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Daniel Matt is a scholar and a teacher of Kabbalah, a philosophy of mystical teachings which Daniel will explain today. Daniel also did a massive translation of The Zohar, which is the main book of Kabbalah. And he’s going to share some gems from it.

I encountered Daniel through his book, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, which I loved. It’s so beautiful. And I had so much fun talking to him about the revelations that he’s come across in his work. Some are quite radical and striking, some are potentially dangerous, and many are again just so beautiful.

We talk about the idea of God being equally male and female. We talk about the cult of Mary; the relationship between the ethical and the mystical; and some of the positives and negatives of Pop Kabbalah.

We talk about the things we can’t truly discover, or understand, or even catch a glimpse of—unless we’re willing to stumble a bit. And what can happen when we do.

At the very end of our conversation, Daniel explains how you can study with him, which I really want to do! So stick around if you’re interested in learning more about that. And I’ll also include the link to his site and courses in the show notes.

The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism

The Zohar: Volume 1

Daniel C. Matt’s Website

Courses in Zohar

ELISE:

All right. I thought I would start with the very last, just as a preamble, as we dig into this, whoever delves into mysticism cannot help but stumble as it is written, this stumbling block is in your hand. You cannot grasp these things until you stumble over them. I thought that was a perfect place to start because I’m hoping today I can ask you questions about Kabbalah that maybe are obvious, but for the rest of us are not so clear.

DANIEL:

Sure, sure.

ELISE:

And I want to ask you about Zohar. I’m hoping for people who are uninitiated, sort of the most rudimentary table setting, which is, what is this? I’m sure people are familiar with Luria and Tzitzum, and I’m sure I’m mispronouncing everything by the way. And Tikkun Olam, people know Tikkun Olam, but-

DANIEL:

That’s correct.

ELISE:

Yeah. But this idea of how it sits in relation to Torah, how it sits in relation to the other books and Luria, Zohar, the various authors and what sort of makes it up because I feel like people don’t understand. Is it one text? Is it a different reading of Torah? What is it?

DANIEL:

Yeah, I can give some just the basic ideas. Yeah, I would say Kabbalah has three great contributions to make about God and Torah and reality. One is a new name that they invent for God, which is Ein Sof. You could spell that E-I-N-S-O-F, two words. And means there is not, and Soph means end. So it means infinity. Literally, there is no end. So that’s according to Kabbalah, that’s the only accurate name for God. All the other names you find in the Bible, Elohim, that unpronounceable name people say Yahweh or Jehovah. Nobody really knows how to pronounce it. Lord, Lord, God, Adonai, all these names. The Kabbalah says those are really very inaccurate, very limited attempts to describe God. God really is beyond what we can imagine. So this word the infinite infinity is what the Zohar prefers, what the Kabbalah prefers. So on the one hand, that’s really beyond the personal God.

The traditional notion is God is up there. God is controlling the world. God created the world. This is really beyond God in personal terms. You might say God as the energy that animates everything. And really what Kabbalah does is to reimagine God as that animating energy. Not a limited being, not a personal figure, but the energy that enlivens everything. So that’s one key insight. On the other hand, Kabbalah is aware that you can’t grasp the infinite. So if you’re trying to relate to God, it’s natural to picture God in what’s called anthropomorphic terms, right? Picturing God in human terms, father, king, ruler. So there, the Kabbalah says, okay, granted that we’re going to fall into that secondary mode of picturing God, we have to balance the masculine with the feminine. And that may be its greatest contribution to insist that God is equally male and female.

We could say all of Western religion, God is predominantly masculine. Father, king, ruler, judge. It’s very rare to find feminine descriptions of God in Judaism or Christianity or Islam. Of course, in Christianity, you have Mary, but Mary is not really divine. According to pure Catholic theology, you can’t worship Mary. People did on the popular level, but what theologians say is you should venerate Mary, but you can’t worship Mary. She’s not divine. So even in Christianity,

ELISE:

God- Splitting hairs. Yeah.

DANIEL:

Yeah. And what’s God is basically masculine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. So it’s very radical for the couple of to say God is equally male and female, ultimately beyond gender. So if God is infinity, that’s beyond all our categories of gender. But if we’re going to call God, describe God in human terms, we have to say equally male and female. So that’s the term they use there is Shekhina. Shekhina, you could spell it S-H-E-K-H-I-N-A-H. Shekhina. A good way to remember it is the first three letters are she. The Shekhina is the she of God. Literally, it means presence, the presence of God. E-N-C-E, the divine presence in the world. So that word, it’s not invented by the Kabbalah. You find that earlier in Judaism, not in the Bible, but the rabbis of the Talmud. They frequently talk about Shekhina, but they don’t emphasize the feminine. They see Shekhina as God’s presence in the world.

So they say, for example, wherever you look, you can find Shekhina. So it’s saying, don’t think that God is just beyond God is right here. So the rabbis are aware of Shekhina, but they don’t emphasize the feminine. For example, you would never find a description in the Talmud in early rabbinic Judaism that the holy one blessed be he, the masculine is married to the Shekhina. And that you could say is the main theme of the Zohar, the marriage of the divine male and female. It sounds strange that that would be a teaching in a monotheistic tradition, but that’s what the Kabbalah insists, that God is male and female. And in fact, that brings us to the third point. You could say the first God is infinity. The second God is equally male and female. The third is that God needs us. God needs us. And the way that’s expressed is the divine couple can’t unite unless we stimulate their romance.

