In the beginning …. With these words, the Bible lays out the advent and history of Creation simply and clearly, even poetically. Unfortunately, the beginnings of Kabbalah are not so well defined.
It's not as though the emergence of the modern Kabbalah movement after Moses can be traced to a single year or to a single man who one night had a divine vision and sat down the next morning to write about it in a clear and fully formed manner, the publication of which then attracted a wide following of believers. Indeed, part of what makes Kabbalah so esoteric is the mysterious and mythological nature in which this mystical system emerged, developed, and subsequently disappeared over the ages. The concepts forming the Kabbalah belief system underwent many changes over the centuries before they came to us as the complex system they are today, and their development crisscrossed and meandered throughout history, leaving, at times, only scattered breadcrumbs behind to mark their route.
Tracings of Kabbalistic thought appeared in the first centuries B.C.E. in what is now Israel, then disappeared, only to reemerge in other centuries and other locales as the Jewish people dispersed throughout the world. Kabbalah was alternately embraced and disdained by mainstream Jewish leaders, and was finally left to dwell in the far fringes of the community until very recently, when it experienced renewed interest. While a few personalities stand out as having made specific and significant contributions to the development of Kabbalah, there were many hands involved in its shaping. And the evolution is still not complete.
Kabbalah is constantly being formed and reformed. New minds apply themselves to the ancient texts; new discoveries in science, psychology, and human relationships shed light on old interpretations. This is what makes Kabbalah so interesting: the fact that it reveals itself in new ways constantly; the fact that personal experiences add to the understanding; the fact that we, too, can uncover gems of insight when we stumble upon something in Kabbalah that resonates with us.
Volumes of scholarship have been devoted to theories about exactly where and when the Kabbalah belief system first emerged; yet there are few definitive answers, owing in part to the fact that many of the first Kabbalist writings were authored anonymously and without the existence of peripheral texts, such as diaries or letters, to give us an idea of how the beliefs took shape in the community at the time. Just as Kabbalah itself can drive one to distraction, so can the mere study of its birth and maturation.
To simplify matters, it is generally acknowledged that Kabbalah as a codified movement began in Europe among the Jewish communities of twelfth-century Provence in southern France and thirteenth-century Spain, where the most influential writing of Kabbalah, the Book of Zohar, was first published. But the roots of Kabbalah reach back much further. In fact, according to Kabbalah tradition, they go back to the dawn of Creation.
It is here that we have to make a distinction between Kabbalah, the actual body of divine secrets that God passed to Moses on Mt. Sinai and the legends that surround the giving of this knowledge, and Kabbalah the movement or intellectual tradition that developed over centuries thereafter, out of an attempt to decipher and interpret these secrets.
It is helpful to keep these two histories separate, because while the latter is for the most part grounded in documented — and therefore traceable — fact, the former relies much on legend and oral tradition and eludes careful investigation. Regardless of this distinction, however, the two of them together make up what we call Kabbalah.
Kabbalah legend tells us that the secrets of Creation and the universe were first given to early man (that is, Adam) at the time of Creation. God made everything known to Adam but then took back or veiled the secrets for several generations after the Fall, because of the copious sinning that characterized the periods of Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. In the words of Rabbi Isaac, a Kabbalah sage, “God irradiated the world from end to end with the light, but then it was withdrawn, so to deprive the sinners of the world of its enjoyment.”
God then revealed the secrets a second time to Abraham, the first Jewish patriarch, who passed the secrets down to his son, Isaac, and then to Isaac's son Jacob. From Jacob, the tradition passed to his son Joseph. But Joseph, despite his greatness, either didn't have time to write the secrets down or was so distracted by his Technicolor coat that he simply forgot, and the information went with him to his grave. (Some Kabbalists suggest that the coat of many colors that Joseph received from his father and of which his brothers were envious was actually a metaphor for the secret teachings of God that Jacob passed to his favorite son.) For many years thereafter, while the Israelites dwelled in slavery in Egypt, the secrets were withheld and put aside until the people had evolved to such a level that they would understand and be receptive to the teachings. The person chosen to receive the secrets was Moses — the world's first rabbi.
Moses achieved a level of communion with God that was unprecedented since the time of Abraham. His relationship with God was a fractious one, in which Moses questioned and badgered God as much as he obeyed Him. Moses was a man of the world who experienced the height of power within the house of Pharoah Seti, as well as the depths of social powerlessness among the Jewish slaves. It took the experience of both extremes to give him the balancing qualities of leadership — justice and compassion — that would bring the Jewish people out of Egypt and into a new era of self-rule. To this end, God revealed to Moses the nature of Creation and the spiritual realm, so that he might pass on to the people knowledge of the source from which they came, and God also gave Moses the keys to the future, so that the people might find the path back to the same.
Since it was ordained that Moses would lead the Israelites out of Egypt but would not step foot in the Promised Land himself, the Israelites bid him good-bye and crossed into the Land of Canaan without him. Over the next several generations, they succeeded, with the help of divine intervention, to win the land from its unfriendly occupants, and the to unify tribes under a single monarch (King Saul). The greatest of their military victories was achieved by Saul's successor, King David, who captured Jerusalem and made it the capital of his kingdom, which stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea. Around 950 B.C.E., David's son, King Solomon, constructed according to God's specifications the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (known as the First Temple), on the site where Abel and Noah had made burnt offerings to God, where Abraham had brought his son Isaac to be sacrificed, and where Jacob had dreamt of the ladder that ascended into heaven. The Temple was considered hallowed ground, and specific rituals governed who could enter and when. Inside the Temple was a special room, known as the Holy of Holies, where the Ten Commandments, which had accompanied the Israelites for centuries throughout their wanderings and battles, were finally housed. The Holy of Holies was the place where God was said to dwell, and where only the High Jewish Priest was allowed to enter, and then only one day a year.
