Ask about Kabbalah

[agricola]

A Personal God

However, the idea of balancing good and evil does not tell the whole story. We have a long tradition in the West, beginning with the Bible, of God responding to some kinds of human actions with a sharp, punishing response, while providing reward for other actions...Often, people have interpreted the stories of divine punishment as if God had an angry personality. ..Judaism has always insisted on understanding God in a personal way. It does not mean that every time something bad happens, God is punishing someone. Rather, we have two perspectives on God and divine action in the world: a more impersonal one...and a more personal one...The question is, how can the two perspectives be reconciled?

There's the hard spot of faith: why do bad things happen to good people? Kabbalah is apparently going to explain this with a variation on 'we can't see God's POV/plan'. That's about the same answer as given in the book of Job, I believe.

There is a whole lot in this chapter, and I'll get to the end of it eventually, I promise! I don't want to skip so much that it is incoherent though.

Comments so far?
zeek, have you read this far yet? We are about 1/3 of the way into the book at this point.

[teresa]

agricola

I am still struggling to understand the basic concept.

This is what wikkipedia says: The Sephirot are considered revelations of the Creator's Will ... ten different ways the one God reveals his Will through the Emanations...It is not God who changes but the ability to perceive God that changes.
I am wondering how, in practice, in terms of Kabbalah, an individual would perceive God's Emanations? I think maybe you are saying that according to Kabbalah we can't perceive God's highest Emanation, at best we can only know it exists? (But how can we know it exists, if we can't perceive it?) But somehow we can perceive the other Emanations?

In the Bible, God is understood to self-reveal who He is through his actions, including his promises, etc. According to Kabbalah, are the Emanations something the individual experiences in their inner being without any outward experience of God, so to speak?

[agricola]

It's more like - God is - to a large degree, from our POV, 'hidden': we can't see, touch or really perceive God in any physical way. But we believe that God exists, and that God acts in this world. So kabbalah is a theory? I guess you'd call it a theory - about how what we CAN perceive 'shows' God to us in various ways, given that although we 'perceive' many different things about the world and about God (justice, anger, punishment, love) ultimately, we believe that God is the ultimate UNITY.

So we are the blind man, God is the elephant, and what the blind men 'see' are the sefirot - they look separate but they really aren't.

I'm no real expert on this stuff either, you know - and many Jews never bother with it because it is complex and doesn't answer any questions they have about God I suppose.

Hasidic Jews, on the other hand, live this stuff all the time. God is ALWAYS present but RARELY perceived. We can 'see God's back' like Moses, by seeing correctly what the EFFECTS of God's will is on this world. Like you can't see wind, but you can see what wind has done.

The mystics seem to be saying that not only is God 'hidden' but God MUST be hidden, because humans cannot withstand the undiluted presence of God (this is why the ark and the Temple were off limits and why people who touched the Ark died, and why Nadab and Abihu died - it wasn't 'God's punishment' it was just that they got 'too close' to God's actual Presence, and that divine presence in this world is hazardous.

So when God acts in the world, we are seeing only the results, not the cause, and the way God's will reaches into this world is through the sefirot, in one fashion or another.

With kabbalah, it is perfectly okay to have completely contradictory metaphors going on at the same time. Whatever works for you.

[agricola]

OK - I got this via email today - enjoy! It is from Chabad (the outreach arm of Lubavitch Hasidim - chabad - binah - da'at, remember? 'CHaBaD')
h**p://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/ ... mon-GO.htm

It’s confirmed. Nintendo has Kabbalists designing their games.

Game designers create worlds. I know because I taught game design in a school funded by Nintendo back in the ’90s.“Whatever you see or hear in this world is a lesson in your mission in life.”—Baal Shem Tov Studying and teaching their craft, I came to fathom the depth of the hidden knowledge of the cosmos.

And now, it’s out of the box. As any Kabbalist will tell you, the ultimate secret of the universe is the secret of the hidden sparks. They are all around us. Our souls came into this world and entered bodies as avatars to find and rescue these sparks. Some require coaxing, some require struggle, some just some specific activity.

How do you detect these sparks? How do you know how to rescue them?

Only because you have a device, namely Torah, that leads you to them and signals their presence. And then this Torah tells you what’s needed to release that spark and reconnect it with its origin, the origin of all sparks, where they are all one.

The Kabbalists at Nintendo get all that.Life is all about finding and liberating the hidden spark of meaning within each thing. They designed their game accordingly. They allowed us all a glimpse of a deeper reality, where a hidden world lies beneath the apparent world. They gave us a tool to imagine the world of the future, when those two worlds will merge. But there’s an essential element they left out.

The activities we do to rescue these sparks also liberate and fix up the world. In truth, that’s all those sparks are—the inner meaning and purpose of each thing. As we rescue all those sparks, the entire world comes to discover its meaning, until it sings its song in harmony.

So here’s the challenge for Nintendo. Will they take the next step? Will they provide meaningful activities for those who find a poké wherever they find it?

