Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction

Contents
Illustrations VII
Preface IX
1 Kabbalah: The Term and Its Meanings 1
2 Ancient Jewish Mysticism and the Emergence
of the Kabbalah 11
3 The Kabbalah in the Middle Ages 25
4 Main Ideas of the Medieval Kabbalah 37
5 Modern Times I: The Christian Kabbalah 61
6 Modern Times II: Safed and the Lurianic
Kabbalah 71
7 Modern Times III: The Sabbatian Messianic
Movement 85
8 Modern and Contemporary Hasidism 93
9 Some Aspects of Contemporary Kabbalah 103
Further Reading 113
Index 119
V
1 A Latin translation of
Shaaey Ora (“The Gates
of Light”). Courtesy of
The Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of
America xiv
2 The ancient Sefer Yezira
(The Book of Creation,
Latin translation,
Amsterdam, 1642).
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 12
3 The book Zohar, the
Book of Splendor.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 26
4 Permutations of divine
names and names of
angels in a protective
amulet. Courtesy of the
Illustrations
Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of
America 28
5 A Latin schematic
drawing of the ten divine
emanations, the sefirot.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 36
6 An amulet designed to
repel the power of Lilith.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 51
7 The Kabbalah Denudata.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 60
8 Henry More’s Vision of
Ezekiel. By permission of
Houghton Library,
Harvard University 65
VII
9 The structure of the ten
sefirot. Courtesy of the
Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of
America 70
10 Portrait of Shabbatai
Zevi. Courtesy of the
Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of
America 84
11 The holy name of God.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 94
12 Esther represents the
Jewish feminine divine
power, the shekhinah.
Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America 104
I LL US T RA T IO NS
VIII
Every author of a “very short introduction” is faced with the
difficult task of finding a way to present his subject in a brief
and coherent manner, addressing readers who seek only the
basic, yet most important, aspects of the discipline to which
the book is dedicated. In the case of the kabbalah, however,
there is an added difficulty: many readers will seek in the few
pages of this book not only new information, but also a confir-
mation of their own impression of what the kabbalah is. Some
will even, knowingly or unknowingly, seek here a description
of what the kabbalah should be. For fifty years I have been try-
ing to respond to the question “what is the kabbalah?” And, in
many cases my answer was accepted with disappointment or
even resentment: this is not what I believe that the kabbalah is,
and certainly it is not what I feel that the kabbalah should be.
The term “kabbalah” has never been used as often and in
so many contexts as it is today, yet now, as in the past, it does
not have a “real,” definite one meaning. From its early begin-
nings, it has been used in a wide variety of ways. Every medi-
eval kabbalist gave the term his own meaning, which differed
slightly or meaningfully from the others. In modern times nu-
merous Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and
even scientists have used it in various, sometimes contradic-
tory, ways. It has been an expression of strict Jewish orthodoxy
Preface
IX
P RE FA CE
X
as well as a vehicle for radical, innovative worldviews. The ex-
planation of the meaning of the term must, therefore, be de-
fined within a clear, historical context, stating the time, place,
and culture that used it in the past or is using it today. From
the point of view of the historian of religious ideas there is no
“true” meaning that is above all others. This short introduc-
tion is intended, therefore, to present some of the most promi-
nent characteristics of the different phenomena that were
described as “kabbalistic” in various periods, countries, and
cultural contexts.
Our libraries contain many hundreds of works of kabbalah,
printed or still in manuscript form. And, beside these, there are
thousands of works—collections of sermons, ethical treatises,
and commentaries on the scriptures and the Talmud—that use
a little or more kabbalistic terminologies and ideas. As a result,
there is hardly a Jewish idea that cannot be described as
“kabbalistic” with some justification, as most of these ideas are
found in works that use kabbalistic terminology. How can one
distinguish between a traditional Jewish ethical norm and a
kabbalistic one? Today, it often seems that designating an idea
as “kabbalistic” makes it more welcome to outsiders than if it
were described as “Jewish.” The main work of the medieval
kabbalah, the book Zohar, contains 1,400 pages that deal with
every conceivable subject. There is nothing that cannot be con-
firmed by a quotation from the Zohar. A friend of mine who
was teaching kabbalah at a university in California in the 1960s
produced a beautiful quote from the Zohar to confirm that it is
forbidden to study the kabbalah without, at the same time,
smoking pot, and he demanded that his students do so in class.
I failed in my attempt to persuade him to change his attitude;
my authority could not compete with that of the Zohar as he
understood it at that time. This small book should therefore be
regarded as a subjective selection, augmented by my experi-
ence as a historian of religious ideas, of the most prominent
meanings attached to the term kabbalah through the ages, with-
out designating any of them as more truthful than the others.
P RE FA CE
XI
As for the deluge of meanings given to the term in contempo-
rary culture, only a future historian will be able to distinguish
between the ephemeral and the enduring ones.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2005
1 A Latin translation of Shaaey Ora (“The Gates of Light”), one of
the most influential presentations of the kabbalistic world-view,
written by Joseph Gikatilla in the thirteenth century.
