Chapter 104. Kabbalah: From the Bahir and the Zohar to Lurianic Safed

Kabbalah, the “received” tradition of Jewish mysticism, is the single most important body of doctrine behind the Western esoteric tradition. The Renaissance magus, the Rosicrucian, the nineteenth-century occultist and the Scottish Rite Freemason all claimed to draw on it. Its documented history as a theosophical system starts in twelfth-century Provence with the Sefer ha-Bahir. It reached classic form in thirteenth-century Castile with the Zohar, and it was rebuilt in sixteenth-century Safed by Isaac Luria. This chapter follows that arc, setting the traditional claim of antiquity beside the critical account [Wikipedia: Kabbalah].

The Sefer ha-Bahir: parables of the king

The library holds the Bahir (“Brilliance” or “Illumination”) in several editions. One is catalogued under the traditional author, Rabbi Nehunia ben HaKana [Nehunia ben HaKana (attrib.), The Book of Illumination, #78434]. The attribution is traditional. Aryeh Kaplan accepts it and calls Rabbi Nehuniah “the greatest esoteric master of his time”. He writes that “it is from Rabbi Nehuniah that we have the Bahir, one of the oldest of all Kabbalistic texts”, the book in which “we find the earliest discussion of the Sefirot, as well as the doctrine of reincarnation” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, “The Hekhalot School”].

Its usual teaching device is the royal parable. The thirty-two paths of wisdom are “like a king who was in the innermost of many chambers. The number of such chambers was 32, and to each one there was a path.” The king does not reveal “his hidden and concealed secrets” to all comers. Instead “he touches the Daughter, and includes all the paths in her and in her garments” [Sepher Ha-Bahir, #79998]. Alexandrian notes that the Bahir names only three of the sefirot and that Isaac the Blind “probably invented” the names of the rest [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, “Misterele Cabalei”].

The Zohar: authorship disputed

The Sefer ha-Zohar (“Book of Splendour”) appeared in Castile in the last decades of the thirteenth century. Kaplan describes its appearance: “Rumors began to fly that an ancient text had been discovered, stemming from the famed Second Century mystic, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. This remarkable manuscript was being published by an important Kabbalist of that time, Rabbi Moshe de Leon (1238–1305). By 1281, a number of mystical texts were already quoting passages from this text” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, “Publication of the Zohar”]. Kaplan records the rival stories, including “whispers that Rabbi Moshe himself had written these books,” and the inquiry of Rabbi Isaac of Acco: de Leon “swore that the manuscript was an authentic text”, but after his death his widow “claimed that the manuscript had never existed.” Kaplan himself defends authenticity, judging it “difficult to imagine that a saint such as Rabbi Moshe would violate the Third Commandment and swear falsely” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999].

The traditional editions print the text under Shimon bar Yochai’s name. Their commentary tells how he “buried himself neck deep in the ground for 13 years, during his learning of the Zohar” [Shimon bar Yochai (attrib.), Zohar, #52967; The Zohar, #72058].

Gershom Scholem gives the critical account. He rejects Heinrich Graetz’s picture of de Leon as a forger driven by “greed for profit,” but concludes that “Moses de Leon must indeed be considered the actual author of the book.” His grounds are that de Leon “was in possession of the original work and circulated it from 1280 on,” so that Isaac ibn Sahula “read The Secret Midrash as early as 1281,” and that de Leon’s own Hebrew writings from 1286 on “reveal an author who lives and moves wholly in the specific world of the Zohar” [Scholem, Zohar. The Book of Splendor, #53020, “Origin and Authorship”]. Alexandrian summarises Scholem’s linguistic analysis: eighteen treatises share one author and show “the spirit of thirteenth-century medieval Hebrew” behind the Aramaic. He adds that the translator Jean de Pauly held to its antiquity [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, “Zoharul”]. Nesta Webster, following Paul Vulliaud, takes a middle position: “the Zohar was not the composition of Moses de Leon, but a compilation made by him from various documents dating from very early times” [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. I].

The Zohar is not a single book in form. It is “a Midrash (a biblical commentary)” that “follows the same pattern of division of biblical books used in midrashim” [The Book of Self Creation, #77740, ch. 8]. Alexandrian describes it as “an ensemble of treatises” recording the discourses of Simeon ben Yohai with his son Eleazar and his disciples. It was printed at Mantua (1558–1560) and Cremona [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, “Zoharul”]. Scholem writes that “from about 1500 to 1800” it stood “as a source of doctrine and revelation equal in authority to the Bible and Talmud” [Scholem, Zohar. The Book of Splendor, #53020, Introduction].

