JEWISH
MYSTICISM - KABBALA
by Rabbi Lawrence
Kushner
A
mystic is someone who has the suspicion that the apparent brokenness,
discord, and discontinuities of everyday life conceal a hidden
unity. Just beneath the surface, everything is joined to everything
else. To a mystic, what we call reality is really only the myriad
refractions of that ultimate, underlying unity. Or, as we say
in Yiddish: Alz ist Gott—everything is God!
The
world, you and I, everything, resides within the divine All. God
is simply all there is. All reality is one and it is all God. And
therefore, the separateness, discreteness, boundariedness, and
autonomy of every individual and every thing is illusory. Everything
is but a manifestation of God. Or, in the words of the prophet
Isaiah, “The fullness of the whole earth is the
presence of God!” (Isaiah 6:3)
In
such a system, you obviously cannot have a relationship with
some thing of which you are already a dimension. You are simply
made of it. Ultimately, even the borderline between your consciousness
and the divine becomes blurred. There is no God outside the system
(That would mean that God wasn’t everything) to whom you
can complain, talk or offer thanks. Instead God
is the One through whom everyone and everything is joined to
everyone and everything. And prayer becomes an
occasion for contemplation, meditation, reciting the words of
the liturgy as an extended mantra.
In
Judaism the mystical tradition is called Kabbala—a
system that took shape in Twelfth and Thirteenth century
Provence and Castille, reaching its apogee with the appearance
of the Zohar. The great Israeli scholar, Moshe Idel, once
suggested that Kabbala can be characterized by three unique
ideas: Ayn Sof, sefirot, and mitzvot.
Let us take them one at a time.
The Ayn
Sof or God is the Oneness in which all being is dissolved
and from which being continuously emerges. Ayn
Sof is Hebrew for the One “without end.” Ayn
Sof is neither numeric nor mathematical. It means,
instead, without boundary, without definition, without
any characteristics whatsoever. Indeed, to say anything
about it at all violates the essential notion of the term. Ayn
Sof is the font, the source, the matrix, the substrate,
the mother-lode of being. For Kabbalists, therefore, creation
is not some event that happened in the past but a continuous
and ever-present process. When we express our gratitude
for the world, it is because it has literally been created
anew each day, each moment.
The
second characteristic of Kabbala is the process through
which this infinite One(ness) manifests itself and brings
creation into being. Simply
through being, by its very existence, there emerges from
the One a series of concentric emanations or sefirot,
literally, in Hebrew, numbers. Sefirot are a metaphor
for trying to comprehend how the One could possibly make
this world of so many apparently discrete and discordant
parts. The sefirot themselves are alternatively
described as both dimensions of the divine and the human
psyche, the steps in the emanative process of creation, and,
because everything is made of God, the sefirot are
also an image of infrastructure of reality itself. Every
dysfunction in our universe can be understood as the result
of a destabilization of the sefirot—which
are also the divine psyche. Performance of religious deeds
now becomes a kind of repair of and maintenance for the divine.
Finally,
classical Kabbalah is predicated on the idea that human
beings, through acts of goodness, worship, love, healing, and
giving or, mitzvot, are able to influence the divine. In
the Kabbalistic maxim: By means of awakening below comes awakening
on High. Kabbala, in other words, necessarily involves the performance
of righteous deeds. Kabbalah thus gives to the behavior of each
individual Jew literally cosmic importance.
Copyright ©2004
Lawrence Kushner
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