It’s not for nothing that there’s a stigma around Kabbalah and all manner of “strange interpretations”: people can and do get confused. I often find myself with some severe dilemmas on how to properly convey certain ideas out of fear that the readers will get it the wrong way.
And there are a lot of teachings in Kabbalah that would be a full course meal for the inclined skeptic who doesn’t want to “think outside the box”. Consider the topics of Partzufim, the description of Sephirot, the foreign gods that inhabit the lower spiritual realms (which were also created by the One True God before the first Shabbat), and we can readily understand why so many people are afraid of Kabbalah.
Pshat, refers to the simple meaning of an idea, but it is often translated as the act to “strip”. This term is applied to when certain commentators seek to dispel the fog of confusion behind something in the Tanakh or Talmud. They are, in a sense, trying to reach the absolute essence of a word, idea or teaching so that people are able to understand it better.
The pshat’s importance cannot be overstated: kids need to learn in school how to understand well the text, be it the Torah, Gemara or Midrashim. In a sense, everything can be reduced to the pshat level for the simple understanding.
However, the Pshat is not everything there is because it can only be applied in the physical realm. And reality, besides being more complicated and nuanced, can transcend it.
Consider the word house – בית (bayt), which everyone can picture. Aside from the fact that the house in your head is different than my house in mine, house can convey many meanings as follows:
The same goes for a musician when he sees an instrument, a cook when he sees a dish or an engineer when he sees a building. They will each depict their tools of the trade in poetic, sometimes even transcendental language. And who could blame them?
Additional problems with the pshat arise when we consider they’ve often been used by very small minded people to vilify Kabbalah or to insidiously misinterpret the text while attributing this simplistic approach to the Rambam and call it “rationalism”. It’s clear to any thinking person that “rationality” is a spectrum, and what can be obvious to some, is not so obvious to another person.
Consider that a simple behavioral pattern (pshat) for an adult, such as looking to both sides of the street before crossing can be considered a tremendous wisdom to a toddler who might be flabbergasted at your prophetic abilities to foresee cars coming.
(But we digress)
The Arizal divides the 4 levels of the Pardes (Orchard) in the Torah as follows:
Any given idea has all these 4 levels, and many levels within those 4 levels. And, throughout centuries, the mystical teachings of Kabbalah have served as a powerful tool for interpreting and clarifying the often cryptic verses of the Tanach and the layered discussions of the Talmud. These texts, foundational to Judaism, can appear puzzling, dense, and at times even contradictory.
That’s why Kabbalah provides a unique interpretive framework that reveals deeper spiritual truths, hidden meanings, and connections that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
And here, we will bring 4 issues with the Pshat that are only addressed by Kabbalah.
Perhaps the most pshat-shattering teaching of the Arizal is that the entire creation before the fall of Adam and Chava was not at all physical. As it turns out, Adam, Chava, the snake and all the animals inhabited the world of Yetzirah, which has no physical counterpart. Only when they partook of the fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil (which, for the love of Hashem, was not an apple), was the physical reality solidified.
(Even back then, the world was completely different than what we know today)
In fact, the Zohar describes the snake (Nachash) as an incredibly wise and resourceful servant Adam had, who has wings, arms and legs, and “could collect precious stones from all around the world” and served him faithfully. It was only when the angel Samekh Tet, vested itself into the snake that it acquired its malicious nature and tricked Chava into eating it first, then giving it to Adam.
(According to the Baal HaTurim, Chava “took the Tree of Knowledge and smacked Adam with it, forcing him to eat as well. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.)
Some readers may point out to the famous story by Alexander the Great, that he sought to conquer the world and even enter the terrestrial Gan Eden as brought in the Talmud Chaguigah, but there are many ways to conciliate this pshat with the Arizal’s position: either the terrestrial counterpart began only after the first sin or it could be that Alexander astral traveled to the location where Gan Eden was.
So, no: the snake we see at the zoo is not at all similar to the original snake that served Adam.
The disputes of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, as well as any other dispute in the Talmud where one opinion is “rejected” is a very difficult matter to explain.
Sure, there are different ways of saying “elu v’elu divrei Elohim chaim” (these and these are the words of the living God), or that the opinion of Beit Hillel is to be followed in this world, whereas the opinion of Beit Shammai is to be followed the in next.
However how one opinion (the word of the living God) “supposedly” be rejected in the Talmud. And what are we to do with it?
Again, a few reasons why rejected opinions are quoted at all, which is to “provide credence and refute people who bring them up later”, by saying “so-and-so already said it, and it was rejected”, but that’s not a very convincing argument since anyone who wants to sin or invent new laws, will do it anyway. So either someone is intellectually honest to actually want to follow the law properly, or no amount of “your opinion was already disproved” will change his mind.
The first thing to understand is that we are not talking about philosophers that circle-think ideas and arrive at some “I-think-this-is-probably-real” conclusion.
