Kabbalah

The study of Kabbalah hinges on a truth that most Westerners: Christian, non-Christians, conservative liberal, creationists, evolutionists would simply not understand about myth and story. Not that the Bible is a different sort of myth and story, or that myths are a SORT OF TRUTH but that stories are true and everything is real, therefore the Scriptures are read on many levels and all of these levels are held to be true. American religious thought is sadly shallow and often centers around two badly educated people arguing about if evolution happened or not, or did Jesus REALLY feed five thousand people. Kabbalistic thought is mystic and slightly more sophisticated.
Did God make the world is six days? Of course not. You know better. Of course he did that’s what the story says? What the story says means something different? What is God? What is a day? Are all appropriate answers with question upon question. Kabbalah is the serious initiation into God’s Torah. I use a Hebrew Bible for it.
Much of it does not center around a Bible, but around a book which had never been fully translated: the Zohar. The Zohar reads like Allen Ginsberg’s' Howl meets Green Eggs and Ham attached to the Gospel of Thomas and The Story of O. Men waste their semen in sleep and are raped by demons. Wives cook the resulting children and eat the them for dinner. Mysteries are unsolved but produce still more questions.
Kabbalah is best studied in your sleep, in the passions of the body. It comes to life in your visions and in your dreams.
Kabbalah is not Bible Study. Bible study centers on the idea of reading a text in the hopes of “getting it”. Bible study is a chance for you to expound upon “how you feel” about this passage or prove that it proves what you believe. Both are fruitless tasks, completely different from Kabbalah which presumes that very few conclusions are definite, and translates to English as the phrase” that which is received.” You cannot study Kabbalah. You must receive it, and sometimes you receive very little. Kabbalah is not studied. It is dreamed. It is hearing the Bible for the first time and realizing that it is a series of tales fit only for children. Hence why Christ said you must be a child to receive the Kingdom of God.