Isaiah53IsMessiah
Elder
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2014
- Messages
- 406
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- 64
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- Age
- 37
- Location
- New England, USA
- Faith
- Orthodox
What is the Orthodox view on Jewish Kabbalah? Has the Church said anything about this? From my investigations, it is an extremely complex, comprehensive, and systematic form of Jewish mysticism which is not easy to understand at all. I've only heard about it within the last few months and have been attempting to investigate it by reading a commentary on the primary book of this practice, the Zohar, and I still do not understand it, it took 70 pages in the book I'm reading just to explain what the first chapter was attempting to communicate and indeed, it is very very very obscure and vague and requires a lot of diagrams and illustrations to even understand and I still can't fully grasp it... The best way I can put it is that they seem to understand God as a kind of dynamic force which is manifested directly in our own human psyches and that we must ascend through different levels in order to subsume back into God by transforming our, and subsequently God's, "desires" into benevolence... but that's not even half of it and that's probably a really incorrect way to put it anyway... It also has a very unique creation myth based on extremely strange Biblical exegesis and takes the metaphor of the marriage between God and Israel extremely literally and applies extreme depths of interpretation to it, our own souls seem to be understood as literal fragments of God. Don't get the wrong idea here, I have not been attempting to implement Kabbalistic practices into my own spiritual life because 1. It's not Orthodox, obviously, but also 2. It would probably be extremely disrespectful since it would be a form of appropriation. However, in order to truly engage with Jews and Judaism I think we ought to have an understanding of its teachings just as St. Irenaeus investigated the Gnostic heresies. Funnily enough, I'd characterize Kabbalah as a form of Jewish Gnosticism really. The Church must recognize this, but I can't seem to find and word on it by any bishop or anything... Apparently some Catholics and Protestants attempt to appropriate it though. 
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