The Tree of Life
How Jewish mystics drew the hidden life of God as ten lights, and why their tree spread so far.
The lecture, painted and spoken
Watch The Tree of Life
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below.
Your plan plays the whole lecture, all twelve ideas.
The twelve ideas
Each idea is one chapter of the film: its headline is the caption on the painting, and its words are what the Oracle says. The tag says what kind of claim it is: a fact from history, what a tradition teaches, what a symbol stands for, or a question for you.
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Fact
Kabbalah means receiving.
Kabbalah means receiving, or tradition: wisdom handed from teacher to student. It is the mystical tradition of Judaism, rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the teaching of the rabbis.
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Tradition
The Infinite has no end.
Kabbalists call God beyond all knowing Ein Sof, without end. Of the Infinite in itself nothing can be said, so they speak instead of how it shows itself.
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Tradition
Ten lights: the sefirot.
It shows itself, they teach, through ten sefirot, ten qualities or emanations. Drawn together, they form the figure later known as the Tree of Life.
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Tradition
Crown, Wisdom and Understanding.
At the top stand Keter, the Crown; Chokhmah, Wisdom; and Binah, Understanding. They are the first stirring of thought, before anything has taken shape.
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Tradition
Love and strength must balance.
Then Chesed, loving-kindness that gives without limit, and Gevurah, strength that judges and holds back. The world stands, Kabbalists teach, only when the two are balanced.
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Tradition
Beauty stands at the heart.
Between them, at the heart of the tree, is Tiferet, Beauty, which joins mercy and judgment. Below it come Netzach, Victory; Hod, Splendour; and Yesod, Foundation.
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Tradition
Kingdom: the presence in the world.
The last is Malkhut, Kingdom, identified with the Shekhinah, the divine presence dwelling in the world. It receives the light of all the others.
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Fact
The Zohar, the Book of Radiance.
The great book of Kabbalah, the Zohar, appeared in Castile late in the thirteenth century. Scholars credit Moses de León and his circle; tradition credits the sage Shimon bar Yochai.
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Tradition
Luria taught of broken vessels.
In sixteenth-century Safed, Isaac Luria taught that the vessels made to hold the divine light shattered, scattering sparks of holiness through all the world.
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Tradition
Repair is the work of every life.
Gathering those sparks is tikkun, repair. In Luria's teaching, every good deed, every prayer and every kindness lifts a spark and helps to mend the world.
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Fact
Christians and occultists redrew the tree.
From the Renaissance, Christian scholars such as Pico della Mirandola read Kabbalah in their own way, and later occult orders redrew the tree again. Their readings differ from the Jewish tradition.
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Reflection
Which light do you need now?
Mercy or strength, understanding or foundation: the tree is a map of balance. Which of its lights is missing from your days right now?
Sources
- Sefer Yetzirah (late antiquity)
- Sefer ha-Bahir (Provence, twelfth century)
- The Zohar (Castile, late thirteenth century)
- Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)
- Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988)
- Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (2006)
What this lecture does not claim. Kabbalah is a Jewish tradition with many schools, and this is an introduction to one of its images. The Christian and occult readings it mentions differ from it.
The Tree and the Letters
Jewish mysticism's map of the divine, the alphabet it was spelled in, and the cards that borrowed it.
In the dictionary
Common questions
Can I watch this lecture for free?
The first three ideas play for anyone. Members watch all twelve, and every idea is written out below. Every plan opens the whole lecture, and every other lecture in the hall, and a plan begins with seven free days.
Who made this lecture?
The Great Almanac wrote it from the sources listed on this page and tagged every idea, so history is never passed off as teaching. The paintings were made with an image model and the voice is the Oracle’s synthesized voice, as how we use AI explains.
Does watching send anything about me anywhere?
No. The only request the film makes is each idea’s spoken line, by its fixed number, and only after you press Play. Nothing about you goes with it.
