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Cabbalah Questions for people in the know.

13:15 / 20.02.02

1) Right, I've been reading about the ma’aseh merkavah (the “workings of the chariot”

and the ma’aseh bereishit (the “workings of creation”

. Can somebody explain these two ideas.

2) And also, how these attempts helped them connect us finite humans to the infinite divine?

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:38 / 20.02.02

There's a boy in dire need of a copy of the Holy Book of MG.

However: quote:Ma’aseh bereshit (the workings of creation) and ma’aseh merkavah (the workings of the chariot) are the two primary teachings of ancient Jewish mysticism (see Talmud, Haggigah 11b ff.). Ma’aseh bereshit is the esoteric interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. It teaches us about the basic constituents and order of creation, as well as how the human being is an Image of God (tzelem elohim) and a microcosm of this creation. Ma’aseh merkavah is based on the first chapter of Ezekiel and related texts. It teaches us how to concretely realize how we are made in the Image of God and thus achieve intimacy (da’at) with God.

Related stuff here, and here.

It seems perhaps a little hopeful, given that this stuff rests on the deep connections between the Hebrew alphabet and numerical systems and the Torah, to think that you can get a serious understanding of it through the English language. I have always suspected that it requires a rather greater immersion in the language/reality/culture set from which it comes.

Call me an old fogey.

You may wish to look here too.

15:27 / 20.02.02

Thanks for the links, Nick. Now I understand the part about the Merkavah. It's a meditative technique in where they "ride" this thing all the way up to the throne of glory, right?

But I'm still a bit lost about "Ma’aseh bereshit is the esoteric interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis." Can you (or anyone really) explain this further.

[ 20-02-2002: Message edited by: impulsivelad ]

23:14 / 21.02.02

One of the most pervasive ideas in Kabalah is that all of the writings in the Torah (and/or the Bible, in Christian versions of Kabalah) contain both an "open" meaning and one or more "occult" (literally: "hidden") meanings which are not readily accessible to the average reader, but which become clear after extended study, or following some other kind of initiation.

So, the "open" meaning of the first chapter of Genesis is that God makes the universe, culminating in the creation of man, in a period of six days, followed by a day of rest.

The first layer of "hidden" meaning is that this is a metaphor for the structure of the cosmos. By examining the story, one can discern a variety of things about how the cosmos was constructed, the "psychology" of G-d, etc. The Workings of Creation says, at some level, "this isn't just an event that occurred on one particular day a few thousand years ago, it's a schematic of processes that are happening right now."

(As we slide out of my depth

Additional layers of hidden meanings are developed through gematria (rearrangement of the holy words through mathematical processes) and other means. So, for example, the Zohar and the Bahir are books generated through the recombination of the Torah to "reveal" these hidden meanings.

For a very short example of gematria in use, check out the movie Pi, where the Hasidic guy says something like, One of the names of G-d is this, which if you take the values of the Hebrew letters equals such and so a number, say: 144, and the word (Eden/Satan/Adam...anyway, one of these) has a corresponding letter value of 233. 144 divided by 233 equals the ratio of the Golden Mean, which is embedded in the spiral of nautilus shells, and is used extensively in classical architecture (practical and speculative) among other things.

14:31 / 22.02.02

The level of close reading can't be overstated, either.

Not just that every letter has a numerical value, and words with equivalent numbers have to be read (in Hebrew) as somehow synonymous (a cryptological level), but also a layer of semantic codes as well. The only example I know of is that bit Neil Gaiman mentioned, where the original story of Adam and Eve says "male and female created He them" - which means, esoterically, that the first human was a hermaphrodite, whole unto itself.

The interesting thing with the close readings is it gives you a chance to notice the same motifs happening again and again throughout the Book, only in different (and occasionally far fetched) ways.

Here, check out some midrashim. If you don't feel like printing out lists and heading to the local Judaica library, here's a good explanation of the process:
quote:In developing midrash, there are two schools of thought on how to
handle the language of Torah. One is that the language is the language
of human discourse, and is subject to the same redundancies and
occasional verbiage that we all encounter in desultory conversation.
The other view holds that since Scripture is the Word of G@d, no word
is superfluous. Every repetition, every apparent mistake, every
peculiar feature of arrangement or order has meaning.

And if you're following the Head Shop, here's a new midrash on circumcision.