Kabbalah why are we here

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And then picture below it a very tiny little circle. And that represents you in the world. There was a cartoon recently in T he New Yorker. It shows two angels and a big guy talking without a beard. We all know that picture. Just another metaphor, relax. Same big circle that represents God, but the only difference is is that the little circle that represents you and me is inside the big circle.

And the goal in that model is not to pray to God or have God tell you what to do, but to realize that you have been all along, contrary to all of your illusions, a dimension of the divine, and in moments of heightened spiritual awareness, the boundary line, which is the little circle defining you inside the big circle, momentarily is erased.

Tippett: I actually want to quote you at yourself again, because this is so wonderful. A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity. Rabbi Kushner: Yeah, I like that a lot. Tippett: Yeah. But it also raises these very mysterious questions, right? They come and go according to their own timetables and for their own reasons.

Something has changed. I want to add just one more thing before we go on. The odds are against it. But I am increasingly convinced that mystical seekers are able to have that moment where they lose themselves in the divine all, the unio-mystical experience several times a day. And of course the phone lines completely just filled up. Each of them actually described very much this definition that you gave, the sense of separation fell away.

It was this knowledge, this experience of a vividness and a unity. Tippett: But again back to religious terms, to say that God is not just in everything but God is everything and that occasionally human beings apprehend that.

It also makes God much more messy. And if God made the world, how did God do it? And most people crash and burn on that. If you think about the other circle where we are within the divine, it poses obviously different problems. We solve some, and it makes new problems. What are the questions that this tradition asks? Rabbi Kushner: Well, any attempt to just explain those things quickly is going to be a disaster, obviously.

What I need to do is to find something holy even in it, and thereby try to redeem it and free me from it. And I can do the same thing with the world.

It raises a challenge for me, though. What can I do to redeem even this? This terrible thing, whatever it is. What is holy in it? I will keep working at it, and that is how I can free myself from it. Rachel Naomi Remen: In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the ein sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand, thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke.

And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world.

And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. And this is of course a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born.

We are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility. Tippett: Rachel Naomi Remen. After a short break, more with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. You can always listen again, and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed.

Now with bite-sized extras — wherever podcasts are found. As Rabbi Kushner says, Judaism had largely torn the pages of Kabbalah out of its history books in its response to the Enlightenment. Rabbi Kushner: Well, enter Gershom Scholem. But the second time God puts the light into humans. Part of the story the Kabbalah tells is how humans have had to go and retrieve the shards of those broken vessels that shattered when they could not contain the light.

Humans are still doing that, and the shards of light are all over, including in really bad places. So, there are two trains of Kabbalistic thought, named for those two stories. Contrary to popular opinion, the Kabbalah is not an ancient text, although there are some who argue that there are ancient versions of it.

But most people believe that the Kabbalistic texts, including The Bahir , the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar , which are the three major Kabbalistic texts—I read them with the students in class—were written in the Middle Ages.

Speaking of your reading list, is there anything on your syllabus particularly meaningful to you, something specific that you look forward to teaching? He was the false messiah in the 17th century, and he drew an unprecedented number of Jews to his side, who really thought that he was the messiah. In the end, he converted to Islam under threat of death.

He was a disseminator of a certain kind of Kabbalistic thought, developed by a man named Isaac Luria. Was there a lesson or unit that brought you unexpected joy or pleasure this past semester?

So, we just did a unit on the Shekinah. The Shekinah is a Jewish female goddess, or god.