Religion 101 Read Online Free PDF Page A

world. Such an attitude is anathema to Judaism, which emphasizes the significance of the individual.
    In the Talmud, the Jews are taught that every person is like a balanced scale — a person’s deeds will tip the scale either toward good or toward evil.
    A Jew is defined by his actions more than his intentions. It is his actions that bind him to his community and, through it, to the larger human community.
    — Elie Wiesel, writer and human rights activist
    God holds people responsible for their actions and teaches us to follow His high standards of ethical behavior. His expectations apply to all human beings, even those who have lost contact with God. In Micah 6:8, it is written that God requires that we “do justice … love goodness and … walk modestly with … God.”

THE KABBALAH
    Source of Jewish Mysticism
    The Kabbalah is a mystical tradition within Judaism. Mysticism refers to the belief that personal communication with or experience of God, or the Divine, is possible through intuition or sudden insight rather than through rational thought.
    While it is difficult to know the historical origins of Kabbalah with absolute certainty, discovered texts indicate that it surfaced in the late 1100s in southern France in the area of Provence, and soon spread to northern Spain. The first unequivocal kabbalistic text, Sefer HaBahir , is written as though it has a readership that is familiar with its kabbalistic terminology, even though such terms had never appeared in writing before. The earliest Kabbalists speak of the oral transmission of secret knowledge from master to disciple throughout the generations, so there was evidently a kabbalistic community already in existence when Sefer HaBahir was written.
    What’s It Mean?
    The term Kabbalah comes from the Hebrew root word l’kabel, which means “to receive,” so Kabbalah means “received teachings.” Kabbalah also denotes “tradition,” meaning a body of knowledge and customs passed down from one generation to another. Kabbalah also has the connotation of the oral transmission of tradition and knowledge containing the inner and secret mystical teachings of the Torah.
    Despite the fact that Hebrew had ceased to be the spoken language of the Jews even before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, the vast majority of kabbalistic texts are written in Hebrew. A particularly striking exception for the history of Jewish mysticism is that the most influential kabbalistic text of all, the Zohar , is mostly written in Aramaic. Since the Zohar is so heavily quoted in later sources, it is very common to find Hebrew kabbalistic texts from the end of the 1200s sprinkled with Aramaic phrases. Over the centuries some kabbalistic texts were translated into other languages such as Latin beginning in the late fifteenth century. In our own day some kabbalistic texts are finding their way into English translations of varying quality.
    In the thirteenth century, Spanish Kabbalists spoke of the Torah existing on four different levels. Moshe de Leon coined the term Pardes to refer to these four levels.
    Pardes , which literally means “orchard” but also has the connotation of Paradise, refers to mystical knowledge.
    Moshe de Leon treated this term as an acronym for the four levels of reading Torah. Each of the consonants in the word Pardes stands for one of the levels of meaning in the Torah. The p stands for pshat or the simple, literal meaning of the words. The r stands for remez , which means “hint,” but in medieval Hebrew came to stand for the allegorical reading of the text that was the mainstay of Jewish philosophy. The d stands for d’rash , which essentially means “to investigate, to seek out, to expound” and here refers to Aggadic and Talmudic interpretations. The s stands for sod , the secret meaning of the text. Kabbalah itself is understood as constituting this secret meaning of the Torah.
    All the levels of the Torah