Kabbalah?

rahma

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I doubt there are many practitioners of the traditional kabbalah online. It has always been a practice of older jewish men who study lots. If I'm not mistaken, until more recently, most of kabbalah wasn't taught to anyone who wasn't over 40 and a male.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
 
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Yaacova

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Salubri said:
isanyone here familr with the practices ad beleifs of the Kabbalah? And I'm not talking about Holloywood Maddona-Kabbala, I'm talking Pre-fad trendy practices and beleifs.

First of all, Kabbalah (if indeed it is more than mere legend) is not something that is practiced by the average Jew, or even the average rabbi. There are a number of stories that discourage the pursuit of such knowledge and power as dangerous and irresponsible. If you see any books on the subject of "practical kabbalah," you can safely dismiss them as not authentic Jewish tradition because, as these stories demonstrate, this kind of knowledge was traditionally thought to be far too dangerous to be distributed blindly to the masses.

These misunderstandings stem largely from the fact that the teachings of Kabbalah have been so badly distorted by mystics and occultists. Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. In more recent times, many have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings. Today, many well-known celebrities have popularized a new age pop-psychology distortion of kabbalah (I have heard it derisively referred to as "****-balah") that has more in common with the writings of Deepak Chopra than with any authentic Jewish source.
 
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Warren Peace

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If you want an accurate answer about the real meaning of Kabbalah, go to an Orthodox Rabbi and ask. A Hermetic Kabbalist (i.e. non-Jewish) does not know and understand the full extent of the Kabbalah.

In all honesty, and meaning no insult, a person who is serious about the Kabbalah would seek conversion to Orthodox Judaism before even attempting to even understand its meaning, let alone read from it.

Madonna is one of the worst things that Kabbalists could hope for. A woman who has no sense of Godliness whatsoever passing herself off as someone who is interested in something so deep as the Kabbalah is, to me, insulting! She is doing it for the media attention, plain and simple. She has not changed one bit since becoming a "Kabbalist", so I can hardly see why "Kabbalists" welcome her with open arms.

I liken Madonna to Snoop Dogg - he tells the media that he's a converted "Christian" and that he goes to church every Sunday. Yet he never went to the folks at "Girls Gone Wild" to have his name and image removed from their advertising and their product.

A Christian who endorses and condones inappropriate content is NOT a Christian.

Blessings...
 
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Warren Peace

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rahma said:
If I'm not mistaken, until more recently, most of kabbalah wasn't taught to anyone who wasn't over 40 and a male.
Close. Ashkanaz (East European) Jews could not study Kabbalah before the age of 40, but this rule did not apply to Saffardic (Middle Eastern) Jews.

Blessings...
 
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Salubri

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Yeah, the closest source I have ever had to reading on it, is a book written in 1801 by Francis Barret, called The MAgus and it talks about Kabbalah and the Hermetics, but I am not sure how detialed it goes or how accurate it is. I have just recently begun reading it.
 
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jewishprincess613

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Most Jews don't study Kabbalah until they are 40. However, Chassidic Judaism is deeply rooted in Kabbalah. It is a very mystical, spiritual movement.



rahma said:
I doubt there are many practitioners of the traditional kabbalah online. It has always been a practice of older jewish men who study lots. If I'm not mistaken, until more recently, most of kabbalah wasn't taught to anyone who wasn't over 40 and a male.
 
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AdamAnderson21

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Perhaps we should start at the beginning and when we get to the end stop! The reason the Kabbalah has recently been opened to the public is because today it is simply ignored. Way back in the day, this was seen as very powerfull information if it got into the hands of someone who was not ready to receive it. People took this stuff very seriously. Nowadays, someone could be on TV telling you the most important secrets of The Bible and most would just change the channel. The "time was right" for the Kabbalah to be opened up to those who truely sought spiritual development.

Kabbalah means "to recieve" because, as has already been stated, it was generally passed down from a learned male Jew to another Jew traditionally after the age of forty.Kabbalists state that the Kabblah, the set of teachings, is an oral tradition that was passed down from Moses himself. According to Judaism there are two Bibles. The written part, and the oral part.If one dosen't have access to either or, it is very easily to get lost.

