108. - Kabbalah

Summary

“Kabbalah” refers to the tradition of mystical writings and practices in Judaism. By the early seventeenth century the dominant and most creative development within Kabbalah stems from the teachings of R. Isaac Luria, who taught in the mid sixteenth century, and his disciples Haim Vital and Israel Sarug. The Lurianic cosmology is grounded in a supreme divine principle, the Ein Sof (Unlimited), and its creation narrative invokes the divine light, which, through a process of outpouring, becomes manifest in ten sefirot (circles, attributes, numbers) configured first as a Primordial Man (Adam Kadmon), incorporating five configurations, and then through a complex series of processes and “four worlds,” finally in the sensible, material world in which we live. The Sarugian version of the Lurianic Kabbalah includes the important process of divine contraction and concentration (tzimtzum) from Luria, together with elaborate arrangements of divine points formed into letters, prior to the expression of the sefirot in the form of Adam Kadmon. In the 1630s, a student of Sarug, living in Amsterdam, wrote a work in which the Lurianic cosmogony and cosmology are elucidated through an exhaustive synthesis of philosophical arguments and exploration from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.