With God secure in his house, and the Jewish people in theirs, a golden era ensued in which the Israelites could finally fulfill God's commandments and realize their potential as a people. During this time, God's presence was readily discernible, and there was ongoing communication between the divine and physical worlds. This was the thousand-year period of prophecy (the years 2448 to 3448 by the Jewish calendar) that had been ordained when Moses spoke with God.
For one full millennium, there was a direct line of communication between the Jewish people and God. Prophets arose in every generation who were selected by God to act as intermediaries between Him and the people. For the most part, these charismatic individuals were members of the upper echelons of society, although a few did come from humbler origins. In times of crisis or important decision making, the prophet would slip into a meditative state of ecstasy and embark on a journey to commune with the divine spirit, who would reveal His will and instructions to these mortal messengers. The journeys, of course, were not physical, but the result of deep meditative trances.
Nothing good lasts forever, however, and after two centuries of self-rule, the Jewish kingdom began to fall into decline. There were constant threatening forces outside it, and growing corruption within it. Over the years, the land was attacked by different rulers, whittling away at the kingdom's size, and as the era of prophecy began to wind to an end, Jerusalem was finally conquered by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia in 597 B.C.E. Thousands of Jews were shipped off to exile in Babylonia, in what is today Iraq; then, in 586 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Jewish Temple, but not before Jewish leaders could whisk away for safekeeping the Ark containing the Ten Commandments. (The Ark would never be found again.) Among the exiles sent to Babylonia was one who would become a central figure in Kabbalah, the Prophet Ezekiel.
In the Jerusalem Temple, Ezekiel was a respected priest who distinguished himself in exile as one of the elite who was privy to God's counsel. There isn't much that we know about Ezekiel except that his ability to commingle with God was a blessing for the exiled community; they feared that their estrangement from Jerusalem also meant estrangement from God, who they believed resided in the Temple in Jerusalem and could only be accessed there. But Ezekiel's encounter with God revealed that the people had not lost their connection to Him.
As mentioned earlier, the Book of Ezekiel is one of the most important biblical texts for Kabbalists and is unlike anything else we find in the Hebrew Bible. It describes a mind-boggling, surreal journey of Clockwork Orange proportions, in which Ezekiel recounts strange and fantastical visions, like the one in the valley of dry bones where skeletons that line the landscape suddenly begin to jiggle and rattle their bones and reconstruct themselves as flesh-and-blood, or the one in which he sees wheels soaring through the sky (what some people have taken to be flying saucers).
Most important to Kabbalists, however, is the first chapter of his book, which they believe paints a portrait of the prophetic experience and reveals the nature of God. In it, Ezekiel describes how “in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day…” the heavens open up to him and reveal an extraordinary sight. A stormy wind comes down from the north, carrying a great cloud with flashing fire inside it. Out of the cloud emerge four figures who resemble men except that each has four faces on his head — the face of a man in front, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left, and an eagle's face on the back — and cloven feet that shine like bronze. Each figure has two pairs of wings, which they use to fly through the sky. They fly in unison with each other and without needing to turn to the direction in which they move, since they already have a face in every direction. Beneath the cloven feet are four wheels, each with a second wheel at a cross angle inside it, enabling the wheel to move forward, backward, right, or left without needing to turn. The wheels move in conjunction with the figures: If the figures fly upward, so do the wheels; if they zoom sideways, the wheels go with them. It is apparent to Ezekiel that the spirit of the four beings resides in the wheels.
The description goes on and on until finally, in the sky above the four figures, Ezekiel spies the figure of God sitting on a chariot or throne of blue lapis. Ezekiel writes, “Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking.”
God tells Ezekiel that He is to deliver a message to the exiles in Babylonia and then gives him a scroll with writing on both sides, filled with prophecies of doom and salvation for the Jewish people, particularly those still back in Jerusalem. For Kabbalists, the prophecies themselves are less interesting than Ezekiel's description of how he came by them. Kabbalists have honed in on this chapter of the Bible because it differs from anything written by other prophets, and anything out of the ordinary in the Bible is granted great significance.
Numerous prophets had channeled the spirit and words of God before, but none had recorded the vision that Ezekiel did, and certainly not in such precise detail. Why? the mystics wondered. Perhaps because the other prophets felt this preamble was unimportant. If I had a face-to-face audience with the president of the United States, I wouldn't tell you about my taxi ride over to the White House (unless there was something significant about the ride), I'd cut to the chase and tell you the details of what the president and I talked about. But here was Ezekiel going into considerable detail about the weather conditions and tourist sights down Pennsylvania Avenue. He must have had a reason, the Kabbalists decided. What they concluded was that buried within this detailed description, Ezekiel was recounting the realms that one passes through before hearing the voice of God.
Why did Ezekiel go beyond previous prophets to provide us with information that no one else had bothered to give? Kabbalists believe Ezekiel was doing us a favor. He knew that the era of prophecy was drawing to an end and that he was the last of a breed. It seems he had the foresight to record his experience so that someone in the future might pick up where he left off.
Ezekiel's revolutionary words set off an entire genre of mystical musings that focused on achieving the vision that Ezekiel had seen and on discerning the mysteries of the heavens. Rather than just accepting God as an unknowable force, people were beginning to fathom God as some knowable being. Other writers, most anonymous, used Ezekiel as a jumping-off point to devise theories on the character of God, the nature of His heavens, and the means for breaking through barriers to the spiritual world. By studying the steps that Ezekiel described, the early mystics concluded, they, too, could attain divine prophecy. This led to another important discovery about Ezekiel's account: The suggestion that God might be found anywhere by anyone who had the skills to reach him. God was accessible through a power that we possessed, if only we could learn how to develop it. This early era of mysticism, which began sometime around the first century B.C.E., marked the beginnings of spiritual awakening and continued for nearly a millennium into the tenth century C.E. It became known as Merkavah mysticism, stemming from the Hebrew word for “chariot” that Ezekiel used to describe the moving throne upon which God sat.