How do we do that? By acting virtuously, by fulfilling the Mitzvaht. If you fulfill the commands of the Torah, then you’re stimulating the romance of the divine couple. The way I like to say that is every mitzvah, every good deed is an Aprodisiac for the divine romance.

So it’s beautiful. It’s like, without us, God remains, you could say unfulfilled. In other words, we actualize God in the world. God is potentially in the world. We actualize God by improving society. By that phrase you mentioned earlier, Tikkun Olam. By repairing the world, by mending the world, by bettering society, by spreading justice, we actualize the possibility of holiness of divinity in the world. One of the most beautiful names for Shekhina is the secret of the possible.

ELISE:

That’s beautiful.

DANIEL:

So that becomes real only through our action. You could say that’s the mystical meaning of the covenant. What Kabbalah does is it takes all the traditional ideas and gives them a more spiritual meaning. So covenant is basic in the Bible. There’s a covenant between God and the world after the flood. God promises not to destroy the world, so that’s called the covenant. Then there’s a covenant with Abraham, with Israel. But for Kabbalah, the covenant means a partnership. We each need the other. Usually it said, we need God. It’s unusual to say God needs us. So that’s a mystical interpretation. That’s a mystical innovation.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s funny. I interviewed, I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered, he’s a theologian. His name is Dan McClellan. He’s actually LDS, but he’s on TikTok and he’s such a dork, a delicious dork who goes up against sort of Christian nationalists. And he wrote this book, but he talks a lot about the feminine principle and how it’s actually layered into all these texts. It’s just God had a wife in many ways, and yet we’ve just chosen to interpret around it or read past it. But even in the tradition of Christianity, God needs Mary’s consent to co-create, which is ... It’s all over the place when you look at it, this idea of man, the soul creator actually doesn’t quite connect. Right?

DANIEL:

Right. You’re right. I mean, the mystical stream in every tradition, that’s what’s so fascinating about mysticism that they’re discovering the same truth and then expressing it in their own individual traditional ways. But something you said about, does God have a wife? That’s fascinating. Really, that’s very important for Shekhina. I mean, Shekhina is the divine wife. But what’s amazing is that what you said made me think of this, that in ancient Israel, you do find the goddess, but really because the Canaanite goddess, she’s known as Asherah, Astarte. She’s given different names. Ashe Rah is the most common name. So the Bible talks about Asherah, but the Bible is out to destroy her, to eliminate her. It wants to establish the worship of the one true God, and it wants to eliminate all the Canaanite gods and goddesses. So it’s clear that the feminine goddess was attractive to the people, which is natural.

People aren’t satisfied with the God of one gender. So what’s interesting is some Israelites who would be attracted to Asherah instead of God, or maybe they would be attracted to the male divinity and the Canaanite Pantheon Baal and the female divinity. But there were other Israelites who wanted the God of Israel and Asherah.

They wanted the two of them together. Now, the authors of the Bible are dead set against that, but it’s clear that that was attractive to some of the Israelites. So you might say what happens in the Kabbalah is that this feminine goddess reemerges. She was hidden. She was fought against. Sholam, the great scholar, Gersham Sholem, has a beautiful phrase for this. He says, “This is the revenge of myth.”

ELISE:

Yeah.

DANIEL:

Or you could say more popularly, you could say, “This is the goddess has finally become kosher.”

ELISE:

That’s amazing. It’s

DANIEL:

True. That’s really what happens with Shekhina.

ELISE:

Well, and it’s interesting when you were mentioning how people are instructed to venerate Mary and not worship her, but Notre Dame, you think about the number of monuments and cathedrals that are devoted to her and how desperately people want to connect with her. It’s wild that it’s missing.

DANIEL:

I’m sure that was part of the appeal of Christianity that you had the feminine figure so prominently. And it’s interesting, the cult of Mary, it really reaches a high point in Spain in the 13th century, and that’s exactly where the Zohar emerges. So it’s no accident. I’m sure the Kabbalists, they wouldn’t have admitted it, but they were influenced by the figure of Mary. And that contributes to Shekhina. A Shekhina is more clearly divine than Mary, but the emphasis on the feminine, I’m sure it has something to do with Jews seeing Christians who are venerating Mary and many of them worshiping her.

ELISE:

Yeah. Okay. So give us a tiny bit of history if you don’t mind. So the Zohar, you teach a course on it, you can start in the middle. What is it? Where did it come from?

DANIEL:

So I guess the first thing is to distinguish between Zohar and Kabbalah.

ELISE:

Yes, please. People

DANIEL:

Often use those interchangeably. The simplest way to put it is there’s no book called the Kabbalah.

ELISE:

Okay.

DANIEL:

Kabbalah’s a named for the overall philosophy. For the overall mystical teachings, they’re called Kabbalah. That literally means tradition. So it’s things that are handed down from teacher to disciple over the ages, usually in an oral way, not written down. So gradually these Kabbalistic teachings were written down. I’ll come back to the history in a moment, but so Kabbalah is not a book. Zohar is the masterpiece of Kabbalah. Zohar is the main book of Kabbalah. Someone says they’re studying Kabbalah. That really means they’re studying the Zohar or commentaries on the Zohar. All of Kabbalah is based on the Zohar.

