The early mystics meditated on the image of the fiery chariot, using it as a visual mantra. They described the path through the upper world to the heavenly chariot as dangerous and terrifying. It led past seven palaces filled with armies of angels. Rivers of fire flowed out of the sky as angels drew the chariot through the air. The goal of meditating on the chariot was to overcome the obstacles en route to the chariot itself and to see the image of the Lord seated on the throne. Reaching the throne required extensive spiritual training, tremendous focus and concentration, and a deeply founded desire to know God.
This early book introduces the idea of the ecstasy that comes from direct communion with God on a physical and emotional level (more on this in chapter 12.) This notion of communication with God forms the core of all Kabbalistic thought. The Mystery of the Chariot also introduces the idea that close encounters with God can be dangerous to untrained minds. Though the Torah indicates that any faithful Jews could communicate directly with God without risk, Kabbalists believed that contact with a force as infinite and omnipotent as God could lead to madness. For this reason, Kabbalists initially limited study of Kabbalah to married persons over forty who had studied the Torah and the Talmud.
The Mystery of the Beginning developed from a mystical interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, in which God created the universe and all the life within it. The Mystery of the Beginning explained that because God encompasses all of creation, humans are by default a part of God. Rather than merely accepting the biblical account of Creation, Kabbalists read meaning into every word of the Torah. They would ask questions like, What is implied by Eve coming from out of Adam? This penetrating, mystical interpretation of Genesis led Kabbalists to form their own account of Creation, and this became apparent with the publishing of The Mystery of the Beginning. Their account differed significantly from the traditional Jewish understanding of the origins of the universe, revealing a growing contrast between traditional Judaism and Kabbalism.
The Book of Creation is a short book that expands on the theories in The Mystery of the Beginning. The Book of Creation proposes that God created the world with thirty–two secret paths of wisdom. These paths of wisdom are composed of the ten emanations (sefirot) and the twenty–two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The first chapter of The Book of Creation explains the emanations—and this is the first time this concept of divine emanations appears in Jewish literature. The emanations of The Book of Creation differ from the ten “aspects of God” that appear much later in Kabbalistic thought. Here they take the form of numbers with mystical qualities, each one representing a stage of Creation and a pathway from and back to God. The Torah tends to personify God as a humanlike being who can talk and interact with people on earth—the familiar image of an old bearded man in the sky. The Book of Creation presents God as an unknowable, genderless force entirely devoid of form or emotion. In the Torah, God creates simply by using the power of his word, his command. But in The Book of Creation, God creates through emanations, or projections of its being. God becomes a part of the universe, everywhere and nowhere at once, a spirit with infinite power. This initial mystical theory—that the world was created through emanations of the Divinity—forms the foundation of Kabbalistic thought and separates it further from traditional Judaism. This concept also created much controversy. Everything about the emanations, from where they came from to what they mean, has been debated for many hundreds of years.
The Book of Brightness begins with a discussion of The Book of Creation, and the second part is an attempt to clarify the order of the emanations, which The Book of Creation describes as ten numbers. In The Book of Brightness the emanations are described for the first time as attributes of God’s being. In addition to representing a particular part of God, each emanation also corresponds to a stage in Creation and a character from the Bible.
Another concept that The Book of Brightness introduces for the first time is the Tree of Life, a visual representation of the ten emanations. The Book of Brightness describes the locations of each emanation on the Tree of Life. The Tree is intended to symbolize the body of “Adam Kadmon,” also known as “primordial man,” a prototype for the creation of human beings. Adam Kadmon is not the Adam of Adam and Eve in Genesis but a kind of mystical template for human beings that God made before creating them. He is proof that our being was created in God’s image. Like the Word, or Logos, that Adam Kadmon represents, we are a part of God. The Tree of Life was considered to reflect the body of Adam and the spiritual form of God linked symbolically in visual diagrams of the ten emanations. Kabbalah is in many ways a spiritual movement that is both thorough and obscure. As Kabbalists tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe, such as Creation and the birth of humankind, they argued for centuries over passages in the Torah. The closer they looked at words, the more mysterious the universe became. Though exceptionally difficult, The Book of Brightness arranged and organized Kabbalah’s sprawling ideas into a coherent form in one volume. Most importantly, it explained that the emanations are aspects of God’s being, not just numbers. The emanations represent God’s attributes, such as wisdom, mercy, and beauty, and Kabbalists believe they represent the core components to having a fulfilling life.
Today the Zohar is the most popular book of the Kabbalah. In 1280 CE, a Spanish mystic named Moses de Leon began circulating small booklets written in archaic Aramaic, an ancestral language to the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. De Leon claimed that the booklets were taken from ancient texts written by the great second–century rabbi Simeon ben Yohai. Rabbi Yohai, fleeing persecution by the Romans in Palestine, hid in a cave for thirteen years with his son, Eliezar. Legend has it that Elijah actually visited Yohai and his son in the cave, after which God inspired Yohai to write down the wisdom he gathered from Elijah’s teachings. De Leon claimed his pamphlets contained Yohai’s writing. Kabbalists believed de Leon’s story for hundreds of years. However, today some researchers believe de Leon wrote the pamphlets himself. The strongest argument against this is that de Leon was not a deeply spiritual man who was practicing deep meditative communion with God and was not a spiritually inspired poetic writer. The Zohar is poetic mystical wisdom, written in a style considered to be “automatic writing,” or, as Cayce refers to it, “creative writing,” with the Spirit inspiring the writer. This type of writing requires the writer to enter a mystical trance and write what comes to mind, no matter how scattered or unrelated. It is believed that this type of writing reaches through the veils of lower consciousness, allowing higher levels, even God’s consciousness, to come through. Others contend that the bizarre style of the Zohar results not from the automatic writing but from the contributions of several writers over hundreds of years.
The Zohar describes the journey of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai and ten companions through Galilee, the northern region of Palestine and formerly the kingdom of Israel. Along their journey, the travelers discuss their interpretations of the Torah and, specifically, the Torah’s main characters. The characters become a part of the narrative of the Zohar, their lives weaving in and out of those of Yohai and his group. The companions come and go gracefully within their own group, turning from one character to another. The Zohar uses the term Ein Sof for God, meaning the “Infinite Eternal.” Ein Sof is a departure from the traditional concept of divinity, which portrays God as a knowable presence, a being in the heavens that people can comprehend and feel. Ein Sof, on the contrary, is so vast that It is unknowable, beyond the boundaries of human comprehension. Kabbalists believe that, at most, they can know merely fragments of the Infinite Eternal, which they receive only through profound mystical experiences. The Zohar depicts God as a distant presence that sacrificed Its own being in order to create the universe.
Though the Zohar and its teachings spread quickly from Spain and Italy into other parts of Western Europe, it was slow to reach Eastern Europe—at least at first. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, study of the Zohar became more widespread as Jews fled eastward. The Zohar remains in print today and has been translated into English in a twenty–two–volume set.
In addition to these volumes, there are over a hundred texts elaborating on Kabbalistic concepts and practices. And even though we have these Kabbalah codices, wisdom is still sought and received directly