Merkavah mystics were not members of the general masses, but rather were elite, highly educated orthodox rabbis who lived devout lives and conducted their discussions of esotericism in private circles, wary that the information might be passed to the wrong hands or garner criticism from traditional circles who considered such discussions outside the realm of normal Judaism. The writings of Merkavah mystics took many forms — from apocalyptic forewarnings to spiritual hymns — and did not represent an organized movement by any means, but there were enough similarities among the texts — angels and demons, multiple realms of heaven — to suggest a belief system in the infant stages of development. Many of the accounts were spiritual travelogues from explorers who had visited the supernal world and then returned to write about it. They provided instructions for achieving states of ecstasy and described fantastic journeys through seven heavens bathed in divine light. In one, an angel tells the mystical journeyman, “If you rejoice over this light, imagine how much more you will rejoice in the seventh heaven when you see the light of God,” suggesting, perhaps, our source for the expression “in seventh heaven.” Whatever the experience, the writings make clear that this is knowledge that cannot be obtained through mundane intellectual study. It comes only through deep meditation, through releasing the rational nature and allowing the spiritual nature to soar in the realms of the divine.
We should note, here, that mysticism during this period was not a phenomenon unique to Judaism. A belief in the transcendental experience was common to many people at the time, and Jews and non-Jews alike were attempting to apprehend the nature of the spiritual world. But the difference with Jewish mysticism, as preeminent Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem has pointed out, lay in the fact that it remained linked to a particular people and tradition, whereas other mystical movements were not rooted to any one people or tradition.
It is within this Merkavah tradition that a second important development in Kabbalah emerged sometime between the third and sixth centuries C.E., with the circulation of a manuscript called Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Creation”). No one knows who wrote the text, but Sefer Yetzirah — a short essay, really, that runs only a few pages long — is the first mystical work we have that lays out a theory of Creation and the order of the universe. It is from this work that later Kabbalism derives much of its vocabulary, including the naming of the sefirot, the ten elemental energy forces that are the characteristics of God and the agents of all Creation.
The author, interpreting the text of Genesis, proposes that Creation occurred on two levels or in two stages: first, at the level of conception (before there can be action there has to be an idea or a concept); then at the level of physical manifestation of that concept. God had an idea, and then He made that idea reality. The process of getting from concept to reality involved the ten sefirot and the Hebrew alphabet, which are the instruments of Creation.
It is a sophisticated theory of Creation based on language, speech, and sounds (“God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”). The author speculates that Creation occurred via thirty-two paths; he arrives at the number thirty-two by adding the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten sefirot (sefirot, pronounced sphi-ROTE, is plural for the Hebrew sefira and comes from the verb “to count”). What this means is that through interaction between the letters of the alphabet (which have their own internal force or power) and the powers of God, all Creation came into being. The number thirty-two can also be arrived at by adding the numerical equivalents of the first and last Hebrew letters of the Bible: bet, the first letter of Genesis (with a value of 2) and lamed, the last letter of Deuteronomy (with a value of 30). The implication is that the secrets of Creation are to be found within and between all the letters of the Bible; the thirty-two paths of wisdom are found in the Torah.
Ultimately, however, Sefer Yetzirah isn't just offering an interpretation of Genesis; it is instructing readers in the art of creative magic. Encoded in Genesis, the author suggests, is a recipe for creation that anyone can follow. Learn the process and remix the elements according to a precise formula, and you too could develop godlike powers, though certainly on a lesser level. The book's final chapter offers a summary in which the author asserts that all these secrets were given long ago to Abraham by God and that Abraham was the first practitioner of the Creation magic. (Some people have taken this to suggest that Abraham was actually the author of Sefer Yetzirah, but scholars reject this.)
Later on, we will discuss how exactly it is that letters can create. However, it is important to note here that numbers and letters play a significant role in Yetzirah. Numbers, of course, have a much wider importance in the theories of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who lived some 900 years prior to the appearance of Yetzirah and who asserted that all of the universe could be reduced to numerical formulas — a theory that has been borne out by modern science, with the development of genetic coding and the atomic numbering system for chemical elements. What this means, simply, is that some of the basic concepts of Kabbalah had their roots in philosophical ideas that were already circulating at the time Kabbalah mysticism was developing.
Yetzirah was not intended for mass consumption, but for elite rabbis who had deep understanding of the written and oral traditions. While some in the community feared that the book promoted the conjuring of black magic, the work was taken very seriously and paved the way for ideas that would later become the core of Kabbalist Creation theory. Some scholars tend to negate the connection between the majority of early mystical writings and later twelfth-century Kabbalah, but it's hard not to see the influence that the works of Merkavah mysticism had, particularly since many of the ideas espoused in Sefer Yetzirah are elemental to later Kabbalist texts. The ideas, perhaps, were still a bit premature at this stage and needed to incubate, but they are definitely discernible as the impetus for concepts that appear later on. There is at least one main difference, however, between early Merkavah mysticism and later Kabbalah, and that is that the former addressed humans, for the most part, only insofar as they played a role in receiving information from God. The inner nature of human beings and their relationship to God did not seem to interest the Merkavah mystics, while Kabbalists of the Middle Ages devoted much energy to this topic.
