1. Heaven and Hell
Jews believe in the immorality of the soul--an immorality whose nature is known only to God--but they no longer accept the literal idea of heaven and hell. There was a time when heaven and hell were accepted in Jewish theology, but even then, rarely as physical entities. A soul tormented with remorse for misdeeds was "in hell"; a soul delighting in a life well lived was "in heaven." The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides opposed the idea of rewards and punishments for behavior; the reward for virtuous living, he said, is simply the good life itself. (Maimonides makes this point in his later writings. He gives a more literal interpretation of the hereafter in his "Thirteen Principles," written at the age of twenty. Thus, Judaism can be said to have two concepts of the hereafter--on sophisticated and philosophical, the other relatively simple.)
In general, Jewish thinkers have focused on the ways to lead a good life on Earth and improve this world, leaving concerns about death and beyond until the appropriate time. Judaism has stressed the natural fact of death and its role in giving life meaning. Of course, issues of death are inevitably important. The fear of death, concern about the fate of our own soul and those of our loved ones, ethical concerns that some people die unfairly, all these and many other issues are discussed in Jewish literature. Since God is seen as ultimately just, the seeming injustice on Earth has propelled many traditional Jewish thinkers into seeing the afterlife as a way to reflect the ultimate justice of human existence.
Traditional thinkers considered how individuals would be rewarded or punished after their deaths. There are a few rare descriptions of life after death. Traditionalists gave the name Gehenna to the place where souls were punished. Many Jewish thinkers noted that since, essentially, God is filled with mercy and love, punishment is not to be considered to be eternal. There are, similarly, many varying conceptions of paradise, such as that paradise is the place where we finally understand the true concept of God. It is also possible that there is no separate Heaven and Hell, only lesser or greater distance from God after death. In addition, punishment might be self-determined on the basis of suffering in kind the suffering the person brought about. That is, Judaism doesn't have a clear sense of Heaven and Hell, with different places in Hell for different punishments. Rather, the idea is that God uses the afterlife to provide ultimate justice and for the wicked to seek some sort of final redemption.
Judaism does not believe people who are Gentiles will automatically go to Hell or that Jews will automatically go to Heaven on their basis of their belonging to the faith. Rather, individual ethical behavior is what is most important. Many traditional Jews believe that Judaism provides the best guide to leading such an ethical life.
2. Mysticism and Kabbalah in Judaism
When non-Jews ask about Judaism, they commonly ask questions like: Do you believe in heaven and hell? In angels or the devil? What happens to the soul after death? What is the nature of God and the universe? The answers to questions like these define most religions; in fact, I have heard some people say that the purpose of religion is to answer these kinds of questions. Yet in Judaism, most of these cosmological issues are wide open to personal opinion. The areas of Jewish thought that most extensively discuss these issues, Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, were traditionally not even taught to people until the age of 40, when they had completed their education in Torah and Talmud.
Mysticism and mystical experiences have been a part of Judaism since the earliest days. The Torah contains many stories of mystical experiences, from visitations by angels to prophetic dreams and visions. The Talmud considers the existence of the soul and when it becomes attached to the body. Jewish tradition tells that the souls of all Jews were in existence at the time of the Giving of the Torah and were present at the time and agreed to the Covenant. There are many stories of places similar to Christian heaven and purgatory, of wandering souls and reincarnation. The Talmud contains vague hints of a mystical school of thought that was taught only to the most advanced students and was not committed to writing. There are several references in ancient sources to ma'aseh bereshith (the work of creation) and ma'aseh merkavah (the work of the chariot [of Ezekiel's vision]), the two primary subjects of mystical thought at the time.
In the middle ages, many of these mystical teachings were committed to writing in books like the Zohar. Many of these writings were asserted to be secret ancient writings or compilations of secret ancient writings.
Like most subjects of Jewish belief, the area of mysticism is wide open to personal interpretation. Some traditional Jews take mysticism very seriously. Mysticism is an integral part of Chasidic Judaism, for example, and passages from kabbalistic sources are routinely included in traditional prayer books. Other traditional Jews take mysticism with a grain of salt. One prominent Orthodox Jew, when introducing a speaker on the subject of Jewish mysticism, said basically, "it's nonsense, but it's Jewish nonsense, and the study of anything Jewish, even nonsense, is worthwhile."
