renaissance and modernist thinkers, artists, writers, and poets, as well as the fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
While it is fascinating to examine the crosspollinations that exist between Kabbalah and other systems and to delve into questions about who borrowed from whom, it is not our purpose in this book to decide which system originated which ideas. Many scholarly books have already addressed these questions in detail. Suffice it to say that Kabbalah did not emerge in a vacuum; it was a product of the times in which it arose, and the Kabbalists couldn't help but influence and be influenced by those around them and those who came before them. What these similarities might tell us, though, particularly those that appear in different times and different places, is that there are certain universal and inevitable truths that we all eventually find. If various people from various cultures arrive at similar conclusions independently, Kabbalists feel, this can only tell us that they are on the right track. Kabbalists believe, in fact, that we all have different paths to the same truth; despite subtle variations in the route, ultimately we all arrive at the same destination.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in this time of shifting theological borders, when Bu-Jews (Buddhist Jews) are growing in number and seeking a more mystical understanding of their existence and relation to the universe, we've arrived at a time in which the beliefs of the Kabbalists are ready for mainstream acceptance. Indeed, Kabbalists have long believed that a time would come when the world would be evolved enough to comprehend their teachings. It seems the signs are here. Faith and reason, in the guise of religion and science, have been at odds since the Age of Enlightenment. For decades, scientists and religious fundamentalists have butted heads over their theories of Creation, taking great care to never let science and religion merge. But we have arrived at a point in history in which the gap between science and religion seems to be narrowing. In the last few years, national news magazines have begun touting headlines such as “Science Finds God,” and divinity schools have begun offering courses in “Theology and the Natural Sciences.” It seems only obvious, then, that a change regarding our view of the universe and the meaning of life is in the works.
Science teaches us that the world is governed by forces and laws of physics over which we have little control, and we have made great progress in learning how to work with these forces to give us a semblance of control over our world and to make our lives comfortable. But what is the point of all this knowledge if all we do with it is create a better coffee or sport utility vehicle or make potato chips that we can eat without getting fat? Is this the divine plan? Olestra and Nutrasweet? The Sports Channel and Batman?
This is where Kabbalah comes in. Kabbalah teaches that we play an integral role in the universe, that we indeed do have great purpose and have great power to affect change. Everything we do has a consequence in the world and every act we commit in the physical world produces a parallel act in the spiritual one. Indeed, Kabbalists say that everything in the universe is interconnected: the universe is a whole, and we are an important part of that whole. As we evolve, so does the universe. It is an ancient spiritual belief that scientists have only recently begun to discover. A paradigm shift in the scientific world has at last awakened researchers to the idea that everything in the universe is part of a related and necessary whole. Scientific relational theories propose that everything, from the immense planets in the universe down to the small microbes in our bathroom sink, are connected in some way; that everything in the universe is dependent on other things around it for its existence; and that there are millions of sub-“communities” that support one another.
To Kabbalists, the discoveries we are making today are simply examples of science catching up with Kabbalah. Furthermore, science is beginning to acknowledge what spiritual practitioners have known for ages: that all the empirical facts about the world will never satisfy our human need for meaning and purpose in life in the way that simple faith does. Albert Einstein once said, “All who seek the truth in the sciences of nature eventually come to understand that there is a power above that is reflected in the laws of the universe.” In the end, all our efforts to uncover the cause and effect of the universe will lead us to one conclusion: that God is the essential cause of all. Some time toward the end of his life, looking back on his entire career and everything that he had studied and discovered, Einstein was apparently asked, if he were just starting out, on what mystery he would now focus his talents and energies. What question would he now pose if he were beginning his explorations all over again? He replied, “Is God friendly?”
As mentioned previously, the beliefs of the Kabbalists are rooted in the words of the Torah. Torah, which means “teaching” or “law” in Hebrew, refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (also called the Books of Moses or the Pentateuch), but it can also refer more generally to all the holy writings in the Hebrew Bible, including the books of the prophets — Joshua, Ezekiel, Isaiah — and all the psalms, proverbs, and songs.
