A Kabbalistic Journey Through Time #1 - Collected Talks of David Solomon #102

[Music] as some of you know or some of you might know i'm often reticent to discuss the topic of kabbalah so when rabbi khan rang me a little while ago and said would i give a talk but sometime between pesach and shavuot on the subject of kabbalah and i immediately my i was inclined to say no because um it's just not a subject although i spend most of my time in it it's not a subject that has been successfully in my opinion transmitted one of the reasons behind that and i'm already into the talk now this is not simply by way of introduction the content has already started but one of the reasons behind that is because when you speak to a group of people such as this and i'm looking around at the face of some of whom i recognize some of you my i don't and some of you i almost recognize or from past lives is that when you look at a group like this there is such an incredible disparity in prior knowledge so that i don't know if i'm people speaking to people who are complete novices and just want to know about this or if i'm speaking to people who are very informed and that's why they decided to come here because they wanted to enrich their already already informed perspectives i don't know any of that and the chances are and the likelihood is that we've got a bit of everyone in this room i'm going to talk about very advanced concepts and the challenge that i'm going to do in this four part series is to give over some very advanced concepts starting from basically zero okay so the challenge is to try and absorb that so that the outcome would be the same as if you study this for 10 years on these particular points but you'll understand the points because we're going to unfold them from the beginning everybody follow what i'm doing if you find that the talk is too severe too intellectual too high then let me or rabbi can't know and we'll bring it down if you find the talk way too basic and i'm basically wasting your time we can up the level we can but it's always good to go over it's always good to revise the basics is it not so the question then and i'm still in content here this is not just introduction i'm actually this is really a part of what i'm really need to communicate to you about how this four part series is going to go whether you come back for the other three or not is that with that ambiguity of would you please take a course on something to do with kabbalah i'm kind of left you know like a person who's well and i was going to bring a metaphor of a person in front of a smorgasbord of the kiddush but in fact i uh thank you very much i the reality is is that we have to anchor it somehow you can't just go and start talking about kabbalah people who do will inevitably find themselves inside a vacuum or that no one knows what they're talking about you need an anchor for that and it just so happens that i've been giving a lot of thought to the type of anchor i would like to communicate in my teaching in in in the field of kabbalah where i consider myself um after quite a few decades of immersion in it i still consider myself a teacher i'm not a student i mean not a teacher a student the great the great teachers of kabbalah in our world they take it to another level but they have given me permission to teach so i'm like someone who sits in the academy every day and i see what's going on and then they allow me to go out and speak about it on occasion the reality is we need an anchor for how i'm going to talk about it and the anchor is this what they sometimes don't tell you at school is that jewish history itself for example the rabbi spoke about the subject of jewish history and i've thought about that too a bit and this is talk is of course is called a a kabbalistic journey through time is that jewish history itself is of a cosmic nature and is involved in the business of revelation now unless that project of revelation and it's the revelation of godliness in the world and the revelation of unity in the world ultimately with the purpose of raising human consciousness so that we can actually begin history but if you're going to have a project of continuous revelation that it needs to be continuous revelation it's not that we once had a revelation everybody talks about the revelation at sinai which we're going to be celebrating on shovel what in a few weeks and everybody talks about that but it's not that that we're always thinking back lumafreya as they say in hebrew to that revelation and that's when it was and it doesn't happen again there's a famous you know famous midrashic line that everything that was destined to be revealed was revealed to moses at sinai and that's fine but we don't have access to those revelations they become further revealed underlining the word revealed throughout history history is an ongoing project of revelation it's important to remember that point i'm going to come back to it the second point i want us to note and what this course is founded on and this is kind of this is kind of where we're pushing towards territory that is not always in fact hardly ever stated and that is that it is the nature of the revelation of the jewish people in the world about god and about the purpose of the world and about the human being it is in the nature of that project of revelation that it moves constantly towards synthesis it takes what exists and without getting too hegelian about it the next level of revelation is almost always a synthesis of previous revelations that appear at first to not be connected which are suddenly burst through through by a divine light of revelation that pierces the consciousness first of the jewish people and then the world about a new paradigm that synthesizes both those or both or more of those does everybody follow that's the meaning of synthesis and when