The mystical school of thought came to be known as Kabbalah, from the Hebrew root Qof-Bet-Lamed, meaning "to receive, to accept." The word is usually translated as "tradition." In Hebrew, the word does not have any of the dark, sinister, evil connotations that it has developed in English. For example, the English word "cabal" (a secret group of conspirators) is derived from the Hebrew word Kabbalah, but neither the Hebrew word nor the mystical doctrines have any evil implications to Jews.
Kabbalah is one of the most grossly misunderstood parts of Judaism. I have received several messages from non-Jews describing Kabbalah as "the dark side of Judaism," describing it as evil or black magic. On the other end of the spectrum, I receive many messages wanting to learn more about the trendy doctrine popularized by various Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities.
These misunderstandings stem largely from the fact that the teachings of Kabbalah have been so badly distorted by mystics and occultists. Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. In more recent times, many have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings. Today, many well-known celebrities have popularized a new age pop-psychology distortion of kabbalah (I have heard it derisively referred to as "crap-balah") that has more in common with the writings of Deepak Chopra than with any authentic Jewish source.
I do not mean to suggest that magic is not a part of Kabbalah. There are certainly many traditional Jewish stories that involve the use of hidden knowledge to affect the world in ways that could be described as magic. The Talmud and other sources ascribe supernatural activities to many great rabbis. Some rabbis pronounced a name of God and ascended into heaven to consult with the God and the angels on issues of great public concern. One scholar is said to have created an artificial man by reciting various names of God. Much later stories tell of a rabbi who created a man out of clay (a golem) and brought it to life by putting in its mouth a piece of paper with a name of God on it. However, this area of Kabbalah (if indeed it is more than mere legend) is not something that is practiced by the average Jew, or even the average rabbi. There are a number of stories that discourage the pursuit of such knowledge and power as dangerous and irresponsible. If you see any books on the subject of "practical kabbalah," you can safely dismiss them as not authentic Jewish tradition because, as these stories demonstrate, this kind of knowledge was traditionally thought to be far too dangerous to be distributed blindly to the masses.
It is important to note that all of these magical effects were achieved through the power of God, generally by calling upon the name of God. These practices are no more "evil" than the miracles of the prophets, or the miracles that Christians ascribe to Jesus. In fact, according to some of my mystically-inclined friends, Jesus performed his miracles using kabbalistic techniques learned from the Essenes, a Jewish sect of that time that was involved in mysticism.
To give you an idea of the nature of Kabbalah, I will briefly discuss one of the better known, fundamental concepts of kabbalistic thought: the concept of God as Ein Sof, the Ten Sefirot, and the kabbalistic tree of life. This explanation is, at best, a gross oversimplification. I do not pretend to fully understand these ideas.
According to Kabbalah, the true essence of God is so transcendent that it cannot be described, except with reference to what it is not. This true essence of God is known as Ein Sof, which literally means "without end," which encompasses the idea of His lack of boundaries in both time and space. In this truest form, the Ein Sof is so transcendent that It cannot have any direct interaction with the universe. The Ein Sof interacts with the universe through ten emanations from this essence, known as the Ten Sefirot.
These Sefirot correspond to qualities of God. They consist of, in descending order, Keter (the crown), Chokhmah (wisdom), Binah (intuition, understanding), Chesed (mercy) or Gedulah (greatness), Gevurah (strength), Tiferet (glory), Netzach (victory), Hod (majesty), Yesod (foundation) and Malkut (sovereignty). The middle five qualities are mentioned explicitly and in order at I Chronicles 29:11: Yours, O Lord, is the greatness (gedulah), the strength (gevurah), the glory (tiferet), the power (netzach), and the splendor (hod). I have seen this passage translated in widely varying ways, but the Hebrew corresponds to the names of the Sefirot in order.
The Ten Sefirot include both masculine and feminine qualities. Kabbalah pays a great deal of attention to the feminine aspects of God.
The Sefirot are not separate deities, as some might think by taking this too literally. They are intimately a part of God, and yet they are in contact with the universe in a way that the Ein Sof is not. The Sefirot connect with everything in the universe, including humanity. The good and evil that we do resonates through the Sefirot and affects the entire universe, up to and including God Himself.
