The Modern Kabbalists

Abstract

During the twelfth century there evolved in central Europe a mystic movement of Jewish devotees, the kabbalists, whose belief in the transcendence of God led them to the Ein Sofi the infinite. According to the Kabbalah (in Hebrew: “tradition”), God is revealed to man only through His virtues and deeds, never directly as Himself; the many references to God in the scriptures are only allusions to His manifestations. In their search for spiritual fulfillment, the kabbalists were seeking a path to the divine spirit, if not to God Himself. This they achieved through a system of ten sephirot (literally: “spheres,” and also “enumerations”), emanating from the Ein Sof (“endless”), which became the symbol for the hidden God (Fig. 22.1). The upper sphere, the one closest to the Ein Sof, was called the “crown”; next came the spheres of “wisdom,” “intelligence,” “mercy,” and so on down to the lowest sphere, the “kingdom.” It is only through the ten sephirot, according to the kabbalists, that one can approach the divine spirit; perhaps we can find here a subtle reference to the mathematical idea of limit, of an infinite series whose sum we can only approach, never reach. The kabbalists depicted their sephirot in various geometric forms, as in Fig. 22.1.

…Here

In the interminable wilderness

Of worlds, at whose immensity

Even soaring fancy staggers.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)