Deep Ecology and Kabbalah
August 11th, 2006
Updated May 2006
An artistic representation of the Tree of Life
Perhaps the single most difficult task in understanding Kabbalah is overcoming the epistemology of the Western world. Indeed, changing one’s method of understanding has proven difficult for both teachers and students of Kabbalah, which perhaps in part explains the proliferation of terribly obtuse texts dealing with this mystical system. In many ways, explaining Kabbalah to the neophyte is a very daunting task, because of its deeply holistic, even ecologic, nature. We cannot understand the parts without understanding the whole, but speaking of the whole without understanding the parts seems preposterous to those of us who have grown up in an educational system predicated on the Cartesian philosophical model which is inherently mechanistic.
That probably sounded like a lot of pedantic blather, but it is nonetheless true. We have been formed in a society that loves hierarchies and stratifications. This “ordered” and value-based view of the world is so deeply ingrained that even postmodern religions that claim they are non-hierarchical and ecological subscribe to maxims such as “As Above, so Below.” (1). This obstacle, then, is a deeply ingrained one, but must be circumvented in order to gain any true insight into the nature of Kabbalah.
On First Look: The Tree of Life
At first glance, the Tree of Life looks like it jumped right out of the pages of a textbook on patriarchy and mechanistic thinking. It looks like the Ein Sof emanates “down” the tree, beginning at Kether, the Crown, and ending at Malkuth, the kingdom. But if we could lift the Tree off the paper (or the computer screen) we would see that the tree is actually three dimensional. (Something that can be noticed on paper, but is very easily overlooked.) The three dimensional aspect of the Tree of Life is important because it makes it more difficult to talk about the tree in terms of the “top” and the “bottom”. Of course it still has a top and bottom, just like most any 3D object, but it also has an inside, an outside, and a throughout. In other words, the “top” and “bottom” become far less important than , for example, its depth, or its very structure.
When teaching the Tree of Life, most teachers, myself included, are always tempted to begin with a very brief overview of the Tree and then jump right into explaining the various spheres and paths. The tendency is to “analyze” the tree given the tools of hierarchy and Cartesian philosophy: we take it apart, look at the pieces and then stick the whole thing back together again. Viola! Instant understanding.
This approach isn’t entirely wrong; it serves to give the student a very rudimentary conceptualization of the values and ideas inherent in Kabbalah. What it doesn’t do, however, is prepare the student for the very basic paradigm shift required to fully understand Kabbalah. Kabbalah, like any holistic or ecologic system, cannot be understood by taking it apart. Kabbalah can only be understood by taking a survey of the relationships within it.
Quantum Theory and the Roles of the Sephirot
–Fritjof Capra
It is tempting to refer the sephirot as the “building blocks” of the Tree of Life. In Western philosophy, we have long “used the metaphor of knowledge as a building, together with many other architectural metaphors derived from it.” (2) But this type of language brings us right back the primary epistemological problem: we cannot understand Kabbalah from this vantage point. T o talk in terms of fundamentals and building blocks is to talk around the very nature of Kabbalah. How, then, should the sephirot be approached?
Quantum physics has revealed to us that the very “building blocks” that make up our universe are not the indivisible fundamentals that scientists thought they were. Currently, and indefinitely into the future, the subatomic particles that make up our universe cannot be studied objectively. What we can observe, however, is not the “things” themselves, but rather the relationships among these things. As Fritjof Capra writes, “[S]ubatomic particles are not “things” but interconnections among things, and these, in turn, are interconnections among other things, and so on.”(3) It is these relationships, then, not the “things” themselves that become important to us.
On the Tree of Life, the overall picture that we should seek to see is the web of relationships depicted. When seen in this light, the sephirot become “recurring moments”, elements of time rather than space. This is a challenging concept, but I think it’s crucial to a complete understanding of the Tree. If the Tree is composed of flows of energy or Divine Light, which is probably a fairly widespread way of looking at the Tree, then the sephirot can be seen as points in time in which these energies interact. This is especially useful considering that the only sphere in which physical space actually exists is Malktuh.
Regardless of how one chooses to see the sephirot, as bits of space or as recurring relationships in flashes of time, the key to unfolding the Tree is to understand that truth is not encapsulated in the spheres themselves, but rather in their relationships to each other and the patterns they form. If we think of the sephirot on the Tree as the counterparts of musical notes in a symphony, it is easy to see how irrelevant the actual spheres are. The music is not contained in the notes, but in the intervals between notes and their relative durations. A musical piece written in one key may easily be transposed into another key, making the notes ephemeral, and yet the melody remains unchanged. So it is with the Tree of Life. The holy melody remains the same, regardless of the actual spheres. The melody is in the pattern. (4)
Lastly, we must keep in mind the ecologic notion that in a network, the pieces exist not for each other, but by means of each other. (5). Each sephira is necessary to the Tree because each sephira in fact gives rise to every other sephira, no matter how indirectly. Even those that are “above” others exist because of the existence of the ones “below”. In fact, I will later argue that G!D itself cannot exist as it does without all of creation. G!D is as inextricable from nature as nature is from G!D. Thus, each and every sephira is dependent upon the existence of each and every sephira. There is no room for hierarchical value judgments-there is no “above and below”.
Endnotes:
(1)While the example I had in mind was feminist Wicca, the idea of above and below can be found in many traditions, including traditional Kabbalah.
(2) Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life, Anchor Books, New York, 1996. p. 38
(3) Ibid., p. 30
(4) Ibid, p. 32
(5) Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom, Cheshire Books, Palo Alto, 1981.
On to Chapter Two : The Mythic Kabbalah