Kabbalah and its Discontents

Aside from a small circle of students and admirers, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag was an unknown figure at his death in 1954. Today, religious schools and New Age "educational centers" around the world are actively spreading his ideas, and his writings are being analyzed by professors and graduate students. After spending an hour in the rabbi's stone mausoleum, the pop-diva Madonna emerged with tears in her eyes. Who was this person to whom scores of pious (and impious) Jews and non-Jews are turning for inspiration?

Latter-Day Luminary  Micha Odenheimer,  Haaretz.  The life and times of Yehuda Ashlag, who saw Judaism's esoteric tradition as the instrument for transforming both human consciousness and human society.  SAVE

Spiritual Materialism  Yehonatan Garb,  Eretz Acheret.  New Age movements traffic in mystical urgings to achieve material gain and cultural status.  SAVE

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Tu b'Shevat: What Sorts of Trees are We?

Deuteronomy 20, discussing the laws of war, and in particular siege, forbids the cutting down of fruit trees, adding, in an ambiguous and tantalizing phrase, "ki ha-adam etz ha-sadeh." The words can be translated as a simple if enigmatic statement ("for man is a tree of the field") or as a question (in the rendering of the JPS Torah,"are trees of the field human?"). The classical commentators were likewise divided. The Talmud, reading the phrase as a statement, is moved to offer a prototype of a human "tree of the field": a virtuous sage, a worthy teacher and role model. Rashi, the great exegete of medieval Franco-Germany, understood it as a question. People make war, but why should trees suffer? 

The Zohar has its own take. God, the ultimately inaccessible divine person, is knowable in this world through the tree of life: that is, the Torah. Indeed, humans, trees, Torah, God—all mirror each other, each in its own way bridging heaven and earth, maintaining itself while branching out and bearing fruit. This perspective lives on in modern Jewish thought and literature. 

Zionism gave still another response. The human tree is the new Jew, who in planting trees advances settlement of the Land and figuratively undoes the rootlessness of exile. It was Zionism more than anything else that called into being the contemporary holiday of Tu b'Shevat, which in modern times bears multiple connotations, including environmentalist ones, but in ancient times was simply a convenient date for gathering tithes on fruits.

So what sorts of trees are we humans? The great 17th-century moralist Maharal of Prague had an answer: upside-down trees, whose spiritual roots lie in heaven above, and whose far-reaching branches and twigs form us earthlings below.

The Great Tree  Meir Poppers,  Ilan Ha-Gadol.  A 17th-century kabbalist sketches the spiritual universe.  SAVE

I Contemplate a Tree  Martin Buber,  I and Thou.  "I ought to approach a tree with a sense of its own living unity and wholeness, to the point where I can call a tree ‘you.'"  SAVE

Man is the Tree of the Field  Natan Zach,  For Man is a Tree of the Field.  A contemporary Israeli poet seeks a grim comfort in the arboreal bond. A song based on the poem is performed by Shalom Hanoch.  SAVE

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