Here are some general Kabbalist views. There are ten "creational energies". These are represented by the word "Elohim" which is plural. It has five letters and is plural, so five times two is ten, thus it represent the ten creational energies. An example of this can be seen in Genesis 1:1, where the subject and verb are not in agreement. Far from being any "plural majestic" this is seen as indicating that Elohim is in fact not the the actual subject, but that "God" is the implied subject. So it would be "In the beginning, God created the Elohim. The word "et" which indicates the direct object is said to represent the whole Hebrew alphabet, much as the "alpha and the omega" does in the New Testament. A Kabbalist would say this is in fact what Jesus is refering to. So it would be "Elohim, the language of the heaven and the language of the earth". This does not mean that this is the only way to interpret the sentence. Far from it. Every grammatically accurate interpretation is seen as showing something improtant. In fact, it is taught that there are 12 ways to interpret this sentence.

1) "With his head, God created"
2) "Using his head, God created"
3) "In the head, God healed"
4) "With the head, God healed"
5) "In wisdom, God created"
6) "With wisdom, God created"
7) "In wisdom, God healed"
8) "With wisdom, God healed"
9) "In the beginning, God created"
10) "In the beginning, God healed"
11) "With the beginning, God created"
12) "With the beginning, God healed"

Some Aramaic translations use "With wisdom, God created". The grammatical basis for this is that "Beth" means either "in" or "with". "Reshit" means "beginning, head, or wisdom". And "bara" means "created" or "healed".

The view is that most of the Bible talks about the "Elohim" or "gods" rather then "God". The only other time God is mentioned is in Exodus with moses, and this is seen as showing that Moses is talking directly to God. God is seen as implied in only two places. This is because his name was so sacred that nobody used it. This tradition can still be seen with Jews today.
 
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Yaacova

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Did you know that if I take every third letter in the first two lines of your post it will read,

rpeod a ahen n nhwe oed otrs myne wbktd, i aeae.

What do you mean you have no idea what it means? odviously it's the answer to lifes most persistant question.

Not to pick on anyone, just making a point. If I turn the letter "T" upside down, then clockwise one degree, then flipped it would be the sign of the end of the world, because my Oija board clearly led me to those directions, and the first thing I saw after looking up from the game, I saw the letter "T." What makes the secret Torah code any different?
 
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AdamAnderson21

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Lol. A whole lot.

"The earth was without form and empty, darkness is on the face of the deep, and God's spirit is moving on the waters."

Whammo. Two different tenses. This is Genesis 1:2. The "was" is showing that this is describing what happend before Genesis 1:1. This is giving a glimpse of how the Elohim were created. "Without form and empty" is quite a loose translation of the Hebrew. The words are "tohu" and "bohu". "Bo" means "he", and "hu" means "in it". "Tohu" traditionally is related as "confusion". So it is actually "confusion he was in". This is different from nothing. God is there. There just isn't any "information" present.

This also shows gives us steps to meditation. Before we create "heaven" and "hell", we are in a state of confusion. We don't have any purpose. We are merely another chain in a series of causes and effects. So we created the perception of "heaven" and "hell" or good and evil so that we can perceive that we have a choice between two opposing forces. And thereore perceive that we have purpose and control over the future. I'll point out that this is the extremely esoteric version, and it would probably br hard to find a Kabbalist that will tell you this. This paragraph is my own commentary : )

The Hebrew word for water is "mayim" and it is where we get the word "Mayhem" from. It conveys the same sense of chaos that "tohu" and "bohu" talk about. As do Greek mythology, Babylonian beliefs, and the Sumerian tablets, among all other religions. This whole sentence serves as a guide to meditation. We first feel confused. "Why are we here?" "Who am I?". Then, in this confusion, we begin to see information being conveyed. We see that He is in it. We then begin to focus on this and enter into the "darkness". The "nothingness" because we've penetrated all that which clouds our mind. The last step of meditation is when we go beyond the darkness and enter into God's spirit, or the Brahman.
 