Before the Merkavah mystics would begin their musings, however, there were still a number of events that would occur for the Jewish people in exile and in the remnant communities of Judea. Following the defeat of the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., some forty-seven years after the destruction of the Temple, the conquering Persian ruler allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Judea and rebuild their Temple. This new temple was completed some time around 515 B.C.E. and became known as the Second Temple. For many years thereafter, during Persian rule and under subsequent conquerors after the Persian empire fell, the Israelites lived fairly autonomously. All this changed, however, when the Romans arrived in 63 B.C.E.
Roman policy toward the Jews throughout the first hundred years of its rule went through several stages, beginning rather benevolently but gradually progressing to increased repression. Oppressive and unequal taxation, corrupt local Roman rulers, and the demand for strict loyalty to Rome resulted in escalating clashes between Roman authorities and Jewish subjects, which culminated in an all-out Jewish revolt that engulfed the entire land. Roman legions were sent in to quell the revolt and, in 70 C.E., the Roman general Titus conquered Jerusalem and leveled the Second Temple, sending Jews fleeing to other parts of Judea.
Out of this turmoil emerged another key Kabbalah figure, Rabbi Akiva ben Yoseph, a respected Jewish sage and the foremost scholar of his time, who lived in early Palestine from 40 to 135 C.E. and was head of the Sanhedrin council, the top Jewish legal council. Akiva is best remembered, for our purposes, for his starring role in two Jewish legends. The first regards Moses on Mt. Sinai. When Moses ascended the mountain to receive the Torah from God he found God preoccupied with ornamenting the letters of the Torah with decorative marks that resembled little crowns. Moses asked God, Why the crowns? And God replied that in the future there would live a man who would find great wisdom and significance in these crowns and base numerous laws upon them. When Moses beseeched God to show him this man, God showed him a vision of Rabbi Akiva. The second legend is the one previously mentioned about the four sages who ventured into the Pardes, and only Rabbi Akiva exited in peace.
Akiva was an extremely simple, modest, and devout man who lived most of his life as an uneducated peasant who abhorred scholars. “Had I a scholar in my power,” he was known to have said, “I would maul him like an ass.” He didn't even know the alphabet until, one day at the age of around thirty or thirty-five, he decided to immerse himself in the Torah to fulfill a promise to his wife Rachel. It is said that he was so humble he sat patiently in a classroom full of small boys, among them his own son, in order to learn how to read and write Hebrew from their teacher. He studied diligently for some twelve years, and also explored esoteric aspects of the Torah, as did many other rabbis of his time. He concluded that since the Torah emanated from God, it could not contain any errors, and that everything in it was intentional. His command of the alphabet eventually led him to make one of the more astounding declarations about the language of the Bible: that encoded in the words and letters themselves, even the shapes of the letters, one could find great meaning.
The fact that Akiva was the leader of the Sanhedrin is evidence that early mystics were far from being zealous heretics or community outsiders; indeed, they were often respected scholars who, out of spiritual devotion, were simply delving into the sacred texts to find deeper meaning in the words of God. Akiva would eventually die by terrible torture around 135 C.E. at the hands of Roman soldiers following a second failed Jewish revolt, but his knowledge of the many levels of the Bible lived on.
The trail of mysticism from this point to the twelfth century runs a ragged course. After the failure of the second revolt, Jews escaped and dispersed, spawning exile communities in many lands that would eventually be known as the Jewish Diaspora. The attention of Jewish leaders became less focused on spiritual matters and more focused on practical ones revolving around Jewish communal life. The second century to the sixth century C.E. became known as the Talmudic period, in which the revealed oral traditions and legends that had passed down through the generations since the revelations at Sinai were collected and written down. The painstaking process of debating, commenting on, and compiling all the traditions and legends involved hundreds of rabbis and unfolded over several centuries and several lands, culminating in the publication of the Babylonian Talmud around 500 C.E.
From the fifth century to the twelfth, Talmudic studies dominated Jewish theology, and mysticism took a back seat to the more pressing matters of managing the day-to-day life of the community. Mysticism didn't disappear during this period — there were still practitioners of it — it simply retreated to circles outside mainstream Jewish studies. Over the next centuries, Merkavah texts, some of which survive today, made their way quietly across the Mediterranean to Europe, and were circulating in Provence in the twelfth century when Kabbalah, the movement, began to take shape within the medieval Jewish community there.
The Middle Ages in Western Europe were characterized by religious and political fervor as well as by great intellectual activity in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities. These were tumultuous times in Europe, and so much was going on in the areas of philosophy, theology, and science that it's no wonder Kabbalah found a life here among scholars who were as versed in the Torah as they were in the rational discussions of their age. Spain in particular was a beehive of Jewish intellectual growth during this period. The Jewish community there thrived under the Islamic rule of the moderate Spanish caliphate. Jews occupied important social positions and many Jewish philosophers, doctors, and mathematicians played leading roles in the development of medicine and science. They wrote volumes on medical remedies and ethics, invented navigation equipment, contributed advancements to geography and cartography, and translated into Arabic much of the Greek works on geometry, physics, and astronomy that would become the foundations for our later science. It was also a golden age for Jewish literature, marked by the emergence of great poets such as Judah Halevi and the noted twelfth- and thirteenth-century philosophers Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides) and Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), a leader of the school of rationalists who drew parallels between Aristotelian and Jewish thought and wrote the influential philosophical tome Guide to the Perplexed around 1191.
Mystical texts were circulating among elite circles at this time, and in France between 1150 and 1200 a manuscript appeared called Sefer Ha Bahir (“The Book of Brilliance”), which was a collection of mystical interpretations of the Bible. No one knows where the book originated — as with nearly all early mystical works, the author's identity remained a mystery — but the manuscript became known as the first official Kabbalist text. It was one of the first works to introduce the concept of other realities of existence beyond the comprehension of our physical senses. One person who was especially intrigued by the text was a man named Isaac the Blind, who would become the preeminent Kabbalist of his time.
