Kabbalah is a doctrine of esoteric knowledge concerning God and the universe. Kabbalah stresses the reasons and understanding of the commandments, and the cause of events described in the Torah. Kabbalah includes the understanding of the spiritual spheres in creation, and the rules and ways by which God administers the existence of the universe. (Some of its adherents may describe Kabbalah as: A unique, universal and secret knowledge of God, the laws of Nature and of the Universe. Technically speaking it explains laws of "Light". All things in the world are different levels, the closer to God the more revealed the Godliness.) According to Jewish tradition, this knowledge has come down as a revelation to elect saints from a remote past, and preserved only by a privileged few. It is considered part of the Jewish Oral Law. It is the traditional mystical explanation of the Torah.
Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven is another example of a mystical experience. Moses' experience with the Burning bush and his encounters with God on Mount Sinai, the prophet Ezekiel's visions are all evidence of mystical events and beliefs in the Tanakh, and most importantly, all these episodes form the bed-rock of Kabbalah's teachings.
Early forms of Jewish Mysticism at first consisted only of empirical "lore". In the medieval era it greatly developed with the appearance of the mystical text, the Sefer Yetzirah. Jewish sources attribute the book to Abraham. It became the object of the systematic study of the elect who were called baale ha-kabbalah (ילעב הלבקה "possessors or masters of the Kabbalah"). From the thirteenth century onward Kabbalah branched out into an extensive literature, alongside of and often in opposition to the Talmud.
Kabbalah teaches that every Hebrew letter, word, number, and accent of the Hebrew Bible contains a hidden sense; and it teaches the methods of interpretation for ascertaining these meanings.
Orthodox Judaism rejects the idea that Kabbalah underwent significant historical development and change.
Eminent rabbinic teachers in the Land of Israel held the doctrine of the preexistence of matter (Midrash Genesis Rabbah i. 5, iv. 6), in spite of the protest of Gamaliel II. (ib. i. 9).
In dwelling upon the nature of God and the universe, the mystics of the Talmudic period asserted, in contrast to Biblical transcendentalism, that "God is the dwelling-place of the universe; but the universe is not the dwelling-place of God". Possibly the designation ("place") for God, so frequently found in Talmudic-Midrashic literature, is due to this conception, just as Philo, in commenting on Genesis 28:11 says, "God is called ha makom (םוקמה "the place") because God encloses the universe, but is Himself not enclosed by anything" (De Somniis, i. 11).
Even in very early times of the Land of Israel as well as Alexandrian theology recognized the two attributes of God, middat hadin (the "attribute of justice"), and middat ha-rahamim (the "attribute of mercy") (Midrash Sifre, Deuteronomy 27); and so is the contrast between justice and mercy a fundamental doctrine of the Kabbalah. Other hypostasizations are represented by the ten "agencies" (the Sefirot) through which God created the world; namely, wisdom, insight, cognition, strength, power, inexorableness, justice, right, love, and mercy.
While the Sefirot are based on these ten creative "potentialities", it is especially the personification of wisdom which, in Philo, represents the totality of these primal ideas; and the Targ. Yer. i., agreeing with him, translates the first verse of the Bible as follows: "By wisdom God created the heaven and the earth."
So, also, the figure of Metatron passed into Kabbalah from the Talmud, where it played the role of the demiurgos (see Gnosticism), being expressly mentioned as God. Mention may also be made of the seven preexisting things enumerated in an old baraita (an extra-mishnaic teaching); namely, the Torah, repentance, paradise and hell, the throne of God, the Heavenly Temple, and the name of the Messiah (Talmud Pes. 54a). Although the origin of this doctrine must be sought probably in certain mythological ideas, the Platonic doctrine of preexistence has modified the older, simpler conception, and the preexistence of the seven must therefore be understood as an "ideal" preexistence, a conception that was later more fully developed in the Kabbalah.
The attempts of the mystics to bridge the gulf between God and the world are evident in the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul, and of its close relation to God before it enters the human body - a doctrine taught by the Hellenistic sages (Wisdom viii. 19) as well as by the Palestinian rabbis.
In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza may have had this passage in mind when he said that the ancient Jews did not separate God from the world. This conception of God may be pantheistic or panentheistic. It also postulates the union of man with God; both these ideas were further developed in the later Kabbalah. (He was excommunicated from the main Jewish community of his times by the rabbis at the time for espousing these views).
