Beliefnet Guide To Kabbalah

1 What Is Kabbalah? Be prepared for thy God, oh Israelite! Make thyself ready to direct thy heart to God alone. Cleanse the body and choose a lonely house where none shall hear thy voice. Sit there in thy closet and do not reveal thy secret to any man. . . . Cleanse thy clothes, and, if possible, let all thy garments be white, for all this is helpful in leading the heart toward the fear of God and the love of God. --Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (ca. 1240-1291) The very word Kabbalah implies something sinister and furtive. Cabals (see page 2) hatch conspiracies behind closed doors; cabbalistic matters are by definition dark and obscure. But what exactly is Kabbalah? If you have a smattering of religious literacy, you know that it has something to do with Judaism (though it is not a denomination or movement, like Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or Reconstructionist). If you've spent any time browsing the shelves in the New Age section of your local bookstore, you'll know that it pertains to magical beliefs and practices, everything from palmistry, numerology, astrology, time travel, and reincarnation to summoning demons and raising the dead, but mostly to mysticism--the felt conviction that there is a sacred, underlying unity to the world and that the divine presence can be experienced directly, rather than through the intermediary of organized religion. To that end, Kabbalah involves meditation, ecstatic dance, chanting, and other practices that are reminiscent of Sufism (the mystical form of Islam) and many Eastern religions. How Come? Are Cabals Kabbalistic? Some people claim that the word cabal (meaning a small group of secret plotters) originated in Restoration England as an acronym for Charles II's hated inner circle of advisors: Clifford of Chudleigh, Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury), Buckingham (George Villiers), Arlington (Henry Bennet), and Lauderdale (John Maitland). Indeed, this group was referred to by that name, but the word had already acquired its meaning. It entered the English language in the early sixteen hundreds by way of the French, who took it from cabala, the Latin spelling of the Hebrew word Kabbalah, which means "tradition" or "receiving." Type the word Kabbalah into an Internet search engine and you'll be directed to hundreds of websites expounding halakhic (meaning it's in strict conformity with biblical law), Chassidut (meaning it's in conformity with Hasidic beliefs and practices), feminist, and modern Kabbalah, speculative and practical Kabbalah, Christian and Gnostic Cabala, and Hermetic Qabala, to name only a few of the available varieties and spellings. Bearded, black-hatted rebbes teach "kosher Kabbalah" as an essential facet of strictly Orthodox Jewish observance; other teachers--Jewish and non-Jewish alike--explore Kabbalah in the context of Buddhism, Tantric meditation, political activism, and even ecology. Practitioners of Qaballah are as likely as not to be pagans or Wiccans. Kabbalah Centres all over the world teach Kabbalah as a "spiritual technology" that "creates order out of chaos," while healing the body and soul. The "New Kabbalah" endeavors to integrate the teachings of the medieval Jewish sage Isaac Luria (1534-1572) with modern secular thinkers like Freud and Derrida; a tiny organization in California is attempting to revive Shabbetainism, the seventeenth-century movement that believed that a kabbalistic rabbi named Shabbetai Zevi (1626-1676) was the Messiah. Kabbalah looms large in high and low secular culture. It figures in literary classics like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (which was probably inspired by a Jacob Grimm story about a Kabbalistic sorcerer) and the visionary poems of William Blake (who would have learned about it through its Christian permutations, particulGoldwag, Arthur is the author of 'Beliefnet Guide To Kabbalah ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385514538 and ISBN 0385514530.