Like treating someone to a cup of coffee. Helping out a homeless veteran with a dollar and a few kind words. Or helping someone’s elderly mother with her shopping. Learning some words of wisdom. Or just sitting there to appreciate the awesomeness of this creation we stand within. And with that, their poké will truly find itsWith one small tweak, Pokémon GO could change the world. meaning.

Will Nintendo come to understand the power they have to better our world? Because, as any Kabbalist will tell you, if they wield that power wisely, it will be a very different world.

[agricola]

Back to Frankiel -

There are two names used for God in Torah, one is the four letter 'Name' and the other is 'elohim' (God). In most Bibles, the four letter name is rendered as 'LORD' and elohim is God (this is why you sometimes see 'the LORD said' and sometimes 'God said' and sometimes you see the interesting construction 'the LORD God said'). Scholars attribute that, btw, to different sources.
Kabbalists on the other hand, attribute the two names to different ways we see God, or to different 'sefirot' acting in the world.

The sages tell us that the Torah itself shows two different ways God manifests in our world...Lord is the personal aspect of God that intervenes in history and our lives, while God is God as manifest in nature and law, balancing everything in cosmic justice. Y-H-V-H (the four letter name) is Expansiveness, God is Restraint.

So Judaism (and kabbalah) emphasizes that God is not ONLY transcendent, so to speak, but God is ALSO personal, inside, merciful - someONE, not someTHING, that we can talk to, relate to, address in prayer.

This approach has some interesting implications. If God has experiences and feelings, is it true that, as the medieval philosophers said, God never changes?....The biblical view seems to be that God is not an objective entity or an impervious cosmic mind, rather, God responds - God has an inner life, and we can interpret God's life in terms analogous to ours...God's "anger" then, is the way the Bible speaks of the human experience that we are calling Restraint, while God's "love" is the way it describes what we are calling Expansiveness. Both are God.

Kabbalah encourages us to think of God's relationship to us in human terms. The terms Father and Mother for two of the sefirot are one example.Another is the description of God's relationship with the Jewish people as being analogous to that between husband and wife.

So if God is 'in' the universe ALONG WITH US (as this implies) then God is affected by our actions just as God's actions affect us.

When we abandon our divine purpose, there are likely to be consequences. Gevurah-Restraint means that God is leaving room for human freedom, but if we misuse it, God becomes even more concealed, and on the level of the revealed world the results are bitter..

.(Holocaust reference here).

[agricola]

Vision and Higher Purpose: Tiferet - Splendor

I believe Frankiel is saying that OUT OF our experience of Restraint and Expansiveness,which includes experience of pain and suffering - the reason we actually HAVE questions about the meaning of suffering is because we have this inner sense of purpose (that there IS 'meaning', or should be) - we have a 'deep belief that things ought to make sense' and we have ideals - we think there is or should be a larger purpose - and this is because we have the sefirot of 'Tiferet-Splendor' which gives these ideas their energy.

We see patterns, growth, and development. The patterns are no more than a dim reflection of the glowing template of the world of unity, but they give us hope. The vessel of that hope crystallizes our organizing purpose, and human energies organize themselves around it, like filings around a magnet.

The sefirah of Splendor represents the emergence of conscious purpose.

The divine image - man is made in the divine image and

'Image means the possibility of likeness: Just as God has a purpose, now (at the moment of creation of humans) creation includes a being that can embody purpose.'

[agricola]

In kabbalah, this first human was Adam but not the 'Adam' of the next story. THIS Adam was 'adam kadmon' the primordial adam. This Adam was a unity, both male and female, and it/he was huge - this Adam could see from one end of the universe to the other, and this is the Adam that was 'given dominion' etc.

But the original creation 'shattered' into the separate sparks filling the universe, and God had to remake the world, and this time we have the 'Adam' and 'Eve' we see in the next part of Genesis - and the created world is filled with little lost 'sparks' of divinity hidden by 'shells' which we need to be found, polished up or revealed and reunited with God - we are fixing the world this way so that things become they way they always 'should have' been and man's unity is as apparent as God's unity.

(now I'm pulling up related ideas from other readings)

(it is fairly common in Jewish circles - I heard it at my kid's summer camp, actually) to understand the original human as a composite male/female, which was 'divided' into a male half and a female half (Adam and Eve).)

Tiferet-Splendor is the sefirah of vision, purpose and capacity for high-level organization in light of that purpose.

How are humans able to hold this vision, this sense of purpose? It is because we have 'heart', and the sefirah of Tiferet is also the 'heart' of the Kabbalistic Tree. If you look at the graphics, you will also see that the 'heart' sefirah has a direct connection to the 'Crown'

'This tells us that the heart can become a direct expression of the soul.'

The heart - in a person - can be expressed in a human as 'passion' (not sexual passion, but more like purpose and dedication to change the world).

In the Bible, we see that people put things in their hearts, or thought over things in their hearts, because the heart is the source of true, deep understanding.

