Topics in Kabbalah

Topics in Kabbalah
Andrew Feinstein
September 28, 2009

1. Introduction

Our Yom Kippur class this year is on the Kabbalah. I must confess that I cannot precisely define what Kabbalah is. I can say Kabbalah is the mystical, magical, spiritual, folklore-ish, fantasy-based, popular, insular, primitive, and highly sexual form of Judaism that developed in Spain and Eastern Europe in the late middle ages. In many ways, Kabbalah is the antithesis of modern, American Reform Judaism, with its focus on rationality, individual responsibility, and involvement in the world.

Don’t be misled by the adjectives I used to describe Kabbalah. Many of the leaders and practitioners of Kabbalah were highly observant, Halakhah-bound Jews. For them, Kabbalah was not a frontal attack on traditional, rabbinic Judaism; instead, they found rabbinic Judaism too limiting, insufficiently spiritual. So, Kabbalah was an added ingredient to make their lives more meaningful. The traditional rabbis, however, reacted with hostility and contempt. It was through that reaction that Kabbalah became antagonistic to rabbinic Judaism.

Speaking meaningfully of Kabbalah in general terms is impossible. It was a powerful current in Judaism for 800 years and bubbled up in Spain, Poland, France, Italy, Palestine, and Egypt. What came to the surface in each of these places and at differing times from 1160 to 1940 varied widely. What remained constant were the esoteric nature and the supernatural belief. As I noted in my sermon on the Golem in July, even a very tangible concept like the Golem morphs from place to place and from time to time.

Kabbalah has, as you know, become a plaything of New Agers. I went on Barnes and Noble.com and came up with 1,547 books with Kabbalah in the title, including “God Wears Lipstick: Kabbalah for Women”, “The Power of Kabbalah: Technology for the Soul”, “The Spiritual Rules of Engagement: How Kabbalah Can Help Your Soulmate Find You”, “The Kabbalah Code: A True Adventure”, “Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming: Awakening the Visionary Life”, and, of course, “Kabbalah for Dummies”. I have not read these books and cannot say whether they are Madonna’s Kabbalah or not. I can say that the most scholarly, serious and reliable books on the Kabbalah were written by Gershom Scholem in the 1940’s and 1950’s, including “Kabbalah”, “On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism” and “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.” If you are serious about learning Kabbalah, read Scholem. If you are looking for a woo-woo vocabulary to go with you hot yoga, Birkenstocks, and vegan diet, don’t bother.

I must admit that I am flummoxed at trying to arrive at a coherent point to synthesize Kabbalah. So, rather than attempting to synthesize Kabbalah into a coherent, homogenous structure, I will pick a number of the better-known and more interesting topics and give you a little introduction to each. I will cover sefirot, the Zohar, the Tetragrammaton, Shabbatei Zvi, gematria, Lilith, and Hasidism. This leaves much uncovered, particularly demonology, eschatology, Matatron, Samael, dybbuks, Issac Luria, the soul, and onanism.

Kabbalah is an incredibly rich vein to mine. I must admit that, other than my historical interest and my addiction to mind candy, I don’t see any reason to do so. Kabbalah does not provide any moral compass. Kabbalah does not explain life or my relationship to God to me. Yes, it is important to know where we come from to know where we are going. And, Martin Buber, who does provide a moral compass, who does explain life and my relationship to God, was a product of Kabbalism. So, some understand of the Kabbalah is helpful background. Still, to me, Kabbalah is not the secret path to understanding claimed by its practitioners in 1650 and in 2009.

2. Sefirot

Let’s begin with Sefirot, or emanations. According to the dictionary, an emanation is “the origination of the world by a series of hierarchically descending radiations from the Godhead through intermediate stages to matter.” Stated otherwise, the concept of emanation is that all derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the more primary. It is distinguished from the doctrine of creation by its elimination of a definite will in the first cause, from which all things are made to emanate according to natural laws and without conscious volition. It differs from the theory of formation at the hands of a supreme artisan who finds his matter ready to his hand, in teaching that all things, whether actually or only apparently material, flow from the primal principle. Unlike evolution, again, which includes the entire principle of the world, material and spiritual, in the process of development, emanation holds to the immutability of the first principle as to both quality and quantity, and also in the tendency of the development evolution implying one which goes from less to more perfect, while emanation involves a series of descending stages.

