Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Kabbalah: Penetrating Insight”
Rev. Rod Debs
September 26, 2004

At Boston University School of Theology, my Hebrew Scriptures prof Dr. Harrell Beck wrote a note on one of my papers recommending that I pursue Biblical scholarship. This would involve learning Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic languages, plus German in which a lot of Biblical scholarship is published. Before getting to Christian Scriptures, in order to grasp Judaism, I would study various translations and interpretations of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures known as Torah, the Written Law, plus the Oral Law, the Mishnah that decoded and explained it. Study of all Hebrew Scriptures known as the Tanakh would include the Torah, the Prophets and Holy Writings, what Christians call the Old Testament. And this would be only a beginning study of Judaism.

Because the Oral Law, Mishnah was intended for memorization, it is highly cryptic. Each phrase has historical and cultural associations just as our terms `gay’ and `straight,’ `bad’ and `cool’ have cultural connotations that radically alter the meaning of specific usages. To understand Judaism one must study the collection of commentaries, the discussions and debates of various schools of interpretation, know as the Talmud. However, even more expansive than these logical reasonings of Talmud, Judaism has a body of literature that explores the widest magnitude of conceivable interpretations of each teaching, known as Midrash.

Finally, apart from the logical study of Hebrew Scriptures there is a mystical tradition of meditation upon Jewish teachings known as Ecstatic Kabbalah. Rather than cold academic logic and debate, the mystic’s life of religious practice, study and meditation opens intuitive insights, new levels of awareness into the meanings of interconnected reality, penetrating insight into how life works moment by moment, relationship by relationship. The meditative techniques of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah are not so different from Buddhist Insight Meditation (vipassana). The meaning of the term `Buddha’ is to “wake up” to `the way it is.’ It is just such new, penetrating insight from meditation practices of Jewish Mysticism that awakens a continuously greater awareness of the interconnected wholeness of reality.

I have no regrets that I did not pursue Biblical scholarship. It feels to me like a “black hole” that could suck me in causing me to lose perspective on what I care about. I care most about life issues in the here and now, as do many of you, issues of how to have meaningful mutual relationships with the different people around us, how to heal our inner personal lives without sacrificing our integrity, and how to be open to that which is beyond our ability to comprehend, the awesome, confusing, wonderful, chaotic, glorious world. There are people smarter than me who do the scholarship. My shortcut is to reflect on their insights.

One of our newer members, Danyael Phire recently shared his husband’s study of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah with me. This morning I would like to share with you what I understand from Rabbi David A. Cooper’s explanation of Kabbalah as something more than an inaccessible, exclusive, esoteric mystery tradition (God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Jewish Mysticism, 1997).

I was in fifth grade when I first realized that there are different levels of awareness possible in the very same world. Our teacher assigned us to collect and identify fifty different varieties of tree leaves. I collected hickory, walnut, cherry, oak, ash, ironwood, horse chestnut, buckeye, mulberry, sugar maple, silver maple, red maple, Chinese maple, and so on. From that time on, whenever I was outside, I did not just see grass, flowers, shrubs and trees---I was aware of and felt love for the varieties of trees that I recognized. I had a higher level of awareness, not a separate realm, directionally higher than before, but a greater connection to the trees that had always been there.

Then I recognized that bird-watchers enjoyed a higher level of awareness, and I began to learn the names of different breeds of horses, an endless source of enjoyment. As we walked through the woods on college field trips my botany prof pointed out countless wild plants that I thought were only weeds, calling each by name and telling their stories.

As a parent, I learned to see beyond a child’s angry cry “I hate you” to recognize the development of her desire to make her own decisions in a life of constant adult direction. I could see in her disappointment that she could not go out, her adolescent development of social drives and her loyalty to her friends. I could see her confidence in me that no matter how unkind and ear-splitting her outburst, she still knew that I would still love her. I could see in her scream “I hate you” that she was fully experiencing and expressing without restraint her grief that life doesn’t always give you what you want, the reality of the way it is. I could also see her brilliant display of rebelliousness as my opportunity to resist punitive reactivity, my opportunity to reflect on whether there was anything constructive I could do or say in that emotional moment.

The Kabbalist does not say that one level of awareness is better than another. A mosquito’s awareness is merely different than that of a rabbit. The nature of human consciousness is that we are generally unaware of all the connections we have with every other being, generally seeing ourselves as separate and self-concerned rather part of one another in a dance of mutual relationship. Human beings can choose to see ourselves as single cells ignoring our organic connections with others, or we can focus on how we are so very much like every other cell in the body and focus on our interdependence with elements beyond us.

The religious practices, study and meditation of Jewish mysticism enable Kabbalists to expand consciousness to enhance our natural awareness. Try something with me for a moment. If you are willing, allow your vision to expand peripherally. You do not have to look around in order to take in more visual information about what is happening around you at this moment.