we look at the revelation of kabbalah within jewish history we see precisely that we see precisely that now one of our earliest kabbalistic texts in fact one of the ones i'm going to talk about tonight has a very enigmatic statement in it about the transmission of kabbalistic knowledge and it says it really has three different dimensions to it i brought markers we have a marker it's like a that's an amateur's mark remember that scene in crocodile dundee that's a marker now these three dimensions that the one of the early the earliest text within the kabbalistic tradition refers to three ways in which we can communicate revelation through sapphire um put your hand up if you can read hebrew letters put your hand up if you can't okay someone put a finger up i'm not sure what that meant far same word but obviously different nico different voweling sephirah of course means book or text sfar means mazel espor so spar is number and sipur which is of course story narrative communication obviously we immediately note that all of these have the same root and obviously they're going to go on to become the root of the word sphera which is going to be so paramount to what we're going to discuss tonight basically and i'll come back to who gave this nonklemature later book or text number communication yep it's the first of those it is the first of those that is going to be our anchor because there is no transmission of kabbalistic knowledge without the texts of kabbalistic knowledge revelation comes into the world through the concept of into the jewish world through the concept of sephir through the concept of book if people weren't writing books it would be very difficult to transmit the ideas that we are talking about especially as the world in the last few thousand years has become more complex more global more shifting more changing texts are that which anchor that transmission and there is no greater mystical tradition that is compiled in texts than ours so what i want to do each week is i'm going to go through a bit of the history of how kabbalistic ideas come about and what are those ideas and what was the journey of the jewish people it's going to be like we're kind of like in a in a chronological hovercraft we're going to go very fast in some respects because i want to look at this as a continuum and how we have made the transition to where we are now it is not the case and i don't want anybody running out of the room in terror throwing the yamaka in the bin on the way out but it is not apparently the case that we have always known what we know now now you might sit there and go ah david's being for socialist but i'm not there are people who believe that what we know now has always been known they are what we might call homogenizers of revelation they want to try and read back and say well so and so you know it's for sure the rum bomber at the zoro for sure he just decided not to talk about it that sort of statement um if if you are even if you're not familiar with that you're familiar with that type of statement but in fact it's much more exciting to realize that we haven't always known what we know now because it means that revelation is an ongoing and constant interruption into jewish history and shift things shifts our direction shifts history literally shifts history marx was in my opinion my humble opinion at the end of the day wrong i mean for me to say marx is wrong it's a big statement because marx is right about a great many things but i don't believe that it is material conditions that drive human history i believe it is ideas i don't believe it's economic materialism it is ideas they are the true movers of history all right so much for a quasi intro but i want us to understand what i'm going to be doing so no one goes why did he start talking about books is the first book that the field of kabbalah whether you are coming from a scholastic perspective in the academic field of kabbalistic study carried on at universities and there is that field or whether you are coming from the perspective of a a capitalist with his talus over his head in mahasharim or whether you are running around in some orchard in california playing uggabooga what would we generally regard as the oldest kabbalistic text anyone sorry good so i asked that question in order to get an idea of where the audience is at so the gentleman here and others said what about this book [Music] put your hand up if you've heard of sephi yetzira put your hand up if you've never heard of safiyatsira very good sephi very good sephi yetzira might translate that what's the meaning of the word sefer book so it's the book of what we might translate yera as formation sophietsira is not strictly speaking a kabbalistic book that statement is washing over here and people are going okay what's the next sentence but the point is that that's quite a radical statement and i'm going to unpack it a little bit i believe it is the first kabbalistic book not because of what's in it oh no it's not sorry because of what's in it not because of what it meant to be and i'm going to explain that because we're going to talk about the sephietsira and its foundational role in the unfolding revelation of kabbalah here's the deal sephietsira is a book that is mentioned in very early texts it's mentioned in the talmud the famous story of rava and rabzay you know that they're you know he's looking at rav is the famous statement of the gemara that a sage called rava and amura of the fourth century used sephiroth a book called sephi yitzira he used it to make a dude he made a person he met a man using this techniques and energies of this particular book so obviously thousands and tens of thousands of jewish people that are reading this talmudic passage over centuries are wondering what's that book and where could we get our hands on that book but the