{"id":619,"date":"2024-01-11T11:10:03","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T11:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital-brilliance.org\/wordpress_V\/?page_id=619"},"modified":"2024-10-27T19:18:17","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T19:18:17","slug":"the-tree-of-life","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/digital-brilliance.org\/wordpress_V\/?page_id=619","title":{"rendered":"The Tree of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most brief explanations of Kabbalah begin and end with the Tree of Life. The sephiroth are enumerated, their names given, a convenient illustration is provided, and some explanation is attempted. Almost nothing of value is communicated, and most people will come away mystified. The Tree of Life is most emphatically not a ladder of lights shining like a stained glass window in the sun – anyone trying to find this pretty picture in any of the early classics of Kabbalah will come away mystified. Tishby, attempting to elucidate this confusion in his commentary to the Zohar<\/em> puts it very well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is clear from the passage just quoted that the sephirot, which are finite and measurable, are not, however, static objects, like fixed, solid rungs on the ladder of the progressive revelation of the divine attributes. They are on the contrary, dynamic forces, ascending and descending, and extending themselves within the area of the Godhead. This dynamism is found both in their hidden existence, which is oriented upwards towards En-Sof<\/em>, and also in their association with the lower world, as forces of creation and direction of the universe. They are in continuous motion, involved in innumerable processes of interweaving, interlinking, and union. Even their order changes as a result of their internal movement, and “their end is fastened into their beginning”. The lower sephirot elevate themselves in their yearning to return and cleave to their source, and the upper sephirot move downwards in order to give sustenance to the lower, and to transmit divine influences to the worlds below.” Tishby also observes that the Zohar<\/em> hardly ever uses the term sefirot<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Instead we have a whole string of names: “levels”, “powers”, “sides” or “areas”, “worlds”, “firmaments”, “pillars”, “lights”, “colours”, “days”, “streams”, “garments”, “crowns” and others. Each term designates a particular facet of the nature or work of the sephirot<\/em>.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, visual depictions of the Tree are hard to find.  One of the earliest images comes from the Portae Lucis<\/em> of Paolo Riccio<\/a>, a Latin translation of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light<\/em>. It is rather vague. The classic image known to so many appears in the Oedipus Aegyptiacus<\/a> of Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest, published in the middle of the 17th. century, four hundred years after the first kabbalists began writing. The diagram of the Tree used by modern Jewish Kabbalists is usually based on the diagram published in the print edition of Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim<\/em>, published in Cracow in 1591, and sometimes called the “Safed Tree”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frontpiece from the 1516 Latin translation of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Tree of Life published in the 17th c. by the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Tree of Life from a Zohar manuscript.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The historic lack of imagery is all the more startling given the modern tendency to begin and end with the diagram of the Tree of Life. This may have something to do with the Biblical prohibition on images, but almost certainly something to do with the perplexing fluidity of kabbalistic writing. Many readers will be looking for clarity and consistency, and will adopt a disjunctive<\/em> view of conflicting metaphors and explanations: this OR this OR this. Kabbalists tend to have a conjunctive<\/em> view: this AND this AND this, even when views appear to conflict. It is useful to think of the Tree as a higher-dimensional construct that cannot be described from a single viewpoint.

With these observations it is possible to begin to try to describe something about what the kabbalistic Tree of Life actually signifies. The Tree of Life is a collection of views<\/em><\/strong> of the dynamics of the relationship<\/em><\/strong> between God and the Creation. It is a view<\/em> because it is created by human beings. It is a collection<\/em> because no single view captures the complexity of the relationship. It is dynamic<\/em> because the relationship between God and the Creation is constantly changing. And the Tree provides a view of relationship<\/em>, not a view of God, which kabbalists regard as unknowable, beyond any kind of imaginative or conceptual description. Most importantly, each view is of a whole<\/em>, not a collection of parts. Recall always the Shema<\/a>: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”. The activity of God with respect to the Creation is always that of a whole – the parts, however described, have no autonomy.

The activity of God is the prototype for all activity, for anything we can describe as “living”, and so the Tree of Life is also a description of the relationship of any living thing to the Creation. The activity of human beings, for example is also characterised by the Tree of Life, and as the “activity of a human being” is just another way of defining the soul, the Tree of Life describes the soul. The Tree of Life is a fractal structure that appears at every level of reality. Every element of the Tree of Life, considered as a living thing, is another Tree of Life. R. Moses Luzzatto (1707-1746) puts it concisely:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Each of these Sephirot<\/em> [in the Tree] is constructed of ten Lights, each of which in turn is composed of an equal number of lights and so on ad-infinitum<\/em>. When, in one of these vessels only a single light is illuminated it is called a sephira<\/em>. When all ten lights are illuminated it is defined as a Partzuf<\/em> (Person).” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The recursive similarity of all levels of created existence leads to an additional complication: kabbalists have a tendency to flip between differing levels of description, so that one paragraph may use descriptive elements from the Tree to refer to the activity of God, another to the soul and its response.

The basic skeleton for the Tree of Life comes from an ancient document that is often\u00a0beautiful and poetic in its engimatic brevity: the Sepher Yetzirah<\/em><\/a>. The Sepher Yetzirah describes how God created the universe using number, language and speech:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“With thirty-two mystical paths of Wisdom engraved Yah, YHVH of Hosts, God of Israel, the Living God, God Almighty, high and exalted, dwelling in eternity on high, and his name is Holy, and he created His universe with three books, with text, with number, and with communication. They are Ten Sephirot of Nothingness and twenty-two foundation letters.” The Sepher Yetzirah<\/em> was almost certainly a work of Hebrew Neopythagoreanism composed in the Hellenistic Middle East in late antiquity, but it was the seed for highly original readings in the atmosphere of southern Europe during the Middle Ages. The ten sephiroth of the Sepher Yetzirah<\/em> became ten emanations of the divine, and the 22 Hebrew letters, divided by the SY<\/em> into 3 mothers, 7 doubles, and 12 elemental (based on Hellenistic cosmology), provides the framework of the Tree of 3 horizontal paths, 7 vertical paths, and 12 diagonal paths.
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A Tree of Life with 10 sephiroth and 22 paths – 3 horizontal, 7 vertical. 12 diagonals. This is an earlier version that is still favoured by Hermetic Kabbalists, and is described in R. Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim<\/em>. It is sometimes called “The Tree of Emanation”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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A Tree of Life with 10 sephiroth and 22 paths – 3 horizontal, 7 vertical. 12 diagonals. This version appears as a diagram in R. Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim<\/em>, and is the preferred form in modern Jewish Kabbalah. It is sometimes called the “Safed”  Tree after R. Isaac Luria who described it,  or “The Tree of Return”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The ten sefirot are<\/p>\n\n\n\n