In Kabbalah, there are ten emanations. They come from the Ein Sof, the Godhead. They are part of our bodies or, more precisely, they become our bodies. They are the way God reveals Himself. They are also the conduits that connect us to every other human being. Let me be clear on that. My heart is connected to your heart because both our hearts are the projection of God’s emanation on us. Emanations are not one way. My heart communicates directly with your heart through the radio channel created by God’s emanations.

I am sure you have seen the classic drawing of the eleven sefirot. Wait, you say, I just said there were ten. There are 10, but the center core, Da’at, is the pivot point that merges the intellectual and the emotional. And, the Keter and the Da’at are just the conscious and unconscious manifestation of the same principal. Obviously, the notion of ten emanations creates conflict with the single God theology of classical Judaism. Is Kabbalah polytheistic? Not really, but the godhead referenced is the Ein Sof, or Without Limit. If God is everything and limitless, it makes little sense to speak of God as one or as many. The fact that the emanations make up the human does not make the human divine. The earthly beings are human and the emanations are the archetypes. Sounds a tad Jungian, right? Sometimes emanations are referred to as powers or lights or divine intellects.

The emanations are clearly the revelation of God. Here is how it works. We cannot hear divine speech. Rather, when God talks we pick it up as thoughts. The other emanations work the same way. We do not see the divine expression. We see its manifestation. Remember Plato’s image of the shadows on the wall of the cave. There is something highly platonic about sefirot. The term “sefirot” roots in the same word as the word “sapphire”. The sephirot are the divine radiance. Compare that to the seven Hindu Chakras, which are seen as energy sources within the body. Sefirot are manifestations in the human of attributes of God. Chakras are internal energy sources.

From highest to lowest, the ten sephirot are the Keter or Crown, the infinite light of the Creator, which is the name of God in Exodus: Ehyeh Asher Ehyer, I am what I am. This sephirah exists above intellectual consciousness. There are then sephirot that are the conscious intellectual powers: Hokhman or wisdom and Binah or understanding. Hokhman, which is the flash of an idea before it is delimited, is male, while Binah, the flash of understanding that gives birth to emotions, reason, and understanding is female. In the middle is Da’at, which is the conscious intellectual understanding of God. D’at is the central state of unity or the Tree of Life. These are followed by the six conscious emotional powers: Chesed or kindness, Gevurah or severity, Tiferet or beauty, Netzach which is victory or persistence, Hod or glory, surrender, withdrawal, and Yesod, foundation or coherent knowledge. The first three: kindness, severity and beauty are primary. Victory, glory, and foundation are secondary emotions needed to implement the primary emotions. Finally, at the bottom we come to the female sephirah of Machut or kingship.

These ten sephirot are associated with the four planes of existence of the Zohar. Each plane is progressively further removed from consciousness of the divine, until, in our world, it is possible to deny God. The four worlds are the world of emanation in which the light of the Ein Sof radiates, the world of creation, the world where souls and angels have self-awareness but no form, the world of formation, where form and limitations occur, and finally, the world of action which is physical. There are also three pillars, the central pillar of mildness, the right pillar of mercy, and the left pillar of severity.

Okay, so what? Are the sephirot just some bizarre and opaque way to understand the world, having the same aim as the Hindu Chakras or Freud’s ego, id, and super ego? The answer is yes, but the critical difference is that the sephirot come directly from God. Humans are merely the screens on which God projects His characteristics. Sefirot are not intermediary beings; they are God Himself. The model used is the candle that can light other candles and lose none of its own radiance. And so, the sephirot are part of the world of unification, as opposed to the world of separation.

The doctrine of the sephirot is the main tenet dividing the Kabbalah from traditional Jewish philosophy. Jewish philosophy, particularly the dividing of the attributes of action from the essential attributed of God, was transformed by Kabbalah into the theosophic concept of a Godhead which was divided into realms or planes which, in the eyes of the beholder, appeared as lights, potencies, and intelligences, each of unlimited richness and profundity, whose content man could study and seek to penetrate. Indeed, the anatomical structure of the sephirot soon led to a description of God based on the human structure. To oversimplify, Kabbalism says that we are fundamentally divine. Traditional Judaism says we are fundamentally human.

This tree of ten or eleven sephirot became the source of wild mathematical and organic imagery. The top and bottom five, the three columns, the male/female split, four elements, four winds, four metals. For Jewish voodoo, little beats the emanations. Each sephirah is connected to every other sephirah and each line of connection is identified with specific characteristics of God. To make matters more interesting, each sephirah comprises all others successively in an infinite reflection. So, for example, there are 620 pillars of light in Keter, and 32 ways in Hokhman, 50 gates in Binah, and 72 bridges in Chesed.

