The Zohar and Safed

The teaching

As the Kabbalah of the Zohar and of Safed teaches it.

The companions on the road

The Zohar teaches as it walks. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his companions go along the roads of Galilee, and when they meet a traveller, a child or an old donkey driver, or sit down under a tree, one of them opens a verse of the Torah and the others follow, until the plain words open onto the life of the sefirot. In its great assemblies, the Idrot, the companions sit in a circle around Rabbi Shimon to hear the deepest teachings, and some of them, the book says, die there of joy.

The maiden in the palace

The Zohar's own parable of the Torah is a love story. She is like a beautiful maiden hidden in a palace, whose lover passes her gate again and again. She opens a small window, shows her face for a moment and withdraws, and only he notices. Then she speaks to him from behind a curtain, in words he can bear; then through a fine veil, in riddles; and at last face to face, telling him all her hidden secrets, so that he sees that nothing in the words he first heard was without meaning. So the Torah shows herself to the one who loves her, a step at a time.

The spark and the palace

The Zohar tells the beginning of all things in a few lines. At the head of the King's will, it says, a dark flame, a spark of blackness, flashed out from the most hidden, from the mystery of Ein Sof; it had no colour, no size and no form, and when it was measured out, colours shone within it. Then a single hidden point broke through and shone, and beyond that point nothing can be known; it is called the beginning. Around the point a palace was built, which is Binah, and from the point and the palace the rest of the sefirot unfold.

The Holy One and the Shekhinah

At the heart of the Zohar is a love story within God. Tiferet, the Holy One, blessed be He, and Malkhut, the Shekhinah, are king and queen, bridegroom and bride, sun and moon, and the world is whole when they are joined. The wrongs of Israel divide them, and when Israel went into exile the Shekhinah went with them; she is in exile still, and every good act and every prayer said with intention brings the two nearer.

The Sabbath is their wedding. On the Sabbath eve the queen is united with the king, which is why the Sabbath is greeted as a bride and kept in joy, with lights, a set table and its own clothes.

The other side

Evil, for the Zohar, has no root of its own. It is the left side broken loose, judgement cut off from love, and it lives on what it takes from holiness, as a shell lives around a fruit. Its realm is called the other side, and its forces are the husks, the qelippot, which surround the light and feed on it. A wrong done gives them strength; a good deed takes it back.

Three souls in one

The soul, in the Zohar, has three levels. Nefesh, the life of the body, is given to every person; ruach, the spirit, is earned by good deeds; and neshamah, the highest soul, comes to the one who studies and serves with the whole heart, and is drawn from Binah. Later teaching, Luria's among it, adds two more above them, chayah and yechidah, the living one and the single one.

Tzimtzum, the withdrawal

Isaac Luria begins earlier than the Zohar does, before the first point. Before creation, he teaches, the light of Ein Sof filled everything, and there was no room for anything else. So Ein Sof withdrew, contracted itself, to leave an empty space in its own midst, and into that space it sent a single thin ray of light. Within the ray the worlds take shape, first as a primordial human form, Adam Kadmon, from whose ears, nose, mouth and eyes lights stream out. Creation begins with a giving way: room is made before anything is made in it.

The breaking of the vessels

The lights from the eyes were to be held in vessels, one for each sefirah. The highest vessels held; the vessels of the lower seven could not bear the light, and they broke. Most of the light rose back to its source, but sparks of it fell with the shards, and the shards became the husks that hold the sparks captive. Since then the world is made of broken vessels and hidden sparks, and everything in it, even what seems evil, holds a spark of holiness that waits to be freed.

Tikkun, the repair

The repair began at once, as the light reshaped itself into faces, the partzufim, which can give and receive in balance: the long face, the father and the mother, and the small face of the six sefirot with his female partner. But its completion is left to people. Each commandment done with intention, each prayer said with its kavvanah, each meal blessed and each act of kindness lifts a spark out of its husk and returns it to its place.

Israel's exile, in this teaching, scattered the people across the world to gather the sparks that fell everywhere, and when the last of them is raised the repair is whole and redemption comes. Souls take part in it too: one that has not finished its repair returns in another life to complete it.

The rites of Safed

Luria's circle in Safed lived the teaching. At midnight many rose to mourn the exile of the Shekhinah and the ruin of the temple, sitting on the ground like mourners, and then to pray for her return, in the rite called the midnight repair. Rising at night belongs to a whole way of life kept within a community, and it is never to be taken up at the cost of health.

On Friday afternoon they went out into the fields in white to greet the Sabbath as a bride, and the song written there by Shlomo Alkabetz, Come, my beloved, to meet the bride, is still sung as the Sabbath begins in synagogues everywhere.