THE GENESIS OF MANKIND

Man is plastic, elastic, pliable. The meaning of his existence is stretched from end to end of the cosmos, and as it stretches it thins, expands, contracts, circles always around the very mystery that stands sessile in the ocean that tugs it to and fro. What does this mean?

In the Haggadah (?) the scholars explained man’s genesis as a pure act of will of the Creator, one of the definitive moments in God’s own history. They interpreted the creation of mankind on earth as a decision taken by God alone, and even in opposition to the angelic beings. The proposition was never put forward that unmanifested man, the soul of man, was a co-creator with God of his own physical existence in third-dimensional reality.

But this is what I am saying now. The qualities evident in the descriptions of the Sefirot pre-existed man’s physical form but were characteristic of the spirit beings who already had a relationship with God, who drew those qualities from Him, and who wished to create for themselves a greater field of opportunity and endeavor. The nurturing stream of their wisdom already flowed freely from the fountainhead of God. They were already in a loving and deeply dependent relationship with Him, and they already had great power in the spiritual realm.

They were already gifted with Keter, the Crown: the great connection between the fountainhead and spirit itself, the cord, the link, that infinitely extensible lifeline between God and the individual soul — this pre-exists birth and indeed pre-existed the first birth. Because this connection can never be broken it is the source of spiritual life, both in life and death.

How did mankind, the soul of mankind, know that greater growth was possible, and how was it able — how were the group of individual souls able — to envisage a platform for this growth? It was God who showed them the possibility of physical manifestation. But they already had the wisdom to know that they required greater growth. And this was because they fed from the wisdom of God; he opened the 32 paths for them. Knowing nothing of their own limitations they followed the paths back to the Source, just as it says in the powerful Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, (5:16), “But those whose wisdom is made pure by the wisdom of their inner spirit, their wisdom is unto them a sun and in its radiance they see the Supreme”.

The Zohar says a number of times that when God proposed to create man the angels argued forcefully against it, saying that mankind would surely sin, and this would force God to punish His own creatures. Nowhere in the Zohar is any explanation attempted of this curious story, although it does go on to say that mankind was not therefore given any substance from the angels in his makeup — that he was given all his substance from God alone. From this we are to learn that He alone is our maker and we are to rely on no one other than Him for our salvation. But a difficult question arises. If the souls of men already existed (and were already yearning for greater growth), what could possibly have been the qualitative difference between them and the angels?

The answer might be that mankind, a particular group of souls or spirits, was given free will but angels were not. It has long been said that angels have always been jealous of mankind because of their ability to manifest physically on the earth, but it is more likely that if they were jealous their jealousy arose from the free will granted to humans. The legend of the fall of Lucifer implies that angels had had free will at one time; perhaps it was taken away from them after the rebellion. And yet the Torah says over and over that no matter how much humans sin, God will never abandon them or utterly destroy them or remove their ability to refuse Him (although He will certainly punish them when necessary).

This may sound like fruitless speculation, but if true it shows why man is plastic, elastic, pliable. We are not kept to any standard of behavior by any outside force. Unlike the angels, whose mandate is to watch and to assist God, we are free to do whatever we want. Even Moses knew in advance that once freed from his governance his people would surely sin, and God of course knew this without the angels’ admonitions: His own governance on earth was remote enough from peoples’ active consciousness that it would be easy for them to fall into error. And this is what happened and still happens every day. Yet the Covenant that God has with mankind is a covenant of the purest compassion (Chesed) for the difficulties encountered on earth. And it is a covenant of the purest wisdom (Chochmah) and understanding (Binah) — wisdom to know that the physical life can teach what no other life can, understanding that some people will fail and some will succeed but that all will be given opportunity and fair justice (Gvurah). Chesed, Chochmah, Binah, Gvurah...

Over and over the qualities in the Sefirot reassert themselves to provide a framework for discussion and arrangement of every issue in the Torah. When one has internalized the concept of the Sefirot there comes a time when they are automatically mapped onto any problem that arises, and this can bring great clarity to life. This is one of the benefits that can be gained from nonmystical study of kabbalah. There are others, of course. The thousands of alternative and ever deeper explanations of the Torah loosen up one’s mind in such a way as to encourage one to find new ways of adapting scriptural lessons to life’s problems. Kabbalah ‘study’, as might be experienced by a weekly class or a little reading every day, helps to firm up dedication and to exercise the spiritual imagination.