Let me try to put this together. Kabbalah is esoteric, meaning that it was internal knowledge not generally accessible to outsiders. Kabbalah is Gnostic, focusing on the secret meaning of words. Kabbalah is highly symbolic. Kabbalah is filled with mathematical and logic tricks and games. Kabbalism, like Judaism, was fundamentally aimed at understanding human’s relationship to God. Obviously, humans have a somewhat better understanding of how humans work than how God works. So, the Kabbalists created a vision of God as a projection of the human. Instead of creating humans in God’s image, the Kabbalists created a God in human image. In doing so, they departed, in a very fundamental way, from traditional Judaism. But, they also created a philosophy of God that was far more immediate, far more accessible than what traditional Judaism offered.

3. The Zohar

I will now move on to the Zohar. The word means radiance and refers to a group of books that form the spine of Kabbalah. Written primarily in 13th Century Spain, but claimed to have been written in 2nd Century Palestine, the Zohar is asserted by Kabbalists to be an essential part of the Oral Torah. As you know, the Written Torah is the Pentateuch, the five books. Everything else -- the prophets, the writings, the apocryphal, the Talmud, the Midrash – is part of the Oral Torah. The Zohar was likely written by Moses de Leon in the 1200’s, but he claims that the book was written by Shimon bar Yachi in the 2nd century. Legend holds that during a time of Roman persecution, Rabbi Shimon hid in a cave for 13 years, studying the Torah with his son, Elazar. During this time he is said to have been inspired by the prophet Elijah to write the Zohar.

So, what is the Zohar? First and foremost, it is well-nigh unreadable. It does embrace of dualistic view of deity. In Eros and Kabbalah, Moshe Idel of Hebrew University argues that the fundamental distinction between the rational-philosophic strain of Judaism and theosophic-mystical Judaism, as exemplified by the Zohar, is the mystical belief that the Godhead is complex, rather than simple, and that divinity is dynamic and incorporates gender, having both male and female dimensions. These polarities must be conjoined (have yihud, "union") to maintain the harmony of the cosmos. Professor Idel labels this point of view as "ditheism," holding that there are two aspects to God, and the process of union as "theoeroticism." This ditheism, the dynamics it entails, and its reverberations within creation is arguably the central interest of the Zohar, making up a huge proportion of its content.

An alternative approach is set forth by Professor Elliot Wolfson of NYU. Wolfson likewise recognizes the importance of heteroerotic symbolism in the Kabbalistic understanding of the divine nature. The oneness of God is perceived in androgynous terms as the pairing of male and female, the former characterized as the capacity to overflow and the latter as the potential to receive. Where Wolfson breaks with Idel and other scholars of the Kabbalah is in his insistence that the consequence of that heteroerotic union is the restoration of the female to the male. Just as, in the case of the original Adam, woman was constructed from man, and their carnal cleaving together was portrayed as becoming one flesh, so the ideal for kabbalists is the reconstitution of what Wolfson calls the male androgyne. Much closer in spirit to some ancient Gnostic dicta, Wolfson understands the eschatological ideal in traditional Kabbalah to have been the female becoming male. So we go from the sexual to the sexist.

Let me read you a sample of the Zohar:

Woe unto the man, says Shimon ben Yochai, who asserts that this Torah intends to relate only commonplace things and secular narratives; for if this were so, then in the present times likewise a Torah might be written with more attractive narratives. In truth, however, the matter is thus: The upper world and the lower are established upon one and the same principle; in the lower world is Israel, in the upper world are the angels. When the angels wish to descend to the lower world, they have to don earthly garments. If this be true of the angels, how much more so of the Torah, for whose sake, indeed, the world and the angels were alike created and exist. The world could simply not have endured to look upon it. Now the narratives of the Torah are its garments. He who thinks that these garments are the Torah itself deserves to perish and have no share in the world to come. Woe unto the fools who look no further when they see an elegant robe! More valuable than the garment is the body which carries it, and more valuable even than that is the soul which animates the body. Fools see only the garment of the Torah, the more intelligent see the body, the wise see the soul, its proper being; and in the Messianic time the 'upper soul' of the Torah will stand revealed.