There were certain early Rishonim who are known to have been experts in Kabbalah. One of the best known is Nahmanides (the Ramban) (1194-1270) whose commentary on the Torah is considered to be based on Kabbalistic knowledge as well as Bahya ben Asher (the Rabbeinu Behaye) (d. 1340). Another was Isaac the Blind (1160-1235) who wrote about the mystical classic the Bahir,
Following the upheavals and dislocations in the Jewish world as a result of the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the trauma of Anti-Semitism during the Middle Ages, Jews began to search for signs of when the long-awaited Jewish Messiah would come to comfort them in their painful exiles. As part of that "search for meaning" in their lives, Kabbalah received its biggest boost in the Jewish world when the explication of the Kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), by his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital who published the Luria's teachings, gained wide-spread popularity. It was Luria who popularized and gave credence to the teachings of the Zohar which had until then been a little-known work. The author of the Shulkhan Arukh (the Jewish "Code of Law"), Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488-1575), and Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570) were also great scholars of Kabbalah and spread its teachings during this era.
One of the most important teachers of Kabbalah recognized as an authority by all serious scholars until the present time, was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1525-1609) known as the Maharal of Prague. Many of his written works survive and are studied for their deep Kabbalistic insights. During the twentieth century, Rabbi Isaac Hutner (1906-1980) continued to spread the Maharal's teachings indirectly through his own teachings and scholarly publications within the modern Yeshiva world.
The spiritual and mystical yearnings of many Jews remained frustrated after the death of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his disciples and colleagues. No hope was in sight for many following the devastation and mass killings of the pogroms that followed in the wake the Chmielnicki Uprising (1648-1654), and it was at this time that a controversial scholar of the Kabbalah by the name of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676) captured the hearts and minds of the Jewish masses of that time with the promise of a newly-minted "Messianic" Millennialism in the form of his own personage. His charisma, mystical teachings that included repeated pronunciations of the holy Tetragrammaton in public, tied to an unstable personality, and with the help of his own "prophet" Nathan of Gaza, convinced the Jewish masses that the "Jewish Messiah" had finally come. It seemed that the esoteric teachings of Kabbalah had found their "champion" and had triumphed, but this era of Jewish history unravelled when Zevi became an apostate to Judaism by converting to Islam after he was arrested by the Ottoman Sultan and threatened with execution for attempting a plan to conquer the world and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
Many of his followers continued to worship him in secret and most leading rabbis were always on guard to root them out. The Sabbatian movement was followed by that of the "Frankists" who were disciples of another pseudo-mystic Jacob Frank (1726-1791) who eventually became an apostate to Judaism by converting to Catholicism. This era of disappointment did not stem the Jewish masses' yearnings for "mystical" leadership.
The eighteenth century saw an explosion of new efforts in the writing and spread of Kabbalah by three well know rabbis working in different areas of Europe:
Two of the most influential sources spreading Kabbalistic teachings have come from the growth and spread of Hasidic Judaism, as can be seen by the growth of the Lubavitch movement, and from the influence of the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1864-1935) who inspired the followers of Religious Zionism with mystical writings and hopes that interpreted the rise of modern day Zionism as the onset of the atchalta dege'ula - the "beginning of the redemption" of the Jewish people from their exile, in expectation of the arrival of the "final redemption" of the Jewish Messiah. The varied Hasidic works (sifrei chasidus) and Rabbi Kook's voluminous writings drew heavily on the long chain of Kabbalistic thought and methodology.
Modern historian Gershom Scholem (a famous scholar and historian of Kabbalah in the twentieth century), echoing many of the arguments of some of these rabbis, contends that de Leon himself was the author of the Zohar. The Zohar contains and elaborates upon much of the material found in Sefer Yetzirah and Bahir, and is considered the Kabbalistic work par excellence.
Some Kabbalistic scholars, such as Moses ben Jacob Cordovero and Schneur Zalman of Liadi (founder of Lubavitch (Chabad) Hasidism), hold that the first aspect of God is all that there really exists; all else is completely nullified to God and therefore an illusion. Depending on how this is explained, such a view can result in Panentheism, or Pantheism. However, most other Jews who believe in Kabbalah hold that there is an aspect of God that is revealed to the world.
Kabbalists speak of the first aspect of God as Ein Sof (ןיא ףוס); this is translated as "the infinite", "endless", or "that which has no limits". In this view, nothing can be said about this aspect of God. This aspect of God is impersonal.
Most forms of Kabbalah teach that the Sefirot are not distinct from the Ein Sof, but are somehow within it in a potential manner. Kabbalists speak of the second aspect of God as being seen by the universe as ten emanations from God; these emanations are called sefirot. See also Kabbalistic use of the Tetragrammaton.
