There are certain religious texts that confirm a person’s beliefs (loudly or quietly) and please him or her. But there are others, like Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar, that up-end the believer. For what Ashlag does here -- among many other things -- is present us with the more ignoble human motivations; with what matters more than one would ever have thought and what is meaningless; with who and what he deems God is and is not; with the makeup of the ultimate future and the content of the human situation given that; and with, at bottom, the point of it all. He demands a lot of the reader in the process, including considering who he or she actually is and what life is all about. He likewise challenges that same reader to see things through a Kabbalist’s eyes, which is to say complexly and in grandly, splendidly nuanced ways.
In point of fact, Kabbalah is a very technical subject that’s rooted in principles and mechanisms that God is said to have used in creation and which He then continues to use to nourish and maintain the cosmos, which its practitioners lay out so as to enable the adept to experience a sort of reenactment of all of that deep in his or her being.
As such, there's a world (and more) of data to contend with in Kabbalistic texts, a wealth of principles to grasp and internalize, and a staggering amount of worldly and otherworldly interactions to have explicated. The truth be known, Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar doesn't touch on the latter very much at all (though it offers a fair share of technical points). Instead, it’s a philosophical work rooted in the experience of someone who is said to have gone through all the above on his own and tried to express that to non-Kabbalists in more experiential terms.
In point of fact, Kabbalah is a very technical subject that’s rooted in principles and mechanisms that God is said to have used in creation and which He then continues to use to nourish and maintain the cosmos, which its practitioners lay out so as to enable the adept to experience a sort of reenactment of all of that deep in his or her being.
As such, there's a world (and more) of data to contend with in Kabbalistic texts, a wealth of principles to grasp and internalize, and a staggering amount of worldly and otherworldly interactions to have explicated. The truth be known, Ashlag’s Introduction to the Zohar doesn't touch on the latter very much at all (though it offers a fair share of technical points). Instead, it’s a philosophical work rooted in the experience of someone who is said to have gone through all the above on his own and tried to express that to non-Kabbalists in more experiential terms.