If this is confusing, perhaps the confusion can be lifted if you stop thinking of the Torah as a book or a scroll. No, to the Zohar, the Torah is a living organism, a sentient being. The Torah dons clothes just like you and I do.

The Zohar posits four types of biblical interpretation: Peshat, or literal meaning, Remez, allusion or allegorical meaning, Derash, by compassion or illustration, that is, the metaphorical meaning, and Sod, its secret, hidden meaning. The initial letters of the words form together the word Pardes, which means paradise. The mystic meaning is the highest essence of Torah.

Kabbalism holds that the Torah is a living organism woven of holy names that not only denote the object referred to but are the object. In fact, the Torah is seen as the Name of God and a living body with a soul. The Torah differs from your body and mine in only one meaningful way: we have organs that are not vital. There is no part of the Torah that is not essential. Obscure, apparently meaningless passages form the springboard from which the Zohar leaps. By the way, the heart of the organism is the written Torah. The mouth is the oral Torah. The words do not serve as symbols to denote something else. The words are the thing in itself. Words, hence, have power, perform magic.

4. The Tetragrammaton

This leads us to a discussion of the Tetragrammaton of the name of God. The most closely guarded and most sought-after of secret knowledge has to do with the Tetragrammaton Yud Hay Vav Hay. These four letters form the secret name of God. Is it Yahweh or Jehovah or Adonai? Do you read the letters backwards as Hu Hi or He/She? If we knew how to pronounce these letters, the mystics claimed, we would have the power of God. The word is the power. And, the power of God is, as we know from Genesis 1, the power to create life. The Kabbalists did not stop with the Tetragrammaton. They believed the entire Torah was the name of God. The spaces and the vowels were just one way of reading the scroll. Divide the letters differently, use different vowels, and you have another true story of human creation.

And why would the Torah begin with a Bet, not an Aleph? An Aleph has no sound of its own; it takes its sound from the vowels and the surrounding letters. What is the Aleph but a breath of air? Is it not the breath of God that created Adam in Genesis 2? By the way, the Tetragrammaton occurs 6,828 times in the Hebrew text of both the Bible. It does not appear in the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, or Esther. It first appears in the Hebrew text in Genesis 2:4.

The take away from this is Kabbalah is filled with magic. The Tetragrammaton is very much like Abracadabra in Fantasia. Say the secret word, win the power to create the world. Words have power. Words are living beings. The positive message is to be careful what you say because words have far more power than we know. The downside is that this leads to a fanciful view of reality.

5. Shabbetai Zvi

And speaking of fanciful views of reality, I will now discuss perhaps the most bizarre character in the entire history of Judaism, Shabbetai Zvi. Even after Shabbetai’s departure from Judaism, the Shabbatean Movement continued and, in fact, continues to this day. Judaism has always been a messianic religion, praying for the coming of the Moshiach, so the claims of Shabbetai fell on fertile ground. Yet, the 1660’s were a particularly propitious time for such claims due to the wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Poland and Russia starting with the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648. This was followed by the Russian-Swedish war of 1655 that was fought literally over the homes of the Jews. Torment, misery and oppression were more than traditional Judaism could explain. At the same time, Kabbalah’s spiritual renewal in Safed, under the leadership of Issac Luria was spreading and becoming dominant in Jewish life throughout the world. The Lurianic form of Kabbalism was more mystical than the older contemplative form.

Zvi was born in Smyrna, a major trading center, allegedly on the 9th of Av, a Sabbath no less, in 1626. Shabbatai’s father, Mordecai, was a poor chicken dealer from the country. He moved to Smyrna, became the agent of an English trading house, and became quite wealthy. At Cheder Shabbatai excelled in Talmud but was weak in Halakha. He became a rabid devotee of Lurianic Kabbalah. Shabbetai loved the asceticism and mortification of the body. He married early but, in keeping with Kabbalistic traditions, refused to have intercourse with his wife. She sought a Get which he freely gave. It happened again with his second wife. Shabbatai was likely bipolar, falling into deep depressions and then becoming frenzied, restless, given to ecstatic visions. He felt compelled to eat nonkosher food, to speak the forbidden Tetragrammaton, and commit other holy sins.

Note that during the first half of the 17th century, there was a burst of millenarianism. Christian authors set the apocalyptic year at 1666. Did this burst of millenarianism travel from England to Mordecai and then to Shabbetai, leading him to believe that he was the messiah? Gershom Scholem says no. Scholem relies on the fact that the Sabbatians timetable for redemption placed the major events a year early or a year late.