While Kabbalists examine all the books of the Bible, the Book of Genesis and the Book of Ezekiel are the primary texts they focus on, the former because they say it depicts in detail a very specific and hierarchical process of Creation through which we can understand the workings of the physical and spiritual worlds, and the latter because it presents an account of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel's “face-to-face” encounter with God, through which Kabbalists have gleaned information about the workings of God and how to attain communion with Him. By examining the words and images expressed in these books and looking for deeper meanings beyond their obvious interpretations, Kabbalists have developed an understanding of how and why the world exists, which they have charted out in a complex map called the Tree of Life.
Kabbalah, thus, is a deeper level of meaning of the Bible. It is often referred to as the “soul” of the Torah, and the relationship between the Torah and Kabbalah is likened to the body and spirit of an individual. When we look at a person, we see the person's external, physical self. But inside the body is the soul, which holds the essence of who the person is. Just as we are composed of an inner and an outer layer — the physical and the spiritual — so, too, is the Torah. The narrative Torah is the outer layer, while Kabbalah is the inner layer. And just as the body of a person clothes the soul and serves as the vehicle to carry the soul through this world, the words of the Bible are the clothing hat carry the ideas of Kabbalah into this world — they are the means by which we can comprehend the spiritual realm; they are the tangible tools that give concreteness to ethereal concepts.
Don't mistake the body for the person, Kabbalists say, because it is simply a covering for what lies beneath. As the Zohar puts it, “Woe to the man who regards that outer garb as the Torah itself …. They who lack understanding, when they look at the man, are apt not to see more in him than these clothes …. So it is with the Torah …. People without understanding see only the narrations, the garment; … But the truly wise … pierce all the way through to the soul, … which is the root principle of all.”
If we read Genesis literally, it tells us that in a matter of six days, God — for no apparent reason other than perhaps to assuage His boredom — decided to make order out of chaos. First He divided the darkness from light, then He created heaven and earth and all forms of vegetation and animal life in it. Only on the last day of Creation, in the last hours before the sun set on Friday evening — the Sabbath eve — He created, seemingly as an afterthought, a tiny creature to inhabit this world: Adam.
But this is a very simplistic explanation for a hugely significant and complex event. It requires the suspension of disbelief and a disregard for the logical and orderly manner that science tells us exists in the universe. Things don't just happen, we know; the world runs on laws of cause and effect.
Kabbalists read the Book of Genesis in a much different way. Adam and Eve and the six days of Creation are an accurate description of what occurred thousands of years ago, they say, but only on an archetypal level. We have to look beyond the literal surface to see what the words actually suggest; and what they suggest is an amazing and complex construction that seems incomprehensible at first, but gradually reveals a very orderly and beautifully harmonious plan of the world.
To comprehend fully the context for Kabbalah and how the Kabbalists developed their beliefs, it is helpful to know something about its relationship to conventional Judaism because, as mentioned before, Kabbalah masters did not live in a vaccum. They were rabbis and Torah scholars, for the most part, who were well versed in the traditional readings of the Bible and Jewish law, and they had a strong foundation in the literal interpretations before they embarked on the spiritual journeys that led them to the knowledge of Kabbalah.
Conventional Judaism is composed of two parts: a written tradition represented by the Torah, and an oral tradition represented by the Talmud, which contains a collection of commentaries on the Torah as well as an extensive code of Jewish law that was originally passed down orally from generation to generation until it, too, was written down between the second and sixth centuries. Together these two parts compose what is called the “revealed Torah.” According to Kabbalists, however, there is a hidden Torah, a hidden teaching about the Bible, which was also passed down to Moses. This is the Kabbalah.