The sefirot mediate the interaction of the ultimate unknowable God with the physical and spiritual world. Some explain the sefirot as stages of the creative process whereby God, from His own infinite being, created the progression of realms which culminated in our finite and physical universe. Others suggest that the sefirot may be thought of as analogous to the fundamental laws of physics. Just as gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force allow for interactions between matter and energy, the ten sefirot allow for interaction between God and the universe.
The Raaya Meheimna, a later addition to the Zohar by an unknown author, posits that there are two more parts of the human soul, the chayyah and yehidah. Gershom Scholem writes that these "were considered to represent the sublimest levels of intuitive cognition, and to be within the grasp of only a few chosen individuals".
Both rabbinic and kabbalistic works posit that there are also a few additional, non-permanent states to the soul that people can develop on certain occasions. These extra souls, or extra states of the soul, play no part in any afterlife scheme, but are mentioned for completeness:
Following that, the English word "cabal" came to refer to any small, secretive and possibly conspiratorial group.
Kabbalistic knowledge is required to produce a Golem. Some adherents of Kabbalah developed the idea of invoking a curse against a sinner termed a Pulsa diNura (lit. "lashes of fire") although the majority of Kabbalists reject the notion that a person can actually cause it.
Apocalyptic literature belonging to the second and first pre-Christian centuries contained some elements of later Kabbalah, and as, according to Josephus, such writings were in the possession of the Essenes, and were jealously guarded by them against disclosure, for which they claimed a hoary antiquity (see Philo, "De Vita Contemplativa," iii., and Hippolytus, "Refutation of all Heresies," ix. 27).
That many such books containing secret lore were kept hidden away by the "enlightened" is stated in IV Esdras xiv. 45-46, where Pseudo-Ezra is told to publish the twenty-four books of the canon openly that the worthy and the unworthy may alike read, but to keep the seventy other books hidden in order to "deliver them only to such as be wise" (compare Dan. xii. 10); for in them are the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the stream of knowledge.
Instructive for the study of the development of Kabbalah is the Book of Jubilees written under King John Hyrcanus. It refers to the writings of Jared, Cainan, and Noah, and presents Abraham as the renewer, and Levi as the permanent guardian, of these ancient writings. It offers a cosmogony based upon the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and connected with Jewish chronology and Messianology, while at the same time insisting upon the heptad as the holy number rather than upon the decadic system adopted by the later haggadists and the Sefer Yetzirah. The Pythagorean idea of the creative powers of numbers and letters, upon which the Sefer Yetzirah is founded, and which was known in the time of the Mishnah (before 200 CE).
Original teachings of gnosticism have much in common with Kabbalah:
However there are also aspects of Gnosticism at odds with Kabbalah. Most glaring is the fact that within most of the Christian Gnostic groups the Jewish creator God was looked down on. This ranged from somewhat sympathetic pity for what the Gnostics felt was a deranged abortion, to outright identification of the Jewish God to evil incarnate.
Essene, Manichaean and Nasorean doctrines (of gnostic character) claim that before Kabbalah there existed a so-called Aramaic Quabalta.
Rabbi Leon Modena, a 17th century Venetian critic of Kabbalah, wrote that if we were to accept the Kabbalah, then the Christian trinity would indeed be compatible with Judaism, as the Trinity closely resembles the Kabbalistic doctrine of sefirot. This critique was in response to the fact that some Jews went so far as to address individual sefirot individually in some of their prayers, although this practise was far from common. This interpretation of Kabbalah in fact did occur among some European Jews in the 17th century. To respond, others say that the sefiros (To clarify for the reader not accustomed to the jargon, Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum says "The names of God are the Ten Sefiros of which the kabbalists spoke. The Ten Sefiros are ten kinds of revelation of God's powers that are accessible to us: these are His Ten Names, as explained in the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah") represent different aspects of God. In order, the first six are Chesed (kindness), Gevurah (might). Tiferes (harmony), Netzach (victory), Hod (splendor), and Yesod (foundation). The German Jews may have been praying for and not necessarily to those aspects of Godliness.
Kabbalah had many other opponents, notably Rabbi Yitzchak ben Sheshet Perfet (The Rivash); he stated that Kabbalah was "worse than Christianity", as it made God into 10, not just into three. The critique, however, is considered untenable. Most followers of Kabbalah never believed this interpretation of Kabbalah. The Christian Trinity concept posits that there are three persons existing within the Godhead, one of whom literally became a human being. In contrast, the mainstream understanding of the Kabbalistic sefirot holds that they have no mind or intelligence; further, they are not addressed in prayer, and they can not become a human being. They are conduits for interaction - not persons or beings.