reality is is that we don't know anything about sephiroth no one's talking about it no one's really aware of it throughout the talmudic period and the first sign we have of it by which time legends have developed that whatever it is it was written by abraham or and maybe edited by rabbi akiva obviously two very big figures from jewish history had a hand in it which gives it a kind of credence and approbation whatever it is and then at some point by the end of the onick period that is by the end of the ninth tenth centuries so only a thousand years ago or eleven hundred years ago the text is known the text is known it appears and suddenly all the great rabbis of the generations from say the 900s onwards are writing commentaries on it telling people what it might mean one of the famous famous early commentaries on it was of course i mean if you're living towards the end of the garnic period and you've got a text that a go on is going to comment on then one of those girl on him is going to be sadja so sadja gohan has a commentary on sefi et cetera but so do a number of other late go on he meant early rishonim from the 10th 9th 10th century it exists in different kind of forms variations but in a recognizable form it's not printed of course until much later not printed until the 1600s so it's kind of late on the scene of printing as far as jewish history is concerned but i can tell you that everybody who has ever stuck their nose in kabbalistic literature has read that book everybody has read that book and the reason it is regarded by catalysts as a mystical text and we might talk about what exactly kabbalah means in that context but it's so often the case that people who lecture courses on kabbalah dive into a definition of kabbalah at the start and people's eyes glaze over because there's no point trying to define what kabbalah is without actually looking at what it's saying and then you can work out what it is but the reason the reason everybody looks at it is because it tells us it describes how god created the universe and it tells us that god created the world i'm using the word meaning world or universe created this physical reality through a set of combinations god was able to do combinations of something called the 10 spherot the 10 spherot and the 22 letters of or actually the 22 letters of the hebrew alphabet azo state now in talks like this people will often go well the tens fee right i'm sure he's going to explain that and i'm sure he's going to unpack that some of you might even be sitting here going i've heard a lot about the tennis field but i'm not really sure entirely what they are let's see if david solomon can actually tell me but i'm not going to right now i want you to realize that when you open up sephiroth and normally that would be done by someone in kind of private because you wouldn't want people knowing that you were taking an interest in this material because no doubt your parents or your teachers or your elders or your counselors in some way will come along and go not for you but the first thing you're going to encounter is this fact that god creates the world through tens firot and 22 hebrew letters and you have no idea what that means it is not the case that cabalists open up a book like you know like like in a harry potter movie and go most capitalists when they open up these faring these books for the first time have no idea and it's very clear from the early commentaries on sephiroth that we don't really know what the tens firot are at that stage in fact in fact sadji gaon even tells you you're not supposed to think about what they mean just accept it when the sephietsira says hold your mouth from talking it means that whatever it is you can't talk about it and you don't know about it yet the 22 letters of the hebrew alphabet we know the safiyad syria also tells us the soviet syria also tells us that the 22 letters of the hebrew alphabet that god invests in creating the world invests divine intelligence in the world through 32 pathways of wisdom 32 pathways of wisdom once again we only have illusions of to what that mean what that might mean commentators will come along and they will say i'm talking kabbalistic commentators who are trying to come to terms with this textual revelation they'll say oh well the 32 is the 22 plus the 10. and you're going okay what does that mean others will come along and they say ah the number is third number 32 is significant why is the number 32 significant why is the number 32 significant why is the number 32 significant in relation to creation means the heart but why is that connected to creation everything you're saying is absolutely right but it's not the right answer that i'm looking for it is it is absolutely right that it connects to the word lev which is lumet bet which is 32 and in fact they make a whole big deal about that but what i was looking at was specifically in relation to the act of creation 32 times the name elohim is mentioned in the first chapter of genesis 32 times that means that there are 32 different investments of divine energy into creation now what the sefi etc is telling you if you extract its essential idea is that what god did you can do this is a manual to access divine creative power divine creative power can be channeled into this world by you to create stuff divine energy is channeled into the world through 200 by by the practitioner through 231 gates the famous ralla sharim 231 gates and what you realize is that the 231 gates are the 22 letters placed in an array a circular array and you are going to have 221 point lines they're going to connect them all yep because that's the formula isn't it 22 squared is 4 6 4 over 2 gives you 2 3 1 or 2 2 4 6 two gives you two three one now that takes us really in another direction because once you start to understand the cetera also the civil syria