Question: What came first, the Torah or the wisdom of Kabbalah? Why do we study the wisdom of Kabbalah without studying the Torah, Moses’ Torah?
Answer: History tells us that gases were created after the Big Bang and the particles of matter that began to spread came together, and this is how our planet was created. Then the oceans were formed, then came the vegetative and the animate world, and finally man.
Man began to develop significantly about 3,500 years ago. The bulk of the developed people were in ancient Babylon [1], which became the basis of modern civilization.
From 20 generations to ancient Babylon, 5,777 years ago, a man called Adam [2] appeared. He discovered the leadership system of our world, which he described in the book The Angel Raziel (The Secret Force). According to Rambam, the great Kabbalist of the 12th century, Adam and his students wrote books, but none of them have reached us except for the book The Angel Raziel. Twenty generations after the first generation of Kabbalists, Abraham [3] appeared.
Abraham was a priest in ancient Babylon, and according to Midrash Rabba, he used to go out at nights, look at the stars, and wonder where the force that moves the whole universe comes from. Why do people live, for what purpose, how, who manages them, who is spinning this whole mechanism of the galaxy?
Gradually he began to explore the system of creation in great depth. Of course, there were many other people who looked at the stars, but only he was lucky enough to discover it since this is a special attribute of the soul.
Abraham discovered the system of creation and described it in his book The Book of Yetzira (creation). It is a small book of several dozen pages, which summarize the main points of the system of creation and how the world is managed. This book, just like Adam’s book, can be bought in bookstores today. The other writings of Abraham have not reached our days.
Everything Adam and Abraham wrote is the pure wisdom of Kabbalah. After Abraham, his students Isaac and Jacob, called the children of Abraham, continued his study, which actually represented a development of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Only after the exodus from Egypt when the need for a more sophisticated method of uniting the nation and attaining the Creator arose was it revealed to Moses in the same way that we study it today. This method is called the Torah.
Adam wrote his book almost 6,000 years ago; Abraham wrote about 3,500 years ago, and the Torah was written about 3,300 years ago.
Question: Does this mean that the Torah is secondary to the wisdom of Kabbalah?
Answer: The Torah is also the wisdom of Kabbalah.
We study the basics of the wisdom of Kabbalah in order to study the Torah, The Five Books of Moses, since it continues the wisdom of Kabbalah on the next level.
To a person who doesn’t study the wisdom of Kabbalah, the Torah seems like a collection of stories about the ancient Jews who wandered in the desert and about what happened to them. In order to understand what this book really says and what is encoded in it, we must know the wisdom of Kabbalah.
[194080]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 5/8/16
Related Material:
When We Open The Torah [4]
The Torah Is A Program And A Guide [5]
The Oral Torah Is A Key To Penetrating Inside [6]