The Tree of Life (the ten Sefirot), operates on many levels. The basic Tree can be taken as a complete model of the entire universe, of every being who lives in it, and of all the beings together in their collectivities and hierarchies. However, in the next layer of complexity, the basic Tree is construed as representing only our immediate terrestrial world. The Kabbalistic teaching is that there are three higher worlds above this, and each world is represented by a complete Tree, with the spheres overlapping in a particular way. This figure is traditionally called "Jacob's Ladder," indicating that it portrays the esoteric reality behind the Bible story in which Jacob saw a ladder reaching up into heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it.
For indeed, the sphere of these higher Trees are said to be the habitations of angels. Every sphere is designated by the name of an angel, which can also be understood as a collective entity: a whole race, tribe, species, or "choir" of angels. And all these legions of angels are ranked into three basic orders corresponding to the three worlds.
The up-and-down/higher-and-lower imagery is supplemented in some Kabbalistic sources by three-dimensional imagery of smaller spheres within larger spheres. Thus the "higher" worlds are also the greater worlds, and contain the lesser worlds within themselves - just as within the universe are galaxies, within galaxies are solar systems, and within solar systems are planets. So the formations of the material cosmos do in fact body forth the nested spheres of the angelic realms. And so it is that this ancient graphic correlates perfectly with modern astronomical knowledge, fleshing it out with the higher knowledge of life-forms far beyond the power of radio telescopes to see. For this perennial wisdom shows us that there exist beings so vast that their reach is coextensive with the universe itself; that these are served by entities of galactic proportion; and that the will of the Galactic Gods is in turn administered by angelic creatures who oversee every stellar system and the lesser beings within it.
The movement and transmutation of spirit can be conceived as going down our charts in the mode of creating, or rising up in the mode of evolving. The process transcends time as a one-dimensional vector, so both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives are simultaneously valid. The Tree of Life shows us the basic nature of this movement.
The Kabbalah can be used as a system of spiritual development paralleling the Hindu and Buddhist methods of progressive opening of the chakras. It also corresponds to the Gnostic doctrines of the soul traveling through the planetary spheres. And in the largest sense, it is also a map of collective human spiritual evolution through vast eons of time.
Jews believe in the immorality of the soul--an immorality whose nature is known only to God--but they no longer accept the literal idea of heaven and hell. There was a time when heaven and hell were accepted in Jewish theology, but even then, rarely as physical entities. A soul tormented with remorse for misdeeds was "in hell"; a soul delighting in a life well lived was "in heaven." The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides opposed the idea of rewards and punishments for behavior; the reward for virtuous living, he said, is simply the good life itself. (Maimonides makes this point in his later writings. He gives a more literal interpretation of the hereafter in his "Thirteen Principles," written at the age of twenty. Thus, Judaism can be said to have two concepts of the hereafter--on sophisticated and philosophical, the other relatively simple.)
In general, Jewish thinkers have focused on the ways to lead a good life on Earth and improve this world, leaving concerns about death and beyond until the appropriate time. Judaism has stressed the natural fact of death and its role in giving life meaning. Of course, issues of death are inevitably important. The fear of death, concern about the fate of our own soul and those of our loved ones, ethical concerns that some people die unfairly, all these and many other issues are discussed in Jewish literature. Since God is seen as ultimately just, the seeming injustice on Earth has propelled many traditional Jewish thinkers into seeing the afterlife as a way to reflect the ultimate justice of human existence.
Traditional thinkers considered how individuals would be rewarded or punished after their deaths. There are a few rare descriptions of life after death. Traditionalists gave the name Gehenna to the place where souls were punished. Many Jewish thinkers noted that since, essentially, God is filled with mercy and love, punishment is not to be considered to be eternal. There are, similarly, many varying conceptions of paradise, such as that paradise is the place where we finally understand the true concept of God. It is also possible that there is no separate Heaven and Hell, only lesser or greater distance from God after death. In addition, punishment might be self-determined on the basis of suffering in kind the suffering the person brought about. That is, Judaism doesn't have a clear sense of Heaven and Hell, with different places in Hell for different punishments. Rather, the idea is that God uses the afterlife to provide ultimate justice and for the wicked to seek some sort of final redemption.