ELISE:

Okay. Got it.

DANIEL:

Let’s just go back to the Bible itself. You could say, where is there mysticism in the Bible? If Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism, literally tradition, but you could say Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. So do you find that in the Bible? Now, of course, that takes us to what is mysticism. It’s hard to define. And mystics almost pride themselves on not being able to define it. But you could say mysticism is yearning for direct contact with God or with ultimate reality. In other words, a mystic isn’t satisfied with just fulfilling the divine commandments. The mystic wants direct communion with God, relationship with God, feeling God’s presence. So certainly you find that in the Bible, the clearest places in the book of Psalms. Psalms has all this beautiful lyrical descriptions yearning for God. My soul yearns for God. My soul thirsts for God like a deer searching for water, my soul thirsts for God.

So the searching for God, the intense yearning to be in the presence of God, they could say that’s the core of all religion. Certainly it’s there in the Bible. It’s there in the prophets. Who is a prophet? A prophet is someone who’s suffused with God, who is conveying the divine word. God speaks through the prophet. So you could say that is mystical experience. It’s there in the Bible. But if we’re talking about groups of people who actually are developing techniques, let’s say techniques of meditation, who are meeting for intense prayer, that you find already in a classical rabbinic period, the period of the Talmud, the Mishnah, let’s say the first five centuries of the common era. So there you have rabbis, for example, who meditate on the vision of Ezekiel. Ezekiel in the Bible had a fantastic vision of God whirling through heaven in a chariot, kind of chariot throne, being carried by angels.

So that was Ezekiel’s vision of God. And there were rabbis in the Talmud who tried to reexperience that, who would go into deep meditation and try to envision what Ezekiel envisioned. Either they would interpret what Ezekiel wrote or they would have meditative practices to experience what he experienced. So you have those mystical circles in Rabbinic Judaism among some of the key figures of the Talmud Rabbi Akiva, for example, one of the most famous figures in the Mishnah lived in the second century. So he was intensely mystical. There’s a story in the Talmud of four rabbis who meditated on the divine secrets. The way the Talmud describes it is four entered the orchard. Four entered the Pardes. Pardesis, a word meaning orchard. It’s the same word as paradise. Pardesis is the Hebrew word. It comes from Persian and then it enters Greek. Same word that becomes paradise.

So four rabbis meditated on the divine secrets. Of the four, Rabbi Akiva was one of them. The other three, one went crazy, one died, perhaps died in ecstasy, and one became a heretic. So it doesn’t give you very good odds for mystical experience. Rabbi Akiva was one of the founders of rabbinic Judaism, so he was a successful mystic. So you have to say that mysticism is there almost at the core of the Bible, the core of rabbinic Judaism, but it’s not talked about so openly. Why? We could say because of the danger of mystical search. What’s the danger? The danger of mysticism, I would say there’s two aspects. One is psychological because the mystic is trying to melt into the divine, to dissolve one’s ego in the ocean of divinity. And if you let go of your ego, it’s very dangerous. How do you know where you stop and that truck coming down the road begins?

You don’t want to become one with the truck. So it’s important to have a sense of self, and yet the mystic yearns to find something greater than the self beyond the self. So one danger is a psychological danger. The other is social danger. If you’re a mystic, then who needs the rabbi? Who needs the laws? I have my own relationship with God and I don’t need tradition. So mysticism could easily be seen as a threat to tradition and a threat to the stability of the ego. So I think because of those reasons, the rabbis were hesitant to promote mysticism, even though some of the greatest rabbis were involved in mysticism. Okay. So all of this is a preamble to the Kabbalah. What is the Kabbalah? The Kabbalah developing later, let’s say beginning around the 12th century, these are circles of rabbis who are getting together and studying the texts, meditating on God, developing techniques of meditation, and trying to describe the dynamics of God, trying to describe the divine realm, the divine mind or the divine being.

Ezekiel pictures, God is seated on this chariot throne. So the Kabbalists said, well, what does God look like? What are the qualities of God? And they actually talk about the body of God, God’s different limbs. So that’s the origin of Kabbalah. You could say in the 12th century where in Southern Europe, in Provence, interesting that it’s Province, beautiful country. That’s where you have Christian mystical circles developing. That’s where poetry is developing. And the first Kabbalist, the first people who call themselves Makubalim. Kabbalists are in Provence in Southern France and then spilling over the Pyrenees into Spain. And it’s in Spain in the 13th century that Kabbalah really crystallizes, and that’s where the Zohar emerges. So the Zohar is the major text. I said the masterpiece of Kabbalah. And the question is, where and when was it written? I kind of gave the punchline by saying it was written in Spain in the 13th century, but it’s much more interesting than that.

