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December 22, 2024

The Real Reason Why Kabbalah Was Hidden for Thousands of Years

The Real Reason Why Kabbalah Was Hidden for Thousands of Years

Past Writings of Kabbalists Were Often Hidden

Anything that people need spreads naturally in the world. But when it comes to The Zohar and the Kabbalah, matters are not that straightforward.

The disclosure of the writings of Kabbalah has been accompanied by intriguing stories. The Book of Zohar has undergone many hardships, and only a small portion of the original manuscript remains today. The writings of the Ari [Rav Isaac Luria, author of The Tree of Life], were dug out of his grave only three generations after his demise. Indeed, there is a special integration of revealed and concealed, and painful labor pangs when it comes to expanding the wisdom of Kabbalah.

 

Difficulties that Surrounded the Spreading of Kabbalah in the 20th Century

Baal HaSulam made great efforts to publish his interpretation on The Zohar, the Sulam [Ladder] commentary, and wrote as much as 20 hours a day. When he fell asleep on his desk, it was hard to pull the pen out of his hand because his fingers were cramped around it.

For lack of funds to print the manuscripts, he had to wait until he could find the resources. And once he found them, he arranged the lead letters in the printing press by himself, although he was already ill and very weak. Yet, volume by volume, his life’s work was completed.

Still, people were afraid to open The Zohar and preferred to stay clear of it. As early as 1933, Baal HaSulam began to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah in an effort to prevent the looming holocaust. “Time to Act” was the title of his opening essay in the first tract that he printed—out of fifty that he had planned to publish. However, his work was frowned upon by certain orthodox circles, and within a few weeks they managed to apprehend the printing of the tracts to prevent the expansion of the wisdom.

In 1940, Baal HaSulam published a paper, The Nation, in which he called upon the Israeli nation to unite. His wish was to establish a by-weekly paper, but the paper initiative, too, was thwarted after the publication of the first issue.

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The Conclusion of the Renaissance Ends the Concealment of Kabbalah

The Conclusion of the Renaissance Ends the Concealment of Kabbalah

How Kabbalah Was Kept Secret Up Until the Renaissance

In tune with the shifts that took place at the onset of the Renaissance, Kabbalists began to remove the veil from the wisdom of Kabbalah, or at least to speak in favor of removing it. Since the writing of The Book of Zohar, Kabbalists have set up various obstacles before those who wished to study. It began with Rashbi’s concealment of The Zohar and continued with declaring all sorts of prerequisites that one had to meet before receiving permission to study. The Mishnah, for instance, gives the apparently paradoxical instruction to avoid teaching Kabbalah to students who are not already wise and understand with their own mind, but the text does not specify how is one to come by wisdom if one is not permitted to study.

In the Babylonian Talmud, there is a well known allegory about four men who went into a PARDES (an acronym for all forms of spiritual study—Peshat (literal), Remez (Implied), Derush (interpretations), and the highest level being Sod, Kabbalah). Of the four, one died, one lost his sanity, one became heretical, and only one, Rabbi Akiva, who was a giant among Kabbalists—entered in peace and departed in peace. There are other deeper and more accurate explanations to this allegory, but the story was nonetheless used to intimidate and deter people from studying Kabbalah.

Another prerequisite that Kabbalists set up was to “fill one’s belly with” (be proficient in) Mishnah and Gemarah before one approaches the study of Kabbalah. To justify that condition, they cited the Babylonian Talmud, which warns that one must spend a third of one’s life studying the Bible, another third studying Mishnah, and the remaining third studying The Talmud.

This, of course, leaves no time to study Kabbalah, so when the time came for Kabbalists to permit the study, they had to “make room” in the day for the study of Kabbalah. Thus, Kabbalists such as Tzvi Hirsh of Zidichov, “detoured” the prohibition by declaring that every day, one must “fill one’s belly with” Mishnah and Gemarah, and then study Kabbalah.

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