Kabbalah Quotes

“According to Abulafia, the rabbis had purposely ignored the knowledge beyond the five senses, limiting themselves to the safety of “tradition” and “hearsay” rather than embarking on the path to experiential “understanding.” Tradition, he said, was nothing without the vehicle of the human body. Kabbalah, as old and as valid a Jewish tradition as any other, boldly made use of the human apparatus. Only change, new life, and new interpretations of the time-worn systems would revive them. Human beings, vehicles for change resulting from their spiritual experience, could vitalize the old traditions and make them worthy of being passed down to new generations.”
― Perle Besserman, Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic

“The less intelligible the divine Name, the higher its order. The less reason and intellectual control at play, the greater the spiritual force. Literal study of the Torah, for Abulafia, served only to sharpen the intellect; the real “work” took place only in mystic trance.”
― Perle Besserman, Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic

“A letter, perceived thus, is what it represents: it is physical by virtue of its being uttered by physical organs; it is spiritual in that it is linked to the world of angels; it multiplies to form the world of names and objects, but when reduced to its original sound, it becomes nothing more than the hum of the universe, vibrating in a place where light and sound merge in radiant silence.”
― Perle Besserman, Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic