Free Kabbalah by Joseph Dan Page B

positioned matter and spirit, body and soul in opposition, became paramount in the three scriptural religions. In such a context values such as the love of God, faith, and trust became paramount, while anything that involved physical activity was regarded as spiritually inferior, emphasizing the distance between man and God rather than bringing them together.
    The traditional Jewish concept of mitzvah (precept, commandment) demanded physical action. The list of 613 such commandments, which every Jew was required to perform (or, in case of prohibitions, abstain from performing) hardly included any purely spiritual demand. Even prayer was not regarded as properly performed unless one’s lips moved during recitation. Judaism thus had an image, and a self-image, of being an earthly, physical practice, remote from pure divine spirituality. Jewish theologians, deeply aware of this contradiction between their tradition and the spiritual norms in which they believed, sought ways of emphasizing the spiritual aspect of Judaism. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, Jewish rationalistic philosophers developed systems of taamey mitzvot , “reasons of the commandments.” They pointed out the nonphysical 53
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    reasons for complying with the ancient demands, discovering new layers of meaning in rituals and social requirements. In medieval Germany, the Jewish pietists developed a system that emphasized the aspect of spiritual trial in every commandment.
    They maintained that the physical instructions were difficulties that God presented on the path of individuals trying to achieve spiritual perfection. By subjugating their physicality to divine commandments the righteous achieve the spiritual goal of obedience to God and overcoming earthly desires. Both the rationalists and the pietists thus denigrated the importance of the physical commandment and attributed its religious meaning to the underlying spiritual significance of its performance.
    The kabbalists developed a system that had similar results, but one that carried with it unusual spiritual power and became dominant in Judaism. Prayers and other rituals, physical and social demands, ethical deeds, and every other aspect of religious practice was associated by the kabbalists with the dynamic concepts that they developed concerning processes in the divine realms. From the late thirteenth century, the subject of taamey mitzvot became a central, and often dominant, one in kabbalistic literature. It is a central message of the Zohar, and almost every section of this vast work includes one or another interpretation of a commandment in light of the needs and demands of the divine powers. This put in the center of the kabbalistic worldview a powerful concept of interdependence between man and God, in which the commandments were the instruments used by man in order to influence the processes of the divine world, and ultimately shape his own fate.
    The mythical processes that dominate this interaction are described in the Zohar and later works as being based on one dynamic aspect of the divine world. It is usually called the shefa , the flow of divine spirituality from the extreme, highest stages in the divine world down to the lower divine powers, and then to even lower realms, those of the archangels and angels, and finally the material world and to human beings. This divine flow is the necessary sustenance of all existence, even of the 54
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    divine emanations themselves. Nothing can exist without deriving spiritual power from this divine flow. When this flow is diminished, the existence of every being is weakened. The upper realm may still derive its due from this flow, but lower strata of creation are deprived and threatened. According to the Zoharic myth of the dynamic world of the sefirot , the situation is always in flux: the right side may become stronger or weaker, and at the same time the realms on the left,