Note: This series begins with ‘buyer beware’: It is part of a larger exploration. As a goy who doesn’t speak Hebrew, if I have any excuse for writing this, it is to provide a bridge to more significant sources. And the sheer fun of a beginner’s mind.
The Hebrew Kaballah is notoriously esoteric and challenging. However, I’ve found that the Tree of Life can also be very straightforward. Learning basic Sefirot—the divine attributes on the Tree—is no more complicated than learning a few chords on the guitar. You need a few basic alchemical principles to get started. I’ve picked these up in various places: in David Chaim Smith and Marc Gafni’s books, Rabbi Friedman’s YouTube channel, podcast discussions with Zevi Slavin—also in miscelanous Western esoterica, and texts by Dion Fortune and Alister Crowley.
The Tree of Life’s origins are obscure and hotly disputed. There are a couple of principal source texts, including Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, but its origins are believed to be much earlier. The Zohar—the Book of Splendour and the greatest book of Hebrew mysticism—was written in obscure Aramaic to Moses de Leon in 13th-century Spain. De Leon claimed to be channeling a more ancient book—even if modern scholarship has concluded that he is the author.
While introductory principles of the Sephirot may have originated in the second century in the Sefer Yetzirah, the images of the attributes as a tree are a more recent innovation. Furthermore, Hermetic philosophers from other traditions, such as Christianity, have also been interpreting the sefirot and Kaballahla for centuries. In the early twentieth century, people like Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune engaged in highly creative interpretations, integrating Egyptian hieroglyphs and Tarot and suggesting an ancient Egyptian origin.
Greek philosophy and mythology are common knowledge, but non-Jews know little about Kaballah or the Tree of Life. Most intellectuals in the West have heard the words logos, mythos, and pathos—but how many have heard about Keter, Chockma, and Binah, or the supernal trinity at the head of the sefirot? Why is this? Why does Kaballah belong to the wacky esoteric world on the one hand and the orthodox yeshiva on the other? Perhaps the dissemination of information in the internet age will allow for the diffusion of this aspect of Hebrew wisdom, and books like the Zohar will be studied alongside Dante’s Inferno.
The sefirot are said to be ‘attributes’ or ‘emanations’ of God, mainly represented by the fruits of a tree or the organs of a body, and sometimes as a series of concentric circles. Sefirot is a symbol of creation and the creative process itself. At the top of the sefirot is a crown called Keter, which we could call the godhead. The rest of the Sefirot are limbs of the divine body. These express the divine embodiment of the Aur En Sof, which means ‘light without end.’ For a guiding image, think of a tree made of light.
There is much mythology about the Sefirot, including the idea that God, in his mercy, reduced himself into a tzimtzum or contraction to be intelligible to human beings. This is the “emanationist” and dualist view of Sefirot, which David Chaim Smith opposes in his book, The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis. Smith points out that the divine didn’t contract into anything—this is a dualistic notion. However, despite the ultimate truth of unity, we still suffer a sense of duality and separation—of having hard shells of separation and alienation. The klipots (or shells covering the divine) are rectified through a lightning flash of illumination, revealing the divine attributes that are always already present.
To paraphrase the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, the Godhead manifests as all things while never leaving the Godhead. The divine and its expressions (such as the cosmic map of the Tree of Life) are a unity. In this view, there is no ultimate fall from the Garden of Eden, no great chain of being reaching into God, no emanations, or any reified states or stages. Therefore, the whole path of the Sephirot is provisional by nature and empty of any essential solidity. Of course, this is radical rather than ordinary theology and is not commonly understood. In apophatic mysticism, mystical symbols are used to undo the structures and veils of illusion rather than to describe an ultimate platonic architecture. There is no problem with divine reality itself; only our perception must be corrected.
The Tree might be provisional, but it is a beautiful elaboration. You do not need to know the esoteric formulas of the tree in your search for enlightenment—you can just as easily find a path like Zen, which is intensely beautiful and straightforward. But if you have a complex and colorful mind and like serious esoteric games, you might discover these symbols helpful and illuminating. The contemplative aim of all great non-dual traditions is essentially the same: that is, unity with Aur En Sof, Mahamudra, Rigpa, Christ consciousness—whatever name you like to call God.
The Tree of Life has three pillars: the expansive pole on the right, the contractive bar on the left, and the mediator in the central pillar. This can be compared to the gunas of Hinduism: Rajas, Tamas, and Sattva—energy, inertia, and harmony. Furthermore, The Tree of Life represents the masculine-feminine duality and its integration. The great mother on the left is considered severe, like Kali (because birth is a contraction); the masculine pillar on the right represents mercy (the free energy of luminosity). The central pillar of the sefirot is the integrative force.
Metaphorically speaking, the tree's roots are in the air, and the branches are flowers down below. In ordinary religion, God usually lives up in the sky, but in the mystical traditions, the divine is often described as the ‘ground of being.’ But, as the Buddhists say, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form—above and below are relative notions. This is another way of saying Malkuth (the base) is Keter (the crown), and Keter is Malkuth.
Regarding basic architecture, The Keter is the source and the crown of existence. On the left and right are Chokma and Binah, the ‘heads’ of the masculine and the feminine principle, like a King and Queen, or the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Below that are Chesed, Gevurah, and Tiferet—the second triad of positive, negative, and integrative principles, followed by a third triad, Netzach, Hod, and Yesod—with Malkuth at the base, which is the densest realm. There are also paths between the various attributes.
So there are ten sefirot. The tradition of ten is stated in the Sefer Yetzirah, "Ten sefirot of nothingness, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven.”
In the following essays, I will elaborate and improvise on the ten and the invisible eleven. Stay tuned.
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