Kabbalah-What It Is and Isn’t
We must be clear about this from jump: No rabbi of any standing and education regards the so-called new-age ‘Kabbalah Centers’ that have cropped up online and throughout the world as anything but bunk.
That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s about the nature of actual Kabbalah and the prerequisites for its study. As most Jews know, no rabbi worth his or her degree and training will (if steeped in kabbalistic study) will welcome a student to study Jewish Mysticism until the potential student will have studied Talmud — the medieval-in-origin Oral Law — not simply Torah (the Five Books of Moses), and for twenty years or more. That’s the kind of preparation and knowledge necessary.
Imagine a graduate school physics professor were to offer quantum theory seminars to students whose top preparation has been a high school general physics class. The overwhelming majority of (even Orthodox rabbis) are not Kabbalists and are not remotely prepared to teach Kabbalah.
I want to make two ideas clear.
Kabbalah is not a branch of Judaism, nor is it a sect within Orthodox Judaism. The standard and traditional branches of Judaism are Orthodox (with its many sects), Conservative, Reform, and, beginning in the early part of the last century, Reconstructionism.
Kabbalah is a complex content-area, a discipline, a highly-layered mystical set of teachings and understandings whose purpose is to bring a person to a deeply intimate knowledge of the ways of God. It cannot be usefully cherry-picked for nifty sayings and turned usefully into Enlightenment. I cannot successfully compare it to any other discipline or study that you may know, such as, say, Zen, or Christian Mysticism.
Kabbalah is sui-generis.
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For a more complete explanation of Kabbalah try the topic at www.judaism101.com.
The classic book on the subject is by the gifted writer, Gershom Scholem, KABBALAH.
07/24/2019 @ 2:04 pm
Let me start off by saying that you are absolutely right about the Kabbalah Centers. They are utter bullshit. One of their scams is to sell you a complete set of the Zohar in Aramaix (which most modern Jews can’t read) with the explanation that you merely had to look (they call it scanning) the pages in order to glean the wisdom in a language you can’t read. Total bullshit.
You are quite wrong, however, about the nature of Kabbalah. It is not, as you would have it, the pristine province of those who have absorbed the Torah and the Talmud in their entirety. Yes, those are the requirements for those who would TEACH Kabbalah to others, but that isn’t the whole story.
The key text of the Kabbalah was first “published” in Spain in the 13th century by Moses de Leon but de Leon claimed that it was actually written by Shimon bar Yochai,of questionable memory in the 2nd Century of the common era. Modern scholars believe that it actually de Leon’s recollections of a verbal teaching he received.
What matters, however, is that Kabbalah was never meant to be the privileged possession of a few highly educated rabbis. On the contrary, the foremost proponent of Kabbalah was Israel Ben Eliezer – the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) who was the founder of modern Hassidism
This is important because the Baal Shem founded his school of Hassidim at the age of 18, and that was after he learned Kabbalah from Rabbi Adam Baal Shem,. who was the last in a line of Kabbalists. (He was 18 when he was introduced to Kabbalah. He probably spent the rest of his life studying it.)
What did the Baal Shem do with the Kabbalah he learned? It became the inner teachings of the Hassidic movement. It was the Baal Shem’s goal to liberate Kabbalah from the privileged few and give it to the Jewish people..but what did he give them?
A system of concentration exercises and meditation practices that were reputed to increase knowledge, understanding and compassion, while conferring good health and long life upon the practitioners.
As a school of mysticism, Kabbalah teaches specific techniques for the manipulation of worldly phenomena. It’s ultimate objective is the creation of the what the sufis call the “insani kamal” the perfected being. You can spend years focused on the Shem’ma or simply on the letter Aleph..
Striped of its hokum, Kabbalah is a teaching of ancient PRACTICES that have been handed down from lip to ear (verbally) for thousands of years. While there are numerous books about Kabbalah, it is actually possible for the discerning reader to extract the practices from the rhetoric.In fact, the rhetoric is specifically designed to protect the secrets from the uninitiated, which is why no one can learn Kabbalah from a book, The study of the texts merely proves that the student has the capacity to learn and no moral imperfections that would disqualify them from learning.
Actual practical Kabbalah is both very powerful and very dangerous, which is usually the case with powerful technologies. It involves physical exercises as well as mental gymnastics, and requires periods of abstinence and periods of indulgence. (The indulgences are harder than than the abstinences)
This probably doesn’t interest anyone else as much as it does us, but I would point out in closing that Einstein was 26 when he proposed the theory of relativity, so he didn’t really have 20 years of study behind him. Jesus was 33 when he supposedly died, Starting at 13, the earliest age one could study Kabbalah ( you must be bar mitzvah first) he would not have had time to begin his study of Kabbalah, which he certainly had to have done in order to do the things he was supposed to have done because he would have just qualified to begin his studies at the point where he did his disappearing act.
07/24/2019 @ 2:06 pm
Having said all that, the best way to separate fraud from reality is this: true teachers do not charge for the teaching. True students do not ask for support. If they ask for money, hang up.
Jonathan Wolfman
07/24/2019 @ 2:08 pm
I’m with you there.
Jonathan Wolfman
07/24/2019 @ 2:10 pm
…and if a reputable rabbi were to have a student whose depths were akin to young Einstein’s in physics, I’ve no doubt an exception might be made.
07/24/2019 @ 4:48 pm
It was
Jonathan Wolfman
07/24/2019 @ 4:52 pm
😉