On the other hand, the Zohar seemed to indicate that the year 1648 was the year of the coming of the messiah. Indeed, despite the fact he was only 22 at the time, Shabbatai revealed himself at Smyrna to a group of followers as the true redeemer, designated by God to overthrow the pagan nations and restore the kingdom of Israel. He proclaimed his mission by pronouncing the Tetragrammaton in public. This act did not gain him a tremendous following but he remained in Smyrna for several years leading the life of a mystic. The college of rabbis was not amused and placed a ban of cherem or excommunication on him. In the early 1650’s he and his followers were banished. He showed up a few years later in Constantinople and found a sidekick named Abraham ha-Yakini who forged an ancient manuscript showing that Abraham predicted Shabbetai’s birth in the year 5386.

Fortified by this document, known as The Great Wisdom of Solomon, Shabbatai moved to Salonica, the heartland of kabbalism. He won numerous adherents, partly by a number of publicity stunts, including a marriage to the Torah. Finally the rabbis of Salonica had enough and banished him as well. Shabbatai moved: to Alexandria, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Smyrna and finally Cairo. In Cairo lived a very paradoxical fellow named Raphael Joseph Halabi. He was the mint-master and a tax farmer for the Ottoman government and, consequently, enormously rich. To the outside world, he was a Donald Trump, living luxuriously. Privately, Halabi led an ascetic life, fasting and scourging his body. Halabi became a great disciple and promoter of Shabbatai. Armed with disciples and money, Shabattai did what every self-respecting messiah does: he traveled to Jerusalem. Zvi had a great voice and would spend the entire night singing the psalms. He would pray at the graves of the pious. He gave candy to children. But he had to return to Cairo in a hurry. It seems the Ottomans were about to destroy the Jewish community. Zvi became the negotiator. He did what any good negotiator does. He found out the Ottoman’s price. He got the money from Halabi and paid off the Turks. Presto. Shabbatai Zvi became the deliverer of the Jews.

Enter Sarah. During the Chmielnicki massacres in Poland, a six year old Jewish orphan was found by Christians and sent to a convent. She escaped through a miracle ten years later and went to Amsterdam and then Livorno where she was an active and successful prostitute. She got it in her mind that she was going to the bride of the messiah, who was soon to appear. Word of Sarah reached Zvi in Cairo. He sent for her and they were soon married in Halabi’s house. Zvi claimed to have a dream that told him that the messiah had to marry an unchaste woman, like Hosea. Sarah turned out to be a charming and attractive wife who won Zvi followers.

With his harlot wife, Halabi’s money, and more followers than ever, Zvi returned to Palestine, stopping in Gaza. There he met his most important follower, Nathan of Gaza, who joined the messiah train by declaring himself the risen Elijah. In 1665, Nathan announced that the messianic age was going to begin the next year, just as the millenarians had said. Shabbatai spread the word, embellishing it with predictions that Nathan would conquer the world without bloodshed and that he, Shabbatai, would lead the lost ten tribes back to the holy land riding on a lion with a seven-headed dragon in its jaws. The rabbis of Jerusalem were understandably hostile so Shabbatai decided to return to Smyrna which he declared would be the holy city henceforth. On Rosh Hashanah in 1665, Shabbatai jumped the gun and declared himself messiah in the Smyrna synagogue, a declaration that was greeted with cheers and the blowing of the shofar.

Shabbatai became the absolute ruler of the Jewish community of Smyrna, deposing the old chief rabbi. He grew more popular, with Christians as well as Jews. Heinrich Oldenburg wrote to Baruch Spinoza about the revolution taking place involving the return of the Jews. Many prominent rabbis became followers. There was a report of a ship with silk sails manned by Hebrew speaking sailors off Scotland. The Jewish community of Avignon made plans to emigrate en masse to the new Israel. With pogroms abounding, the Jews of Europe were ready to believe in the coming of the messiah.

So, what did Shabbatai stand for? Well, with the coming of the messiah, halakha was no longer required. Fast days became days of feasting and rejoicing. The covenant involved no obligations. Freedom from the rules of kashrut, communal meals, group sex, ecstatic singing, occult reading of the Torah, equality of women, and openness to other religions appear to aspects of Shabbatai’s religion. Now, Zvi was not a systematic thinker, but Nathan of Gaza was. Nathan took the Lurianic doctrine of zimzum, or divine contraction, and added to it. This division of the world into the thoughtful light and the thoughtless light is way too complicated to explore within the confines of our brief 24 hour fast. Yet, Nathan’s doctrine provided the theoretical underpinning to explain Zvi’s apostasy. You see, Zvi is the mystical counterpart of the red heifer. He purifies the unclean but, in the process, becomes unclean himself. As throughout kabbalism, we see a dialectic paradigm. Opposites defining each other, complementing each other, and ultimately becoming the same. Light and darkness; thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness, God and Satan, and eventually good and evil all become one.