is talking about the fact that there are different perspectives and understand you know there's world and there's soul and there's year all corresponding to this idea of the paradigm of space time spirituality and what a lot of people have come to realize is that they can actually use the safiyatsira as a deep form of creative meditation and there are people throughout jewish history who have claimed to have created things like a golem yep everybody's familiar with the golem a few of them running around melbourne i'm sure you've seen them some of the ones i created i couldn't control them all i apologize you usually see them in glicks on a friday morning so and and i didn't mean you you'll see and if you are deep into sefiatira and you're doing all that then what you're actually doing is creating realities in your mind you are emblazoning them and you are following through the divine formula of creation in order to literally with your mind carve these things out of the ground around you raise them up and they become what they become and there are many different interpretations of how sephietsira works but we're still not really at what we call kabbalah because no one really knows yet what these 10 spherot are and there's a very very good chance that they were something else entirely scholars will tell you that it has more in common with pythagorean mysticism than it does with later kabbalah after the zohar which is already the 13th century most of the commentators on safiyatsira are going to tell you that these tens firat are our 10 spherot the ones that we talk about in kabbalah but it's a big love dufka we're not sure and certainly all of the great none of the great sages of the later oneic and early medieval period are telling you that because they don't know about that they just know that there's some kind of abstract force that is related to numbers and that they are some kind of permutating abstract system of divine energies creative energies but that's all really know those of you who are interested you see i thought we're going to be around the table so i brought a copy of each of the books this is a classic this is one of the like the vilna edition of the cephera it's a facsimile of the of of of a printing a 19th century printing and what it is basically they treat it like a mishna so you will have the central text and then you have all the commentaries around it and each mishna will tell you uh a condensed very very condensed and opaque piece of information although the cefi etc is not overly fashionable today necessarily it still forms a foundational text a foundational text for any journey in jewish mysticism in kabbalah because so many later texts refer to it the whole concept that we have for example in contemporary spirituality particularly in khasi dot and so on that talks about concepts like ratsova shove running and returning as a spiritual paradigm whether that applies to angels or will it applies to us or the creation as a whole these ideas can be read back into safiyatsira and some of those terminologies are read back into severity i come from syrah and there's no more famous terminology that comes from zephyr yitzira than the concept of tens fearot but when sephiudzira first appears it does not seem that they are understanding it the way we understand it or as it came to be understood later in the revelations of jewish history yeah so where did that come from well i'm watching the time and i have to be very careful is that really the time is that really the time ow i have three books to discuss tonight and i have discussed one of them if you want don't play with the clock grabber don't play with this one if you have an yearning to look at sephiroth or you want to make a journey and you want to understand it and you want a good translation and a commentary then i can't recommend anything greater in our generation than the late arya couplands translation and commentary bearing in mind bearing in mind that kaplan wrote that commentary and translation bringing the full weight of 20th century knowledge about the development of kabbalah so he has no problems reading the vre into it reading the ramak into it reading desire into it anyone later he will use to explicate that but that's also brilliant because kaplan was one of those people that also realized that kabbalah was being unfolded in time it is being revealed and the revealing and the synthesizing is ongoing what we need to understand is that sephietsira establishes certain terminologies and concepts that safiyat might know what it means but we don't really know what it means what we do know is that the book is trying to tell us that we can channel divine creativity for to make things for ourselves and for the world and that it's using elemental combinations elemental combinations it's not such a far cry from contemporary technology and science it's just that they had different concepts of what those elementals might be but everything in the world is created ultimately from the combination of elementals and here we're talking about combinations of 22 hebrew letters all the hebrew letters are creative dynamic forces if you can manipulate them you can create things and a lot of people got involved in sephiets here safiya sira also tells you and this is one of the reasons why it was attributed to abraham at the end of it it tells you that abraham used zephythsira to make souls you know when the torah says and the souls which abraham made in gharan yeah so that's understood by the mystics literally literally he literally made souls using the power of the cepheids we don't know what that means people can look at me in confusion and curiosity i can't help them and not many people can help them how you make a soul with the cephet syrup go home read the civilian zero try it if it works tell me we read the cepheid