Description

Kabbalah isn׳t religion, mysticism, magic, holy water, red strings, amulets, and a lot of things it׳s popularly associated with. Taken from ״Kabbalah Revealed״ Episode 1 - A Basic Overview.

Transcript

Kabbalah predates religion. Religion is a phenomenon of disconnection from the Upper Force, of speculation and a misunderstanding of Kabbalah, even though it has a formal similarity with it because the Kabbalists created Halachah, they created the books that we study and consider to be holy books. And our traditions and so on come from them, but the purpose, the meaning of them, what the books are actually written for and what they speak about—we are not very well in touch with these things. So, the relationship with Judaism is like Kabbalah and amnesia.

Now, as far as mysticism goes, Kabbalah is a science, it is not a mysticism. It's a way of making a direct connection with things that seem to us magical and infathomable only because we, in our current state of awareness, don't understand how they work. And it's the same as if you brought a lighter to some tribe that lived on a desert island that had never seen any technology at all; you would be the god of fire, some mystical creature that can produce fire out of your hand. I mean, it's simply a matter of what is hidden and what is revealed.

That it's magic: well, magic implies the using of hidden Upper Forces in order to manipulate people to get what you want and to cause certain outcomes for your benefit or against other people and so on. But it's impossible to make any contact with the Upper Forces at all unless a person changes their moral inner nature. The attainment within Kabbalah is a matter of inner transformation and it is impossible to be in contact with the forces without that. So, this simply has nothing to do with anything except somebody's vivid imagination.

That only a few people are allowed to study Kabbalah and there are conditions, the conditions being: you have to be Jewish. This is not so, because the Kabbalists all along taught people who were not Jewish by birth. Some of the greatest Kabbalists, in fact, were gentiles—people of other nations—such as Unchelos, Rabbi Akiva, the list goes on. And all Kabbalists took students who were worthy students, but not based on some kind of physical attribute, but on an inner attribute that is called "Yechud," or "Yehud," and we'll explain that later.

That you have to have a lot of... You have to have mastered preliminary wisdom—Gemarah, Mishnah and so on—before you can study Kabbalah. Well, if you don't understand what's written in Torah or Gemarah, then you're not going to understand Kabbalah either. So, it's not that you need these preliminary wisdoms, it's that if you cannot find spirituality in these preliminary wisdoms, you must move to books that talk directly about spirituality in a way that they can't be mistaken for things of this world, like the language in which the Torah is written, or the language of stories, Haggadah, and so on.

And amulets and protection, and the use of number and letter manipulations in order to create stuff and to protect people from evil. Well, this is the complete and total opposite of what Kabbalah deals with. In fact, it's completely forbidden. It's considered idolatry that one should use the Upper Forces for some selfish, personal reason here. And besides that, there is nothing to be protected from. So holy water, amulets, red strings and so on are psychological things and they have absolutely nothing to do with Kabbalah.

And finally, there's the mixture of Kabbalah with eastern religions where, since we didn't know anything, we made an association with Buddhism or with aspects of Hinduism that deal openly with spirituality. And that's only because spirituality from the books of the Kabbalists were not open.