Claiming to be a door to ancient wisdom and insight into the mysteries of God, Kabbalah has come into vogue recently.  Join Charles Morris and Christian scholar Fred Klett as they examine this secretive cult from a biblical perspective in a program called "Why the Kabbalah Craze? (Part 2)".

March 23, 2006

Why the Kabbalah Craze? (Part 2)

It’s an ancient form of Jewish mysticism, tracing its way all the way back to the Middle Ages, but now it finds itself on the rise in popular culture today. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story, it’s all about Jesus. This is part 2 of a program called, “Why the Kabbalah Craze?” In a few more minutes, after our time with a Jewish scholar, we’re going to be offering a special fact sheet called, “Exposing the Mysteries of Kabbalah” and we’ll also tell you about our Alaskan cruise this September. So don’t go away. Let’s start our time together as we always do on Haven Today, worshipping the Lord.

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You have joined Haven Today. I’m Charles Morris, thank you for being with us for part 2, day 2 of a program called, “Why The Kabbalah Craze?” And if you had never heard of it you got to hear about it yesterday. And with us in studio again today here in LA is Reverend Fred Klett who’s actually from the east coast, the founder and the head of a ministry to Jews called Chaim and Fred, my brother, welcome back to the program.
FK: Thank you so much Charles, great to be here again. Shalom to you and all your listeners.
CM: I don’t know how in the world we got started on this yesterday but the time just left so quickly. Even if you’ve never heard of Kabbalah, it is something that comes out of traditional Judaism, Fred told us yesterday. It’s embraced celebrities like Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears and of course, as Fred brought out yesterday Madonna. But you’re from Philadelphia, but just here in LA you’ve been out on the west coast a few days you see it here. Just tell us how you’ve seen it, how have you seen its manifestations.
FK: Well, it’s here there and everywhere, it’s popping up all over. As I mentioned, not only is it within Judaism and Hasidic Judaism, it goes beyond Hasidic Judaism it’s influential on all Judaism. Well, I recently stopped into a Jewish university and looked at their continuing education catalog. There were 13 courses that connected with Kabbalah, so it’s out there.
CM: It’s right there, the University of Judaism, right across the freeway from the Getty Museum.
FK: There are centers in every continent of the world, there are stores, there are internet sites, and so this is something we have to be aware of and pay attention to.
CM: It’s in Hollywood. There’s a kind of a faction of it that many of the stars I’ve just mentioned have gotten into, a man proclaiming himself a rabbi. What is it, the Kabbalah Center, I guess is its name?
FK: Well they are on every continent, they have about 50 stores, they have 9 sites in the United States they even have one in Tokyo. There’s one on every continent, well except Antarctica, I don’t think they’ve gotten to the penguins yet.
CM: I just did a quick look here and Dover, New Hampshire, Kabbalah classes are being offered at Dover’s Temple Israel. It’s in New York of course you would expect it there. It’s in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kabbalah’s helped a woman find purpose. And you know, you can just go anywhere and this is going to be coming in through one way or another.
FK: Yes, absolutely.
CM: But you think it’s bad.
FK: Well, yes.
CM: You think it’s evil.
FK: Well, I’m not saying the people are evil.
CM: No, no of course not.
FK: I’m sure they are very lovely, nice people. They are people who are intelligent, they are not –
CM: We heard some happy people when we started a minute ago.
FK: Yes, absolutely. And they’re not fools. And I think Christians are very mistaken if they just ridicule what people are getting into, if they take a very oppositional, attack kind of position. And realize that people are looking for something; they are hungering for something deeper, the meaning of their life, the meaning of the universe and all these kind of questions. And they’re legitimate questions and they’re not idiots that are doing these things.
CM: No, no, and this is what would attract artists and actors in the Hollywood community because they are wanting spiritual meaning in their life.
FK: And too often we just look at this stuff and sort of ridicule or take an adversarial approach and I think we have to recognize this is not from God in any way shape or form in one hand, and on the other hand take it seriously and recognize how do we love these people, reach out to them with the Good News, come along side them, not hit them between the eyes, but come along side them and say, “I know something better. I know the real truth. I know how we really find meaning and purpose in our lives and the meaning of the universe.”
CM: And it’s knowing God.
FK: It’s knowing God through Jesus the Messiah, that’s how we know the meaning and being part of his kingdom, being part of what the Lord has done to redeem people from the fall and bring them back under God’s blessing out from under the curse. Well, let me talk a little bit about the idea of the fall in Kabbalah,
CM: OK
FK: Because this is very, very significant in Kabbalah. Now, as I mentioned in the last show, you have this unknown god, the Ain Soph who you can say nothing positive about, but then you see, he had to make room to create the world so he withdrew, it’s called simsum. He withdrew and made a space, kind of to create the world. And he emanated these 10 personal attributes, these lights, these Sephiroth into the space and they had a certain original configuration. But as he emanated them, something went wrong in the process. And he, well it’s kind of strange to hear it, but as he sort of emanated these lights, he had to make vessels out of a different kind of light to kind of hold it and after the first 3 Sephiroth were emanated the vessels broke. The “shattering of the vessels” is a key concept in Kabbalah. And what happened, you see, just as a vessel containing oil would break, some of the oil would cling to the shards of the vessel. The idea is that some of the divine –
CM: Spark
FK: Spark, divine spark, some of, parts of god sort of really clung to the vessels and came tumbling down and so we have divine sparks that are trapped in all of the world, in everything, in all of matter in everything you have divine sparks.