It is unclear whether Isaac the Blind was truly blind (scholars argue that it would have been difficult for him to study the Torah as carefully as he did if he couldn't see it) or whether his name was merely a metaphor for the blinding spiritual light within him. It was said that he could sense the good and evil in a person's soul, as well as predict how long a person would live. While he wasn't a prolific Kabbalist — he only wrote a few works throughout his life — his influence on Kabbalah was significant.
Isaac the Blind was the first to use the name kabbalah with regard to the mystical teachings. He began to examine the story of Genesis and developed a theory about how the forces of God, the sefirot, evolved and interacted over time to create our universe and us in it. Anyone who reads his text will be amazed at how closely his seven-hundred-year-old writings resemble the most recent theories about the Big Bang and Reverse Big Bang. Rabbi Isaac also showed how humans evolved from God and were essentially a manifestation of the divine energy in the physical world. He used the words Ein Sof to denote God for the first time and put forth a theory of Creation as a process that went from Divine Will to thought to the utterance of words, through which the world was ultimately created. The Torah, he proposed, was the key to seeing our place in the universe, and was also the bridge to connecting our divine spirit back to God.
Partly due to his social status as son of the head of Provence's Jewish community, Rabbi Isaac's words carried enormous weight, and his disciples, who came from as far as Spain, carried his beliefs back to the Jewish communities in Gerona and Castile, where they began to take root in the latter twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Isaac the Blind himself opposed the general dissemination of Kabbalah, but once in Spain, his ideas began to disperse to a wider audience and were embraced by a young Nachmanides, who would later become the top religious authority of Spain. There were still those who opposed Kabbalah as heresy, but the fact that a man of Nachmanides' stature could be a proponent of Kabbalah indicated for many that it was not far from traditional Judaism and that there was nothing to fear from it.
While the ideas of Kabbalah were taking shape during this time, they were still fairly obscure and passed hand to hand quietly from Kabbalah master to disciple. This began to change toward the end of the thirteenth century, when the Sefer Ha Zohar (“Book of Splendor”) was published around 1280 in Spain, and became the seminal work of Kabbalah, its so-called bible after the Bible itself. The Zohar revealed the mysteries of Kabbalah to a whole new and wider audience. Ideas and interpretations that previously were fragmented and oblique became fully developed and linked in the Zohar.
“Four Rabbis Were Riding Through the Galilee…”
This sounds like the beginning of a Jay Leno joke, but this summation is at least in part an accurate description of the Zohar as an account of a series of walking strolls or road trips embarked on by four rabbis who ride through the Galilee on donkeys, troubadour-style, espousing theories and stories about the Torah. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a second-century master, is the protagonist of the book. He embarks on the journeys with Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Judah, and Rabbi Hiyya. Along the way, they meet Rabbi Phineas coming in the opposite direction and take leave of their mounts to settle in the shade of a tree to kibitz. During the course of their discussions, Rabbi Shimon tosses out biblical passages for his companions to interpret, as if playing some ancient form of Quiz Show. This, at least, is the surface structure that holds the book together.
Written in Aramaic, and divided into three parts with further subdivisions, it is a strange but wonderful book that has little form to it. The narrative has no linear structure but instead jumps back and forth, delivering information about such topics as the Creation of man, the nature of good and evil, and how our actions affect the destiny of the soul, all couched in stories, expositions, allegories, and little Zenlike koans. The story of Jonah and the whale, for instance, is explained in the Zohar as an allegory about the course a man's life takes in this world. The narrative of the book has elements of eroticism and Shakespearean comedy to it, as well as touches of a Carlos Castaneda story without the benefit of peyote. And all of it is very much colored by the personalities of the storytellers.
One night, for instance, when Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Yose meet, Rabbi Yose declares how great it is to be in Rabbi Hiyya's profound presence, after enduring the annoying company of his old and simpleton donkey driver who pestered him throughout his journey with all manner of foolish questions and tiring riddles, such as, What commences in union and ends up in separation? What are they who descend when they ascend, and ascend when they descend? Who is the beautiful virgin who has no eyes?
Rabbi Hiyya, curious about the fool's identity, summons him to appear before the two rabbis. When the old man appears, he begins to spout more gibberish but then reveals himself to be a learned man whose nonsensical riddles carry great insight. The two rabbis fall down before him weeping, and Rabbi Yose learns an invaluable lesson: Just as he shouldn't judge the Torah by its seemingly simple clothes (because there are wonderful secrets and messages hidden within it), so he shouldn't judge the fool (or the foolish experience for that matter), because he may also carry hidden lessons and wisdom. As Rabbi Hiyya concludes, sometimes “a seemingly hollow vessel holds some grains of gold.”
The first part of the Zohar is composed of allegories that depict the nature and life of the soul. Shimon bar Yochai and his merry band of travelers make many appearances in this section. The second section, the main one, consists of a collection of writings that further explore the nature of God, the world, and the soul. In the final section, Rabbi Shimon carries on an imaginary conversation with Moses about the secrets embedded in the commandments. But while the parts imply that there is order to the narrative, there is actually no single adhesive to bind them. At one point we are offered what seem to be orderly interpretations of the five books of Moses. But then the work departs from this pattern and embarks on stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy to offer interpretations of the interpretations that seem to be written by a different author or authors.
As with Sefer Ha Bahir, the Zohar contends that buried within the words of the Torah are mysteries that can be uncovered with careful study. The Torah and Zohar deal with the same issues surrounding the relationship between humans and God, but whereas the Torah addresses the tangible, physical nature of that relationship — with regard to laws, behavior, and rituals — the Zohar elevates the relationship and issues to a spiritual plane. The Torah describes the physical picture of how the world was created, while the Zohar peaks behind the curtain to see the wizard in action, to see the turning wheels of the machinery of Creation.