Here's how it works. According to Jewish tradition, which counts time from the beginning of Creation (rather than the birth of Jesus as in Christian tradition), God spoke with Moses in the year 2448. Through careful calculation of certain passages in the Hebrew Bible, twelfth-century Jewish scholars determined that the world was created 5,760 years ago (that's 5,760 years ago from today); therefore, 2,448 years into creation, Moses ascended Mt. Sinai for his appointment with God and came down forty days later with the divine revelations.
These revelations were of two kinds: written and oral. The written revelation consisted of the Ten Commandments — a highlighted or bulleted list of laws that God expected his people to follow — and the Torah, or Hebrew Bible.
The first and most basic principle in Kabbalah, and in traditional Judaism for that matter, is that three months after the exodus from Egypt, God dictated to Moses an account of Creation that included all of the momentous events up to that point — and even many years beyond that — which Moses then wrote down and which later became the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is a given that God is the author of the Bible, and that Moses was his ghostwriter.
During the next forty years, while the Israelites wandered through the desert, Moses made thirteen hand-scribed copies of the Torah on parchment scroll, and distributed one copy each to the twelve “judges” or leaders of the Jewish tribes (the twelve tribes of Israel were composed of all the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob). The thirteenth copy was kept with the Ten Commandment tablets and stored in the Ark of the Covenant, a specially constructed wooden chest that was later housed in the Jewish Temple built in Jerusalem. Every year in late spring, Jews commemorate the giving of the Torah on the holiday of Shavuot, which falls seven weeks after Passover. The giving and receiving of the Torah is the defining moment in Jewish history, because it was at this point that the Jewish nation agreed to enter into a committed relationship with God.
In addition to the history and teachings that Moses wrote down for the Israelites, there was more that he didn't record in writing, but passed on to the Israelites verbally. This consisted of elaborate instructions and commentaries on the Bible that filled in missing details and gaps to aid the Israelites in understanding what God wanted them to do. As with the written tradition, Moses passed these oral teachings on to the leaders of the twelve tribes, and from them the teachings were passed down from generation to generation to the sages and prophets and rabbis of the communities. For nearly a thousand years, these oral teachings passed from person to person, the breadth of the teachings expanding as each generation added to their understanding, until finally they were collected and written down in the second century C.E. in a piece of legal work known as the Mishnah. This became the basis of Jewish law, which described elaborate codes of behavior for all practical aspects of life, such as eating, praying, marriage and divorce, sexual relations, religious sacrifices, property ownership, and work holidays. Altogether the laws encompassed 613 commandments — 365 “Don't” commandments (“Don't take the Lord's name in vain”), and 248 “Do”s (“Honor thy mother and father”) — that a Jew was supposed to follow. Later on, the Mishnah was collected into a larger work, along with centuries of commentary on it, plus legends and homilies preserved over the ages, into a piece of literature known as the Talmud.
But there was more. During the time that Moses was on Mt. Sinai, according to Kabbalists, God also imparted to him esoteric information about the cosmos, such as the nature of the physical and spiritual worlds. This information, which Moses shared with only a select few, was in fact written into the text of the Bible for anyone to read, only it was written in a coded language so that only those who searched for it would find it, only those who achieved the proper level of spiritual development and understanding would have the expanded consciousness to see beyond the words.
It is believed that the information was written in code because the Israelites were not yet ready to receive this information. The Book of Exodus tells us that God initially intended to appear to all the Israelites at Sinai, but the people were unable to withstand the strength of God's energy, and so Moses alone spoke to God. Rather than forcing the message onto the people, the information was hidden in metaphoric language and was left for a day when the people would be evolved to such a level that they would seek and find it on their own.
What do we mean when we say the message was hidden in metaphoric language? According to Jewish tradition, there are four layers of meaning to the Torah, four levels on which we can read and interpret the Torah: the literal meaning; the metaphorical meaning; the allegorical; and the secret or esoteric. In Hebrew they are peshat, remez, drash, and sod. The first letter of each of these four words — p, r, d, s — spell the Hebrew word pardes (orchard). (Vowels are not spelled out in Hebrew but are understood in the pronunciation of a word.) Therefore, in the earlier parable about the four rabbis entering the orchard, we are talking about their delving into the deeper meanings of the Torah.