syrup because it's there because everybody says oh the sephi it's syrup it's dangerous don't get involved it's a very it's but interestingly enough it doesn't come across as a book of sorcery it comes a book as a as a book of tremendously high spiritual power and a very very [Music] monotheistic refined philosophical view of the concept of god but it's out of reach it's out of reach now the story for our purposes and i'm probably already going to have to apologize for going five minutes over tonight but i i want to make sure that i transmit this journey that i want to talk about our story really starts the origin of what we call kabbalah actually happens a couple of hundred years after people are already aware of the sephie or or have already written some of the major commentaries on sephiroth by the time you get to the 1100s yeah what is where would we be looking at in terms of the just to see if anyone knows this what would we call the center of the kabbalistic world when i say the kabbalistic world where are the mystics congregating and producing figures that are revealing or receiving revelations and looking at different types of material that they are expounding mystically developing innovative ideas anyone know where that was happening in the 1100s no we're way before it's what way before do you go to about the 1100s you're going to find a bunch of keraites and and probably you know some islamic rulers that aren't really um that chilled about jews moving around the place there might be a few sufis you might learn off but no it's not the eleven it's not zfate so it's not quite spain either it all starts in the south east of france in provence provence is really with the greatest jewish mystics of the time we're living and it is provence in provence that we first see the emergence of the next big cephere that is going to re there's not the only seven but the next big one if we can only talk about a few that's really going to influence jewish mystics because everyone's going to look at it and try and work out what's going on just like the sefi etsira had been for the last few hundred years we're now adding something it's a new revelation well it's it's a revelation of something that looks like it's been around for a while but we don't know of it before the 1100s really and it is and it's a book called safer huh very good very good safer haba here now the cabalists of the early middle ages are busy they are reconciling different streams that are coming to them one of course is sephietsira the other are some very interesting configurations of ten of ten sephiroth tells us of the tens pharah divine creative potentialities we don't know what they are the mishna tells us in ten utterances was the world created it's a famous midrash in fact it's it's in the mission it's in uh it's in uh per cavot chapter five but we also know that by the time you get to the middle ages people had philosophized ptolemy's cosmology so that the universe itself was understood as ten concentric spheres the whole basis of that was the whole basis of astronomy in the middle ages the ptolemaic model and once you get to people like the rum bum maimonides that's how they see the universe earth is at the center and you've got these ten concentric circles which mediate between whatever is on the other side and for you know i mean for the rumba it was all divine intelligences and then outside that you've got the angelic realm and you've got god and so on but the number 10 keeps configuring and then you get people saying oh well you know what we know from midrash midrash some of the more mystical mid rasheem are giving us an insight into not just god from the perspective of creation but god from the perspective of god itself what's actually happening in the divine personality that is reacting to creation in other words what's going on with god before god creates the world what's going on with god now that god has created the world what does god do while god sustains the existence of the world it's looking at the hidden interiority of the divine midrash gives us a far greater window into that and what starts to emerge is a book like sephiroth which is not really a book it's more a collection of texts that may not even be kabbalah yet no one really really knows but it is definitely talking about the attributes of god and these attributes are being formed into a kind of a pattern of divine creative attributes and that pattern is starting the elements the symbolic elements of that pattern of ten is starting to be given names each of the ten is starting to take on a name and an identity it's not yet quite what's going to happen but for example we know that there's the famous verse so that's already giving us and the names of quite a number of the spherot and then you're going to have repeated patterns throughout tanakh that they are midrashically and mystically reading that so they're starting to put names to the attributes of god and the shepherd of bahir is linking that the sephirah which has very clearly read sefi etc it's fully aware of it it talks about the 32 pathways of wisdom it talks about a number of concepts that come up in sephiroth and of course it's aware of the tens feared but its pattern of tens virat and the names that it applies are not necessarily what we now know them as what is emerging is an understanding that revelation happens in a pattern and the ba here which is a mystical midrash it doesn't read like sephietira as a physics book it is a midrash which means it's much more narrative much more parabolic it gives you many more naturalistic metaphors it's talking about kings and gardens [Music] it's talking about divine flow not divine investment but the way that divine energy flows into creation like water into a garden if we didn't know any better and we don't we might even assume that a very very