Kabbalah

Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, and its characteristic instrument is a diagram of how an infinite God becomes a finite world.

The problem it addresses is genuine and old: if God is without limit, how does anything limited come to exist? The Kabbalistic answer is emanation through ten sephiroth, Keter the crown, Chokmah wisdom, Binah understanding, Chesed loving-kindness, Gevurah severity, Tiferet beauty, Netzach endurance, Hod majesty, Yesod foundation and Malkuth the kingdom, arranged in three columns and connected by twenty-two paths corresponding to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The unlimited source above them is Ein Sof, that which has no end.

The structure is read on several registers at once, and this is what gives it its reach. The sephiroth are stages of divine self-disclosure; they are also faculties of the human soul, since a human being is made in the image; they are also the anatomy of the created world. The same diagram therefore serves as cosmology, psychology and a map of ascent, and the practitioner works up it.

The Lurianic development of the sixteenth century, from Isaac Luria at Safed, added the elements most people now associate with Kabbalah: tzimtzum, the divine contraction that makes a space for creation; the shattering of the vessels, in which the emanated lights broke the containers meant to hold them and scattered sparks into the material world; and tikkun, the repair, in which human observance gathers the sparks back. That scheme gives ordinary religious action cosmic consequence, and it is why Lurianic Kabbalah spread so fast and so far.

Techniques include letter permutation, contemplation of the divine names, and gematria, the reading of numerical values of words.

The tradition's literature is layered, and the dating of the layers has been one of the most consequential arguments in Jewish scholarship.

The earliest strand is not called Kabbalah at all: Merkabah and Hekhalot mysticism from late antiquity, concerned with ascent through heavenly palaces to the chariot-throne of Ezekiel's vision. The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, is a very short and very strange text on the ten numbers and twenty-two letters through which the world is made; its date is genuinely uncertain, with estimates spanning several centuries.

Kabbalah proper appears in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the Bahir and then the Zohar, which is its central book. The Zohar presents itself as the teaching of the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, recovered after a thousand years. Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern academic study of the subject, established on linguistic and historical grounds that it was substantially composed in thirteenth-century Castile, most probably by Moses de Leon. That conclusion is mainstream in scholarship and rejected by much of traditional Kabbalistic Judaism, which continues to hold the ancient attribution. Both positions should be reported; they are not reconcilable.

Access was traditionally restricted, by a rule of thumb requiring the student to be male, married, forty years old and already accomplished in Talmud, a restriction meant to keep speculative material away from the unprepared, and one that modern Kabbalah-teaching organisations have discarded entirely.

Two later developments carried it outward. Hasidism from the eighteenth century made Kabbalistic ideas the devotional property of ordinary Jews. And Renaissance Christian scholars produced a Christian Cabala, which read the sephiroth as prefiguring the Trinity and the incarnation.

Most people who encounter the Tree of Life in the English-speaking world encounter a Hermetic adaptation of it, and the differences from Jewish Kabbalah are substantial enough that treating the two as one thing produces confusion in both directions.

The line runs from Renaissance Christian Cabala through Eliphas Levi in the nineteenth century to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, and from there into virtually all modern Western ceremonial magic. What that tradition did was to make the Tree into a filing system for correspondences: each sephirah and each path was assigned a planet, a zodiac sign, an element, a tarot trump, a colour scale, an angel, a god-form from Egyptian and Greek pantheons, a plant, a metal, a perfume and a magical weapon. Crowley's Liber 777 is the tabulated result, and it remains the standard reference of the system.

The uses differ accordingly. Jewish Kabbalah is a contemplative and interpretive discipline pursued within Torah observance, in which the sephiroth illuminate scripture and commandment. The Hermetic version is operative: the Tree is a map to be travelled in ritual and visionary work, the paths are worked in sequence, and the correspondences are the material with which rituals are built.

Practitioners on the Jewish side have often regarded the adaptation as a misappropriation that detaches the structure from the observance that gives it meaning, and some Hermetic writers have used the spelling Qabalah for the Jewish tradition and Cabala or Kabbalah for the Christian and Hermetic ones precisely to keep the three apart. The spellings are not applied consistently by anybody.

Modern popular Kabbalah organisations, which teach to non-Jews and have attracted celebrity attention since the 1990s, are a further and quite recent development that established Kabbalists have largely disowned.