While the literal meaning is the usual level on which we interpret the Bible, the other three levels are just as important, because they impart a deeper understanding of the surface reading. Take a simple example that shows two levels of meaning: the Bible's description of the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the Ten Commandments. It was said that the Ark took up no space in the Holy of Holies, the room in the Jewish Temple where the Ark was kept. The size of the room from wall to wall measured ten feet. But even when the Ark was placed in the middle of the room, the measurement of the room from the left wall to the left side of the Ark was five feet, and from the right side of the Ark to the right wall was another five feet. We can read this on a literal level and draw the conclusion that the Temple was a miraculous place and that the Ark was a miraculous object that did not take up any space. Or, we can read it on a metaphoric level and deduce that the passage is actually giving us some information about God. The Israelites believed that God's presence resided in the Ark in the Holy of Holies, so the fact that the Ark didn't take up any space might be a way to tell us that God, the Infinite Being, is not space-limited and therefore cannot be measured in the way that we can measure the distance from one wall to another.
Someone reading the text might say, Well, which is it? What are they trying to tell us? Is it that the place was miraculous, or is it a metaphor for the unknowing, immeasurable nature of God? The Kabbalists say it is both. The one doesn't cancel the other. The Temple was a holy, miraculous place, and God's essence cannot be measured or defined; in one description, the Bible conveys two pieces of information.
Just as scientists have determined that we use only a small percentage of our brain capacity, Kabbalists believe we have only touched on a very small part of the Bible. It only makes sense, given that the author of the work is all-powerful and all-knowing, that the Torah would contain more levels than the ordinary, literal one. As Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says in the Zohar, “If a man looks upon the Torah as merely a book presenting narratives and everyday matters, alas for him!” The Torah holds “supernal truths and sublime secrets.”
The Torah, in this respect, is no different from any other great work of literature — Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — that contain levels of meaning woven into their linear plots. In fact, in most great literature, the plot is just a device for some larger philosophical or sociological message that the author wishes to convey. Take Gulliver's Travels — a fantastic, magical children's fable on one level, it is also a sophisticated political satire on another. One of the best examples I can think of is James Joyce's Ulysses, a complex, multilayered novel that invokes centuries of Irish and Jewish history, alludes to countless literary, biblical, and mythological references, and contains sly social commentaries about politics and religion, all artfully woven into the rather mundane, soap-opera plot about one day in the life of a cuckolded Irish Jew. In fact, Ulysses might be the perfect Kabbalist novel; while it touches on everything under the sun, it inevitably comes down to the quiet, heroic actions of an ordinary, nonheroic man, a theme, as we'll see later, that permeates Kabbalah thought.
Further to these four levels of reading the Torah, the work also has, according to tradition, “seventy faces,” meaning that spread among these four levels are seventy possible interpretations of the text. Think about the complexity of this. Seventy possible interpretations means that every passage, every idea expressed in the Bible has seventy possible meanings to it. In fact, in the fourteenth century a work appeared called Tikkunei Zohar (“Amendments of Brilliance”) that offered seventy different interpretations to the first words of Genesis alone (“In the beginning”), illustrating how the Bible contained so much more than anyone ever imagined.
How is it that there are seventy interpretations of the Torah? One possible answer is that each person brings to the Torah a unique set of experiences and perspective. Have you ever seen a movie with a friend and had an entirely different response to the film than he or she, or a different idea about what the director was trying to convey? Or how often have you discussed a book with a friend, only to think from your friend's interpretation of the story that she must have read an entirely different novel? When any work is approached from two sets of experiences and two sets of knowledge, interpretations are going to vary. Each reader brings a different sensibility to the text; and as we evolve, so does our understanding of the Torah. This is one reason why we refer to the Bible as “the Living Torah.” While the text itself doesn't change with time, our understanding of it changes as we undergo change.