In any case, come 1666, Zvi’s world began to crumble. He moved to Constantinople because some fellow prophesized that Zvi would take over the sultan’s crown. The Grand Vizier, of course, had him arrested. Zvi used bribes to buy lenient treatment for his two months in jail before being transferred to the state prison. There, he lived opulently on the gifts from rich adherents. A competing would-be messiah, Nehemiah ha-Kohen, met him in prison, a meeting that ended in mutual recrimination and, perhaps, a Shabbataian plot to murder Nehemiah. Nehemiah escaped to Constantinople where he got an audience Sultan Mehmed IV and told him of Shabbatai’s treasonous plots. The Sultan had Shabbatai transferred to a harsher prison but, in the process, the sultan’s doctor, a former Jew, advised Shabbatai to convert to Islam. On September 16, 1666, Shabbatai appeared before the sultan, threw off his Jewish garb, placed a turban on his head, and announced his embrace of the religion of Mohammed. Mahmed was well pleased and rewarded Shabbatai with the job of doorkeeper. To complete his conversion, Shabbatai was forced to take an additional wife. Shabbatai complied.

Shabbatai’s followers did not fare as well. They were devastated, a condition exacerbated by the taunting of Muslims and Christians. Some of Zvi’s followers attempted to keep the movement alive. Zvi did not disappear however. At times he would revile Judaism. At other times he seemed to embrace it. He told the sultan he was meeting with Jews to bring them to Islam, and he was successful in producing a number of conversions. Gradually, however, the Turks grew tired of Shabbatai’s schemes. He was banished. One day he was found in a village near Constantinople singing psalms in a tent with Jews. The grand vizier banished Shabbatai to a small town in Montenegro where he died on Yom Kippur 1676.

Shabateanism was the largest and most momentous messianic movement in Jewish history since, at least the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 60 C.E. Yes, there are the classic economic and historical reasons for the Shabbatean thunderstorm. But far more important, at least according to Gershom Scholem, is the profound metamorphosis in the Jewish religious world caused by the spiritual renewal centered in Safed, largely around Issac Luria. Kabbalism had become the dominant steam of Judaism. The Lurianic kabbalism blended messianism with mysticism. The sparks of divinity are dispersed, just like the Jews are dispersed in exile. These sparks are held captive by the power of evil. Final redemption will not come through one messianic act. Redemption will come through a long chain of activities that prepare the way. This is the true meaning of tikkun olam: the process by which the shattered elements are restored to harmony. The messiah himself is only the last stage after the Jewish people have worked to restore harmony. Lurianism held that the process of restoration had been nearly completed and redemption was just around the corner. So, even places that were largely free of oppression – Amsterdam, Lugano, Salonika – became hotbeds of Sabbateanism because of the huge influence of Lurianic kabbalism.

So what are we to make of Shabbatai Zvi? Clearly, he is the undisputed world record holder for the title of weirdest Jewish historical figure. But, it is a cop-out to just dismiss him as weird. There have been lots of weird Jews, some of them members of this congregation. What is wild about this case is that a large segment of the worldwide Jewish population became passionate and contributing devotees of this weirdo. What came over our ancestors? Was the oppression so bad? Was classical Judaism so irrelevant and stifling? Sadly, there are many cases in history of collective hysteria, many of them with far more dire consequences than anything Zvi produced. Certainly, we, as Jews, should be embarrassed by the story of Shabbatai Zvi. And, we need to use that embarrassment to be on our guard against being taken in by such outlandishness again.

6. Gematria

I still want to cover a few other kabbalistic concepts before I conclude. One of my favorites is gematria which involves explaining a word or group of words in the Torah by substituting other letters of the alphabet or numbers for them in accordance with a set system. This set system has to do mainly with assigning numerical values to the letters and then doing calculations. Gematria is surely an activity for people with way too much time on their hands. It did not start with the kabbalists. For example, the reason there are 39 categories of work prohibited on the Sabbath is because of the phrase Elleh ha-davarim in Exodus 35:1, i.e. these are the things that God has commanded you to do, with Elleh ha-davarim translated as these are the things. So, devarim indicates two because it is plural. The additional article “ha” makes it three. The numerical equivalent on Elleh is 36. Add the 36 to the 3 and you get 39. Simple, no?

