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Jewish mysticism dates far back into antiquity, but the Kabbalah ("received" teachings) crystallized with the Zohar, the 13th century masterpiece set down in ancient Aramaic by the Spanish Jew Moses de Leon. Superficially, the book was a mystical novel, a kind of Celestine Prophecy precursor. But initiates knew better. Shrouded in its story lines were the keys to unlock the Hebrew Bible--and hence all existence. Whereas standard rabbinic Judaism sometimes seems to look backward to God's most intimate interactions with his chosen people and forward to a Messiah, Kabbalah stresses the Deity's presence as immediate at all times: an ongoing surge of light or energy communicated from the Unknowable to the material world via a series of 10 divine emanations, or sephirot. By studying and imitating these, the mystic could progress ever closer to their source. Sixteenth century master Isaac Luria added a gloss on Creation: God, having graciously receded to make room, channeled a ray of light into the resulting void through mystic vessels. Some of them shattered--the world became broken--and fallen sparks of the eternal were trapped in every aspect of our mundane existence. It is every human's duty, through good works, prayer and mystical contemplation, to raise the sparks back up to the Godhead and repair the world. In the 18th century, the reformer Ba'al Shem Tov's populist twist on this once secret tradition--that every humble act can be a celebration of God's immanent presence--became the heart of his own ecstatic orthodoxy, Hasidism.
Kabbalah ranged where conventional Judaism would not. The sephirah inspiriting the material world--the Shekinah--was feminine; her hoped-for reuniting with the masculine Holy One introduced both a feminine divinity and frankly sexual imagery to Judaism. Angels and demons struggled in Kabbalistic pages, reincarnation was championed, number codes abounded. Sublime spirituality coexisted with "practical Kabbalah," the use of magic charms or amulets. Such aspects were profoundly embarrassing to the 19th century founders of Reform Judaism. Reform together with the similarly rationalist Conservative movement and modern Orthodoxy came to dominate American Judaism. After the Holocaust wiped out many of its key teachers, Jewish mysticism seemed destined to languish as a superstitious whisper.
Then two things changed. A postwar Israeli burst of Kabbalah scholarship yielded modern Hebrew translations and annotations of vital texts. And seekers appeared. Many younger congregants yearning for individual spirituality became impatient with American Reform and Conservative Judaism's longtime emphasis on communal concerns such as Israel and synagogue building. Some left; some explored Eastern meditation. And some, notes author Rodger Kamenetz, decided that "Kabbalah is the poetic language of the Jewish soul."