K AB BA LA H: TH E T ER M AN D I TS ME AN IN GS
1
1
Kabbalah:
The Term and Its Meanings
A visitor to the State of Israel is confronted by kabbalah several
times every day. When he enters a hotel, he is obligated to face
a desk, behind which a large sign reads “Kabbalah”; in English,
the same sign reads “Reception.” When he purchases anything
or pays for a service he receives a piece of paper on which the
word “Kabbalah” is written in large Hebrew letters. If there is
an English translation on that piece of paper, it reads “Receipt.”
The term will pop up in scores of contexts. If he is invited to a
reception, the Hebrew term for the event is “kabbalat panim”
(literally, “receiving the face”). If he wishes to visit a bank or a
government office he must first check the kabalat kahal—the
hours in which clerks receive the public, the equivalent of the
English “open.” Every professor, of any discipline, is engaged
every week in a kabbalistic hour, sheat kabbalah, that is, office
hour, in which his door is open to students. The verb “kbl” is
present in every other sentence in Hebrew, meaning simply
“to receive.” Judging by their behavior, the Hebrew-speaking
Israelis seem to be oblivious to the depth of their immersion in
mysticism, and treat kabbalah as a simple, mundane word in
their language. In a religious context, the key sentence in which
this word is used is found in the opening phrase of the talmudic
tractate avot, one of the most popular rabbinic Hebrew texts,
which was probably formulated in the second century
CE. The
K AB BA L AH
2
first section of this tractate describes the traditional chain of
Jewish law and religious instruction, which was transmitted from
generation to generation. The first stage of this transmission,
as described in this tractate, is: “Moses received [kibel] the To-
rah on [Mount] Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, who [trans-
mitted it] to the Elders [of Israel] . . . ”; the text goes on to
describe the oral transmission of this tradition to the judges,
the prophets, and the early sages of the Talmud. This para-
graph was used for nearly two thousand years to validate Jew-
ish tradition as a whole, fixing the Mount Sinai revelation as
the point of origin, deriving legitimacy from the sanctity of that
event. The term “torah” in this sentence was understood to mean
everything—scriptures, the law (halakhah), the rules of ethics,
the expounding of scriptural verses (midrash)—everything re-
lated to truth of divine origin. Some even said that everything
that a scholar might innovate was given by God to Moses: what
may seem to be an innovative, brilliant religious observation
was already known to Moses, informed by God in that all-en-
compassing revelation. What Moses “received” on that occa-
sion is kabbalah—tradition, which in this context acquired the
particular meaning of sacred tradition of divine origin, part of
which is found in writing (scriptures), and part transmitted orally
from generation to generation by the religious leaders of the
Jewish people.
Similar conceptions of tradition are found in Christianity
and Islam. The Catholic Church is believed to be the treasury
of tradition that gives divine authority to its instructions. Is-
lamic scholars possess, in addition to the Quran, a vast treasure
of divine wisdom that was transmitted orally from Muhammad
to his disciples and their disciples. In Hebrew, this tradition is
called masoret (“that which has been transmitted”) or kabbalah
(“that which has been received”). The word “kabbalah,” in such
contexts, is an abbreviation, indicating divine truth received by
Moses from God; the term does not refer to a particular kind
of content. It describes origin and the manner of transmission,
without emphasizing any discipline or subject. Essentially, this
K AB BA LA H: TH E T ER M AN D I TS ME AN IN GS
3
term conveys the opposite of what usually is recognized as
“mysticism,” which is conceived as relating to original, indi-
vidual visions and experiences. “Kabbalah” in the Hebrew reli-
gious vocabulary means nonindividual, nonexperiential religious
truth, which is received by tradition.
The Term in the Middle Ages
This was the only religious meaning of the term “kabbalah”
for a full millennium. In the thirteenth century, a variant was
added to it. Groups of Jewish esoterics and mystics, mainly in
Spain, Provence, and later Italy, claimed to be in possession of
a secret tradition concerning the meaning of the scriptures and
other ancient texts, expounding them as relating to dynamic
processes within the divine realms. Their origins and teach-
ings will be discussed in some detail in the next chapters. They
presented themselves as different in some ways from their co-
religionists, and described themselves using several terms.
Among these terms we find self-congratulatory ones such as
“maskilim” (“those in the know”) and “nakdanim” (“those who
know the secrets of language”), among others. A prevalent one
was “yodeey hen”—“those who know the secret wisdom,” that
is, hochmah nisteret (“secret lore”). Yet another of these terms
was “mekubalim,” meaning “those who possess a secret tradi-
tion,” in addition to the usual kabbalah, which is known to ev-
erybody. In the following decades, the terms “kabbalah” and
“kabbalists” became the dominant names for these groups,
though they did not completely replace other appellations. The
term “kabbalah” in this context means an additional layer of
tradition, one that does not replace anything in the usual, exo-
teric tradition but adds to it an esoteric stratum. This secret
tradition, so the kabbalists believed and claimed, was received
by Moses on Mount Sinai directly from God, and was secretly
transmitted from generation to generation up to the present.
Most of this transmission, they claimed, was oral, given from
father to son and from teacher to his disciples.

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