Nachman of Breslov has a story about heart - excerpts only -

Everything has a heart, therefore the world has a heart. The Heart of the World is full of yearning. It years for a Spring that comes from a rock which is on top of a Mountain at the far end of the world. But the Heart cannot reach it, partly because when the Heart leaves its place at the OTHER end of the world, it is beaten down by the sun, but also because the Heart cannot live without seeing the Spring, and once the Heart gets too close it won't be able to actually see it, and would die...

If the Heart died, then the entire world would cease to exist. The Heart is the life force of all things, and nothing can exist without a heart.

The Spring is the divine Wisdom, flowing forth. Understanding (Binah) is the Mother and Wisdom (Chochmah) is the Father (I should have mentioned that before, sorry).

The aspect of the sun (which beats down on the Heart and keeps the Heart from reaching the Mountain where the Spring is) -

The aspect of the sun in Splendor is the pull of waking consciousness...with all its daily tasks, physical needs and material desires. This is the world in which we all live.

so the cares and concerns of daily life is always working to distract us from our 'true' selves and our innermost actual needs and desires.

Rabbi Nachman is telling us that the human heart is stretched between the longing for God on the one hand and the pull of responsibility for, and responsiveness to, the world on the other. Yet this tension is exactly where we must live.

[agricola]

That's the end of chapter 4 -
next chapter picks up the next set of sefirot - Netzach and Hod, then Yesod and the Malchut. That covers the sefirot in the 'from Heaven to Earth' formulation and ends Part II of the book. This is shorter than the last chapter and I am also going to try to pick up the pace a bit going forward.
Part III talks about the sefirot in personal terms - going 'up' the Tree, so to speak.

Meanwhile, here are some additional links on the subject that are good ones - Gershom Sholem is a well known authority on Jewish mysticism, without being a mystic himself (often VERY useful!):

On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah
h**ps://smile.amazon.com/Mystical-Shape-Godhead-Concepts-Mysticism/dp/0805210814/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1469199461&sr=8-6&keywords=Basic+Jewish+beliefs

and then, for 'how to do it':
God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism, by David Cooper
h**ps://smile.amazon.com/God-Verb-Kabbalah-Practice-Mystical/dp/1573226947/ref=pd_sim_14_9?ie=UTF8&dpID=51W5Y43J2KL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR101%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=QW0C1ADWPBMZ007E60WC

[teresa]

So kabbalah is a theory? I guess you'd call it a theory - about how what we CAN perceive 'shows' God to us in various ways

And what is it that we can perceive that 'shows' God to us? Can it be anything -- like the beauty of a sunset, or seeing how a mother nurtures her infant? And if so, where do the Emanations fit in? Do we need the Emanations to perceive God in the beauty of a sunset, or in how a mother nurtures her infant? Or does the beauty of the sunset, etc allow us to see God's Emanations? I feel like I am being dense, but I am struggling to understand.

[agricola]

Yes - to the kabbalists, EVERYTHING is a reflection of these emanations of God. You, the tree, the sunset, the baby, the sand on the ground - EVERYTHING contains a spark from the divine and everything has within it ALL of these ten sefirot. It is us (humans) that confuse the inner reality with the outer 'seeming'.

Because God's 'expansiveness/generosity' allows the world to exist, we have the sun and the sea and eyes and an appreciation for beauty of sunsets. Because God's 'restraint' creates boundaries, the sun is an orb rotating at a certain distance....because we feel 'connected' when we hold a baby, we are experiencing God's 'tiferet/heart', and so forth. Everything 'contains' God and God is contained within Everything, and the sefirot are ways of explaining the PARTICULAR kind of God-connection we are experiencing. But all the sefirot are always 'there' because God is always there.

back on page 3 of this discussion:

A contemporary take on this idea brings in the metaphor of a hologram (a picture created by laser - a picture made of 'light'). A hologram shows a picture, and if you cut the hologram in half (printed on the right sort of material) you don't get 'half the picture', you get the WHOLE picture on both halves (with a little loss of definition). And if you keep cutting the picture into pieces, EVERY PIECE still has the complete picture (continuing with loss of detail - the picture gets fuzzy, but the whole picture is always there.

Each entity within the universe is one of the snippets of film. Each contains all of the elements of divine manifestation...All of God is included in any part of creation.

Don't forget that concept of every entity in creation holding the ENTIRE 'image of the light of God' - all the divine manifestations are present in everything - that's important soon. Of course, the smaller the entities (like a blade of grass, say) the 'fuzzier' the image may be - but it is still there -

However, the fuzziness means it is not always equally easy to see God....

The fact that reality is a refraction of God's light provides us with our religious metaphors. A piece of rock may represent one metaphor for God...inviting us to imagine God's firmness, strength and immovability. When we speak of God's purity, however, we might use the image of ....a newborn baby. God offers us metaphors for divinity in every aspect of our lives. We can see them if we look.



One of the names for God in the Bible is 'I will be what I will be'. This implies that God is in the process of manifesting in the world. Still, much of God is concealed, and according to Kabbalah, there are different levels of manifestation and concealment.



...each human being, without exception, carries the stamp of divinity...each of us is...a complete hologram of God.