Chapter 5.1 – Religion or Science?
Kabbalah is often associated with tradition and even with religion. In most cases, this is a result of the difficulty in finding the logic in the old customs and the various prohibitions in the Mitzvot (commandments). It is a difficulty that is expressed directly or indirectly by antagonism toward religion. This is the reason for the important need to clearly distinguish between Kabbalah and religion.
Every religion relies on a certain prophet, a person who was connected with spirituality and circulated his knowledge among people. This argument is at the basis of every religion, meaning that everything begins with the sublime truth, the revelation of the Creator before the prophet, the founder, be it Judaism or any other religion.
The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method to attain the Creator that is available for all. It allows any person to come by himself without any mediators, to a spiritual contact with the Creator. People, who have attained spiritual attainment, described the way they went through step by step so that one might follow them and reach these attainments by himself. One’s spiritual connection with the Creator is based on one’s own discovery of Him.
Though the wisdom of Kabbalah does not deal directly with studying this world, it is still the basis of every science in our world. The study of Kabbalah imparts one with the ability to see how spiritual forces find their expression in this world, how they climb up and down to and from our world with a variety of forms we call phenomena and physical, chemical and biological processes, as well as moral and other conceptual processes. Because of our inability to learn all those processes as one collective, we study them as separate sciences, divided to specific sciences. However, the truth is that everything is connected and interdependent on every other force and element of nature. After all the subject matter is one, and we just dissect the research to pieces to make it easier on us.
The wisdom of Kabbalah ties all these phenomena of spirit and matter together. This means that from the point of view of Kabbalah, music, astronomy, biology and medicine form an external expression of a unique law of the inner makings of nature. A Kabbalist who feels the upper world finds that there is only one law, expressed in many different ways in our world.
The wisdom of Kabbalah contains all the necessary components of every science: it’s got researches, records of the results of the experiments, continuity and consistency, repetition of the experiments and accumulation of knowledge. It is a science that deals with the study of the universe, the study of reality we live in. It is a science that studies nature’s only law. Today, we are capable of perceiving only a negligible part of the collective law of reality in the degree of our world. We call that negligible part “This World.”