Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America (review)

Madonna learns Kabbalah. Imagine that. The world’s most famous pop star—a woman born into the Catholic faith, whose repute is built on her notoriously sexual stage persona—finds spiritual direction in the esoteric traditions of Jewish mysticism.

And Madonna is not alone. Every Sabbath, hundreds of worshipers, clad in white, gather in Kabbalah Centres all over the world to celebrate the life-changing secrets of Kabbalah. Jody Myers, professor of religious studies at the California State University at Northridge, lives around the block from the Kabbalah Centre’s international headquarters in West Los Angeles. A scholar of religion, the phenomenon was just too visible to ignore. Although the Kabbalah Centre has earned almost universal castigation from the organized Jewish community, Myers decided to step inside and see for herself. The result is this volume, the first full scholarly treatment of the Kabbalah Centre—its history, sociology, and ideology.

What Myers discovered is very different from the Jewish community’s chorus of critique and reproach.

In contrast to those who dismiss the Kabbalah Centre as counterfeit Judaism, Myers argues for the authenticity of the Centre’s teaching, firmly rooted in an important strain of Kabbalah. In the seventeenth century, the northern Israeli town of Safed saw the Golden Age of Kabbalah in the teaching of the sainted Isaac Luria. Weaving together the mystical cosmogony of the Zohar with the traditions of Jewish messianism, Luria offered a mystical plan for the redemption of the world. In 1921, a young Polish rabbi, Yehuda Ashlag, came to Palestine imbued with the goal of completing Luria’s plan. Ashlag believed that the world was on the brink of the Messianic Era and that he could bring redemption by offering the public access to the secrets of Kabbalah. He produced a Hebrew translation and commentary to the Zohar, Ha-sullam, and led a small group of disciples. In the early 1960s, a Brooklyn-born Orthodox rabbi named Shraga Feival Gruberger came to study Kabbalah with Ashlag’s disciple, Yehuda Brandwein. Brandwein charged Gruberger with the task of bringing Kabbalah to the world. Gruberger, who called himself Philip Berg in America, founded the Kabbalah Centre in the 1970s, first as a publishing house and soon after as a center for disseminating Ashlag’s Kabbalah. His motivation, Myers demonstrates, was to win back to Judaism alienated young Jews, especially Israelis, who had drifted into other religious traditions. Only in the 1990s did the Centre turn its concerns outside Jewry and its attention to attracting non-Jews.

Myers’ concise and systematic exposition of the Kabbalah Centre’s theology is the best part of this book. At the core of this theology is Ashlag’s Kabbalah, with its emphasis on personal ethics and the perfection of the human being. Berg added a generous helping of New Age religious jargon, American self-help motifs, and pseudo-science and he presented the theology in a language designed to appeal to an audience deeply disillusioned with organized religion.

According to the Kabbalah Centre, the aim of human existence is to transform our innate “Desire to Receive for the Self Alone” into a divine “Desire to Receive for the Sake of Sharing.” Happiness is the result of reducing the individual’s self-centered focus and egotistical desires. The technique is a program of self-transformation called the “Twelve Steps of the Game of Life.” The Kabbalah Centre’s ideology is deliberately non-authoritarian. Each adherent is invited to try the system out. There are no commandments, expectations, or punishments. The God of the Kabbalah Centre is not the punishing biblical deity, but a non-personal deity imagined as the light that fills the universe. Divine light is available to all who learn to move their ego out of the way.

Kabbalah, according to the Centre, “is not a religion, but universal wisdom,” “religion” connoting oppressive rigidity and authority. Moreover, the Kabbalah Centre resists its association with Judaism, teaching that Kabbalah belongs to all humanity...