Ein Sof, the sefirot, the Shekhinah and the four worlds

The Zohar’s account of creation begins beyond all attributes: “Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the mystery of eyn sof, the Infinite… of no color whatever.” A “hidden, supernal point” then shone forth, and “beyond this point nothing can be known. Therefore it is called reshit, beginning” [Scholem, Zohar. The Book of Splendor, #53020, “The Beginning”]. In the section Scholem titles “The Ten Sefirot,” the emanations are compared to a source, a current, a sea and seven channels: “In this same wise has the Cause of causes derived the ten aspects of his Being which are known as sefirot, and named the crown the Source, which is a never-to-be-exhausted fountain of light, wherefrom he designates himself eyn sof, the Infinite” [Scholem, Zohar. The Book of Splendor, #53020, “The Ten Sefirot”].

Alexandrian lists the sefirot in descending order: Keter (Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Intelligence), Hesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzah, Hod, Yesod and Malkhut. He calls them “pure Intelligences of God” and treats them as the counterpart of the Gnostic aeons. On the Shekhinah, the indwelling divine presence, he reports the Zohar’s teaching that “the Shekhinah settles on the head of a man,” which he gives as the reason for covering the head [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675].

The four worlds were given their classic form in Kaplan’s Lurianic sources: “Atzilut (Nearness), the universe of the Sefirot, Beriyah (Creation), the universe of the Throne, Yetzirah (Formation), the universe of angels, and Asiyah (Making), the universe of forms” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, “The Ari”]. Mathers tabulated the same scheme for English occultists, assigning to each sefirah in “the Four Worlds” a divine name, archangel, angelic order, planet and “arch-devil” [Mathers (tr.), The Kabbalah Unveiled, #77911, Plate IV]. His translated “Book of Concealed Mystery” (Siphra Dtzenioutha) opens with the formula: “The Book of Concealed Mystery is the book of the equilibrium of balance.” Mathers glosses it as the doctrine “of counterbalanced power,” a “fundamental qabalistical idea” [Mathers (tr.), The Kabbalah Unveiled, #77911, Introduction].

Safed and Isaac Luria

The Safed school, Kaplan writes, “reached its zenith in the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572), commonly known as the Ari.” Kaplan calls the Ari “considered by many to have been the greatest of all Kabbalists” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, Introduction]. Alexandrian gives Luria’s dates as 1534–1582. He says Luria spent seven years as a hermit on the Nile before settling in Safed in 1569, and that his disciple Hayim Vital set out the teaching in the Etz Hayyim [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675].

Three doctrines dominate. On tsimtsum, Alexandrian writes that Luria “renewed metaphysics through the concept of tsimtsum (withdrawal, contraction), explaining that God, in order to make room for the universe he wished to create, withdrew partially into himself” [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675]. On shevirat ha-kelim, Kaplan writes that in the first stage, the “Universe of Chaos (Tohu),” the primitive sefirot “could receive God’s Light, but could neither give nor interact… they were overwhelmed by the Light and ‘shattered.’ This is the idea of the ‘Breaking of Vessels.'” The fragments fell from Atzilut to Beriyah, where “evil begins to manifest.” This happened so that man would have free choice, “necessary for the rectification of the Vessels” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, “The System”]. Tikkun is that rectification. The vessels are “rebuilt into the Partzufim,” each of which has 613 parts, “paralleling the 613 parts of the body, as well as the 613 commandments of the Torah.” Keeping the commandments is how man takes part in the repair [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999].

Speculative, meditative and practical Kabbalah; Idel against Scholem

Kaplan divides the tradition three ways. The theoretical Kabbalah includes the Zohar, the Bahir and Luria. The practical Kabbalah “was a kind of white magic,” using “divine names and incantations, amulets and talismans, as well as chiromancy, physiognomy and astrology.” The Ari and other theoretical Kabbalists “frowned on the use of such techniques, labeling them as dangerous.” Some of these techniques, he adds, “appear to have been preserved among the non-Jewish school of magic in Europe.” The meditative Kabbalah “stands between these two extremes” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, Introduction]. Its central Lurianic method is the yichud (unification) of divine names. The Zohar describes the meditator who must “unify the upper and lower levels… binding them so that all of them are a single knot in the Infinite Being (Ain Sof)” [Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, #45999, quoting Zohar 2:216a].

