ON THE KABBALAH AND ITS SYMBOLISM - GERSHOM SCHOLEM

I read this thing over almost a year. I’ve always had something of an interest in Kabbalah, getting it mostly through osmosis from folks like Alan Moore or Thomas Pynchon, i.e. non-jews who have an interest in Western esoterica and who have added Kabbalah to a general arsenal of symbolic structures that include things like tarot or gnosticism. It’s always something I’ve meant to know more about, and Harold Bloom recommended this book on the topic. It’s out of print but I found a copy online and I’ve kept it by my bedside for about a year, reading it in little pieces, trying to figure this whole thing out. It is not what I thought it was going to be. I was expecting a sort of textbook, perhaps one that went over some history then walked through the sefirot and other major concepts. Instead, this book is a series of long essays that touch on topics as broad as the relationship between mysticism and tradition in religion, the nature of ritual, the connection between religion and myth and, finally, on the golem as a figure in Jewish thinking. Scholem is a religious scholar and is more interested in placing Kabbalah in a larger firmament of religious thinking than he is in explaining to you what all the symbols mean. For that sort of information, Promethea is still the best resource I know of. That being said, this book is full of strange ideas and interesting concepts. Scholem sums up the task of Kabbalah as, “turning Judaism into a mystery religion.” which has all sorts of far-out implications. Not unlike certain branches of Islam, they seem obsessed with the Torah and the text of the Torah itself. Perhaps the whole thing is the name of god, perhaps the letters themselves are imbued with spiritual truths and power and can be studied to unlock these truths and powers. Perhaps some of the letters are not complete in our fallen world. Obviously this connects to the golem, who is brought to life and killed by changing Hebrew letters written on his body. Scholem does a good job showing how some of this thinking comes out of Jewish encounters with gnosticism and/or Sufism, the mystical traditions of the other, major, Abrahamic faiths. Overall, there’s lots of interesting tidbits in the book, I was particularly taken with an idea that every nut you bust that doesn’t impregnate someone can be used by demons to create more demons and thus, at one’s funeral, the demons one has sired over a lifetime of onanism return to pay their respects to their father. Overall, very interesting on a religious studies level, I would go elsewhere for really deep Kabbalah explanations, you need to already be familiar with stuff like the tree of life. 613 emanations of G-D