But, if the kabbalists did not invent gematria, they certainly carried it to unprecedented and unmatched heights. The major exponent was Eleazar of Worms. He pointed out that the verse, “I have gone down into the nut garden” in Song of Songs is equivalent to the verse, “This is the depth of the chariot” referring to Elijah’s fiery chariot. One of the principal Shabbatean books is based entirely on the gematria surrounding the phrase Shema Yisrael.

Gematria grew more complicated over time. In addition to the numerical value of a word, some 72 different forms of gematriac analysis developed. You may try them at home and arrive at a new understanding of the role of the divine in human life. Let’s take the number 333, which is 3 X 3 X 37, all of which are truncated triangular numbers, a concept dear to kabbalists and opaque to everyone other than true mathematicians. Still, kabbalists have argued 333 is the value of the word "snow"(שֶׁלֶג). 333 is the value of the words “all the inner chambers” (כָּל חַדְרֵי בָטֶן). 333 is the value of the phrase "To You my heart has spoken" (לְךָ אָמַר לִבִּי). 333 is the value of the phrase "And it was day" (וַיְהִי בֹקֶר). This phrase appears at the end of the account of each day of creation, implying that 333 relates to the power to differentiate between day and night. 333 equals 3 times the value of "mask" (מַסְוֶה), referring to the mask worn by Moses in order to conceal the tremendous light shining from his face and mentioned 3 times in 3 consecutive verses. 333 is the value of "the darkness" (הַחשֶׁךְ). This word appears only 3 times in the Pentateuch, twice in the account of creation and once when Moses recounts the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Thus, "the darkness" actually represents the highest level of revelation of God's word, which cannot be grasped (and therefore is seen as darkness). As its first appearance, this word is the 39th word of the Torah, alluding to the 39 lights of dew that represents the essential highest light of the Torah (which therefore seems like darkness). The 39 lights of dew are the revelation of the Torah with which God will resurrect the dead. This word also rectifies loss of memory, specifically the inability to recall God always. So snow, darkness, light, mask, and day are all closely related. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

7. Lilith

Enough of gematria. Let’s move to Lilith, Judaism’s central female demon. She is mentioned once in scripture, in Isaiah 34:14, where the prophet describes the hell that God will create in His vengeance if the people do not obey:

They shall name it No Kingdom There, and all its princes shall be nothing.
Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses.
It shall be the haunt of jackals, and abode for ostriches.
Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other.
There too Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.


Where does this Lilith come from? She was created before Eve. According to the midrash, she was made for Adam from the earth, just like Adam. She irritated God by arguing that she and Adam were created equally and, therefore, she was entitled to equal rights. God said no. She became disgruntled, used the name of God in wrath, and fled to embark on her demonic career. As such, she has become something of a feminist icon.

Lilith combines two demonic archetypes: the seducer of men and the strangler of children. She is the evil counterpart of the Shekinah, the feminine Godhead. She is married to the devil Samael. One thing that really, really bothered kabbalists was maturbation, onanism, and particularly nocturnal emissions, all forms of spilling one’s seed. In many stories, Lilith comes to righteous men at night and, though her evil powers, forces them to ejaculate. This seed is used to create demons who plague their father. Indeed, the custom of ten men circling a coffin seven times while chanting psalms is to keep the demons from stealing the soul of the deceased. Listen to this 1717 document:

If a man’s seed escapes him, it gives rise, with the help of a female demon and Lilith, to evil spirits, which however die when the time comes. When a man dies and his children begin to weep and lament, these evil spirits come too, wishing, along with the other children, to have their part in the deceased as their father; they tug and pluck at him, so that he feels the pain, and God Himself, when He sees this noxious offspring by the corpse, is reminded of the dead man’s sins. Jews in their lifetime sternly ordered their children not to make the slightest plaint or weep until the dead body in the cemetery had been purified by washing, cleansing, and the cutting of the finger and toe nails, because these unclean spirits are thought to have no further part in the body, once it is cleansed.

Lilith is closely associated with the Queen of Sheba, based on the myth that Sheba was a jinn, half human and half demon. One kabbalistic author asserted that the riddles Sheba posed to Solomon are a repetition of the words Lilith used to seduce Adam.

