The Qabbalah
The Qabbalah is that complex of teachings and practices which constitutes the esoteric and mystical dimension of Judaism—the mystical being aimed at the transcendence of the ego and the union with a higher dimension of consciousness, that is, with the divine—standing beside the Talmud and the Midrash, which respectively reflect its religious and social components.
All these dimensions of knowledge rest upon the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible—that is, the collection of books forming what Christians call the Old Testament (though omitting, in comparison, certain texts)—and, above all, upon the Torah, the five books of the Pentateuch. More precisely, every aspect of Jewish culture and wisdom has, in substance, always been a commentary on the Torah; whereas the books of the Kings and the Prophets, which complete the Hebrew Bible, may be regarded as a mere historical and religious corollary of it. This, because in the Torah Ha-Shèm—the term meaning “the Name,” used to refer to God, since the Tetragrammaton YHWH is unpronounceable—manifests Himself upon the Earth to the chosen people.
According to Rashi of Troyes, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaqi—who lived around the year one thousand and is regarded as the most authoritative commentator on the Torah—there are four levels in the reading of Holy Scripture: the literal, the homiletic, the allegorical, and the secret (sod). The Qabbalah concerns itself precisely with the secret meaning of the Torah.
This observation allows for an important clarification. It is well known that the Qabbalah, as an historical and cultural phenomenon, appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France, from where it spread to Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Land of Israel—a fact beyond dispute. Yet this must be understood in its proper light: the body of doctrines and writings that forms the Qabbalah did indeed arise in medieval Europe, but this does not mean that, prior to its emergence and diffusion, the secret meaning of the Torah did not already exist. The Torah itself contains a secret meaning, and to apprehend it the Qabbalah is not strictly necessary, for it is, rather, a collection of individual commentaries on that hidden significance. The events recounted in the Book of Genesis and in the four books that follow—from the Exodus out of Egypt to the entry into the Holy Land—have their own concealed and definite sense, which remains secret only because, for the most part, human beings are unable to perceive it.
By way of clarification, one may draw a parallel with the Rigveda, the primordial and foundational text of Indian wisdom—and, indeed, of Oriental wisdom in general. It is the supreme text of knowledge, and yet the Brahmins themselves, the Indian priests, have not truly understood it for at least two millennia; let alone the Western scholars, who can scarcely grasp even the literal and superficial sense of its hymns. For those who are able to read the Rigveda, it remains the unique source of true science. Likewise, in the Torah everything that can be said is said, as the Jewish Tradition affirms, even though its full and complete meaning has been lost. Yet just as the sages of the Upanishads preserved the esoteric knowledge of the Rigveda, and as, a millennium later, the Tantric yogins perpetuated it, so too the arcane sense of the Torah has been lost to the multitude, yet preserved within restricted circles of the wise—that is, by the Qabbalists themselves.
From this perspective, the Qabbalah that arose in medieval Europe stands as the counterpart of the Indian and Tibetan Tantras, which—after centuries of silence—revitalized, though without exhausting it, the esoteric value of the revealed scriptures. A similar movement can be observed in Egypt, where the secret meaning of the Pyramid Texts (third millennium B.C.E.) and of the funerary texts of the New Kingdom (second millennium B.C.E.) was lost, only to reappear millennia later in the Corpus Hermeticum.
In this way, one can easily resolve an apparent antinomy created by the rationalistic and analytical approach to what is the central text of the Qabbalah: the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendour. This work is, of course, a commentary on the Torah, presented through the voice of Rabbi Shimʿon bar Yochai and his disciples. Shimʿon himself, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, lived between the first and second centuries A.D., and spent thirteen years hidden in a cave—buried in the sand up to his neck—to escape the persecutions of the Romans who occupied Jerusalem.