We are talking about astronomical spiritual masters who regularly visited the spiritual worlds in mystical trips, with or without divine names, and drew down from the wellsprings of wisdom of their soul root in what would later be called “their opinion”.
Their words carry power beyond the simple meaning. In fact, not only the entire Torah but pretty much the entire Talmud is composed by holy names of God but that will be a matter for another post.
What ends up happening is that Beit Hillel’s light is able to find Kelim (vessels) into this physical world, while Beit Shammai’s light found its vessels in the higher spiritual realms. If we think about it, no light is lost, and indeed, most of us are not at the level where we can follow Beit Shammai, but it’s not that his, or any other sages’s opinions, were rejected, rather they we don’t have the vessels to contain them here.
There’s a certain pattern that emerges when we read the stories of the Biblical figures. Righteous people do righteous things to an extreme, wicked people do wicked things to an extreme although this pattern gets convoluted in the Prophets and we find people mixing their roles.
So I hereby bring 2 interesting interpretations by the Zohar on seemingly mundane lapses of character in the Torah.
Considering the amount of suffering the sons of Yishmael caused around the world, it should irk your mind to read in Bereshit 17:18 when Avraham Avinu was blessed by God that he’d have a child that would succeed in his mission through Sarah Imenu. Avraham Avinu then pleads “May Yishmael live before you”.
It’s should be shocking. Instead of doing a syum haShas, offering some shelamim sacrifices, or even uttering some prayers of thanks, this is what God gets?
Once again, many people use this as an opportunity to distort the Torah and say that “we should be merciful to everyone”, which is a lie because “whoever is merciful to the cruel, will end up being cruel to the merciful” (R’ Elazar, Midrash Tanchuma Metzorah). Truly righteous people never forsake the truth for petty political considetations.
And here the Zohar illuminates us once again by saying that God actually gave Avraham the choice whether he wanted his children to suffer in Gehinom or to have part of the sins expiated through suffering by the hands of Yishmael’s sons. Had Avraham Avinu chosen the former, Yishmael would’ve immediately died since he probably had no other purpose than to expiate [some of] the sins of the Jewish People.
So Avraham Avinu said “let him leave before you [and help atone to the sins of the Jewish People]”. Maybe because of this the Midrash states that Avraham Avinu is standing (not his full soul) at the gates of Gehinom.
A tiny detail in the Torah text can be magnified to a tsunami of secrets, as in the episode of when Sarah Imenu was “taken” to be Avimelekh’s wife. Before he could do anything to her, Hashem sends a plague that locks all orifices of the body (except maybe the nose), causing tremendous pain to the population of Gerar.
During the night, Avimelekh was supposedly visited by Elohim, who tells him he will die because she’s a married woman. In the text, Avimelekh retorts “did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister?’ And she also said, ‘he is my brother.’ By the integrity of my heart and in the innocence of my hands I did this.”
Elohim then retorts “I knew that, and that’s why I also kept you from sinning”.
The Zohar takes serious issues with the word “also” (Gam – גם) which is meant to say he was not the first one.
Clearly, whoever says “me too” is the second to agree to an idea, and that never happens to God who is always first to know. So how can he say “I also saved you”, since when does Hashem need someone else to first begin the saving and then go after him?
The answer is that Avimelekh was visited by none other than the Guardian Angel of Gerar, as these creatures are also called by the term “Elohim” (which could mean a powerful man, a judge, an angel like here, and also one of the names of Hashem).
The idea that this practice of rulers of nations investing in spiritual help from their guardian angels is a practice that continues to this day, and should be a topic for another article.
The honest readers will realize this is not an attack on pshat.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the pshat is important and the stepping stone to deeper understanding of the Torah. Yet, the pshat can also be misleading if not analyzed through the broader lenses of Kabbalah, much like a child’s perspective of a bitter medicine rarely reflects its true meaning.
And that’s because Creation can be infinitely complex and surprisingly simple depending on how we look at it. If we assume ourselves to be holding on the Partzuf of Abba or Imma (as when we relate to our children), then we are complete. If we look at reality holding by the Partzuf of Zeir Anpin and Nukvah, then we are broken, lacking Mokhin and lacking unity.
This does not mean that “anything goes”, God forbid. While, with enough iterations, even horrible ideas can be somehow justified by some distorted logic, Kabbalah has its rules and principles.
We can all agree that the Torah is eternal and relevant for all generations.
Kabbalah explains that creation is not a one-time event but a continuous process of spiritual descent and refinement. By reading Genesis through a Kabbalistic lens, we understand that each day of creation represents a distinct stage of spiritual transformation, as the world moved from divine potential to manifest reality.
This article should serve as a reminder than we live in worlds of contradictions that are often solved by taking a step back and seeing the system as a whole.
That’s what distinguishes Kabbalah from the other areas of Torah: we need to know the entire system to understand a little of it.
And in order to know it, we also need to study the pshat.
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