What is Kabbalah? Sometimes spelled qabalah or cabalah, it is a curious term you’ve likely heard but may have difficulty understanding. It’s associated with Judaism, but people from all over the religious spectrum, from Torah scholars to New Age seekers to Freemason initiates, use its concepts. It’s been called a key part of Jewish thought, a secret occult religion, and every label in between.
So, where does Kabbalah come from? What should Christians know about its ideas and whether it poses any dangers we should know about? Let’s explore those questions today.
Joseph Dan explains in Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction that it is a Hebrew word, sometimes spelled cabalah, that means “reception.” Here, reception means a tradition received, something passed down.
Specifically, Kabbalah involves mystic traditions—processes to access God directly, like Moses or the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) seeing God face-to-face. Often, mystical experiences reportedly show how everything in the universe fits together. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says, “A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.”
Many people use Kabbalah as a catch-all term for any mystical practice vaguely associated with Jewish ideas. However, scholars use it for a precise tradition of Jewish mysticism claiming ancient origins but which didn’t appear in print until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Kabbalistic texts, most famously the Zohar, commentated on the Torah (the Bible’s first five books) in imaginative ways. They read the Torah as filled with secret instructions on exploring God, including mystical meanings in the Hebrew alphabet or different time cycles that affect how people read the Torah (meaning, Kabbalists in different eras can give different Torah interpretations). Kabbalistic texts reshaped how many Jewish communities interpreted the Torah.
Kabbalah is inherently hard to explain because mystical experiences are intimate spiritual experiences that people individually have and may not be able to explain. Some argue that we can’t explain mysticism. In an amusing example, scholar Gershom Scholem once asked practicing Kabbalist Abraham Chen to speak to Scholem’s students. Chen told the students, “A scholar of mysticism is like an accountant: He may know where all the treasure is, but he is not free to use it.”
Furthermore, Kabbalah is an esoteric method. Check the section below for more details about what esoteric means, especially if you want to understand whether Kabbalah is part of the occult. Basically, esoteric means a guarded method for having mystical experiences. For example, Merkavah is a first-century esoteric method describing methods like fasting and visualizing God’s throne to replicate Ezekiel’s experience of seeing God (Ezekiel 1).
Since people may be unable to explain their mystical experiences to others, and the methods are allegedly secret, it wasn’t until Gershom Scholem’s work that religion scholars agreed on a defined, systematic vision of what Kabbalah meant. Definitions varied, and recommended readings changed over time. For example, Tzvi Langerman discusses how the ancient book Sefir Yetzirah didn’t start as a Kabbalistic text but was adopted as one.
Granting Kabbalah is complicated, there are some general ideas.
First, the Torah has layers of mysterious meaning that require direct spiritual experiences and training to uncover. Usually, the process involves understanding numerology (hidden meanings in number patterns). Items besides numbers—like the Hebrew alphabet’s letters—also have hidden spiritual meanings.
Second, Kabbalistic training is meant to help people understand God, but this proves difficult because God is vast and unknowable. He is Ein Soif, the unlimited light from which creation came. Since God is so mysterious, we come closest to him by exploring his emanations—levels of being that emanate from him. Kabbalists like Jay Michaelson frequently argue that creation emanates from God, so these emanations also provide enlightenment about the universe God created.
There are 10 emanations, the sephirot:
Diagrams showing the sephirot (or the Tree of Life) play an important role in Kabbalah, explaining how these spiritual forces relate to each other. For example, emanations on the tree’s left side (Binah, Din, Hod) are seen as feminine energies, while the right side (Hokhmah, Hesed, Nezah) are seen as masculine energies. In the middle (Keter, Ti’eret, Yesod) are traits between these two sides, showing the midpoint between masculine and feminine energy, the most direct path of enlightenment to reach God.
