Most people, understandably, feel that Kabbalah and Christianity would be at odds with each other. When I started studying Kabbalah, my mother went to her vicar, concerned, and he told her that it was devil worship.
It is not.
Kabbalah is the oral tradition which forms the structure underlying all the teachings in the Bible. And that includes the New Testament. The error here is in trying to keep different religions and sects separate. There is no place for separation within Kabbalah – which is why it is known as The Work of Unification.
A work of unification is about dissolving the separation between folks rather than exacerbating them. At heart, a true Kabbalist has no religion but the desire to love and serve God. As soon as you say ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am a Jew’ or ‘I am a Muslim’ you are starting to highlight differences. The job of this website is to highlight the one beating heart of humanity.
However, people are people and, even in the Kabbalah group with which I studied for more than 20 years (a group of excellent people of learning and integrity) there was still an underlying feeling that this was a Jewish tradition and therefore we didn’t spend a lot of time on ‘the Christianity issue.’
However, the leader of that group, a wise and distinguished man, knows in his heart that Kabbalah is for all people. It’s simply not his job to teach the Christian aspect. It’s his job to update the Judaic aspect — which he does to people of all faiths.
Many years ago he led a group of us on a pilgrimage to Israel and, while we were eating St. Peter’s fish on the Sea of Galilee, two of us (who would generally be defined as Christians) asked him about how the Lord’s Prayer fitted onto the Tree of Life. He said, ‘That’s not my job; that’s your job.’
It is. And it does. Even better is how it flows down the central column of Jacob’s Ladder. And there is no coincidence in that just four Gospels were chosen for the New Testament. As the second century Bishop of Lyons and Early Church Father, Iranaeus wrote:
“The Gospels could not possibly be either more or less in number than they are. Since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is spread over all the earth, and the pillar and foundation of the Church is the gospel, and the Spirit of life, it fittingly has four pillars, everywhere breathing out incorruption and revivifying men. From this it is clear that the Word, the artificer of all things, being manifested to men gave us the gospel, fourfold in form but held together by one Spirit.”
The four Gospels reflect the four worlds of Jacob’s Ladder. Matthew is Assiyah, the physical world; Mark is Yezirah, the psychological world; Luke is Beriah, the spiritual world and John is Azilut, the Divine world. Each is imbued with the essence of the world it has been chosen to reflect and, in coming articles we will explore this aspect.
Jesus of Nazareth was born and lived a Jew. He would have understood the Jewish oral teaching of the time and every word he is quoted as speaking in the New Testament is a reflection of that. He came to unite us, not to divide us — and expanding that essential and beautiful work is the goal of this website. In the human soul, there is no Christian, there is no Jew, there is no Muslim, there is no religion there is only unity.
In the human ego there is division. The ego is vital to our lives but it must not rule us. Let us work from the soul.
Kabbalah Questions 