According to Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson (Dean of the Conservative Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies in the University of Judaism), "many western Jews insisted that their future and their freedom required shedding what they perceived as parochial orientalism. They fashioned a Judaism that was decorous and strictly rational (according to 19th-century European standards), denigrating Kabbalah as backward, superstitious, and marginal".
However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a revival in interest in Kabbalah in Conservative Judaism. The Kabbalistic 12th century prayer Ani'im Zemirot was restored to the new Conservative Sim Shalom Siddur, as was the B'rikh Shmeh passage from the Zohar, and the mystical Ushpizin service welcoming to the Sukkah the spirits of Jewish forbearers. All Conservative Rabbinical seminaries now teach several courses in Kabbalah, and the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies in Los Angeles has a fulltime instructor in Kabbalah and Hasidut. According to Artson "Ours is an age hungry for meaning, for a sense of belonging, for holiness. In that search, we have returned to the very Kabbalah our predecessors scorned. The stone that the builders rejected has become the head cornerstone (Psalm 118:22)... Kabbalah was the last universal theology adopted by the entire Jewish people, hence faithfulness to our commitment to positive-historical Judaism mandates a reverent receptivity to Kabbalah".
In recent years, knowledge of Kabbalah has spread throughout the world -- finally overcoming restriction to men of a certain age only. For instance, of the Kabbalah Centre International, has provided one of the first english translations for universal availability which has sparked an increase of adherents globally, to include high-profile celebrities, such as pop icon Madonna. This center is frowned upon by most people involved in the serious study of Kabbalah including those that are in favour of opening up the wisdom. The centers teachings are viewed as s mixture of Kabbalistic terminology and various new age teachings, having little to do with true Kabbalistic knowledge.
"Hermetic" Kabbalah, as it is sometimes called, probably reached its peak in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a 19th-century organization that was arguably the pinnacle of Ceremonial magic (or, depending upon one's position, its ultimate descent into decadence). Within the Golden Dawn, Kabbalistic principles such as the ten Sephiroth were fused with Greek and Egyptian deities, the Enochian system of angelic magic of John Dee, and certain Eastern (particularly Hindu and Buddhist) concepts within the structure of a Masonic- or Rosicrucian-style esoteric order. Many of the Golden Dawn's rituals were exposed by the legendary occultist Aleister Crowley and were eventually compiled into book form by Israel Regardie, an author of some note. The credibility of Crowley is inconsistent at best though, as many of the rituals "exposed" were actually manipulated versions.
Crowley made his mark on the use of Kabbalah with several of his writings; of these, perhaps the most illustrative is Liber 777. This book is quite simply a set of tables relating various parts of ceremonial magic and Eastern and Western Religion to thirty-two numbers representing the ten spheres and twenty-two paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The attitude of Syncretism displayed by Hermetic Kabbalists is plainly evident here, as one may simply check the table to see that Chesed (דסח "Mercy") corresponds to Jupiter, ISIS, the color blue (on the Queen Scale), Poseidon, Brahma, and amethysts--none of which, certainly, the original Jewish Kabbalists had in mind!
However popular within certain sects, especially the Thelemic Orders such as the O.T.O. and Lon Milo Duquette's Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford, Crowley is not without critics. Dion Fortune, a fellow initiate of the Golden Dawn, disagreed with Crowley, and her work The Mystical Qabalah implicitly states this. Elphas Levi's works such as Transcendental Magic, heavily steeped in esoteric Kabbalah (rendering it very difficult to understand correctly; it is completely misunderstood by critics), agrees. Samael Aun Weor has many significant works that discuss Kabbalah within many religions usually considered unrelated to Kabbalah, such as the Egyptian, Pagan, and Central American religions, which is summarized in his work The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah.
The comic series Promethea by Alan Moore draws heavily on Kabbalah, and is in large part a framework for an overview and explanation of many Kabbalistic concepts. The main character journeys up through the entire tree of life over the course of many issues exploring the symbolism and meaning of each level and of the journey itself.
Umberto Eco's 1989 novel Foucault's Pendulum weaves Kaballistic concepts into an imagined global conspiracy involving Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, druidism, and the Knights Templar. The book's ten sections are named after the ten Sefiroth.
This article incorporates text from the Public domain 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia.