Kabbalah

What is Kabbalah?

Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism. It emerged in twelfth-century Provence and Spain, reaching its first peak in the Zohar, a text attributed to the second-century sage Simeon bar Yochai but compiled by Moses de León in the late thirteenth century. The attribution to an ancient authority was itself contested: Gershom Scholem's twentieth-century scholarship established de León's authorship on textual grounds, though the tradition has not uniformly accepted this verdict. Kabbalah's central map is the ten sefirot arranged on the Tree of Life. These represent the stages through which the infinite God (Ein Sof) becomes the manifest world and through which the soul can return to its source.

Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Theosophy

Kabbalah is often grouped with Hermeticism§ and Theosophy, but the three are distinct. Hermeticism is a Greco-Egyptian philosophical tradition claiming descent from Hermes Trismegistus. It shares structural parallels with Kabbalah but has no inherent Jewish identity. Christian Kabbalah, developed from the fifteenth century onward, grafted kabbalistic symbols onto a Hermetic base. Theosophy (Blavatsky's system, late nineteenth century) borrowed from both and added Vedantic elements, producing a synthesis rather than any of the originals. Kabbalah proper is rooted in rabbinic and biblical interpretation. It can only be understood in relation to Torah and the covenant theology surrounding it.

The Tree of Life

Kabbalah's most widely exported diagram is the Tree of Life: ten sefirot (spheres) connected by twenty-two paths. They map the descent of divine influence from Keter (crown) through Chokhmah and Binah down to Malkhut (kingdom, the manifest world). The arrangement is not merely symbolic. Each sefirah represents a particular quality of divine attention, and the structure as a whole models how the unmanifest becomes manifest. The paths between the sefirot correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, linking linguistic and cosmological structure.

Lurianic Kabbalah

Isaac Luria (1534–1572), working in Safed, restructured the entire tradition around three concepts. Tzimtzum: the contraction by which infinite divinity made room for a finite world. Shevirat ha-kelim: the breaking of the vessels at creation, scattering divine sparks throughout matter. Tikkun olam: the repair of the world by gathering those sparks back. This framework remains central to contemporary Jewish mysticism§. The phrase tikkun olam has since entered modern Jewish ethics as a call to social repair, largely stripped of its cosmological context.

Contemporary teachers

Outside strictly traditional yeshiva contexts, the most-watched contemporary Kabbalah teacher in English-language media is David Ghiyam, whose work appears throughout this index. The Kabbalah Centre, founded by Philip Berg in 1965, is the most prominent popularising organisation. The rigorous academic lineage runs through Gershom Scholem and contemporary scholars including Moshe Idel.