The author, the main author of the Zohar never admitted that he wrote the book. He claimed he was copying from an ancient text that went back over a millennium earlier to a student of Rabbi Akiva. So Rabbi Akiva was a mystic back in the second century, and he had a disciple, Rabbi Shimon, Shimon, the son of Yocha. And the Zohar is attributed to him. If you open up any traditional copy of the Zohar, it will say the Zohar and the author is Rabbi Shimon. It won’t give the real author. The real author was Moses de Leon, right? Reminds you of Ponce de Leon. Leon was in Northwestern Spain, and this was Moses de Leon. He also discovered his own mystical fountain of youth, you could say. But Moses de Leon lived in Spain, the 13th century. He wrote the Zohar. He didn’t write the entire thing.

He was the main composer of the Zohar, but he somehow imagined that he was in touch with ancient rabbis. Maybe he thought he was channeling their teachings. He might’ve used a technique known as automatic writing where you go into trance and something just comes through you, something from your subconscious, something from the collective, unconscious. So he was channeling some ancient wisdom. And that’s why in a sense, it’s accurate to say that he wasn’t the author.

You might say that about any great creative artist, a musician, a sculptor, a poet. They would say, “The muse gave it to me. “ I’m just writing it down, but I didn’t create it. It came through me. So I think that’s experience of all great mystics, all great creative spirits. And Moses Leon was in that category. So he composed the Zohar. So what is a Zohar? Zohar is not an independent book. It’s really a commentary on the Bible. It doesn’t begin chapter one in Soph, the infinite chapter two, Shekhina, chapter three, Torah. No, it just starts from Genesis and it goes to the Torah giving a mystical interpretation, not of every verse, but of every major story, of every major figure. It tries to find a deeper spiritual meaning to the text. I’ll give you two examples. One is the very first verse in the Bible.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. We all know that. That’s God created the world. The Hebrew begins with just three words. Birreshit in the beginning, Barah created Elohim. God. In the beginning, God created. Now it happens to be that the order of the Hebrew words puts the verb before the subject. It doesn’t say Bereshi Elohim Barrah. In the beginning, God created. It says Bereshit in the beginning, Bereshi Elohim created God. Now it’s okay to do that. We even do that in English sometimes. In very formal ancient English, thus spoke the King. It means the King spoke. In Hebrew it happens much more frequently, you put the verb before the subject, but it still means in the beginning God created. The Zohar says, no. Let’s take it exactly how it’s written. In the beginning, created God. Now it’s interesting. Created can also be translated, it created.

In Hebrew, a verb actually includes the subject. So the Zohar takes it to mean in the beginning, it created God. Now, how can that be? That sounds heretical. God was the creator. How can you say God was created? Well, for the Zohar that it is Ein Sof is the ultimate God. So who is Elohim? Elohim is, you could say, a lower manifestation of God. One of the divine qualities, one of the 10 Siphi wrote, the 10 attributes of God. So now the verse means in the beginning, you might say, Ein Sof created what we think of as God. What we think of as God is not the ultimate divine reality.

So it’s a very radical interpretation. It’s really on the verge of heresy. In the beginning, it created God. In fact, the Talmud says you have to be very careful how you translate the Torah. Otherwise, you might make a mistake and say, “In the beginning, created God.” And the Zohar does exactly that. In the beginning, it created God. So there’s something very subversive about mysticism and about the Zohar itself. You could say that’s also why Moses de Leon never claimed he was the author. If he had said, “I have an idea. God is a woman.” Might not have gone over very well.

ELISE:

Right.

DANIEL:

He’s saying, no, the ancient rabbis teach us that God is male and female. And I’m just conveying that.

ELISE:

Well, and as you’ve mentioned, one, the co-creative capacity of writing or bringing anything into the world and the fact that these mystical traditions hang in coherence often, right? Whether you’re talking about Kabbalah or Sufism or mystical forms of Christianity, there are these themes which are universal, the oneness and that discussion of duality and so on and so forth. And when I was reading to your translation, so the essential Kabbalah, which is a great place to start, I loved it. It’s beautiful. It’s like these small, short coins, these bits of you chose from Zohar and other texts to put this very accessible, beautiful package together for us. But I wanted to ask you, because there were some themes where I was like, oh, this is so interesting. In your translation, the chain of being and this idea of, I don’t know how to say it, Ayin, nothingness.

Ian, yes,

Yes. Yes. Is that the same, that Ayin, that nothingness, is that equivalent, and I want to also ask you about evil, but is that Ayen that nothingness, is that the same as darkness, unconscious, not yet realized darkness?

DANIEL:

Yeah. I’ll come to that in a moment, but let me backtrack for a moment and continue the history just very briefly.

ELISE:

Okay,

DANIEL:

Sorry.

ELISE:

I got excited.

DANIEL:

It’s very important, but just since we talked about Zohar, I don’t want to leave it there. So Zohar is this masterpiece. Let me say too, I had mentioned there are two great examples of how the Zohar reinterprets the Torah. The second is the Garden of Eden, right? We all know that story, Adam and Eve eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and they’re expelled from the garden. So the Zohar says an amazing thing. It takes a verse, he expelled Adam. Of course, it’s Adam and Eve, but this particular verse says, “He expelled the human .” And the Zohar asks an amazing question. It says, “Who kicked whom out of the garden?” And really what it suggests is that Adam kicked Shekhina out of the garden. And then Adam had to leave the garden, but it says the primary, his sin was what was losing touch with the oneness of it all.