The Zohar is the first book to deal with issues that until its time were only hinted at in the Torah. It crystallizes the theory of the sefirot and the emanation of the creating forces from God. The primary theme of the Zohar is that everything in the universe is connected — nothing is haphazard or random. It also sees Creation as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time incident with a static outcome. The process is governed by principles of cause and effect that influence the interaction between all parts of this interconnected universe, and behind this process there is a reason, indeed a purpose. The Zohar, an enormous work consisting of three volumes, has never been translated in its entirety, although a complete translation is currently in the works.
The ideas introduced in the Zohar helped open up a whole new way of reading the Torah. But despite its significance today, the book didn't really achieve prominence until nearly a hundred years after its appearance, due to a controversy that shadowed its publication. The author, Rabbi Moshe de Leon of Guadalajara, Spain, insisted that he didn't write the work. De Leon claimed that the author was really Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the book's leading character, who had lived in the second century C.E. and had been a disciple of the murdered Rabbi Akiva. After Akiva's death, bar Yochai had been forced to flee into the Galilean hills to escape Roman persecution; he settled in a cave there with his son for some thirteen years. There, de Leon claimed, the Prophet Elijah visited bar Yochai and revealed the ideas in the Zohar to him. The manuscript languished in a cave for centuries thereafter, de Leon claimed, until it was discovered by another Kabbalist who visited Palestine in the mid-thirteenth century and sent it back to Spain, where de Leon worked on it a number of years before publishing it.
The only problem with this story was that de Leon's witness, the Kabbalist whom he claimed found the manuscript, was dead. There was no one to confirm the story. Subsequently, a disciple of the dead Kabbalist appeared to say he'd never heard of the manuscript. He confronted de Leon, who invited the disciple back to his house in another town where he claimed to be holding the original second-century manuscript. But before they could return to de Leon's house, de Leon fell ill and died.
After de Leon's death, people came in search of the original ancient manuscript, but de Leon's widow denied that such a manuscript ever existed and insisted that the work was entirely her husband's. Night after night, she said, he toiled on it alone. The words belonged to him, not to some ancient Sanhedrin, she insisted. Her husband only claimed it was written by bar Yochai because he knew no one would care about his own work.
Some accused Mrs. de Leon of simply trying to garner recognition in death for a man who had never fully received it in life. But most scholars agree with her version, since the writing style of the Zohar is very much a product of the period in which it was published. They conclude that de Leon either wrote the Zohar himself or synthesized ideas that were circulating at the time and ascribed the writing to bar Yochai simply to lend it more authority — as was the custom of many authors in earlier times who dealt with mystical or controversial ideas.
The fact that the Zohar was clouded in controversy didn't make it less valuable or important. Although it wasn't the only book of its kind at the time, it caught the attention of a small group of devotees who felt it articulated precisely their views. As the decades passed and the controversy over the Zohar's publication faded, the number of its adherents grew. Although Jewish leaders would later denounce it as a book of lies, for the next three centuries, until the 1800s, the Zohar was regarded with the highest esteem, equal to that of the Torah and Talmud. It was during this period that the study of Kabbalah really began to take root and grow.
Not everyone in the Jewish community welcomed the Kabbalists' queries and speculations about God and Creation, however. Mainstream Jewish leaders began to fear that Kabbalah would lead people astray and prevent them from studying and practicing traditional Judaism. Already weary of Jewish assimilation, the leaders feared Kabbalah would take people away from the synagogue and cause them to forget the commandments. Kabbalists were divided between those who sought to restrict its teachings to select disciples and those who sought to spread the secrets to as many people as possible. In general, the study of Kabbalah was restricted to men who already had a strong grounding in Torah studies. This, of course, eliminated women entirely, as they were not allowed into the circle of holy studies.
One might wonder why Kabbalah emerged at the time it did. Why, if Kabbalah was based on the Bible, which had been around for centuries, didn't it develop long before the twelfth century? There are two responses to this that are connected: a Kabbalist response and a historian's response, both of which we touched on previously. The Kabbalist response is that everything is revealed in its time; that every generation receives its share of the Torah as the Torah reveals itself anew to each generation. But this idea that a generation receives only what it's ready to receive is also tied to history and the evolution of ideas that create an environment ripe for a generation to accept certain ideas. Scientific advancements do not occur overnight. They require years of study and small steps made by many people before one scientist makes a “discovery.” Many minds and many people contribute to the final breakthrough, but it's only the one who dots the i who gets the final credit. The messages of Kabbalah always existed in the Bible, but it took the evolution of thought throughout the ages to create an environment in which the words of the Bible could be interpreted with deeper meaning. It took advancements in Jewish thought brought on by the Talmudic period and all the mystical, philosophic, and scientific writings that emerged over the centuries to form fully the images and ideas the Kabbalists were receiving.
Kabbalah may have also been a spiritual response to the rationalism of the age, propounded by Maimonides and others. The Kabbalists were devout and pious Jews who were restless for answers about Creation and God that traditional Jewish practice couldn't satisfy. Life had to be more than just a set of laws learned by rote and performed from sunup to sundown, they believed. On the other hand, the Kabbalists listened to what the rationalists were saying and sensed a profound absence of God. Kabbalah offered the possibility of an intimacy with God that intellectual Judaism couldn't provide. As Gershom Scholem has put it, it emerged at the intersection where tradition met intuition, where the concrete met the esoteric and the rational met the irrational. It was the result of a great urge to get at the essence of the Torah and experience God in a new way. Kabbalists were delving into issues of existentialism and asking new and daring questions that hadn't been proposed before. They went beyond the early mystics, who saw themselves as being apart from God without asking why the separation occurred. The Kabbalists wondered if Creation occurred for a reason, if humans were created for a purpose; and if yes, then they wanted to know what that purpose was.
