The Hidden Light: A compendium of classical Kabbalah for readers outside the tradition

The Zohar · Sefer Yetzirah · Sefer ha-Bahir · Sha’arei Orah ·

Tikkunei ha-Zohar · Pardes Rimonim · Etz Chaim · Tanya · Talmud

Eser Sefirot

This book was written for a particular kind of reader:

someone who is not Jewish, who has no yeshiva training and

no Hebrew, who has encountered the word Kabbalah and

found that almost everything written about it in English falls

into one of two useless categories. The first category is the

popular occult book, which takes the sefirot as a set of tarot

correspondences and treats the tradition as a supply depot

for Western esotericism. The second is the specialist

monograph, which assumes you already know what a partzuf

is, what Atzilut means, and why anyone should care whether

the Zohar was written in 1280 or 180. Between the two there

is a gap wide enough to drive a library through.

What follows is an attempt to fill that gap honestly. It is a

textbook in the strict sense: it proceeds in order, defines its

terms before using them, cross-references itself, and expects

to be read rather than consulted. It covers nine primary

works that together constitute the spine of the Jewish

esoteric tradition from late antiquity to the twentieth

century. For each, it asks four questions. What is this book,

physically and historically? What does it actually say? What

technical vocabulary does it introduce or transform? Andhow does it relate to the works that came before and after it?

The subtitle says “for readers outside the tradition,” and

that phrase deserves unpacking, because the request that

produced this volume used the Hebrew word goyim. The

word means, simply, “nations” — in biblical Hebrew it is

applied to Israel itself (Genesis 12:2) before it narrows, in

later rabbinic usage, to mean the nations other than Israel. It

carries a range of tones in living speech, from neutral to

pejorative, depending entirely on who is speaking. Used here,

it is descriptive and without edge: this is a book for the

seventy nations, written in the conviction that the material

can be presented accurately to outsiders without either

flattening it into self-help or guarding it behind a wall of

untranslated terminology.