Adam created a split. You could say a split between his ego and God, becoming aware of his separateness. And through that, he lost touch with the oneness of it all. So Adam really kicked God out of the garden.

ELISE:

Interesting.

DANIEL:

Amazing teaching. But in any case, so the Zohar goes through the Torah and reinterprets things. Not every reinterpretation is that striking or that radical or that uplifting, but again and again, the Zora surprises you with how it can reread the Bible. Sometimes it takes things very much out of the literal meaning. Sometimes it insists on what I would call a hyperliteral meaning. In the beginning, created God. It reads the words exactly as they are. So the Zohar was composed the end of the 13th century, and it gradually Caught on. It was written in Aramaic. Why to make it look ancient? To make it look like it came from the time of the Talmud. Jesus spoke Aramaic. The Talmud was written in Aramaic. The Middle Ages, hardly any Jews spoke Aramaic.

ELISE:

I was going to say, was it even a living language?

DANIEL:

It was living in the sense of people studying it and reading it because the Talmud has written in Aramaic. So learned Jews knew Aramaic in terms of reading it. Hardly anyone spoke Aramaic and common Jews really, they might’ve known some Hebrew, but very little Aramaic. So the Zohar is a very challenging book. At first, it could only be read in very small circles, but gradually it caught on. And the way it really spread was a couple centuries later when we come to ... The Jews lived in Spain. Spain was a great center of Jewish learning. And the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Kate course, we all associate 1492 with Columbus. And some Jews went with Columbus to get out of Spain, in fact, as navigator or astronomer what was Jewish. Some people say Columbus. Oh, interesting. Some people say Columbus was Jewish or converso, but that’s speculative.

But in any case, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and they had to choose really either to convert to Catholicism or to leave the country. A good number converted, but many of them, most of them left Spain. And some of them, since they were leaving Spain, they figured, well, we might as well go to the land of Israel. So they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and went across North Africa and ended up in Palestine in the Holy Land. And that became a great center of Kabbalah, specifically one town in the Galilee called Safed or Swate. A group of Kabbalists lived there, and that’s really where the Zohar spread widely. Because what they did is they took the strange Aramaic of the Zohar and they translated parts of it into more popular books. Books you could say of Jewish mystical ethics. They would say, for example, keep the Sabbath, because if you keep the Sabbath, you’re stimulating the Union of Shekhina and her divine husband.

So they would go through the entire Torah and apply the Zohar to it, but in a more manageable, digestible way. So the Zohar really spread because of that circle. And the main figure in that circle, in Safed, this is 16th century after 1492, middle of the 16th century, was a man named Isaac Luria.

And he created what’s called Luriana Kabbalah. What is Luriana Kabbalah? It’s simply Luria’s understanding of the Zohar. He didn’t rely on other books. He immersed himself in the Zohar. There’s a story that he lived on a small island in the Nile River for seven years studying Zohar. He just studied Zohar and he came up with his unique interpretation of Zohar, and that became Luriana Kabbalah. And that became the standard view of Kabbalah. And the only other thing I’d mention historically is Kabbalah eventually turns into Hasidism.

ELISE:

Oh,

DANIEL:

Interesting. Kasidism is really the popularization of Kabbalah. All of Hasidism is based on Kabbalah. Kabbalah became complicated. The Zohar is complicated and Luria is much more complicated. And Hasidism is kind of bringing it back to its simple form in a way that really could appeal to wide circles, to the masses. It’s interesting. Some of the critique you hear now about Pap Kabbalah, Madonna and the Kabbalah Center, all that. You can find almost the same thing said against Hasidism when it began. How can you take these teachings and spread them to the masses? You’re not studying Torah enough.You’re having ecstatic prayer and not following the rules. So it’s interesting how that happens, but really that’s really the spectrum. That’s the span. Ezekiel’s vision, rabbinic mysticism in small circles, Kabbalah emerging 12, 13th centuries, Zohar in Spain. Luria are reinterpreting the Zohar, and then Hasadism popularizing it.

ELISE:

And then Madonna making it even more popular with her red.

DANIEL:

And then Madonna. I mean- Her

ELISE:

Red bracelet.

DANIEL:

Yeah. There are positive and negative things about that, but the positive thing is that people know what it is. And the negative is that it’s become commercialized and a lot of pressuring people to donate money to their center. A lot of negative, but the positive is certainly ... I think the most valuable thing about it is that people go to their rabbi and they say, “What is this? “ And I went to Hebrew school. I had a bar mitzvah head about mitzvah. I never heard of mysticism. What’s going on here? That’s because the rabbis weren’t taught it in rabbinical school. There was really a reaction against Kabbalah, against mysticism because of the age of reason, because of the rational enlightenment. 18th to 19th centuries, people turned against mysticism. They wanted reason and science and to let go of superstition. So that became an attack on mysticism.

And then in the last few decades, that’s reemerged.