The Tree of Life may also affect how we live everyday life. Isaac Luria argued that the 10 emanations represent 10 energy vessels God used to create the universe. During the creation process, three vessels shattered, a chaotic event that allowed evil to exist. Luria believed God created humanity to restore the imbalance: evil feeds on the shattered vessels’ divine light scattered throughout the universe. Humans restore divine light to its source by doing good and avoiding sin. So, Kabbalah becomes not just a spiritual guide but a moral guide, maybe even a way to usher in the Messiah’s arrival.
Understanding these Kabbalistic symbols brings spiritual understanding about how God works, how he reveals himself in Scripture, and how creation works. We may ask, can only Jewish people explore these symbols?
During and after the Renaissance, European Christians adopted Kabbalistic ideas for various spiritual practices. For example, Eliphas Levi combined Kabbalistic images with tarot card readings in Paris in 1890. Secret societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn combined Levi’s practice with Hermeticism and other elements to produce secret rituals that reportedly brought people closer to experiencing the divine. Scholars usually call these non-Judaistic offshoots “Qabalah.”
Meanwhile, post-Renaissance Jewish teachers like Luria applied Kabbalistic ideas to consider what moral living meant. Modern Jewish groups continue to apply Kabbalah to morals—for example, Hasidic Judaism sees private prayer and worship as helping them achieve moral goodness.
After Scholem provided a systematic overview of Kabbalah, many Jews across different traditions began exploring Kabbalah as an academic subject or a mystical practice to reinvigorate their spiritual lives. As Kushner discusses on the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet, Kabbalah particularly interests contemporary Jews seeking to get past religious dogma to reconnect with God personally. It becomes for Judaism what Pentecostalism is to Judaism.
Granting that Jews, Christians, and others try to learn from Kabbalah, we haven’t established one thing: how do we learn from these symbols?
Kabbalists across history have studied the system’s symbols differently for different reasons. For example, Kushner notes that many medieval Kabbalists wrote texts applying their ideas to musari (or mussar), a school of ethics.
Generally, there are three modern methods that people use to explore Kabbalah:
As Wolfson shows, the first two methods are original to Judaism, and the latter came along in the Renaissance period.
If Kabbalah can be a way to produce magic, we may wonder: does that make it part of the occult?
The short answer is it depends on what you mean by “occult.”
Scholars usually call Kabbalah an esoteric process, which is more precise. “Occult” means hidden. As Patrick D. Bowen explains, “Especially before the twentieth century, the word ‘occult’ has typically been used to describe secret teachings, usually involving some sort of magic and reference to human divinity, that have been passed on since ancient times and are associated with famous sages, such a Plato and Hermes Trismegistus.”
However, since “occult” isn’t very precise and people often use it to cover anything from tarot cards to indigenous witchcraft, many scholars prefer to say that Kabbalah is an esoteric idea. As Earl Fontainelle explains, esotericism covers many spiritual ideas meant to stay secret from outsiders. When we’re talking about Jewish esotericism, Wolfson explains we might define it as “a set of doctrines that are deemed secretive and that must therefore be transmitted only to a small circle of initiates.” He uses the Hebrew word ḥokhmat ha-nistar (“the hidden wisdom”).
All Kabbalah is esoteric because every branch has exclusive methods for passing on ideas. That does not mean that all forms of Kabbalah are connected to modern occult ideas.
Given these facts, we may wonder how Christians should approach Kabbalah. Can we learn anything from it?
We should avoid New Age attempts to use Kabbalah to perform magic or communicate with spirits. Historically, Christian leaders like Irenaeus have argued that whatever spirits we may invoke or communicate with during magic rituals are either self-deceiving delusions or demons posing as benign spiritual forces or pagan deities. Paul warns about demons posing as pagan deities in 1 Corinthians 10:20 and about forces claiming to be angels in Galatians 1:6-12. Therefore, there are genuine dangers to combining Kabbalah with other beliefs to contact or worship spiritual forces other than God.
But what should we think about Kabbalah within Judaism?