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AdamAnderson21

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Further into the rabbit hole we go. "I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!"

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.

And God said, "Let there be a barrier between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the barrier and separated the water under the barrier from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the barrier "heaven." And there was evening, and there was morning-the second day.

Light, barrier, and water are all mentioned five times. Water came before light, as we see from Genesis 1:2. The idea of "water" here is an idealized concept. Meaning it is like the "subatomic" particles of creation. Not tap water. We are given the glimpse of parallels to come. Light is good, dark is bad. But we also see that both light and dark come from the same "water" material. This is the parallel. They were originally one.

Another esoteric commentary. Remember that this is our mind doing the creating here. It is our psychology. So this passage is telling us that good and evil are really the same thing. We just perceive the difference to give ourselves the allusion of control, of power over the future. Because good and evil come from the same basic material, it is possible for them to one day be joined again.
 
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Lifesaver

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Kabalah is a form of Jewish Gnostic mysticism, which began explcitly in the Middle Ages, with the writing of the Zohar.

The Gnosis that gave origin to it, however, is much older. Ever since the times of the Second Temple, since the return of the Babylonian exile and after the Greek invasion in Palestine, esoteric and gnostic traditions began to grow in popularity among the Jewish population.
This Jewish gnostic heterodoxy greatly influenced some early Christian heresies and developed themselves in Jewish circles.

As all forms of esoterism, it is strongly anti-rational, and deems human reason to be illusory, favouring a more intuitive and sensitive aprehension of reality. That is why the Jewish philosopher Maimonides did not like it, and his philosophy is likewise disliked by kabbalists.

According to the Kabbalah, matter is evil. It is a not a good creature of God, but stems from an evil principle. It is not even a creation of God Himself, Jehovah, but of Elohim.
To better explain this, let's have a look at the Kabbalistic interpretation of Gen 1:1

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth."

To the Kabbalists, for an unknown reason, the grammatical subject of this sentence is "the beginning", or "Bereschit" in Hebrew, the Deity superior to Elohim; this "beginning" is an obscure and unknown God, Absolute Nothingness. From Him emanated Elohim, a demiurge, responsible for the creation of matter, and inprisionment of Divine sparks in matter. These sparks are tiny pieces of the true and good Deity mentioned above, and salvation is nothing more than liberating them from the evil prison that is the body.

The goal of Kabbalists is to go back to the mystical nothingness that pre-dates the division of Jehovah and Elohim, before the differentiation of subject and object, of knower and known. Jehovah, the merciful liberator, and Elohim, the rigorous and opressive creator. And since one emanated from the other, both good and evil were in fact the same thing, and likewise with being and non-being.

Once the individual has this knowledge, he is able to liberate himself (his own true spirit; the divine spark: this little piece of nothingness) mystically.

It is true that these doctrines were not fully developed until the Middle Ages, culminating in the Zohar, but they were already present in Jewish pharisaic circles. That is why the Jews were so against the Incarnation of the Word: it means the perfect harmony between God and matter; both pantheism and gnosis are rejected by it.

Its influence from the Middle Ages on was gigantic. Alchemy, many protestant sects (those based on Jacob Boehme, for instance), Romanticism, psychoanalysis, modern art (Salvador Dali is the most explicit example) and even a large part of rock music is deeply rooted in the Kabbalistic doctrines.
 
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AdamAnderson21

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Pretty much. I'd just point out that this all has to do with our psychology. So it's not really liberation from the body as in go kill yourself. It's liberation in the form of "suffering comes from the perception of good and evil, so destroy your perceptions of good and evil and you will be free from suffering". I'm glad to see that you have an understanding of the Kabbalah!

"it is strongly anti-rational"

I disagree on that point. It's not that it is anti-rational, it just believes that our perceptions are what causes suffering. This dosen't mean you can't sit down and solve a math equation. This just means, that you should not go around judging what's right and what's wrong. You should realize that everything is cause and effect and you should be empathetic towards others because of this. Alot of people have a problem with this view. My sister for example used to be really into Taoism, but she decided she didn't like it because it was to "passifist". It's the same thing with the Kabbalah. It dosen't mean you should sit around all day whacking your mental muscles, it just means that for every five people you convert to good, there will be five more who convert to evil. It's a balance like the yin and the yang. This dosen't mean you shouldn't be proactive and good. It just means you shouldn't create suffering for yourself mentally, because you fight a battle that can never be won.
 