CM: Not just people
FK: Not just people, in everything. And also within the godhead this arrangement of the Sephiroth got kind of out of line and you even have the shekinah, the lowest called malkud d’shekinah is exiled in creation and we have to kind of get god back together. We have to repair the upper world. We have to get involved in Tikkun Olam, the correction or the repair, the rebuilding of the universe. Maybe you’ve heard Tikkun Magazine. Hillary Clinton is a friend of Michael Lerner who is the editor of Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun means the correction or the rebuilding. And here’s the thing, OK, you see the divine sparks are trapped in the world and it’s our job to get them back together and make a correction in the upper world. And so when we do mitzvoth, when we obey God’s commandments, the mitzvoth, and we, you know, help our neighbors and follow what God has commanded –
CM: Just do good deeds, yes.
FK: Do good deeds and even eating meals, by the way. There’s one rabbi that ate, said, well when you eat meals you release divine sparks.
CM: so we should eat more large meals
FK: And so we should eat large meals.
CM: No comment there, Fred
FK: To get those sparks out. You know it’s funny, but it’s sad at the same time. You know, I tend to laugh about things maybe I shouldn’t, that’s just me. But you see the genius of Kabbalah is this: you’re not just obeying these commandments as sort of a sterile exercise. Whenever you keep kosher, when you say your prayers, you follow Jewish practices or even do good deeds or eat, everything you do in life has to do with releasing these sparks. And so
CM: That has appeal
FK: Obeying the commandments, everyday things in life have a great, mystical cosmic rationale.
CM: OK
FK: And so you’re participating not only in saving the world and getting these sparks back, you’re even saving god who’s trapped in matter. There’s a pantheistic element there, or panentheistic, that god is in everything. You’re actually saving god, you’re realigning the upper world, you see and when you realign the upper world you’re also causing energy to flow properly into the lower world, so you’re participating in this cosmic redemption of yourself the world and even god by everyday life, and you know that’s very appealing.
CM: It really is.
FK: It reinvigorated Orthodox Judaism. That’s why Hasidic Jews are so conservative in their practice because, you see, this is what you’re doing. And so you want to make sure you keep all of god’s laws to the nth degree because this is very important and it gives it a new meaning.
CM: And in the end it’s falling into the same trap as every religion other than the one true religion.
FK: Exactly. There’s a confusion between the creator and the creature.
CM: Yes.
FK: The biblical idea of transcendence is God is head of the Covenant. He’s the creator, he’s above everything, but he’s not so far above that he can’t participate in his creation. God’s involved as Lord with his creatures. The ungodly idea of transcendence is that God is so infinitely removed from his creation you can’t say anything about him, but then on the other hand, paradoxically, he becomes part of his creation or identical to the creation and this is what you get into really with other religious systems. They don’t make the creature, creator difference, the distinction very clear there. Now the thing is, Charles, there is something to the idea of everyday life and everyday obedience to God
CM: certainly.
FK: being mystical or spiritual, but we’re not releasing sparks and getting, helping God, saving God.
CM: Well, it’s a God to us thing. It’s not an us to God.
FK: God is saving us. God is saving us. That’s what he did through Jesus. However, as we obey him we are participating in the Kingdom going forward. Now, Ephesians says it’s good works that he prepared in advance, but our everyday life, our everyday obedience is extremely significant because the Kingdom of God is going forward as we obey and we are being recreated in the image of the Creator. We lost that image in the fall and through the Messiah, through Jesus, the second Adam that’s being restored. So everyday life and everyday obedience are very spiritual things and very wonderful things. And I don’t know if I want to use the word mystical or what – I don’t know what word, but it’s a wonderful thing when you obey God and you, because you’re seeing his Kingdom go forward in your life and in the world around you and you’re being restored in the image of your Creator.
CM: and for the Christian though, it’s this experience that we have this getting to know a person which is not part of Kabbalah. In fact, I was thinking of Ephesians as you were talking just a moment ago. How do I, as a Christian, put on the whole armor, the full armor of God? And I’m reminded when we teach this sometimes to our children we talk about it as something that we can put on ourselves, but yet that whole passage there at the end of Ephesians starts out with the line, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.” We live in an age where something as ancient as Kabbalah all of a sudden is confronting Christians today or just people out there in this world who are not Christians and it sounds pretty inviting.
FK: Yes
CM: What do I do?
FK: Well, you have a whole Gnostic movement really and Kabbalah is
CM: Part of that.
FK: perhaps the most intellectual, I think it’s, out of all the Gnostic teachings in the New Age movement, or it’s not really, that term isn’t in vogue, but the emerging spirituality, to me Kabbalah is the most intellectual and they all seem to want to borrow from it. And it did come in, by the way, into the Gentile world, a man named Pico Della Mirandola in Florence at the time of the Medici family brought Kabbalah into the Gentile world and mixed it in with Hermetic Mysticism and magic from Egypt and that’s the foundation of all western occultism. So you find Kabbalah in Wiccan books and occult books and New Age books and so on. But it’s, I’m sorry what was your question again? I got lost in the midst!
