Kabbalah in Practice

I did some good learning today about why Kabbalah has these cultural restrictions around learning it, and I kinda get it now.

Kabbalah is deconstructive. It’s how you come out the other end of Judaism. It’s necessary to preserve it, so we know how to do this, but there’s a big risk in transmitting it to people with the wrong idea. They could (and have, and do) throw everybody else off.

It has exactly the same risk factors as any advanced contemplative practice, because that’s exactly what it is: without preparation and containment, you’ll break your gourd.

This doesn’t yet get at what I learned today. We looked at a few great sources about what can go wrong, and I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which these sources are literary, rather than didactic. Think Vajrayana deity scenes, not rabbinic utterances.

The idea, I guess, is to always make sure the community religious practice is sufficiently infused with Kabbalah, providing everyone the power and quality of that practice, without cracking anything open so wide that people will fall through.

Let this serve as a partial corrective to my previous Kabbalah post, which is still important.

I guess I didn’t really believe in the potency of Kabbalistic practice before! But these stories made super duper über clear to me that it works, because I can verify the phenomenology from other things that work.

What are those practices? It’s mantra, basically. Manipulations of long formulae of letters that correspond to divine natures or aspects. “Names of God.” I guess it differs from mantra because the basic mechanism is permutation, not repetition.

It’s still not my thing, but I’ve tried it enough to get it. And even imported it into regular everyday davening to see how that went. It was trippy AF. Just not my vector.