Modern Kabbalah

Theosophy: Torat ha-Sefirot

Theurgy: Human’s influence of the Divine System

Prophecy, Revelations, and Union with the Divine

Reincarnation: Gilgul, Ibur, Dybuk

Practical Kabbalah

Early Kabbalah late 12th , early 13th centuries

Sefer ha-Zohar ~ 1280-1310

Abraham Abulafia 1240-~ 1291

The Expulsion of Jews from Spain (1492)

Rabbi Isaac Luria (Ha-Ari) 1534-1572

Christian Kabbala

The Sabbatean Movement (1665-1666)

Hasidic Movement (Israel Ba’al Shem Tov ~ 1698-1760)

HaBaD (R. Shneor Zalman of Ladi 1745-1818)

Breslov Hasidism (Nachman of Breslov, 1772-1810) R. Shneor

Mitnagdim – Lithuanian Kabbalah (The Gaon of Vilna, 1720-1797)

Shalom Sharaabi (Rashash) (d. 1777)

The Jewish Enlightenment (Moses Mendelsson (1729-1786)

You shall find another evil disease among them, an ancient leprosy that attaches itself to their souls, which serves as an adversary to the wise of heart who attempt to correct their beliefs and improve their ways. This evil is the belief implanted in their hearts involving many vain things, which they refer to by the names of 'knowledge and wisdom of the Kabbalah', as well as their powerful attachment to the sanctity of Sefer ha-Zohar (Y. L. Mises, Qin’at ha-Emet, Vienna 1828, p. 134)

Occult Kabbalah (Eliphas Levi/Alphonse Louis Constant 1810 –1875

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)

The fire of natural love for the nation and its renewal, which is growing in the land of Israel and through the land of Israel, will burst into its power together with the divine flame, the holy fire, of all of the purity of faith in its essential strength and power. The scattered elements of the divine faith, and all of its consolations, and numerous calls to morality and righteousness, to might and hope, to peace and eternal consolation, which have already spread amongst numerous and great nations thorough our dispersal amongst the nations… all these are returning to us, gathering in our treasures, being relocated in the Congregation of Israel, and are revitalized by many new souls of a reborn nation (Kook, Orot ha-Tehiya, 22)

Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (1885-1954)

From the perspective of the Thought of Creation in Ein Sof, it is all bestowal and there is no trace of will to receive in it. It`s opposite is the vessel - the great will to receive that abundance, which is the root of the created creature, in which there is no element of bestowal whatsoever (Ashalg, Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah, 4).

“A wild ass shall be turned into man” (Job 11:12), because when one emerges out of the bosom of Creation, one is in utter filth and lowliness, meaning a multitude of self-love that is imprinted in him, whose every movement revolves solely around himself, without a shred of bestowal upon others. Thus, then one is at the farthest distance from the root, on the other end, since the root is all bestowal without a hint of reception, whereas the newborn is in a state of complete self-reception without a hint of bestowal … The more he grows, the more he receives from his environment portions of “bestowal upon others,” depending on the values and development in that environment…. Thus, that creature develops and marches upward in degrees of the above spoken exaltedness, until he loses all remnants of self-love … (Ashlag, Matan Torah, 12)  

This is because it is certain that if six hundred thousand men abandon their work for the satisfaction of their own needs and worry about nothing but standing guard so their friends will never lack a thing, and moreover, that they will keep it with a mighty love, with their very heart and soul, in the full meaning of the Mitzva, “Love thy friend as thyself,” then it is beyond doubt that no man of the nation will need to worry about his own well being (Ashalg, Matan Torah, 16).  

Martin Buber 1878-1965 The teaching of the Baal-Shem soon found access to the people…The piety of this people was inclined from of old to mystical immediacy; it received the new message as an exalted expression of itself. The proclamation of joy in God, after a thousand years of a dominance of law that was poor in joy and hostile to it, acted like a liberation … the people up till then had acknowledged above them an aristocracy of Talmud scholars, alienated from life … now the people, by a single blow, were liberated from this aristocracy.…

Gershom Scholem 1897-1982

I wanted to enter into the world of the Kabbalah via my thinking and belief in Zionism as a living thing, as the renewal of a people who had greatly degenerated … I was interested in the question: did the Judaism of halakhah have sufficient strength to persist and to exist? Was halakhah really possible without a mystical basis? Does it have a vitality of its own to persist without degeneration over a period of two thousands of years? (Scholem Devarim Be-go, pp. 26-27)

At the end of a long process of development in which Kabbalism, paradoxical though it may sound, has influenced the course of Jewish history, it has again become what it was in the beginning: the esoteric wisdom of small groups of men out of touch with life and without any influence on it. (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticim, 34).