Can Kabbalah Help Bring Us Closer To God?

Normative Judaism is not usually concerned with the mystical, but with following halachah, "the path that one walks." This is not to be considered simply a stultifying compendium of laws that burden the observant, but more accurately a way of life that infuses ordinary behavior like eating and dressing with spiritual significance. Properly pursued with the right attitude or kavanah, Jewish law infuses the mundane world with extraordinary meaning and importance, and helps dignify the simplest of activities by associating with it a particular blessing. Washing one's hands, eating cake, or seeing a rainbow all become reminders of God's omnipresence in our lives when we invest each such act with its own singular blessing.

Kabbalah, however, goes a little further in this regard. Whereas normative Judaism accommodates a wide range of thought regarding the nature and essence of God because it directs its attention to all aspects of how we actually live our lives, Kabbalah assumes its practitioners are already thoroughly versed in Jewish law, and indeed practice it, but moves on to delve into the very nature of God, the existence of good and evil, and the greatest effort of all, how to cleave unto God "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."

Kabbalah is Hebrew for "that which is received". Though it seeks as its greatest aim a union with God, it is not for the aesthete or the monk, to be practiced or studied in solitude, nor is to be intellectualized as some traditionalists have declared, "It's nonsense, but it's Jewish nonsense, and the study of anything Jewish, even nonsense, is worthwhile".

Rather, like the Hasidim have managed to do in opposition to this attitude to the mystical, God is seen as residing in all things, and one's relationship to Him is deeply personal and ecstatic, marked by joy and inspiration. Yet, Kaballah revolves around a complicated set of beliefs about the nature and essence of God.

God is the Ein Sof, without end or limits. He engages with the universe through ten emanations from this essence, called the ten Sefirot. The Sefirot--the crown, wisdom, intuition, mercy (greatness), strength, glory, victory, majesty, foundation and sovereignty, correspond to different attributes of God, and interact with each other in complicated ways. Together they form the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the good and evil we do resonates throughout this tree and affects the entire universe, including God himself.

To create the universe, God contracts himself and creates a space for creation, called tzimtzum. In one rendering, evil is the tendency to destroy creation in order to find one's way back to the Ein Sof. Meditating on the various Sefirot also bring us closer to God. Some of the emanations are active and "male" in character, whereas others are receptive, and "female" in character, but all are encompassed in the Sefirot. The Sefirot reflect not only God's attributes, but those of man as well.

So study and practice, tradition and dance, Jewish law and Kabbalah, can not only bring us closer to understanding the great existential questions that comprise our human existence, but can help imbue us with the presence of the Holy One in all that we do and are.