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Lifesaver

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Oh, AdamAnderson, you must know that this religion, this esoterism, is the mother of all heresies. Gnosis, of which the Kabbalah is one of its most important ramifications, is the religion of the devil, that worships man.
Afterall, it seeks to do the unthinkable: to turn man into God.

The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (the thesis that they are the same thing, because in reality evil lacks substance and therefore cannot be known as an entity), the desire of Adam and Eve to become gods themselves; this is Gnosis, the original sin and the reason of mankind's fall and damnation!

For the good of your soul, abandon these false doctrines, and embrace reason, which is what leads mankind to the truth.

I say it is anti-rational because it identifies good with evil, being with non-being. In short, a thing with its opposite. And reason informs us that a thing is identical to itself, not to its opposite. This philosophical premise is deeply irrational, even though it has been accepted by many suposedly rational systems (most notable Hegelian dialectics).
 
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AdamAnderson21

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Afterall, it seeks to do the unthinkable: to turn man into God.

That's not true. The Catholic Church is the group that believes that God is a man. Man can never be God. The idea of God is just like the Brahman. We are all a part of God. It's like a note saying "Although all of this stuff has to do with your own psychology, don't forget we are all One: there is something larger than yourself."

that worships man

I worship God.

evil lacks substance and therefore cannot be known as an entity

Good and evil are relative terms which we perceive. We are all results of physical causes and effects. If the causes have already happened. We can not change the effects. It's a pysical law of nature. Good and evil do not exist. We are oviously more complex than rocks, but the laws of cause and effects apply to us just as they do to them. It would be like if a rock was like "that rock is evil because it fell off the mountain". The rock didn't choose to fall of the mountain. It happened because I kicked it. I kicked it because I was angry. I was angry because I was in an argument with my girlfriend, to infinity. The same applies to us. We just perceive that we have control over the future to give us a sense of power and control. This is the core idea.

The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil

If you read the original hebrew you'd know that "Daath" is actually a combination of two words. "Know" and "Faithfull Religion". So what caused the downfall of man was the "knowledge of a faithfull religion".

the desire of Adam and Eve to become gods themselves; this is Gnosis, the original sin and the reason of mankind's fall and damnation!

The downfall of Adam and Eve was the creation of the perception of good and evil. This is something we all do psychologically. It is all of our original sin. That is why Adam means "mankind" in Hebrew. In order to get back into the Garden, man has to destroy his perception of good and evil. The Garden talks about our subconscious. Man had to trick himself. Man is the one that creates the Elohim. If man knew that there were no good and evil, we wouldn't get very far. We'd never get very far. Notice that telling someone not to do something bad, presupposes that they already know the difference between good and evil, if you interpret it the way most people do. I like the analogy of a sign that says "don't read me". So man created the subconscious to hide things from himself, so that he could create the perception of good and evil.
 
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Lifesaver

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I see you have completely bought into psychoanalysis, a derivation of the Kabbalah.

There is no such thing as the subconscious, a "hidden deeper self" which is has the reasons why we do what we do, even though we are unaware of it.
There is nothing scientific in it either, despite the intentions of Freud and Jung, and they are nowadays mostly refuted.
 
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DaRkWoLf

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Lifesaver said:
There is no such thing as the subconscious, a "hidden deeper self" which is has the reasons why we do what we do, even though we are unaware of it.
There is nothing scientific in it either, despite the intentions of Freud and Jung, and they are nowadays mostly refuted.

I would love to see some sources of that. Multiple links would be good. I could google it, but since you brought it up, why not prove/support it?

Im not talking about this from a religious standpoint either, merely scientific.

Ill put up a counter-point, its called the study of Human Mating. It is one of the underlying, natural, hard wired functions burned into our brains that dictate much of what we do.
 
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