strong feminine or female presence in the composition of bahir because it is very non-linear and much more concerned with naturalistic metaphors many many less sharp lines than the cepheids era much more circular much more flowing much more intuitive it's difficult to understand but here but it the key takeaway is it's also talking about the concept of cosmic time that time itself is cyclic it talks about the fact that the soul it's clearly alluding to reincarnation whoa here's an idea that wasn't there before the idea that certain souls if not all souls incarnate in different time cycles because cosmic time is cyclic what has happened before does happen again not in some kind of niche in eternal recurrence but as a type of almost fractal relationship between the creation of the world at the very beginning and how the unfolding of time reflects those patterns and the spherot are the attributes of god which are patterned so as to be able to understand revelation in the world and what the divine is it's not an easy book to understand it but here but the takeaway is is that what were formerly just numbers are now the attributes of god but we're still not at what we would call definitively kabbalah as it's going to come to be known the first big influential text that's really going to give us that by the way if you want to look at the by here so the ba here it's very difficult to find a bachelor published by itself except maybe in some extremely modern academic editions one of the ones is margoliot by here which is actually the back of the volume of tikulezar so he actually printed the bahir it's got and if you want to read it in translation kaplan's translation of bahir is floating somewhere just above appalling i as much as i've extolled his translation on commentary on cepheitzera which was a work that he really really spent years he went into my theory is that kaplan's translation of the bahir was published posthumously because kaplan passed away in 1983 from a draft i cannot believe that kaplan would have meant for the translation to go out in the way that it did it is a translation but it's very very it's got some problems here so we don't know who wrote the book we don't know who wrote the fact but but you're not but you know what i'm thrilled to the max that you asked that question because if you hadn't i would have remembered later that i didn't say what i was what i'm about to so thank you okay so let me let me let me let me first answer who who something about the authorship of bahir and then i'm going to answer that question of how do we know it came up from provence the traditional authorship of sephirah bahir no less an august figure than the 1st century tana rabino benacana benakana is mentioned in various places in midrash in other contexts he is an enormously interesting figure was a colleague of rabban yohan zakai a teacher of many of the mystics of the generation he was regarded as the greatest mystic sage of the of that period of the tanayim huge figure but that's a legendary attribution we don't have any evidence of that and not that i'm sitting here going everything i'm going to tell you is evidenced but it needs to be pointed out we don't have evidence of that what we and neither would i we do we have evidence to support the statement and this is the second part this is really important to understand it's not that we have evidence that it came from provence it's that prior to the circles in provence we don't know about it when i say we don't know about it no one is talking about it and if no one is talking about it from our perspective a thousand years later we can't say it didn't exist but we don't know about it so we talk about its origins being from provence because that is where it was revealed that is where it was revealed there's a lot more i could say about by here i'm watching the time it's already nine o'clock and i've gone over and it's a lot of things i wanted to say about by here uh but that's why i'm focusing on this takeaway the numbers have become attributes and they are now embedded not in a scientific text like sephietsira or an abstract text but in a midrashic text that gives me drashik style metaphors and talks about the inner processes of god and i know that i'm already got minus a minute but we're going to talk about the next book because then i want to wrap it up because next week i'm going to start an entirely new phase but the next major text that we would want to know about after sephirah bahir and i'm moving forward a hundred years now and so that no one's confused i'm going to bye-bye by here you can still read the bahir but we're going off the board but here is stunning by the way the bahir is stunning i mean i'm i'm not even giving across the literary qualities of these books they are saturated with mystical vibe and perception and if you understand even just a little bit of hebrew you could make your way through the separate by here even with kaplan's translation however there's a new translation there's a new translation jesse barksdale is running a neutral in the states writing a new translation on by ear i've seen tiny little bits of it it looks very nice hopefully it'll come out very soon but the book moving forward 100 years to the middle of the 1200s where's the center of now now where's the center where's the center now it's no longer provence it with provence and it went to guarana and the whole area of barcelona why because one of the greatest sages of the fir of the of the twelve hundreds is living in guarana someone who definitely was studying the sephietsira and the bahir and is a big big building block in the synthesis of those two ideas and of course that's the ramban nahmanadi's but after garona why are you smiling yeah sorry yeah oh cool google this is i said the rumba it's not often when i say run button people