Comment: You claim that Kabbalah is approximately 4,500 years old. But historians and philosophers claim that it is much less.

My Response: The fact is that philosophy has nothing that could be put to the test of experience. Therefore, each generation writes a new philosophy and the previous one is stored. In the end, nobody uses it.

I met with many experts, in particular, with Professor Daniel Matt, who translated The Zohar into English in a special, academic language. He taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. We gave lectures together. Before that we had a lot of conversations, and I asked him: “Why do you assert that The Zohar was written in the eleventh century by Moshe de Leon?” He replied,: “From the descriptions in The Zohar, it seems to us that it is about the nature of northern Spain, those meadows, those hills… .”

I asked, “Are there really no such meadows and hills in Israel, in Galilee?”

He answered, “Well, so it seems to us.”

This is despite the fact that The Book of Zohar itself repeatedly describes how Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was sitting with his disciples and writing this book, how one disciple asked a question, then the second one, the third, and so on. There is not a single page in it that does not mention how Rabbi Shimon’s disciples discussed all these questions among themselves and immediately wrote down the answers to them.

This is what the book consists of. From this the book was formed.

But Professor Matt believed that Rabbi Moshe de Lyon purposely wrote it in such a way to hide his authorship. It is not clear why.

I think that philosophy’s pride is somewhat hurt because in comparison with Kabbalah, it really is worth nothing, because it operates with purely illusionary, unprovable categories that have no basis whatsoever.

But nothing can be done, and this also has a place in humanity.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Seekers” 9/16/09

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