Perhaps another reason for Kabbalah's emergence during the Middle Ages was related to the social condition of the Jews at the time. While the beginning of the Middle Ages had been a golden age for European Jewry, the end of the eleventh century, when Sefer Ha Bahir began circulating, marked a quick and drastic end to those happier times. It began in 1096 with the first of the Christian Crusades, which ultimately led to the demise of the Spanish caliphate and the takeover of more orthodox Muslim dynasties from Morocco, resulting in various forms of persecution for Jews over the next 400 years. The Christians in Spain eventually ousted the Islamic empire altogether, thus beginning a long period of systematic persecution of the Jewish people, which culminated in 1492, the year Columbus set sail on his momentous voyage. Jews were expelled from influential posts and forced to convert or were tortured and burnt at the stake. In 1109 the Jewish communities of Grenada and Toledo were massacred, and in 1171, in France, the first blood libel case emerged, in which Jews were accused of killing a missing Christian child and using its blood for ritual purposes. Some 100,000 Jews were expelled from Spain and forced to relocate to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Along with this dispersed population the ideas of Kabbalah spread, and the study of this mystical trend became even more available to the masses.
During the mid-sixteenth century, a new and bustling center of Kabbalah study emerged first in Jerusalem, then settled in the tiny northern Galilean town of Safed, which remains to this day a small Kabbalist enclave. Here, the final most significant events in the development of Kabbalah occurred with the teachings of Rabbis Moshe Cordovero and Isaac Luria, the fathers of modern Kabbalist thought.
Moshe Cordovero lived in the mid-1500s in Safed, where he was a devoted and gifted scholar of the revealed Torah. He was so gifted that he was a bit of a prodigy and was ordained a rabbi at the age of eighteen. Two years after he became a rabbi, Cordovero began studying the hidden Torah with his wife's brother, Solomon Alkabetz, a noted Kabbalist, and it wasn't long before Cordovero became a leading Kabbalist himself.
In Safed, Cordovero lived within a circle of extremely pious men, who held themselves to a high ideal of asceticism and morality in which they sought to banish angry and evil thoughts from their minds. They spent their days in deep contemplation, developing interpretations of the Kabbalist texts, particularly the Zohar, which was printed for the first time in 1558 and distributed widely throughout Europe. Ultimately, Cordovero composed a massive text of his own, a compendium of Jewish mysticism that categorized all the principles of Kabbalah, as well as some thirty manuscripts of his own teachings, which included an introduction to Kabbalah, a book of ethics based on the ten sefirot, and a massive volume that is considered one of the most comprehensive commentaries on the Zohar. His book of ethics, The Tree of Devorah, became extremely popular among sixteenth-century Kabbalists and, aside from some dated and chauvinistic viewpoints, is still relevant today, particularly as it relates to practical Kabbalah and our daily life. Cordovero's writings helped synthesize and summarize Kabbalah up to the sixteenth century, and his work influenced many people, including Spinoza. He became a legend in his own time and attracted many disciples who later wrote their own books based on his ideas. When he died in 1570 at the age of forty-eight, it was reported that a pillar of fire appeared at his coffin.
The study of Kabbalah changed Cordovero's life. In fact, despite the many years of learning that preceded his study of the hidden Torah, he wrote that once he began to study Kabbalah it was as if his entire life he'd been asleep. Kabbalah made him a fully aware and conscious being.
Isaac Luria, also known as the ARI, an acronym for his Hebrew title (Ha Elohi Rabbi Yitzhak — The Divine Rabbi Isaak) studied in Safed with Moshe Cordovero a year before Cordovero died. If Cordovero was important for the structured development of Kabbalah, the ARI was essential for contemporizing Kabbalah and clarifying its principles. Luria meditated on the Zohar and was said to receive revelations from the Prophet Elijah, which he then incorporated into his teachings. He refined and reshaped the Tree of Life and made the mystical teachings more accessible.
During his short lifetime, Luria attracted many would-be disciples. But he guarded his teachings fiercely and carefully selected his students. Oddly enough, he never wrote his teachings down. One of his students put them in writing after his death. Although his life was short — he lived only three years in Safed before he died in an epidemic at the age of thirty-eight, a factor that led to his mythologization — Luria's innovative ideas, along with Cordovero's contributions, ultimately helped define and systematize Kabbalah, and it is mainly his ideas, known as the Lurianic tradition, that form the basis of most Kabbalah teaching and writing today.
The period of Safed represented the golden era of Kabbalah studies, and from around 1630, Lurianic Kabbalah began to spread from Persia to North Africa to Italy and Eastern Europe, perhaps due in part to the availability of the texts with the advent of printing. Kabbalah during this period was highly regarded and actually dominated Jewish studies and teachings throughout the Middle East and most of Europe. In Safed and many other places, there was no separation between ordinary Torah and Talmud studies and the study of Kabbalah; those who studied the Torah and Talmud also studied Kabbalah. For the first time in history, the revealed and hidden Torahs stood side by side. But it was the first and last time, according to Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem, that a unified Jewish theology would exist. Beginning in 1666, while Kabbalah would still retain high stature, unity in the Jewish community would begin to dissolve, and Jewish history after that would be a story of fractious enmity and division.