start smiling i'm going is there a joke about the rumble i don't know no that's good that's good no perfect and then from garona it moves to anyone know and this is the really big shift i mean i know when i say this you're going to go oh he's just telling me another place name in europe like really why is that important it's true at this level it's not exactly important but these are quite monumental shifts if you understand the inner workings of the history of spanish and and and french jury at the time but it moves to castile in the center of what is today spain moves like around toledo and these places very very significant important jewish communities but also mystically saturated jewish communities and the next book that we would look at i'm going to speak about only for two minutes because we have to finish up is a book called aura oh you see that's a really it's not correct answer but it's really interesting answer it wasn't no it wasn't a balance yeah but i'm going to come back to them a second it was written by rabbi yosef and this is the first time i'm putting an author up because this is the first book in our list that actually has an author who we know wrote it and it's a very fascinating author and i would have liked a bit more time to go into his personal history because he's one of the seriously interesting people in our continuum it's rabbi yoss of ji katila and of course jigatilla of castile in sha'areora chareora is really the first book already a hundred years after the revelations of the bahia which may have been around for a lot longer but the first the first kind of book that really starts to look like a kabbalistic book that we would recognize it is talking but it is not talking about the spherot in the first instance it's a book about the names of god god is revealed through god's names and god has ten primary names which correspond to divine attributes divine creative energies and yes ladies and gentlemen the ten spherot and the tens firot are says g catilla and the ten spherot are says g catilla i'm smiling because i know the effect of what i'm about to say that which of course is 11. but the real issue is that it's gone from bottom to top that is because the big innovation of the is to link the names of god the modes of revelation with the names of god is the essence of god revealing through the names of these modes taking the idea from sefi etira that you can actually channel divine energy but it doesn't start with you going hocus pocus or gabooga and remember ji katila had started off as a student of abu lafayette and this gentleman mentioned double affirming unfortunately we don't have time to go into abu lafri i've spoken about him elsewhere but avolafie's big idea was names he wasn't into spherotic kabbalah no one really was necessarily in the sphere of the couple he was into names and then ji katila makes the switch over to a more what we call sephiroth kabbalah away from the yogic exercises and breathing and meditational exercises of abu lafayette whose primary aim of rahma bulafiya ji katila's first teacher primary aim was what what was he wanting to achieve from all these mystical meditations and study what does he want we know what jake attila wants well we know what abu lafar wants sorry i mean i mean i mean that's quite funny because abu lafaye probably did want that but if you ask double up who's likely to be bashir he'd look around and go well you know i don't want to sound modest but is looking for is prophecy because abu lafaye spends decades being obsessed with maimonides philosophical word the guide to the perplexed mourinho a completely rationalist medieval philosophical work that abu lafar said no no no forget philosophy forget rationalism it's full of mystical secrets and he interprets them and when the rum bum tells you you can achieve prophecy through activating you your active intellect and having a union mystical with the divine intelligence oh bulafi says bring it on i want some of that so he starts to develop all sorts of techniques to do it she can tell he's a student but geek attila then makes a transition to spherotic kabbalah where he sees human attributes as reflections of the divine it's not the case his philosophy is telling us that we have to anthropomorphize the words in the torah to think that god would go we talk about the arm of god that we're talking about the might of god that's very nice but what's really happening is we have an arm because we are microcosmic reflections of that divine energetic interaction with the world sorry yes that's the transition in other words he starts from malhut it's ten chapters each one dedicated to a name and a spira and an attribute and all its parallel signifiers right throughout in order for us to meditate and particularly use this program of ascent in states of consciousness and rarification of our own bodies to ascend and particularly in prayer we are no longer using divine these techniques to change the world we're using these techniques to change divine configurations to help our reality we are in a sense attempting to influence god through our prayer and through our channeling which is coming from ourselves it's a very very big shift but for our purposes the main thing to realize is that written probably around 1273 probably somewhere around there not printed of course till the 1500s but written around there and distributed in manuscript is a book i'll give you one second that lays out very clearly here the spherot here's the structure here's the order of them so basically from it's kind of fixed is not a massive text this is a copy this is my copy of and it's about that's about that long but it's divided into 10 gates each gate dealing with a different sphere incredibly cornerstone literally turning the cornerstone book in the unfolding of the revelation that is going to come