Alexandrian reports the opinion of “certain authors” that “only speculative Kabbalah is serious, the other being mere charlatanry.” He rejects it: “It would be unjust to believe” this, he writes, since Luria, the “unequalled master of operative Kabbalah,” also renewed metaphysics [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675].

Moshe Idel challenges the historiography itself. Scholem organised the field by “schools – or currents, as Gershom Scholem called them – and their chronological succession,” and “described Kabbalah as a fundamentally gnostic phenomenon.” Idel instead proposes “a phenomenological approach” built on the premise that “within Kabbalah there are two main currents: one theosophic-theurgic, the other ecstatic.” He objects that Kabbalah “is often presented as a body of theoretical knowledge, more a gnosis than a practical-experiential position toward reality.” He traces the ecstatic current back to Hekhalot techniques meant to produce “paranormal experiences of ascent to the Merkavah” [Idel, Cabala: Noi perspective, #46403, Introduction].

Occult, Masonic and polemical readings

Eliphas Levi taught the Kabbalah to a correspondent in ten letters. He states that “all the Qabalah is contained in what the masters call the thirty-two roads and the fifty gates.” [Levi, Elements of the Qabalah, #77581, “The Qabalah”]. Mathers, presenting what he called the “first English translation” of three books of the Zohar, offered the Zoharic Idras to “every biblical and theological student.” He presented the Qabalah as the “key” without which the Old Testament, and therefore the New, cannot be understood [Mathers (tr.), The Kabbalah Unveiled, #77911, Introduction].

Albert Pike, in the Knight of the Sun degree (XXVIII), writes: “All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it: everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all the illuminati, Jacob Bœhme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe to it their Secrets and their Symbols. The Kabalah alone consecrates the alliance of the Universal Reason and the Divine Word” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Degree XXVIII]. Pike names no source for the passage. Pike’s own preface states that he extracted “quite half” of the book from other writers, and René Guénon and Chris Hodapp, as reported on the reference shelf, hold that whole passages were taken from Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie [Wikipedia: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry].

Two library authors read the tradition with hostility. Nesta Webster accepts that an ancient secret tradition “in harmony with Christian teaching” survived in the Cabala. She argues that the later synagogue narrowed it into a doctrine of “salvation for the Jews alone.” She also presents the Toledot Yeshu as “the story of Christ according to the Jewish Cabalists.” She quotes Deschamps on the Cabala as “that science of demoniacal arts, of which the Jews were the initiators,” and holds that “the influence of the Jewish Cabalists cannot be ignored” in the rise of European magic [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, chs. I, IV]. Deanne Loper, writing for Christian readers, argues that the Messiah of modern Kabbalah, identified with Metatron, is “Another Jesus.” In her account the Kabbalist “uses occult methods to achieve union with the divine apart from faith in Jesus Christ” [Loper, Kabbalah Secrets Christians Need to Know, #75115, chs. 1–3].

Key points

• The Bahir, traditionally attributed to Nehunia ben HaKana, is the earliest sefirotic text in the library. It teaches through parables of a king and names only some of the sefirot.
• Kaplan reports that Moses de Leon (1238–1305) “published” the Zohar, which other texts were already quoting by 1281. Kaplan defends its antiquity. Scholem concludes de Leon was its author. Webster, after Vulliaud, calls it a compilation of older material.
• The core doctrines are Ein Sof, the ten sefirot, the Shekhinah as the indwelling presence, and the four worlds of Atzilut, Beriyah, Yetzirah and Asiyah.
• Luria’s Safed system adds tsimtsum, the breaking of the vessels and tikkun. In Kaplan’s account the repair is carried out through the 613 commandments.
• Kaplan separates theoretical, meditative and practical Kabbalah. Alexandrian rejects the view that only the speculative kind is “serious.”
• Idel replaces Scholem’s chronology of schools with a phenomenology of two currents, the theosophic-theurgic and the ecstatic.
• Levi and Mathers passed Kabbalah to modern occultism. Pike declares that all dogmatic religions and all Masonic symbols issue from it.
• Webster and Loper read Kabbalah as a source of anti-Christian or occult influence. These are positions held by those authors.