ELISE:

Well, I think there’s some wisdom to it. I feel like maybe I read this in your book that initiates ... It wasn’t something that you could come to until later in your life. I do think right now, apart from mystical religion, we’re seeing what I guess Ken Wilbur would call people rushing to wake up without growing up and having rushing to these ... You used to need to meditate and pray for decades to have your sort of Satori experience. And now people are taking psychedelics and in some ways cutting the line and doing it in ways that are not necessarily safe, supported, integrated. And he would say, this is how you end up with enlightened Nazis. These people haven’t grown up. They’re not spiritually mature, but they have access or they’re reaching these ... He wouldn’t use this language, but these alchemical powers, these amoral powers that are best approached by people who are in some ways uncorruptible or more experienced.

And that rings true to me that partly this is really hard. I know in Sufism there are ... And I think there might be something similar here that I read in your translation, but I know that Jews, we talk about the 70 faces of God or the 70 interpretations. In Sufism, they talk about the 70 veils that obscure the light because it’s too intense and must be sort of mediated and processed slowly. But I don’t know. I mean, I do think that some of understanding this can be ... It’s like a spiritual fire hose

That maybe needs to be held lightly.

DANIEL:

Yeah.

ELISE:

I don’t

DANIEL:

Know. No, really, that takes us back to the dangers of mysticism. I think something very important is the ethical, the ethical and the mystical. Sometimes those are contrasted. The ethic seems just boring and mystical is juicy and exciting. But it’s interesting that for the Kabbalah, that really the ethical was a prerequisite for the mystical.

It’s a way of saying what you’re referring to. There has to be some training involved. This is very clear in Sufism, that an initiate will go to the master and the master will say, come back in five years after you learn something. But the thing is to rush into the mystical, as you say, to dive into the mystical without some preparation or to give up the ego before you have a healthy ego. Sometimes I say you spend the first 20 years or 40 years of your life developing an ego and then the next few decades dissolving the ego. But if you dissolve before it’s fully formed, then you end up at those negative states that you’re describing. Exactly.

ELISE:

Yeah. You got to build your tower before you can fill it with meaning. Yeah. Yeah. That strong container, that first half of life before you blow it

DANIEL:

Out. Yeah. That takes us to the teaching you wanted to start with, that you can’t discover these things unless you stumble, unless you fail. So it’s interesting, that book, The Essential Kabbalah, it’s been translated into various languages that there’s a German edition, and a German edition leaves out the last teaching.

ELISE:

Wild. Intentionally?

DANIEL:

It’s so telling. It’s like German emphasis on perfection and how can you ... Failure is not admissible, right? But I wanted the book to end with that.

ELISE:

Was this a conversation? Do you think they just messed it up? No.

DANIEL:

Yeah, no, I’m sure they left it out because of German mentality.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s

DANIEL:

Fascinating to me.

ELISE:

Interesting.

DANIEL:

So vital to realize that without failure, you won’t get there. You mentioned the dark night of the soul that you can’t really succeed maybe in anything, but especially in spiritual search, you can’t succeed without failure. I read a beautiful thing a few days ago about Neil’s Boar, one of the founders of quantum physics, and it said he failed so often that he couldn’t help but succeed. Or Dylan says that there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all. So to avoid the possibility of failure, it means you close yourself off from the possibility of success. So to stumble and to realize you can’t understand it, to realize that it’s incomprehensible and yet to get a glimpse,

ELISE:

To

DANIEL:

Get a glimpse of the oneness of it all.

ELISE:

Father Richard Rohr, who’s a Christian mystic, he has this center in Albuquerque. It’s called the Center for Action and Contemplation. And his point is action comes before contemplation because you have nothing to contemplate until you’ve taken action in the world and you understand how intractable and complex these problems are. And they’re not theoretical. So there’s really nothing to ponder until your back is up against the wall through experience and you’re trying to sort through really complex and difficult problems. All right. But talk to me about Ayen. Talk to me about this idea of nothing.

DANIEL:

Ian to me is the most fascinating thing in Kabbalah. So of course, it’s actually the same root as that word means there is not, and Ian is just turning that into a noun. So it’s nothingness. Maybe it’s better pronounced no thinness. So it’s not really a blank. It’s not really emptiness. It’s no thinness. You could say it’s pure potential. So it’s a name for the first of these 10 Sephirot. I mentioned that word, but the Sephirot are important. I don’t want to get too complicated. It’s a very complex system. The Sephirot are qualities of God or aspects of God. You might say, in Soph is the pure transcendence of God. The Sephirot are the ways that that transcendence makes itself known or partially known to us. So the first of them is called Ian. It’s also called Ketter, the crown, the crown on the head of this divine figure.

Kabbalah describes a divine body and soph is beyond that, but then in Soph manifests through these tensifierote, which are divine limbs. And the first of those is the crown on the divine head. Then you come to the divine mind, divine body, but the crown or the first Shura is given this name Ian. So it’s a way of saying that you can’t know God. You can’t put God into the category of being. God is beyond being. And the great Christian mystic said this too. You find this in Judaism, Christianity, in Islam and Buddhism. Buddhism has its own variety of Shunyata, of emptiness. But I’ve written an essay comparing Shunyata with Ion. They’re almost identical. I mean, they’re just so, so close. So Ian is saying God is unknowable. It’s a way of saying God is unknowable. God is no thing. God isn’t Father. God isn’t king.

God isn’t anything you can imagine. God is beyond what we can comprehend. So it’s better to call God no thing. In a way, the comboist really learned this from mymanities.