yes okay okay okay it's a good question but i think inside the question there's perhaps a misunderstanding or perhaps i didn't make it clear when the torah talks about the hand of god yeah difficult to understand necessarily how the rabbis of the talmud that i mentioned in the who are quoting it might have understood it some of them might have actually understood it literally yep if you said to one of the sages of the talmud god's got a body it's just a very big ethereal highly refined spiritual body but it's a body they might have gone okay i don't see a conflict there with monotheism the idea that of course god is completely incorporeal and that to corporealize god is a serious no-no is really a product of the middle ages so medieval philosophy arrives at that and then so then of course jewish philosophers are caught um with the accusations of the kalam and so on saying ah look at your torah full of anthropomorphisms the hand of god the eye of god and then philosophers like sahaja and the rambam they're coming along and they're saying oh no no no no no no it's not like god has eyes or god has legs or god has arms those are metaphors basically for the might of god and then just put in terms of which we can understand decatilla is saying no they're not simply there so that we can understand them we are how we are because we are a direct reflection of the pattern of divine creative interaction so yeah in a way god has an arm but it's not a body it's a particular type of creative energy that works in symmetry in relation to the other dynamic framework energies which the bahir spoke about when the bahir spoke about a pattern of framework of energies these are dynamically interrelated the by here and i'm glad i graduated because i know that i'm well over but i'm just going on around for a minute because i have to the ba here is the first text that gives us the whole idea that there is within the divine or the divine can be understood in masculine and feminine form that in fact masculine and feminine forms must be in harmony to create the flow of creative output from the framework of energies and along comes ji katila and says very nice but here are the actual spheroid and what's actually happening is it's about us and our ability to channel that divine creativity by ascending ourselves through that framework not bringing it down as hocus pocus but actually ascending it ourselves in prayer and becoming a full channel for the revelation of light and of the name of god and of course and of course and of course it is that really explicates the idea of course that the human form is paralleled after the name of god the tetragrammaton jude vauvey which is the name associated with the sphero of tiferet is when placed vertically a human form and therefore each of those letters in the form that it is has a full representation of the spherot and on this point i will finish because that itself is a big revelation but on this point i will finish by saying that ji catilla writes in his famous gate five which is the gate on te feret which is one of the most astonishing reads in all of kabulistic literature for anyone who wants to look at it he explains to you that other religions and he's talking about abrahamic religions he's talking about christianity and islam are caught in the paradigm are two of the sphero on the right and one on the right one on the left that deal with kindness and benevolence on the one hand and withholding and limitation on the other they are caught in that good bad guru judgment mercy paradigm you have to be on the middle pillar which is the jewish people who are sitting in the place of deference between those two domains who can only the middle pillar can transcend vertically it's not simply a horizontal alignment it is a vertical alignment and therefore that is why the jewish people are capable of synthesis and therefore only by synthesizing can you then rise but if you are on the middle column you can rise because then you go up to da at divine consciousness and ultimately up to keter so i know that's a very advanced point to end with and i didn't look at the pattern of the spheroid which i would have liked to and i had to come to an end we will look more at that pattern of what i mean you know the famous pattern that we now talk about this this is this is already by the time you get to yourself you've already got ketter and of course if there's ketter there's not data and that's confirmed already in the sephiroth we don't even know what the cepheid syria is talking about the civilization had already said there's always 10 10 and not 9 10 and not 11. so we know that there's that relationship and then and therefore am israel being tifaret is able to raise up on that vertical level and because they're able to synthesize from the other domains i hope all of that has not been too confusing i'm sorry i went over time and i hope that we got something out of that just to remind us i talked about cepheitera i talked about sephirah bahir and i talked about just the beginning of the journey that i want to do with you over the next four weeks in this cabalistic journey through time [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: David Solomon

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Keywords: David Solomon, Jewish History, Jewish podcast, Jewish learning, Jewish ideas, AḤDUT, ARIEH KAPLIN, AVRAHAM AVINU, BIBLICAL PATRIARCHS, COSMIC TIME, CREATION, CREATION OF THE WORLD, DAVID SOLOMON, DIVINE FLOW OF ENERGY, GILUI ELOKUT, GOLEM, JEWISH MYSTICISM, KABBALAH, MYSTICAL MIDRASH’, PATRIACHS, R. NEḤUNYAH BEN HAQANEH, RAMBAM, REINCARNATION, SA'ADYA GAON, SEFER, SEFER BAHIR, SEFER YETZIRAH, SEFIROT, SEPHIRAH, SFAR, SHAARE ORAH, TIPHERET-DAAT, #mysticism, jewish history

Id: bivpYq5-W0I

Length: 66min 14sec (3974 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021