return to the source
"Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of a bellows ... God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot."
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Kaballah is part of the Jewish mystical tradition, especially that originating in twelfth century Spain. Its central text is the Zohar, which was written primarily by Moses de Leon although the later school of Isaac Luria expanded on many of his ideas. The Zohar is essentially a collection of commentaries on readings from the Torah (the Pentateuch) but the symbolic system that it develops represents a significant alternative cosmology to those great Greek systems that are usually understood to form the basis of the paradigm of "western" thought. Much in Kaballah is at odds with the rationalism of rabbinical Judaism, as exemplified by the broader body of Jewish ceremonial law outlined in the Talmud. It has been particularly popular but has also been criticised for importing Gnostic and Neoplatonic elements into Judaism.
The driving question is one of how man can ever hope to understand his relationship with the divine: if God transcends reality then how can we ever hope to know him. The Kaballah envisions that the godhead is a dynamic unity of divine substances whose structure depends upon humanity. This structure is essentially a detailed metaphor intended as an aid to meditation, whereby understanding the arrangement and operation of the structure brings us to an understanding of ourselves and our place in reality.
Ein Sof [the Infinite] represents the unknowable aspect of God. There is a part of him which is not involved in either the creation or the conduct of the world and will therefore always be beyond us. Insofar as God does make himself known however he does so through a series of mediators, which act to delimit his manifestation in the knowable world. Significantly, it is understood that the relationship between God and the world is a two-way connection. He created the world out of necessity and it remains a part of him. His actions have an affect on it and our actions have an affect on him. Since we originate in God, our ethical living is defined in terms of a return to the source of that which comes to us from the divine.
There are ten Sefirot [Emanations] which link God, beginning with Ein Sof, in a chain of relations down to existence, beginning with Adam Kadmon [Primordial Man]. The Sefirot are effectively the conduits through which God works, each representing an aspect of his nature and each understood in terms of our ability to meditate upon the nature of the divine. They are most commonly designated as follows: Keter [the Crown] represents the will-to-be and is the ground from which everything else flows. The closest that we can come to understanding the ground is to appreciate its antithetical differentiation from the thing-ness of reality. Hokmah [Wisdom] is the initial creative impulse, the sum of potentiality. Binah [Understanding] is when that impulse becomes a concrete thought and is thereby the sum of actuality. Hesed [Love] represents the unconditional compassion which God invests in creation. Gevurah [Power] acts as a counterpoint to Hesed whereby some conditionality must be imposed upon it otherwise the created world would simply be reabsorbed into the divine. Tiferet [Beauty] represents the articulation of the thought and it acts as a harmonizing balance between the competing mediation of Hesed and Gevurah. Nezah [Endurance] and Hod [Majesty] are understood to be a further pair of filters through which the divine relates to reality, operating as the manifestations of Hesed and Gevurah in acts benevolence and acts of judgement. Yesod [the Foundation] represents a transitional relation between the creativity of the divine and the fertility of created reality. Malkhut [Sovereignty] acts to synthesise the prior Sefirot and link them to reality, mediating the immanent aspect of God in the world.
Isaac Luria sought to synthesise the ideas of Kaballah into a myth which could give structure, meaning and purpose to life. He advanced the doctrine of Tsimsum [Withdrawal] according to which God had to make a place for the world by withdrawing from part of himself. This makes the notion of exile both central to creation and the original cause of evil (or simply not-God). With Tsimsum the appearance of evil becomes an intrinsic aspect of the creation process (instead of being a fault of humanity alone).
Adam Kadmon was the light that God sent out into the void that he had created and the Sefirot were the vessels intended to contain it. The three foremost to Ein Sof were able to contain their magnificence but the outer vessels shattered and sparks of light became sunk into matter. God reordered the vessels into five Partzifum [Figures]: Keter became Erech Anfin which is the union of Gods will with all being; Hokmah became Abba which is the active masculine principle; Binah became Imma which is the passive feminine principle; the fragments of Hesed, Gevurah, Tifferet, Nezah, Hod and Yesod were collected in Ze'er which is the male child; and Malkhut became Nukva which is the female child.
The five figures exist in four worlds of emanation, creation, formation and action, which are thereby understood to be the dimensions of our created reality. According to the doctrine of Tikkun [Restoration], it is the function of humanity to restore the world to its prelapsarian state, to return the light of Adam Kadmon to the source. By living in such a way as to pursue redemption we can free those sparks that were trapped by the Klippot [Shells], when the light escaped the shattering Sefirot into not-God.
The patterns of thought in Kaballah have had a broad influence. In the seventeenth century, synopses of the Zohar were translated into Latin as the Kaballah Denudata and began a movement of Christian Kaballism. It was also adopted by various Occult and Hermetic schools of thought. The Kaballah Denudata influenced many enlightenment thinkers and it is now recognised to have made a significant contribution to the ecumenical optimism characteristic of that era.