Kabbalah is the name applied to the whole range of
Jewish mystical activity. While codes of Jewish law focus on what it
is God wants from man, kabbalah tries to penetrate deeper, to God's
essence itself.
There are elements of kabbalah in the Bible, for
example, in the opening chapter of Ezekiel, where the prophet
describes his experience of the divine: "... the heavens opened
and I saw visions of God.... I looked and lo, a stormy wind came
sweeping out of the north-a huge cloud and flashing fire, surrounded
by a radiance; and in the center of the fire, a gleam as of
amber" (1:1,4). The prophet then describes a divine chariot and
the throne of God.
The rabbis of the Talmud regarded the mystical study of God as important yet dangerous. A
famous talmudic story tells of four rabbis, Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha
ben Abuyah, and Akiva who would meet together and engage in mystical
studies. Azzai, the Talmud records, "looked and went mad [and] Ben Zoma died." Elisha
ben Abuyah became a heretic and left Judaism. Rabbi
Akiva alone "entered in peace and left in peace." It
was this episode, the later experiences of individuals who became
mentally unbalanced while engaging in mystical activities, and the
disaster of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi that caused
seventeenth-century rabbis to legislate that kabbalah should be
studied only by married men over forty who were also scholars of Torah and Talmud.
The medieval rabbis wanted the study of kabbalah limited to people of
mature years and character.
The most famous work of
kabbalah, the Zohar, was revealed to the Jewish world in the
thirteenth century by Moses De Leon, who claimed that the book
contained the mystical writings of the second-century rabbi Simeon
bar Yochai. Almost all modern Jewish academic scholars believe that
De Leon himself authored the Zohar, although many Orthodox kabbalists
continue to accept De Leon's attribution of it to Simeon bar Yochai.
Indeed, Orthodox mystics are apt to see Bar Yochai not so much as the Zohar's author as the recorder of mystical traditions dating
back to the time of Moses. The intensity with which Orthodox
kabbalists hold this conviction was revealed to me once when I was
arguing a point of Jewish law with an elderly religious scholar. He
referred to a certain matter as being in the Torah,
and when I asked him where, he said: "It's in the Zohar.
Is that not the same as if it was in the Torah itself?"
The Zohar is written in Aramaic (the
language of the Talmud)
in the form of a commentary on the five books of the Torah.
Whereas most commentaries interpret the Torah as a narrative and legal work, mystics are as likely to interpret it
"as a system of symbols which reveal the secret laws of the
universe and even the secrets of God" (Deborah Kerdeman and
Lawrence Kushner, The Invisible Chariot, p. 90). To cite one
example, Leviticus 26 records "a carrot and a stick" that
God offers the Jewish people. If they follow his decrees, He will
reward them. But if they spurn them, God will "set His
face" against the people: "I will discipline you sevenfold
for your sins...." and "I will scatter you among the
nations" (26:28, 33). At the chapter's conclusion, God says:
"Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I
will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, breaking My
covenant with them, for I am the Lord, their God" (26:44).
On this series of admonitions, the Zohar comments: "Come and see the pure love of the Blessed Holy One
for Israel. A parable: There was a king who had a single son who kept
misbehaving. One day he offended the king. The king said, 'I have
punished you so many times and you have not [changed]. Now look, what
should I do with you? If I banish you from the land and expel you
from the kingdom, perhaps wild beasts or wolves or robbers will
attack you and you will be no more. What can I do? The only solution
is that I and you together leave the land.' So . . . the Blessed Holy
One said as follows: 'Israel, what should I do with you? I have
already punished you and you have not heeded Me. I have brought
fearsome warriors and flaming forces to strike at you and you have
not obeyed. If I expel you from the land alone, I fear that packs of
wolves and bears will attack you and you will be no more. But what
can I do with you? The only solution is that I and you together leave
the land and both of us go into exile. As it is written, 'I will
discipline you,' forcing you into exile; but if you think that I will
abandon you, Myself too [shall go] along with you."'
There are many strands of teaching in the kabbalah.
Medieval kabbalists, for example, were wont to speak of God as the En
Sof (That Which Is
Without Limit). The En Sof is inaccessible and unknowable to man. But God reveals Himself to
mankind through a series of ten emanations, sefirot,
a configuration of forces that issue from the En
Sof . The first of these sefirot is keter (crown) and
refers to God's will to create. Another sefira, binah (understanding), represents the unfolding in God's mind of the
details of creation, while hesed (lovingkindness) refers to the uncontrolled flow of divine
goodness. Most of the sefirot are regarded as legitimate objects for human meditation; they
represent a way in which human beings can make contact with God.
Through contemplation and virtuous deeds, human beings can also bring
down the divine grace to this world.
The greatest scholar and historian of kabbalah in
this century was the late Professor Gershom Scholem of Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. Scholem, himself a nonobservant Jew, was
fond of explaining how he became attracted to so esoteric a
discipline: "My decision to study Jewish mysticism came the day
I visited the home of a famous German rabbi, a person with a
reputation for scholarship in the kabbalah.... Seeing on his shelf
some mystical texts with intriguing titles, I had, with all the
enthusiasm of youth, asked the rabbi about them. 'This junk,' the
rabbi had laughed at me. 'I should waste time reading nonsense like
this?' It was then . . . that I decided here was a field in which I
could make an impression. If this man can become an authority without
reading the text, then what might I become if I actually read the
books?"
As a rule, mekubbalim (people who actively
study and practice kabbalah) are skeptical of men like Scholem, who
studied kabbalah as a university discipline and not from a personal
conviction of its truth. One mekubbal, Rabbi Abraham Chen,
declared on one occasion before a seminar of Scholem's students:
"A scholar of mysticism is like an accountant: He may know where
all the treasure is, but he is not free to use it." A precisely
opposite view on the value of kabbalah was taken by the late
Professor Saul Lieberman, the great Talmud scholar of the Jewish
Theological Seminary. In an introduction to a lecture Scholem
delivered at the seminary, Lieberman said that several years earlier,
some students asked to have a course here in which they could study
kabbalistic texts. He had told them that it was not possible, but if
they wished they could have a course on the history of kabbalah. For
at a university, Lieberman said, "it is forbidden to have a
course in nonsense. But the history of nonsense, that is
scholarship."
Lieberman's caustic comment aside, kabbalah has
long been one of the important areas of Jewish thought. Ideas that
many contemporary Jews might think of as un-Jewish sometimes are
found in the kabbalah, most notably, the belief in reincarnation (gilgul
neshamot). Between 1500 and 1800, Scholem has written, "kabbalah
was widely considered to be the true Jewish theology,"
and almost no one attacked it. With the Jewish entrance into the
modern world, however-a world in which rational thinking was more
highly esteemed than the mystical-kabbalah tended to be downgraded or
ignored. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in
kabbalah, and today it is commonly studied among Hasidic Jews, and among many non-Orthodox Jews who are part of the
counterculture.
Sources: Joseph Telushkin. Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History. NY: William Morrow and Co., 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.