Since Christianity is founded on Judaism, we can (and should) affirm the Old Testament as a divinely inspired text. Since we believe Jesus was the promised Messiah and instituted a new covenant, we approach some concepts differently than orthodox Judaism. However, we can still appreciate many elements of Jewish culture and tradition.
How Kabbalists discuss symbols in the Old Testament raises questions about whether the Bible contains many layers of meaning. What texts are historical narratives, and which are poetry or apocalyptic? Do these genres contain spiritual messages that we miss if we don’t look for subtext?
We can also appreciate Kabbalists like Luria, who emphasize that evil is less than goodness. We may not agree with Luria’s idea of how evil entered the cosmos. Still, its central idea about evil feeding on divine light affirms that evil is a perverted byproduct of goodness. Many Christian thinkers, most famously Augustine, affirm this idea because it helps to explain how Satan is less than God. If evil is not something created, then it must be uncreated, like goodness. That would mean evil is an equal and opposite force to goodness.
We can also respect Kabbalah’s emphasis on experiencing God directly. In his essay “The Mystical Element in Judaism,” Abraham Heschel observes that the Kabbalists “are not content to suppose or prove logically that there is a God; they want to feel and to enjoy Him; not only to obey but to approach Him. They want to taste the whole wheat of spirit before it is ground by the millstones of reason.”
However, there are also substantial differences between Kabbalistic and historic orthodox Christian teachings that we need to remember.
On the principle that all truth is God’s truth, we can affirm some elements of Kabbalah. However, as we converse with people about its ideas and values, remembering to be graceful as we disagree, we need to remember some key differences between Kabbalah and Christianity.
Most obviously, Kabbalah prioritizes direct spiritual revelation over other key elements of religion. Direct spiritual experiences are not all that guide our spiritual lives. Since God is unchanging, we know his messages will never deviate from what he has revealed in Scripture. We also rely on our spiritual community’s memories of history (our tradition) to consider how God has revealed himself in the past and how we have interpreted Scripture in the past. As John Wesley explains, these four values (tradition, Scripture, Holy Spirit, and reason) interlock with and support each other.
As noted earlier, Kabbalists typically emphasize unity between God and creation, often seeing creation as emanating from God. Michaelson writes, “we, the stars, our friends and enemies, and everything around us—all of us are dreams in the mind of God. Nothing has any separate reality—it only looks like there are separate tables, chairs, computers, and people from a certain, limited perspective. Being in itself is actually nothing but God.”
This presents a problem for Christians who take the historic view that God is everywhere, but everything is not God. Kabbalah expresses reverence for creation, but its reverence leans a little too far into pantheism. Even panentheism, a position that Orthodox Christians may support that says that the universe is a part of God, maintains that God has a distinct identity and is above the universe.
Kabbalah also often puts its texts on equal status with the Torah. For example, Joseph Telushkin recalls asking a scholar about something the scholar said was in the Torah, and the scholar said, “It’s in the Zohar. Is that not the same as if it was in the Torah itself?” We should remember as Christians that the canonical Old Testament texts are divinely inspired, but that does not apply to commentaries—even ones reportedly written after having mystical experiences.
Kabbalah also leans too far into allegorizing Scripture. Again, texts like the Zohar treat the entire Torah as a large collection of mystical symbols rather than considering which texts are historical narratives and which are poetic. We recognize that Scripture’s historical texts were divinely guided to have a particular focus and may use literary devices (like putting the story of Isaac almost being sacrificed and Ishmael nearly dying next to each other, parallel stories to reflect a theme). However, that is not the same thing as saying the stories of Isaac, Ishmael, and other figures are huge collections of mystical symbols to unravel.
As Christians, we can appreciate efforts to relate to God intimately and the craving to see all that Scripture offers to tell us about him. We must also be careful of the temptations to emphasize subjective experiences and secret theories over the revealed truth passed down to us from the beginning.
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