It’s hard to say if he was a mystic or not. He was a Jewish philosopher. Some people say he was the great rationalist. He certainly had his own intense spirituality, but he says he develops what’s later called negative theology. You find this in the great Christian mystics too, even before Maimonides Dionysus and John Scotis original. Basically, they all agree that God is beyond what we can comprehend. So Maimonides says something interesting. He says, the more you negate what you could know of God, the closer you get to God. And words, don’t say God is wise. God, say God is not ignorant. Don’t say God is strong. That makes God seem like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Say God is not weak. God is not limited. He prefers the negative formulation. You come closer to God with every negation. So the Kabbalists just take that to an extreme. They say, why say God is not this or not that?

Let’s just say God is nothing. Now that’s problematical because it sounds like atheism. It sounds like you’re saying God doesn’t exist, but it’s not saying God doesn’t exist. It’s saying God exists so much that he’s beyond what we call existence. And Maimonides says that too, God’s existence is beyond normal existence. So the Kabbalists prefer this paradoxical way of formulating it using this word Ion.

ELISE:

It’s interesting when you think about the word atheism, it is defined in its relationship to God, atheism. You cannot escape theism in the definition of atheism. So it is kind of atheistic in its own way. And the nothingness that Ian, it reminds me too, and maybe this is not the conception, but when you think about our universe and it’s 95% both dark matter and dark energy, this substance that contains no light.

DANIEL:

Very, very much so. I’ve written on that. I have a book called God and the Big Bang.

ELISE:

Oh, really?

DANIEL:

Parallels between Kabbalah and cosmology. And one thing I point out there is that it’s very close to what cosmologists say. The cosmologists talk about the world emerging out of the vacuum, but for them, the vacuum is not completely empty. It has some residual energy. So the vacuum is really pregnant with potential. And they use the word nothing, but they’re really talking about what’s called zero point energy. Even within the total vacuum of space, their quantum fluctuations, there’s a potential energy there. And that’s very similar to how Kabbalah says. For example, Jews and Christians and Muslims all agreed in the Middle Ages that the world has created X Nihil, out of nothing. Creation out of nothing is basic to all medieval Western religion. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they insist the world is created out of nothing. For the mystics, that means the world is created out of divine no thingness.

It’s not out of nothing as a blank. It’s out of this pouring, the surging divine energy that hasn’t yet taken any form. You could say that’s what ion is. It’s undifferentiated energy. And then it emerges as specific divine qualities and then as the world. So everything emerges out of ion. But whereas for the rationalists, that means out of nothing. For the mystics, it means out of no thinness, this pure energy.

ELISE:

I know we don’t have that much time, but can I ask you a big question, which is evil. So in this oneness, evil is part of God. What’s the conception of evil?

DANIEL:

Yeah. It’s really such a troubling question. What I usually say when someone asks that, I say, next question. But you could say one of the strengths of Kabbalah is that it tries to address that. Maimonides, for example, basically says evil is just the lack of good. It doesn’t have any substantial existence. It’s just a lack. And the Kabbalah isn’t satisfied with that. For the Kabbalah, evil actually emerges out of God, but how it emerges out of an imbalance.

There are different divine qualities. And two of the most important ones are love and judgment. Or you could say love and rigor. Love is on the right side and it’s God’s pouring out of energy, of light, of love. That has to be limited because we can’t bear the full brilliance of the divine. It would just blow us away. So ideally, there’s a balance between love and limitation. If there’s too much love, then it could drown the world or it could let the wicked get away with anything. If there’s too much judgment, too much strictness, then who would survive? Who would pass that test? So there has to be a balance between love and judgment. If there’s too much love, the world could drown. If there’s too much limitation, that gives birth to evil according to Kabbalah. You could say it’s squeezing out the divine light, not letting enough light come through, and it leads to negativity or to violence.

But my sense is really that there’s not such a thing as metaphysical evil. I think evil should be better understood as an adjective than a noun. There’s not evil per se. There’s evil action. And I think what evil really comes down to is selfishness in various forms, greed, lust, hunger for power. Just seeing yourself as not only number one, but the only one. So what I want matters. What anyone else matters is secondary or trivial. I think that’s really at the root of evil. It’s the ego taken to an extreme. And I think that’s a healthier-

ELISE:

A healthier. Yeah. Well, I think there’s a human evil. And then what is the phrase? Heter, what’s the evil impulse?

DANIEL:

Yetzaharah.

ELISE:

Yetzerhura, which-

DANIEL:

Evil drive. Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s an interesting phrase. Yetz Harah, the evil inclination, the evil drive. That includes things like ambition, which was both positive and negative and the sexual drive. So the sexual drive is vital and it’s beautiful and it’s dangerous.

ELISE:

So

DANIEL:

When the rabbis say, Yetsaharah, they’re really talking about all of that. And in fact, it’s a beautiful thing, Rabbi Akiva, that early Jewish mystic, he has a beautiful teaching. He says, why does it say love God with all your heart? Because he should love God with your good impulse and with your evil impulse. Now, what does it mean to love God with your evil impulse? He doesn’t spell it out, but the mystics do. The Kabbalah does and more so Hassidism, that popularization of Kabbalah. Hassidism says, what does it mean to serve God with the evil inclination? It means to channel that libidinal energy, to channel that energy and redirect it. If you just try to squelch it, it’s not going to work. You’re going to be repressed, you’re going to fight against it, you’re going to give in. You have to take the energy, redirect it.

