To have your Avodah Zarah cake and eat your Kabbalah too

 

Practical Kabbalah: A Guide to Jewish Wisdom for Everyday Life by Laibl Wolf is geared toward the psychological element of Kabbalah made popular by Hasidim.  In this case, Wolf presents us with Chabad’s religious psychology, which revolves around the soul/psychological states of Chokmah, Bina and Daat.  These are the concepts that form Chabad’s name, and the “intellectual” orientation of their corner of Chassidus.  

Wolf is sly.  He realizes that many of the concepts he expounds on can be found in Asian religions.  He explains these parallels through the genealogies in the Torah.  Adam was the first Kabbalist, and he passed his knowledge through the generations.  

With the coming of Abraham, Kabbalah took a sharper, more focused turn.  Abraham had children with a woman named  Keturah after Sarah died (in many traditions, she is supposed to be Hagar by another name, as it makes old Abe seem too randy to take yet another child-bearing age woman to bed).  He eventually sends these children, who are a bad influence on Isaac, away with “gifts” that Wolf interprets as Kabbalistic knowledge.  These Abrahamic offspring head east, to India.  There, they took local wives.  Their already corrupted esoteric knowledge mixes with local religions to form Hinduism and Buddhism.  Hence, the similarities between esoteric Judaism and religions of Asia.

Well, this is certainly insulting to those religions.  Other Jewish thinkers have made this kind of move toward religious triumphalism in the past.  Philo and Maimonides believed that Moses thought the early Greek philosophers their craft.  Abraham Maimonides thought the Sufi orders were descended from the original Hebrew band of prophets, now corrupted by Islam.  All wrong, but these moves are fascinating.  We get to borrow but not acknowledge sources from avodah zarah.  Wolf is the first person I have read propounding this theory for Kabbalah.  It is gutsy and odd.