Judaism does not believe people who are Gentiles will automatically go to Hell or that Jews will automatically go to Heaven on their basis of their belonging to the faith. Rather, individual ethical behavior is what is most important. Many traditional Jews believe that Judaism provides the best guide to leading such an ethical life.
2. Mysticism and Kabbalah in Judaism
When non-Jews ask about Judaism, they commonly ask questions like: Do you believe in heaven and hell? In angels or the devil? What happens to the soul after death? What is the nature of God and the universe? The answers to questions like these define most religions; in fact, I have heard some people say that the purpose of religion is to answer these kinds of questions. Yet in Judaism, most of these cosmological issues are wide open to personal opinion. The areas of Jewish thought that most extensively discuss these issues, Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, were traditionally not even taught to people until the age of 40, when they had completed their education in Torah and Talmud.
Mysticism and mystical experiences have been a part of Judaism since the earliest days. The Torah contains many stories of mystical experiences, from visitations by angels to prophetic dreams and visions. The Talmud considers the existence of the soul and when it becomes attached to the body. Jewish tradition tells that the souls of all Jews were in existence at the time of the Giving of the Torah and were present at the time and agreed to the Covenant. There are many stories of places similar to Christian heaven and purgatory, of wandering souls and reincarnation. The Talmud contains vague hints of a mystical school of thought that was taught only to the most advanced students and was not committed to writing. There are several references in ancient sources to ma'aseh bereshith (the work of creation) and ma'aseh merkavah (the work of the chariot [of Ezekiel's vision]), the two primary subjects of mystical thought at the time.
In the middle ages, many of these mystical teachings were committed to writing in books like the Zohar. Many of these writings were asserted to be secret ancient writings or compilations of secret ancient writings.
Like most subjects of Jewish belief, the area of mysticism is wide open to personal interpretation. Some traditional Jews take mysticism very seriously. Mysticism is an integral part of Chasidic Judaism, for example, and passages from kabbalistic sources are routinely included in traditional prayer books. Other traditional Jews take mysticism with a grain of salt. One prominent Orthodox Jew, when introducing a speaker on the subject of Jewish mysticism, said basically, "it's nonsense, but it's Jewish nonsense, and the study of anything Jewish, even nonsense, is worthwhile."
The mystical school of thought came to be known as Kabbalah, from the Hebrew root Qof-Bet-Lamed, meaning "to receive, to accept." The word is usually translated as "tradition." In Hebrew, the word does not have any of the dark, sinister, evil connotations that it has developed in English. For example, the English word "cabal" (a secret group of conspirators) is derived from the Hebrew word Kabbalah, but neither the Hebrew word nor the mystical doctrines have any evil implications to Jews.
Kabbalah is one of the most grossly misunderstood parts of Judaism. I have received several messages from non-Jews describing Kabbalah as "the dark side of Judaism," describing it as evil or black magic. On the other end of the spectrum, I receive many messages wanting to learn more about the trendy doctrine popularized by various Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities.
These misunderstandings stem largely from the fact that the teachings of Kabbalah have been so badly distorted by mystics and occultists. Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. In more recent times, many have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings. Today, many well-known celebrities have popularized a new age pop-psychology distortion of kabbalah (I have heard it derisively referred to as "crap-balah") that has more in common with the writings of Deepak Chopra than with any authentic Jewish source.
I do not mean to suggest that magic is not a part of Kabbalah. There are certainly many traditional Jewish stories that involve the use of hidden knowledge to affect the world in ways that could be described as magic. The Talmud and other sources ascribe supernatural activities to many great rabbis. Some rabbis pronounced a name of God and ascended into heaven to consult with the God and the angels on issues of great public concern. One scholar is said to have created an artificial man by reciting various names of God. Much later stories tell of a rabbi who created a man out of clay (a golem) and brought it to life by putting in its mouth a piece of paper with a name of God on it. However, this area of Kabbalah (if indeed it is more than mere legend) is not something that is practiced by the average Jew, or even the average rabbi. There are a number of stories that discourage the pursuit of such knowledge and power as dangerous and irresponsible. If you see any books on the subject of "practical kabbalah," you can safely dismiss them as not authentic Jewish tradition because, as these stories demonstrate, this kind of knowledge was traditionally thought to be far too dangerous to be distributed blindly to the masses.