And I think great creativity is that.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it’s making the unconscious conscious, right? Making that darkness or that Ayen. Martin Buber, I think, also said that that evil impulse is, he calls it the yeast that God puts in the dough. I think people really misunderstand Satan and this idea that what Satan actually as a consort, as an angel within God’s court with Job, for example, that the translation is accuser, opposer Diablos, meaning to throw up across ... He’s an obstructor. He gets in the way. He pushes you. He violates what you want in order to push you towards growth. I think of evil as in the way too that M. Scott Peck writes about it, but as the spiritual lethargy, whatever that gets you off the hook, scapegoating, blaming, whatever prevents you from becoming more mature.

DANIEL:

Right. And to take that energy and use it to redirect it, to channel it, that’s a great challenge.

ELISE:

Yeah.

DANIEL:

The yeast and the dough, that actually is in the Talmud.

ELISE:

Oh, it is.

DANIEL:

Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Buber was wonderful.

ELISE:

Before you leave us, so for people who want to study with you, will you quickly give people the option summer program, ongoing program?

DANIEL:

Sure. Yeah. You can find a lot of my website. It’s Daniel C Matt with a C, Daniel C mat.com. The main teaching I’m doing is an ongoing course on the Zohar, on this major book, the masterpiece of Kabbalah. And I’ve done an extensive translation of it. It’s nine volumes published by Stanford some years ago called the Zohar Pritzker Edition. It’s funded by the Pritzker family. And what we do is we read a few pages a week. I read and explain and there are time for questions and discussion. Currently, there are about 120 people in the course, but half of them participate live. We have weekly Zoom meetings, and the other half just listen to the video recordings. So I began this course seven years ago, and some people have been in the course from day one, and some people joined today. And with Zohar, it doesn’t really matter because wherever you join, you’re kind of jumping into the ocean and you need some help and some guidance, and I try to give that.

But it’s fascinating. People who just joined, sometimes they’ll ask a question, which has been on the minds of many people for months or years, and no one has expressed it. So it’s wonderful having this mixture of new people and veterans. And we read a few pages a week and discuss them. Many of you know Aramaic. I also do a different course with the original Aramaic of the Zohar. That’s mostly rabbis or people who have some fluency in Hebrew, but it’s obviously easier to approach it in English. I give another mini course on that book, The Essential Kabbalah in the summer. Last summer we began with the first 30 pages or so. And this summer, probably late July through early September, we’ll do, I think, six weekly meetings on Zoom, moving through the next section of Essential Kabbalah. And that’ll be on my website sometime the next few months.

ELISE:

Amazing. I am inclined to sign up for that. It’s such a beautiful little book. And there are certainly things that I didn’t understand and I would love a helping hand. And then other things that you’re like, whoa, whoosh. Yeah,

It’s beautiful. That was really fun for me. And I really recommend this book again. There’s short translations from Kabbalahh that he’s picked and they’re ... Some of them evade me and some of them are just really fundamentally gorgeous. I just randomly picked one to read to you. These are Daniel Matt’s translations. You should feel as bad for such suffering as if it were your own. Similarly, rejoice over another’s good fortune as if you were basking in it. God does not behave as a human being normally behaves. If one person angers another, even after they are reconciled, the latter cannot bring himself to love the one who offended him as he loved him before. Yet, if you sin and then return to God, your status is higher. As the saying goes, “Those who return to God occupy a place where even the completely righteous cannot stand.” I love that both because it’s just a beautiful conceit, but I also, I love it because it goes to what we were chatting about in our conversation, which is that you cannot contemplate until you have acted.

And of course, action in the world is often out of alignment, which is that original meaning of sin Hamartia to miss the mark. That’s just life, right? We mess up all the time and stumble and fall and get things wrong and hurt people and hurt ourselves. And so I love the inherent forgiveness, not only forgiveness, but celebration that is baked into that. It’s really quite beautiful and difficult simultaneously because there’s that part of us that wants to say, “But that’s not fair.” It’s like the parable of the workers and the orchard when everyone, regardless of when they began to do the work that day, gets the same rate. People just get so outraged because it doesn’t seem fair. And yet, our ideas of fairness don’t necessarily abide with the divine, right? But we sure want to litigate them like they do. Anyway, I love the redemptive promise of that particular passage, and this is where he writes the beginning and the introduction is his setting this up.

Traditionally, restrictions have been placed on the study of Kabbalah. Some Kabbalists insisted that anyone seeking entrance to the orchard must be at least 40 years old, though Moses Cortovero stipulated 20 years. Other requirements included high moral standards, prior rabbinic learning, being married, and mental and emotional stability. The point is not to keep people away from Kabbalah, but to protect them. Mystical teachings are enticing, powerful, and potentially dangerous. The spiritual seeker soon discovers that he or she is not exploring something “up there,” but rather the beyond that lies within. Letting go of traditional notions of God and self can be both liberating and terrifying. All right, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it.

That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.