Modern scholars maintain that both the historical setting of the Zohar and its attribution to Rabbi Shimʿon bar Yochai are fictitious, claiming instead that its true author was Moses de León, a Qabbalist who lived in the thirteenth century. Yet the real issue is not whether the Zohar’s redaction should be ascribed to Moses de León, but rather whether we can accept that the content of the text is not the invention of his overheated imagination, but a treasure transmitted from the past—indeed, from Rabbi Shimʿon bar Yochai himself. (The same may be said of the Corpus Hermeticum. Scholars, holding in their hands the critical editions, assert that the manuscripts cannot date beyond the eleventh century and, at most, reproduce Hermetic writings of the third; and no one disputes this. Yet the content of the Corpus Hermeticum possesses an antiquity and an authority that scholars could never even suspect.) The need to distinguish between the material form of a text and its esoteric content—between the dating and the true origin of a revelation—is, in truth, a problem that troubles only the Western mind, and in particular the rationalistic students of the Qabbalah. In Tibet, for instance, it is well known and universally accepted that many revealed writings are “treasures of the mind” (dgongs-ter), which certain predestined individuals find themselves compelled to set down in writing, the contents having first blossomed directly within their own consciousness.
This long preamble connects directly with what orthodox Jews and the Qabbalists themselves have maintained for millennia concerning the secret doctrines of the Torah. It was God Himself who entrusted Adam with esoteric knowledge; Adam transmitted it to his son Seth, and from him it passed to the patriarchs, down to Moses. Before the burning bush Moses beheld the Lord Adonai, and was instructed in the deliverance of the Hebrew people from bondage in Egypt—at the climax of which God Himself gave him the written Torah upon Mount Sinai. From Moses this esoteric knowledge was handed down to the priestly elite who knew how to guard it, until it resurfaced coram populo in the medieval tradition of the Qabbalah.
Only against this background can the texts of the Qabbalah be approached; without it, they appear as a mere jumble of hallucinatory descriptions and incomprehensible practices.
There are various “souls,” or currents, within the Qabbalah, all of them springing from the Zohar. These may be enumerated, though such a classification remains merely abstract and external, for each current of the Qabbalah contains within itself the other two, and, from another point of view, they all converge upon the same ultimate aim: the transcendence of the limitations of the ego. One might say that the different branches of the Qabbalah correspond to the diverse paths of the yogas—distinct ways leading toward a single goal.
Thus there is the theosophical Qabbalah, represented especially by Isaac Luria, the Arizal, oriented toward celestial and noetic dimensions and centered upon the system of the sefirot, immaterial entities that constitute both the higher and authentic reality and each individual being; the prophetic Qabbalah of Abulafia, more focused on the language of the Hebrew letters and directed toward individual transformation; and finally the magical Qabbalah, aimed at interacting with those dimensions of reality not ordinarily perceptible.
In the eighteenth century there arose in Eastern Europe Hasidism, founded by the Baal Shem Tov, who, among other things, advocated the extension of the teachings of the Qabbalah to the most humble social classes. Heirs of Hasidism are various Qabbalistic lineages still active in our own day, among which the most widespread is that of Chabad-Lubavitch.
A common element among the various branches of the Qabbalah is this: in the Book of Genesis it is written that God, on the first day, created light; yet only later, on the fourth day, did He create the sun and the moon to illumine the earth. From the very beginning, Jewish scholars asked what this primordial light could be—preceding and distinct from physical light—and unanimously recognized it as the spiritual light, inaccessible to ordinary men and reserved for the righteous, the Tzaddiqim.
All schools of the Qabbalah, each in its own manner, speak of how one might strive to reach this light, just as the yogins of India teach the ascent toward the light of a million suns of kundalinī, the Buddhists the Clear Light, and the alchemists the Work of the White.
That the Western man should prefer to believe that the greatest minds of Judaism have, for millennia, pursued mere phantoms is his own affair; yet such disbelief does nothing to dispel the suspicion that it is he himself who is gazing at the moon reflected in the well.
An illuminated page from Abraham Abulafia's Light of the Intellect (1285)