You can do the something similar by paying more attention to sounds that are occurring around you at this moment. You can become aware of sounds other than my voice that you had let go from your awareness. The sounds have been there all along, but we have been oblivious to them.

Now notice your body. You can feel pressure of something beneath you, and the pressure of the ground beneath your feet. Now I suppose, everyone is going to notice a slight irritation on their skin and scratch all at once!

And what if we paid as much attention to the lives of those with whom we share the world, our relationships? We could observe how others behave, listen to what they say, ask why. We could study the circumstances of others’ lives and what experiences result in specific actions. Let me use a political example of how in real life we have separated ourselves from awareness of our interconnections with others.

After 9-11, few Americans were aware of the connections between U.S. foreign policies and those whom we came to know as “terrorists.” The media asked “Why do they hate us?” assuming that the United States has done nothing to merit violence and outright declaring that terrorists had no better reason than jealousy of our successes. U.S. media kept Americans under a cloud of unawareness regarding the brutal client regimes we have set up and armed in the Middle East, from the former Shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein to the Saudi family. Americans were unaware of the U.S. responsibility for the deaths of over 200,000 Iraqi children primarily from diarrhea after U.S. bombing of Iraqi water and sewage treatment plants followed by ten years of embargo against water-purifying chlorine. Finally, Americans have ignored billions of dollars in U.S. funding of Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories, subsidizing 300,000 Jewish settlers in the mere 22% of Palestine identified as theirs, killing three times the number of Palestinians as Israelis. Conscious nationalism in the U.S. ignored 9-11 terrorist connections with Saudi Arabia; rather, terrorist connections with the Taliban were acted upon; terrorist connections to Iraq were fabricated.

As a United States citizen, I am constantly challenged to participate in our becoming more aware of our global relationships. Awareness of the history of U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East would certainly lead to greater accountability and healing than is possible through blind nationalist arrogance and jingoistic militarism.

The Kabbalist would say that our notions of God are too small. God is not a person, male or female, or a thing. It is beyond all our dualisms of yin and yang, light and dark, good and bad. The unnamable and unknowable is the holistic principle which draws us to the awareness of greater interconnectedness, transcending the dualities of our isolated lives.

The Garden of Eden is perhaps the most misinterpreted tales of Hebrew Scriptures according to Jewish mysticism. Rather than blaming Eve for the fall of humankind, the story of Adam and Eve can be seen to display the principle of partnership, the polar opposites of yin and yang, both required for balance and harmony. The serpent is the third element representing the force of fragmentation that clouds our mutual awareness with separate thinking.

Let me go into a bit more into the tangled details of oral connotations. The ancient midrash by Rabbi Eliezer described the serpent who seduced Eve as appearing like a camel, and furthermore, the camel carried or was itself Satan. This all seems so strange except that the Hebrew word for “camel” is gamal which sounds a lot like the Hebrew word for “three”---gimel. Satan is thus identified with the mere three-dimensionality of the material world.

The Kabbalistic teaching therefore affirms Satan/serpent/camel/three-dimensional material world as presenting our fragmented awareness--the third crucial element of reality. We are not God. We are not all-connected, all-knowing. We are not whole. Said another way, without the principal of fragmentation, all awareness would be universally connected and whole. All consciousness would be one with the mind of god, all-knowing, wholly-integrated and unified.

Perhaps the greatest failure of contemporary religion has been to fall into dualistic thinking that I and mine are good and others bad. We value light and miss the value of darkness. We value life and push away from us composting soil and the renewal of death. We grasp after fullness in satisfaction of all our material and emotional desires and fail to embrace the value of generosity and relinquishment and, yes, a certain amount of healthy hunger. We believe we know the mind of God, of goodness, and can name and grasp such holiness without a perspective of wholeness. We have in a box, conceptualized by words and images.

The final thought I want to share with you is even more difficult for me to communicate. Kabbalistic teaching sees God as a mutually interactive verb. Similarly each one of us are not static things, but interactive beings in relationship as well. I am Rod-ing, as you are living your lives in relationships as well. Kabbalism encourages us to religious practice, to study and above all, to meditative attentiveness, that we will open ourselves to mutual intimate relationships. God-ing is our human potential to greater awareness of our interconnections with every being that appears in our lives, that we are not separate but one.

Each moment is the moment of the Divine Kiss of greater awareness. Each moment we are in the Divine presence if we choose to be aware of it, of greater wholeness in relation to the real life beings of our everyday lives.

One Jewish mystic of the thirteenth century, Abraham Abulafia said of this mutual relationship which is Rod-ing and God-ing all at once: “Now we are no longer separated from our source, and behold we are the source and the source is us. We are so intimately united with It, we cannot by any means be separated from It, for we are it.”

Although many religions have images of God as so different, so “out there” from our merely human, real-life imperfections, Rabbi David Cooper writes: “In each of these moments we `know’ the presence of the Divine, and there is no separation.” (God Is a Verb)