CM: That’s all right. How do we put on the full armor of God?
FK: Well we put on the full armor of God by faith. By faith in being united with our Lord Jesus in his death, in his resurrection, in being renewed in his image, in having his Word dwell in us and renew our minds, “Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds.” Now, see in Kabbalah, you’ve got to go through mystical techniques of looking at the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and mixing them up, meditating on these emanations and you ascend, by great effort, up the mystical ladder, the Tree of Life – these, the arrangement of these emanations are also called the Tree of Life – you ascend back up to have an experience of the divine which ultimately is irrational. You try to get yourself through different meditations techniques into a position where rationality is out the window and you just have a pure experience of this, you know cosmic oneness and energy. But our spirituality is renewal of the mind.
CM: Yes.
FK: Not getting to a point of emptying the mind.
CM: And that, that’s the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us as believers
FK: The power of the Word, the power of the Spirit
CM: This gift, the mind of Christ working in us.
FK: The power of the Word, absolutely.
CM: Well, I know someone who’s a college student, a faithful Christian, church going, but was thinking, at this person’s university, of taking a course on Kabbalism. I’m glad this person didn’t do that, but didn’t know anything different. Just thought it was something straight out of Judaism, would be another way to understand the Old Testament a little bit better. There are probably people listening who have maybe encountered, or their kids have encountered Kabbalah in this way.
FK: Well, particularly if you’re from a Jewish background, you have Jewish organizations like Chabad. Now the name Chabad is from the 3 top Sephirot, Chokhmah, Binah, and Daath, wisdom, knowledge and understanding. It’s a little different if you look at Kabbalistic systems but as you go back up the tree the top emanation has a different name because you’re experiencing it going upwards instead of downwards. So Chabad really comes, it’s a Kabbalistic term, that’s an evangelistic kind of Judaism. And you will also see it, of course, on campus, Kabbalah centers, other organizations, Bnei Baruch, other courses and so on in Kabbalah, it seems very attractive and interesting and fascinating, which it can be, but you need to have discernment and recognize that this is not from God, this is Gnosticism. This is Gnosticism that’s syncrotistically mixed with the Old Testament. It’s certainly not the Old Testament. It’s certainly not what the biblical revelation is. I would not recommend Christians get involved in this at all. I’ve gotten involved in it because I’m involved in witnessing to Jewish people and I’ve met people in the Russian Jewish community who have taken Kabbalah courses and have questions and I can’t be ignorant of this anymore than I can be ignorant of the rabbinic arguments against Jesus. I have to know these things, but I’d say for the average Christian it’s not something you want to get into, it’s not going to help you spiritually in any way. Unless you’re involved in critiquing the cults or something, then I’d say it really has no place in your life.
CM: Reverend Fred Klett, we’re out of time. Would you mind leading us in prayer for people maybe that have gotten into Kabbalah and they know it’s not right or they know there’s something wrong with it, but just lead us in prayer, would you?
FK: Absolutely. Lord, you have warned us not to be deceived. You have said to us, see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than the Messiah, for in him, in the Messiah, the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form. And you have been given fullness in the Messiah who is the head over every power and authority. Lord, we thank you that you have given us wonderful precious promises. And I pray for any of those in the audience now or their families who may be looking into this stuff and are falling prey to New Age philosophy, to Kabbalah, that Lord you would help them to see the truth that we have in the Messiah, who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one goes to the Father but through me.” Lord you are the path to the Father, not ascending some Kabbalistic tree of emanation, but you through the blood of your cross provide the way to be reconciled with our Creator. So Lord we pray that you would continually give us wisdom that we would not fall prey to hollow and deceptive philosophy and human tradition, but Lord that we would be committed to your Word and that we would be renewed in our minds through your Word. And we pray this in the name of the One through whom we have forgiveness, through whom we have access to the Father, Jesus our Messiah, amen.
CM: Thank you our special guest Fred Klett for praying for us on part 2 of a program called, “Why the Kabbalah Craze?” Isn’t this interesting? A form of Jewish mysticism that traces its way all the way back to the Middle Ages and now it is seeing a resurgence. If you’d like to listen to yesterday’s program with Fred Klett and you missed that you can go to our website, haventoday.org and you can hear it, we’ve posted it there for you as well. Now we also have a special fact sheet that our friend Reverend Fred Klett has prepared for us. It’s called, “Exposing the Mysteries of Kabbalah”, and we have that just if you’ll get in touch with us. You can write to us and here’s our mailing address and we’ll send it out to you right away. And when you get in touch would you mind letting us know the radio station you’re listening to. Now this fact sheet is free of charge but we are a listener supported ministry. We depend on the gifts of God’s people to sustain us and keep us able to tell the Great Story to people all over the world every day. So you can write to us right now and ask for “Exposing the Mysteries of Kabbalah”. Write to:
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