Kabbalah: Difference between revisions

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Kabbalah is a form of Jewish mysticism that either takes shape in 13th century Spain with a group of Jewish mystics, or during the Exodus while Moses was talking to God if you are a Jewish mystic. Different Jewish denominations have different stances towards Kabbalah. More modern denominations, such as Reform and Conservative Judaism, think Kabbalah itself is nonsense but the academic study of Kabbalah is valid scholarship. Chassidic Judaism, on the other hand, takes Kabbalah pretty seriously, and Orthodox Judaism has views in both camps. It has reached wide popularity via a shiny, Power-of-Positive-Thinking version that Madonna has been wearing since about 1997, but this is only one of the dozens of movements trying to claim the word as their own. Books about Kabbalah tend to have less in common with one another than books about cooking do.

'''Kabbalah''' is a form of Jewish mysticism that either takes shape in 13th century Spain with a group of Jewish mystics, or during the Exodus while Moses was talking to God if you are a Jewish mystic. Different Jewish denominations have different stances towards Kabbalah. More modern denominations, such as Reform and Conservative Judaism, think Kabbalah itself is nonsense but the academic study of Kabbalah is valid scholarship. Chassidic Judaism, on the other hand, takes Kabbalah pretty seriously, and Orthodox Judaism has views in both camps. It has reached wide popularity via a shiny, Power-of-Positive-Thinking version that Madonna has been wearing since about 1997, but this is only one of the dozens of movements trying to claim the word as their own. Books about Kabbalah tend to have less in common with one another than books about cooking do.

The word means "The Tradition" in Hebrew, and it usually means "The Secret Traditional Explanation of Everything," so it has been fights and collaborations between rivals since the beginning. Who wouldn't want to fight over that? The version of the Kabbalah that got big in the 13th century Spain was deeply entrenched in the Jewish religion and tended to deal with the questions that bothered 13th century Jews, such as "Why are we following these Laws?" "How did the Universe come about?" "What's with all these contradictions in the Bible?" They weren't new questions, but kabbalists found some new ways of asking them, usually by looking for hidden messages in the Torah using MATHS, reading Hebrew words as numbers, and numbers as the stuff the universe is made of. Particulars were debated, but the hidden message tended to be that the Universe is made of parts that are out of harmony, but if all Jews were to follow Jewish Law, the universe would be fixed. The Zohar and the writings of Abulafia are the classic from this period, the first being more like sacred adventure stories, and the second being training manuals for prophets. They both claimed to have the ancient secrets, but they disagreed on most specifics.