But how did Jewish sages arrive at the number seventy? Perhaps because this is the number of peoples or cultures that were said to populate the world at the time the Torah was given. Add to this the Jewish legend that the Torah was offered to all the peoples of the world at the same time that it was offered to the Jews (but other groups rejected it once they discovered all the laws that they would be expected to follow); God would have had to write it in such a way that it would be comprehensible to all seventy of them. Other sages put the number of faces of the Torah at 600,000, which matches the number of Israelites who were present at the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.
The primary teaching of the Bible and the stories within it touch only on a tiny aspect of what is contained within the text. We ignore or fail to see the messages and signs that the Torah is sending us when we concentrate on the surface meaning alone. The Zohar compares the divine words of the Bible to a lovely and coy virgin, who catches the eye of a prospective lover by slowly revealing her mysteries to him. The imagery is erotic, seductive, and poetic. The “beautiful and stately maiden” is secluded in the secret chamber of a palace. Every day, her prospective lover passes by the gate of the palace hoping to catch a glimpse of her, and one day when she sees him, she “thrusts open a small door in her secret chamber” and “for a moment reveals her face” to him before quickly withdrawing it. From that moment on, the lover is entranced.
So it is with the Torah, the author continues, “which discloses her innermost secrets only to them who love her ….” When she first attracts them, he tells us, she speaks to them from behind a veil (her words are at first veiled so that they match the listener's level of understanding, and so that her revelations will come to her lover gradually and in a way that will not frighten him away). After a while, she speaks to him “behind a filmy veil of finer mesh” at the level of riddles, allegories, and stories. When, at last, he has begun to understand, the veils are dropped and she stands before him “face to face” and speaks to him about “all of her secret mysteries, and all the secret ways which have been hidden in her heart from immemorial time.” Once her secrets are revealed, the lover looks back at her first words and sees the clues that were there from the start, but which he was unable to see clearly then. Everything she did led him to her; every secret was there for him to see from the beginning.
Thus, we come to understand that nothing in the Torah is perfunctory or happenstance. Nothing is there by whim or fancy. “Not one thing may be added to the words of the Torah, nor taken from them, not a sign and not a letter.” Kabbalists believe that there are no contradictions or mistakes in the Torah. If there appear to be some, it is not the fault of the Bible, but a fault of our inability to interpret it correctly. If anything seems amiss, it's because we don't yet possess the understanding to read it as God intended. What we don't see in the words today, we will find tomorrow. “Hence,” the Zohar concludes, “should men pursue the Torah with all their might, so as to come to be her lovers ….”
Why all the subterfuge? Why couch the message in coded language? Why doesn't the Torah just say what it has to say and be done with it?
Kabbalists believe the Bible was given in the way that it was, forcing us to decipher everything in it and delve deeper and deeper to unravel its mysteries, because this is the nature of true learning. We learn best when we are ready to learn, when we seek out the lesson rather than when it is thrust upon us. Kabbalah requires complete presence and commitment of mind to arrive at its deeper messages.
In addition, the Torah was written on so many levels in order to speak to all people simultaneously. One of the foremost teachings of King Solomon espoused by Kabbalists is that you “teach the child according to his way.” In other words, every person receives knowledge in a different way, and therefore needs to be taught in a way that matches that method of receiving. When we are allowed to learn in our own way, the learning is more likely to resonate within us, to speak to us. And when something speaks to us in a personal way, we hold onto it. In the same manner, we are meant to approach the Torah through whichever interpretation or path speaks to us, to find in it the words and images that help us comprehend it.
And, lastly, the Torah is complex because the subject about which it speaks is complex. The Torah is a mirror of the message it carries. Its very structure, with all its interconnecting parts and paths, mirrors the structure of all Creation.
