Japanese Culture

Kaballah is a religious and philosophical system that has an insight to divine nature. It is a form of knowledge that revolves around God and the universe. It is said to have come down as a revelation to sages of the past and is preserved only by lucky few.

Kaballah is a part of the Jewish Oral Law and the mystical understanding of the Torah. In Kabbalah, you find an understanding of the spiritual spheres of creation and learn about the rules and ways of god in administering the existence of the universe.

In the beginning, Jewish mysticism was considered the only form of empirical lore. However it was only under the Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean era, and under its philosophy that Kaballah started developing a speculative character. After this, it was in the medieval era that the Kaballah developed with the mystical text, the Sefer Yetzirah.

Jews consider this book to be attributed to Abraham; and thus became the object of systematic study of the elect. It was then called 'baale ha-Kabbalah'. It was after the thirteenth century that Kaballah branched into extensive literature while opposing the Talmud. The interesting aspect of the Kaballah is that every letter, word, number and accent of its scripture has a hidden sense. The Kaballah also teaches the method of interpretation of all these various occult meanings.

Some Jewish historians believe that it is only the mystical religious systems that appeared after the 12th century should be referred to be part of the Kaballah. According to them, the era and esoteric Jewish mystical systems that existed before the 12th century should be referred using other terms. However there are other Jewish historians that consider this distinction to be arbitrary. This is because according to them, the period after the 12th century is the next part of a continuous line of development that arises from the mystical roots and elements as the other periods of the Jews.

This is why these scholars feel it is okay to use the term Kaballah to refer to all forms of Jewish mysticism, that had stemmed from as early the first century of the Common Era. Though these are two views to the usage and reference of the term in Jewish religion, there is another group of Jews that hold a completely different view.

This group of Jews is the orthodox Jews who tend to disagree with these two schools of thought. This is because they are against the concept of the Kabbalah undergoing any form of important historical development and change in the Jewish history. It was only in the later part of the 19th century that the Kabbalah is studied as a rational system of understanding the world, and not a mystical one.

This is attributed to the emergence of the subject 'Jewish Studies' in the late 19th century. And the pioneer to this approach for Kaballah was Lazar Gulkowitsch. Though the pioneer for this approach was Lazar Gulkowitsch, there are many groups that have made claims to being the author of the Kabbalah. One example is the group Nasorean Essenes. According to them, the original Kaballah is the Qabalta.

The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, is one of the first books based on Kabbalah. The text is quoted in the 6th century in Jewish history, while its first commentaries were written in the 10th century. However the historical origins of are unclear as it still exists in numerous recessions that go up to 2,500 words long. And the irony of the Kaballah is that like most Jewish mystical texts available today, the Kaballah is written so that it proves to be meaningless to people who don't have an extensive background of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Midrash.

In other words, to realize the beauty, and to understand the Kaballah, it proves to be beneficial to have a background in Tanakh and Midrash.

Darren Williger is an over-caffeinated, low carbohydrate eating, winemaking enthusiast who writes for MicroKarma.com, CoffeeZen.com, and PrimeYoga.com