It is important to note that all of these magical effects were achieved through the power of God, generally by calling upon the name of God. These practices are no more "evil" than the miracles of the prophets, or the miracles that Christians ascribe to Jesus. In fact, according to some of my mystically-inclined friends, Jesus performed his miracles using kabbalistic techniques learned from the Essenes, a Jewish sect of that time that was involved in mysticism.
To give you an idea of the nature of Kabbalah, I will briefly discuss one of the better known, fundamental concepts of kabbalistic thought: the concept of God as Ein Sof, the Ten Sefirot, and the kabbalistic tree of life. This explanation is, at best, a gross oversimplification. I do not pretend to fully understand these ideas.
According to Kabbalah, the true essence of God is so transcendent that it cannot be described, except with reference to what it is not. This true essence of God is known as Ein Sof, which literally means "without end," which encompasses the idea of His lack of boundaries in both time and space. In this truest form, the Ein Sof is so transcendent that It cannot have any direct interaction with the universe. The Ein Sof interacts with the universe through ten emanations from this essence, known as the Ten Sefirot.
These Sefirot correspond to qualities of God. They consist of, in descending order, Keter (the crown), Chokhmah (wisdom), Binah (intuition, understanding), Chesed (mercy) or Gedulah (greatness), Gevurah (strength), Tiferet (glory), Netzach (victory), Hod (majesty), Yesod (foundation) and Malkut (sovereignty). The middle five qualities are mentioned explicitly and in order at I Chronicles 29:11: Yours, O Lord, is the greatness (gedulah), the strength (gevurah), the glory (tiferet), the power (netzach), and the splendor (hod). I have seen this passage translated in widely varying ways, but the Hebrew corresponds to the names of the Sefirot in order.
The Ten Sefirot include both masculine and feminine qualities. Kabbalah pays a great deal of attention to the feminine aspects of God.
The Sefirot are not separate deities, as some might think by taking this too literally. They are intimately a part of God, and yet they are in contact with the universe in a way that the Ein Sof is not. The Sefirot connect with everything in the universe, including humanity. The good and evil that we do resonates through the Sefirot and affects the entire universe, up to and including God Himself.
The Tree of Life (the ten Sefirot), operates on many levels. The basic Tree can be taken as a complete model of the entire universe, of every being who lives in it, and of all the beings together in their collectivities and hierarchies. However, in the next layer of complexity, the basic Tree is construed as representing only our immediate terrestrial world. The Kabbalistic teaching is that there are three higher worlds above this, and each world is represented by a complete Tree, with the spheres overlapping in a particular way. This figure is traditionally called "Jacob's Ladder," indicating that it portrays the esoteric reality behind the Bible story in which Jacob saw a ladder reaching up into heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it.
For indeed, the sphere of these higher Trees are said to be the habitations of angels. Every sphere is designated by the name of an angel, which can also be understood as a collective entity: a whole race, tribe, species, or "choir" of angels. And all these legions of angels are ranked into three basic orders corresponding to the three worlds.
The up-and-down/higher-and-lower imagery is supplemented in some Kabbalistic sources by three-dimensional imagery of smaller spheres within larger spheres. Thus the "higher" worlds are also the greater worlds, and contain the lesser worlds within themselves - just as within the universe are galaxies, within galaxies are solar systems, and within solar systems are planets. So the formations of the material cosmos do in fact body forth the nested spheres of the angelic realms. And so it is that this ancient graphic correlates perfectly with modern astronomical knowledge, fleshing it out with the higher knowledge of life-forms far beyond the power of radio telescopes to see. For this perennial wisdom shows us that there exist beings so vast that their reach is coextensive with the universe itself; that these are served by entities of galactic proportion; and that the will of the Galactic Gods is in turn administered by angelic creatures who oversee every stellar system and the lesser beings within it.
The movement and transmutation of spirit can be conceived as going down our charts in the mode of creating, or rising up in the mode of evolving. The process transcends time as a one-dimensional vector, so both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives are simultaneously valid. The Tree of Life shows us the basic nature of this movement.
The Kabbalah can be used as a system of spiritual development paralleling the Hindu and Buddhist methods of progressive opening of the chakras. It also corresponds to the Gnostic doctrines of the soul traveling through the planetary spheres. And in the largest sense, it is also a map of collective human spiritual evolution through vast eons of time.
