How Kabbalah Is Like Brain Surgery

Here's how the Zohar, the bible of Jewish mysticism, opens its discussion of Genesis 1:1, the story of creation: "A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity--a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors. Deep within the spark gushed a flow, splaying colors below, concealed within the concealed of the mystery of Ein Sof."

Any questions?

If you think you understand, you definitely don't. It's simply impossible for the non-expert to make much sense of kabbalistic symbolism, which is recondite beyond measure. Yet in his new, three-volume translation of the Zohar, the primary kabbalistic text, scholar Daniel Matt has done an amazing job of making kabbalah as accessible as it can be.

Matt, who taught theology in Berkeley, Calif. until taking on the Zohar project for Stanford University Press, retains a claim to authenticity that is not common in the pop version of kabbalah. For many who claim to understand kabbalah, the "cluster of vapor forming in formlessness" has yielded not a concealed mystery but a product line: "Kabbalah Cures: Headache Relief Ointment," made with "pure Kabbalah Water & Essential Oils"; red Kabbalah strings for $26 each, as worn on the left wrist by Madonna and other stars; and all manner of other Kabbalah "gear" on sale from the website of the Kabbalah Centre based in Los Angeles.

But turning from Britney Spears on the cover of Entertainment Weekly wearing a bustier and red string to Matt's monumentally serious and austere Zohar translation, you breathe an entirely different kind of air.

What is the Zohar, exactly? In three volumes that stretch altogether to encyclopedic length, it is, in theory, a commentary on the first five books of the Bible. Some of it reads not entirely unlike any of the ancient Jewish books of midrash. In these works, the ancient rabbis comment and expand upon the terse Biblical text, which is understood to conceal layer upon layer of secret, hidden meanings.

Other parts of the Zohar read like an odd peripatetic novel, as a group of 2nd-century Jewish sages, led by Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, travel about the Galilee in northern Israel, discussing the Torah. Still other parts have no narrative framework and expound, without pretending to be a commentary, on the interrelationship among Ein Sof and the ten sefirot.

The expression Ein Sof, meaning "without end" in Hebrew, is the mystic designation of the unnamable source of all being. Ein Sof is not God, exactly--rather, "it" is "God" as he relates to us humans, somehow emerging into our universe in stages called sefirot, derived from Ein Sof.

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