But it is only through intense and prolonged immersion in the Zohar that its truly transformative powers can be accessed.

The Zohar is dense with allusions to sacred geometry, astrology, merkabah symbolism, gematria, and permutations of the Names of God. These things are not meant to be understood with the intellect. They cannot be understood with the intellect. But the attempt must be made to understand them with the intellect because it is only through the sheer impossibility of that effort that the intellect can finally be sidestepped, indeed defeated, to allow for the understanding of the heart.

Each of the great mystical traditions has a different mechanism for obtaining this same result: chanting, fasting, ritual exercises, spinning, meditation, isolation, sensory deprivation, or prayer. But the Zohar’s relentless pressure on the intellect to try to understand what one is certain could be understood if only one could get the mind to focus on it — this has the essence of pure Zen. All those impossible koans that students of Zen are given to solve partake of the same mechanism as the Zohar. And yet there is a great difference in the perception of God between Zen Buddhism and mystical Kabbalah.

Or is there? In Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on the final reality as nothingness there is a strange echo of the Zohar, and it consists in this: The Zohar in its exegesis of the Torah devotes almost all of its thousands of pages to God — God’s commandments, His presence, His watchfulness, His blessings, His promises, His creation, His punishments, His Holy Names, and so on. He is referred to as El, Elohim, Shadai, Adonai, Hashem, the Holy One, blessed be He, the Ancient of Days, Zeir Anpin, Arich Anpin, Atika Kadisha, and more — each Name meant to portray a subtly different aspect of His divine nature. The end result of this portrayal is the absolute inability to grasp any concept of God at all. One no longer knows what to call Him or how to imagine Him. Is this not like the state of emptiness attained by the student of Zen?

It is, and yet it is not. For what does sink deeply into the psyche through prolonged immersion in the Zohar is the concept of God as the Source, and as Flow. And what else in anyone’s terms, with our limited understanding, could He be, but Source and Flow? There is nothing else.

It is the Source and the Flow that are ultimately accessed through the mystical kabbalah. And the transformation achieved thereby is something that has rarely if ever been spoken of to those outside the circle of kabbalistic initiates. Yet the whole truth is available for anyone to see who has access to the Zohar. On the one hand the great achievement of the Zohar is to free one from the literal interpretation of the Torah. But the greatest secret of the Zohar is that one must take many of its allusions literally. The rabbis did and people do see the visions of Ezekiel. The rabbis did and people do see and converse with Elijah and Moses and others from the spirit world. The rabbis did and people do hear celestial music. There really is a Hidden Book to which the rabbis had and people have access in their minds: it can be seen and read; however, it exists not in the physical realm but in the etheric realm.

These are realities. When the student achieves these connections to higher sources of knowledge and wisdom he or she becomes quite transformed. But there are prerequisite qualities for such study and accomplishment. For hundreds of years kabbalah study was not permitted to any man under the age of 50 (and it was never permitted to women at all). This age restriction is still a wise one for the intensive mystical kabbalah study, because a deep and firm foundation is required in order to move safely through the deep waters. People of an overly rigid mind-set, or those seeking magical powers, would also flounder in its depths and perhaps be damaged by the things they would encounter.

However, a nonmystical study is also useful and is valid for everyone. Besides the benefits listed earlier, the chief one is the sense of balance that comes to the forefront through contemplation of the three columns and the distribution of the Sefirot; over and over we see how left and right, judgment and mercy, light and dark, good and evil, day and night all come to balance and completion in the center. This understanding assists us in balancing our own lives. We also come to recognize higher truths so that we can more easily see where our world conforms to them and where it does not.

We learn from the Zohar how our actions here below affect the realms above, and how they have their echo there. Whether we believe this or not, it soon becomes evident that one pattern of behavior leads to harmony and another does not, and it is not such a great stretch of the imagination to see that the achievement of harmony may have resonance in other realms. The achievement of inner harmony fostered by the Zohar is instantly transferable to harmonious relationships in the family and community. This is particularly interesting in view of the kabbalah’s development as a vehicle of societal and cultural protest and of resistance to power structures that had given rise to enormous evils and imbalances. I will return to this theme later....