There exists a long history of amulets to protect childbearing mothers and infants from Lilith. The amulet contains the names of three angels who prevail over Lilith. Some amulets contain the following story: the prophet Elijah met Lilith on her way to the house of a woman in childbirth to give her the sleep of death, to take her son and drink his blood, to suck the marrow of his bones and to eat his flesh. Elijah excommunicated her whereupon Lilith vowed not to harm women in childbirth whenever she saw or heard her name.

8. Hasidism

Finally, I want to discuss the relationship of Hasidism to kabbalism. Following the demise of Shabbatai Zvi in 1676, a sharp split took place in the Jewish community. Polish Jewry continued to embrace kabbalism, while Lithuanian Jewry was under the sway of orthodox, traditional rabbis. The Cossack Uprising and the subsequent Turkish invasion left Lithuania depopulated. Polish Jews filled the void and, with them, came a rise in mysticism. At the same time, rabbinism, which in Poland had become transformed into a system of religious formalism, no longer provided a satisfactory religious experience to many Jews. Although traditional Judaism had adopted some features of kabbalism, it adapted them to fit its own system: it added to its own ritualism. The asceticism of those who saw the essence of earthly existence only in fasting, in penance, and in spiritual sadness was suitable for hermits, but did not work for most Jews.

Into this situation was born Israel ben Eliezar, the Bal Shem Tov. Born in 1698, his fame as a healer spread not only among the Jews, but also among the non-Jewish peasants and the Polish nobles. Posthumous books about the Bal Shem Tov describe his spiritual powers and knowledge, miracle working, and ability to predict the future. In turn, these notions were passed on to his saintly students and successors, and shaped the Hasidic doctrine of the tzaddik or rebbe, a righteous leader who channels Divine sustenance to his followers. The particular Hasidic emphasis on this concept of the tzaddik became one of the ideas that made Hasidism unique. To this day, Hasidic communities are organized around a Rebbe who combines the role of teacher of Judaism with a charismatic spiritual example.

The teachings of the Baal Shem Tov offered a folk spiritual revival, while also giving the scholarly elite a new depth and approach to mysticism. Hasidism gave a ready response to the burning desire of the common people; in the simple, stimulating, and comforting faith it awakened in them. The scholars attracted to Hasidism also sought to learn selfless humility and simple sincerity from the common folk. In contrast to other sectarian teaching, early Hasidism aimed not at dogmatic or ritual reform, but at a deeper psychological one. It aimed to change not the belief, but the believer. By means of psychological suggestion, it created a new type of religious man, a type that placed emotion above reason and rites, and religious exaltation above knowledge. Traditional devotion to Jewish study and scholarship was not replaced, but was spiritualized as a means to cleave to God. The great activity of Jewish study could, in contrast, offer the scholar spiritual peril, if it contributed to their sense of ego, and therefore a barrier with God's presence.

So, why do Hasidim wear clothes that would have been fashionable in Poland in 1720? That’s easy: because their fathers did. When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt they didn't change their mode of dress and become exactly like their captors. It is thought that this factor merited them being saved in the Exodus. So the Hassidim believe that if they wear the same clothes as centuries ago, it will protect them against assimilation.

9. Conclusions

Let me try to sum this up. What should we make of Kabbalism? Let me say what it is not. It is not traditional Judaism. In many, many ways it is incompatible with both traditional rabbinic Judaism and with modern, rational Judaism. It is magical, folklorish, polytheistic or, at least, di-theistic, and idol-worshipping. It is also not some new age schtick. It was serious, intense, not meant to be dabbled at. At the same time, it has had a profound influence on modern Jews. We hang mezuzahs. We do not name babies after living people. We cover mirrors when we sit shiva. We avoid writing an “o” in the word God.

Tradition has it that no one should study Kabbalah unless they are over 40, happily married, know the Torah backwards and forward, and do not masturbate. That view is wrong. We, as Jews should be literate in Kabbalah to know where we came from, to know who we are. Kabbalah may not provide for you answers to fundamental questions about who we are and the purpose of our lives. It certainly does not address those questions for me. But, Kabbalah is a critical link in the evolution of Judaism. To teach, as our religious schools often do, that modern Judaism is the lineal descendant of Hillel and Maimonides is just wrong. To understand where we are today, we need to know how we got there. Kabbalah was a huge block in the foundation of modern Judaism.