Reading Kabbalah Naked...


It’s almost two in the morning. I told myself I’d be in bed by now. But I’m still up and writing and there is so much more to write. The air is warm and thick tonight. The world is full of a thick darkness. I can’t come to the end of what I want to write before I climb back into bed. I’ve set to writing a long and rambling poem, totally blasphemous and slightly pornographic.
Kabbalah takes you into the place of terrors and the land of nightmares, and when I have been with Kabbalah I can see into that place and write out of it. There are warnings of too much study of Kabbalah, too much looking into the light or the darkness or what have you. But the truth is the smallest glimpse has you looking and looking, making connections, synapses snap together. It is sitting down to read the Old Testament in a very different way, freed from what keeps most Christians in the modern world from reading scripture: that they are SUPPOSED TO. Not that Ezekiel contains the finest stream of consciousness poetry along with Isaiah and Wisdom, not that the tales are some of the most engaging anyone will ever read.
And of course this attitude that does not allow for the Hebrew Scriptures to be taken as story and poem and sung record, but as rule book, comes from a CHRISTIAN and RATIONALISTIC understanding that story is unimportant, that stories are fancy and fancy is lie.No, story is absolute and infinite truth, layer upon layer of truth, the only way we can say what is without limiting it. Because, in a myth we are already knowing that what we say is limited. In a tale we are already saying things are contrived and so there is no deception in it.
And still you will say: how can a story be infinitely and absolutely true if it’s “just a story” and there are other facts that contradict it? If you ask that you have not been paying attention. Myth is infinite and absolute because and not despite its truth never being ultimate or exclusive.