During the seventeenth century, the situation for Jews in Eastern Europe — Poland and the Ukraine especially — declined dramatically as it had earlier in Spain. Anti-Semitism ballooned in Prague with more blood libel claims, in which Jews were accused of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood to make matzoh bread for Passover, and these accusations spread to the Ukraine, where Jews from Poland had settled among resentful Cossacks. Intense persecution culminated in 1648 and 1649 in the pogroms of the Cossacks, in which entire Jewish populations were exterminated or driven off the land. Some 300 Jewish towns and villages were destroyed and more than 100,000 Jews killed. It was a grave time for Jewish leaders. The communities were deeply affected by these events and felt abandoned by the learned men who spent their days bent over books but couldn't save the community or provide adequate answers for why they were suffering. As a result, Judaism was thrust into a deep spiritual crisis. Disillusioned by traditional Judaism, many people seeking spiritual and political redemption found hope in Kabbalah, which claimed that prayer could bring about repair of the world and redemption. A system that was traditionally contemplative in nature began to transform into one that offered messages of hope. Furthermore, people found in Lurianic Kabbalah signs that the world was indeed nearing the final stages of redemption, and with these ideas, Messianic fervor began to take root.
It was perhaps inevitable that out of this climate someone would emerge who offered the Jews in exile salvation and redemption. This at least was their hope about Shabbetai Zvi, the false messiah mentioned in chapter 1. Zvi was born in Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey today) in 1626 and came of age around the time of the pogroms. He came from a wealthy family and was an exceptionally gifted and devoted scholar who became a member of the rabbinical elite. But he was also an extremely eccentric loner and suffered what today would be considered episodes of manic-depression that would produce erratic behavior. Out of the blue he would begin uttering the unmentionable name of God in public squares and advocated abolishing the commandments of Judaism. Not surprisingly, the rabbis of Smyrna kicked him out of the community, after which he settled in Jerusalem.
For years he struggled with the demons inside him. He married twice, but the unions were never consummated and ended in divorce. He finally married a woman who was rumored to be a prostitute. Everything in his life culminated in his meeting in the mid-1660s with a man named Nathan Ashkenazi, who had visions of Zvi as the Messiah. Ashkenazi showed Zvi writings that seemed to suggest the Messiah would be named Shabbetai and be born on Zvi's birthdate. Zvi deduced from this that he was indeed the Messiah and made a formal announcement in Gaza in 1665. The news spread swiftly throughout the Middle East and Europe, arousing a Messianic fervor around him and legends of his apparent ability to perform miracles. He attracted thousands of devotees throughout Europe and created frenzied anticipation among the despairing communities there who were waiting for someone to release them from their suffering. They sold their businesses and belongings and awaited a signal from the Messiah to return to the Holy Land. This atmosphere of anticipation continued for nearly a year before the Ottoman authorities grew alarmed by the thought of thousands of ecstatic Jews converging on the Ottoman-controlled holy city, and arrested Zvi on charges of sedition. Five months later they gave him a choice: conversion to Islam or death. Amazingly, Zvi chose conversion, and even changed his name to Aziz. While some of his adherents were shocked into reality by the idea of the Messiah becoming Muslim, others asserted that it must be part of the Messianic plan and followed Zvi into Islam. For some time after his conversion, a movement continued of radical Shabbatean Kabbalists, who distorted the teachings of Kabbalah and reasoned that if all things were divine as the Kabbalists said they were, then sin was divine too. They engaged in orgies and all manner of heresy until they were forced underground. Fringes of them survived until the early twentieth century, and Messianism itself continued in various forms for many years thereafter. But Zvi himself lived out the remainder of his life off a small pension from the Ottoman coffers and died on Yom Kippur in 1676 at the age of fifty.
The despair and shock felt by many Jews in the aftermath of the Zvi debacle led many of them back to traditional rabbinical Judaism, which, from that time on, dominated normative Jewish learning up to the present day. Kabbalah experienced another resurgence, though of a different nature, with the founding of modern Hassidism in the Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name, because it was said that he possessed the secret knowledge of God's name) was born around 1700 and became a healer and charismatic mystic who witnessed the suffering of the communities in Europe and sought to find a solution to the spiritual crisis within Judaism. He began to study Kabbalah and came to the conclusion that the intellectual masters in Safed had it all wrong. If everything in this world was created by God, then we should celebrate that Creation, rather than vilify it by living an austere and somber life. The Kabbalists in Safed believed that the more rooted in the physical they were, the less spiritual they would be. Eliezer, believed the opposite. Instead of removing ourselves from the physical world, he taught that we should celebrate it as God's creation, but all the while he practiced strict adherence to orthodox Judaism.
The Hassidim today continue to practice a combination of orthodoxy with strong mystical undertones, adhering particularly to the belief that everything in the physical world has a spark of the divine in it and is therefore worthy of awe. But while the Hassidim adopted many of the ideas espoused by Kabbalists, they have always held firmly to traditional Judaism, relegating Kabbalah to an avocational position that exists mainly to support the precepts of the commandments and Jewish law. In general, they tend not to delve too deeply into the cosmic layers of Kabbalah, and we should not confuse modern Hassidim with true Kabbalists, although many of the Kabbalists of the last three centuries have also been Hassidim.
As Kabbalah began to fade in mainstream circles over the years, the Hassidim have kept its flame alive, preserving its teachings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During World War II, Kabbalah received another blow when an entire lineage of Kabbalist scholars disappeared in Nazi concentration camps. With the passing and collapse of communities that held Kabbalah and the Book of Zohar in high esteem, the belief system quietly disappeared for many years. In Europe, the study of Kabbalah declined for the most part during the nineteenth century, and took a back seat to normative Jewish studies and practices that focused on Jewish law and ritual rather than the cosmic oneness of the world.
It has only been in the last twenty years that a new generation of Jews and non-Jews has been rediscovering and reviving the teachings, mostly the Lurianic tradition of Kabbalah, and finding the words very much applicable to our modern and complex times.