It is often asked why, if Moses received the Kabbalah on Mt. Sinai along with the Torah, there wasn't a movement of Kabbalists writing about the Tree of Life and the sefirot around the time of the prophets. The Kabbalists' response is that everything reveals itself in its time. Everything has its season. Kabbalists believe that God reveals only what we are capable of understanding and that He intended that different aspects of the Torah would be discovered at different times. Not everything was meant to be revealed right away. In fact there's a prayer that Jews recite in the synagogue that says: “May it be the will of God that … He shall give us our share in His Torah.” Every generation receives its share of the Torah. The Torah reveals itself anew to every generation.
This doesn't mean that what we find in the Torah today wasn't there from the very beginning. The Torah hasn't changed in more than 2,000 years. Simply, our interpretation of it has. Kabbalists say that all the answers we seek are already in the Torah, we just have to find the way to read them.
The purpose of Kabbalah is to teach us that there is a deeper truth to life and to bring us closer to God. The story of Genesis was not given to us to satisfy our curiosity, it was given to us to teach us the path from which we came, and thus to give us a map back to the source. This isn't knowledge for the sake of knowledge; it's knowledge for the sake of enlightenment, for spiritual elevation.
The question is, however, Do we need to fully understand Kabbalah in order to apply its wisdom to our life? The answer is No. Just as you don't need to understand how the mirror in a camera captures images and reproduces them in order to use a camera, you don't need to delve into all the finer, esoteric aspects of Kabbalah in order to apply it to your life. You don't need to decipher the story of Creation or Moses; simply, if you wish to see how the universe works, it is there for the finding.
There's a famous story in the Talmud about a new convert to Judaism who asked the revered sage, Rabbi Hillel, to teach him everything there was to know about the Torah in the time that he could stand on one leg. Rabbi Hillel replied, “Love your neighbor as you would love yourself; all the rest is commentary.” This is the essence of Judaism, and it is, at least in part, the essence of Kabbalah.
There is no prescribed formula for studying Kabbalah. Some people want a firm foundation in the history of the Kabbalah movement in order to understand the background for the ideas. Others begin by studying the texts on the story of Creation, then become curious about the personalities behind Kabbalah and how the Kabbalists arrived at their ideas. Others aren't interested in the history of Kabbalah or the peripheral texts, but simply want to know how to apply Kabbalah to their lives.
Kabbalah encompasses a vast tradition, and it would be presumptuous to suggest that in one book you could learn everything about Kabbalah. You would have to devote a lifetime of studying all day every day in order to touch everything in Kabbalah. This book is intended primarily to give you an introduction to the concepts of Kabbalah and provide a starting point from which you can delve into further practice and study.
The book begins with a historical overview of Kabbalah — where it began and why, and examines briefly the basic literature of Kabbalah, such as the Sefer Ha Bahir and Sefer Ha Zohar, the two most important Kabbalist works, which give insight into understanding the Bible. In chapter 3 we discuss some of the key concepts of Kabbalah. Chapter 4 provides an example from the Book of Genesis of how the Kabbalists arrived at their interpretations by investigating different interpretations of the biblical text. Chapter 5 discusses the Tree of Life, the main symbol of Kabbalah, which is essentially a map of the Kabbalists' beliefs about how Creation occurred. It is also a map of every aspect — intellectual, spiritual, emotional, physical — of human beings. Finally, in chapter 6, we look at how Kabbalah teaches us about our role in Creation and how we can apply its teachings to our daily lives to gain awareness of ourselves and of the world in general.
As you read this book, there may be things that seem unclear on a first encounter with them. The more you study Kabbalah, the clearer the concepts become. The study of Kabbalah requires a light touch at times. It's like a star that seems to disappear if you stare at it too intently, but comes back into focus if you move your point of vision slightly to the side of it. Kabbalah is like this. Attack it head-on, pursue it too aggressively, and it will frustrate you. But relax and allow it to come to you on its own, and it will reveal itself at its own pace. Kabbalah is not about standing on a mountaintop and meditating on God, or about becoming adept at practicing certain techniques until we have them down — if I follow this recipe and do that, then happiness and fulfillment will follow. It's about living a conscious life, and this is an ongoing, lifelong process.