The Routledge Dictionary of Judaism
(Hebrew: “received [knowledge]”) A form of Jewish mysticism that originated in southern France (Provence) in the twelfth century and northern Spain in the thirteenth; an important movement in the medieval period, with continued significance within Hasidic Judaism today. The Qabbalah developed from systematic speculations about God’s relationship to humanity and developed through new forms of commentary on Scripture that found hidden levels of meaning in the sacred text. Unique to Qabbalah is its theory of the existence of ten divine emanations—called Sefirot—which the Qabbalists see as spanning the void between the infinite God and the finite world.
The central document of the Qabbalah, the ZOHAR, was written by Moses de Leon in around 1280 C.E. but attributed to the Mishnaic authority YOHANAN BEN ZAKKAI. De Leon described God as both transcendent and immanent. God, that is, was a creator, separate from the created world and not subject to the forces of nature. At the same time, de Leon saw God as everywhere present and accessible in the form of the Shekhinah, a feminine, worldly manifestation of God. The Qabbalah thus rejected central tenets of medieval Jewish philosophy, which defined God as unitary and radically other. By contrast, the Qabbalists envisioned God as comprised of two distinct parts, one of them, the Ein Sof (“infinite”), an unknowable, unreachable, concealed aspect, and the other, the Shekhinah, a personification of God directly experienced by human beings.
The Qabbalah saw these two aspects of God as connected through the Sefirot, spiritual realities distinct from the Ein Sof but illuminated by the divine radiance that flows from the concealed part of God. Through these emanations, the essence and being of the Ein Sof becomes manifest in the world in which humans dwell.
Since the earthly world thus is a visible representation of the upper world, worldly phenomena reveal the nature of the divine. In keeping with this thinking, the Qabbalah goes beyond the biblical conception that humans were created in God’s image, recognizing an actual identification between the human and the divine. This identification is represented by the Neshamah (Hebrew: spirit), the highest part of the soul, which the Qabbalists understand to be derived directly from God and to be made up in part of the same stuff as God.
In Qabbalistic theory, prior to Adam’s sin described at the beginning of the book of Genesis, there was no material world at all. Then the Sefirot interacted in perfect harmony. Only after the first sin did Adam take physical form and were the distinct male and female aspects of the Sefirot created. According to the Qabbalah, it has henceforth been people’s task to restore the harmony in which the world was created. People accomplish this through ritual and moral activity. According to the Qabbalah, every proper deed contributes to the well being of God, reversing the impact of Adam’s sin by 1) reuniting the aspects of God represented at the highest level of the Sefirot and 2) reestablishing the relationship between individual people and the Sefirot as a whole. The Qabbalah thus brought an entirely new function to the religious observances central in Rabbinic Judaism. According to the Qabbalah, such observances do not simply lead to a good and moral life or respond to God’s command. Rather, they have cosmic repercussions, helping to reunite God and the Shekhinah and so to return the world to the perfect state in which God originally created it.
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