What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition

Though the pop-cul­tur­al moment that gave rise to the asso­ci­a­tion has passed, when many of us hear about Kab­bal­ah, we still think of Madon­na. Her study of that Jew­ish-mys­tic school of thought in the nine­teen-nineties has been cred­it­ed, at least in part, with the son­ic trans­for­ma­tion that led to her hit album Ray of Light.  A few years lat­er, when she record­ed the theme song for the 2002 James Bond movie Die Anoth­er Day, she man­aged to include in its music video such Kab­bal­is­tic imagery as the Hebrew let­ters lamed, aleph, and vav — which come, as Reli­gion for Break­fast cre­ator Andrew M. Hen­ry says in the video above, from one of the 72 names of God accord­ing to Jew­ish tra­di­tion.

But what, exact­ly, is Kab­bal­ah? That’s the ques­tion Hen­ry takes it upon him­self to answer, attempt­ing to sep­a­rate the real thing from the pop-cul­tur­al ephemera that’s come to sur­round it.

This entails first going back to the ear­li­est Kab­bal­ists, “Jew­ish teach­ers, the­olo­gians, and philoso­phers” among “the edu­cat­ed elite of medieval Europe, liv­ing in Spain and France, writ­ing new and inno­v­a­tive stud­ies on Jew­ish texts and con­cepts about mys­ti­cal con­tem­pla­tion of the divine realms, the nature of God, the pur­pose of human­i­ty, and the cre­ation of the uni­verse.” They searched, and their suc­ces­sors have con­tin­ued to search, for secret divine wis­dom orig­i­nal­ly vouch­safed to Moses at Mount Sinai.

The word kab­bal­ah can be trans­lat­ed as “that which has been received,” but that may make the enter­prise sound sim­pler than it is. Hen­ry frames Kab­bal­ah as a series of tra­di­tions “encom­pass­ing sev­er­al modes of read­ing, a library of texts, a series of con­cepts, and a range of prac­tices with­in Judaism that is con­cerned with mys­ti­cal con­tem­pla­tion.” But what­ev­er their dif­fer­ences, most Kab­bal­ists revere con­cepts like Ein Sof, “an infi­nite imper­son­al god or supreme enti­ty or supreme enti­ty that we can­not describe with our own human fac­ul­ties,” and vast works like the nov­el­is­tic Zohar, or “The Book of Radi­ance,” in which “even the search for mys­ti­cal knowl­edge becomes sex­u­al­ized”: an aspect that, giv­en the skill with which she’s craft­ed her provoca­tive pop-icon image, Madon­na could hard­ly fail to appre­ci­ate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Tal­mud Is Final­ly Now Avail­able Online

Wal­ter Benjamin’s Philo­soph­i­cal Thought Pre­sent­ed by Two Exper­i­men­tal Films

The Ancient Greeks Who Con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism

The Ark Before Noah: Dis­cov­er the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download the “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.