bananabrain
awkward squadnik
a partzuf is just a configuration of the sefirot, so really there are any number. the main ones are as previously stated, but once you start to consider the sefirot within sefirot and the dynamic evolution thereof as part of the Divine Creation process it gets terribly, terribly complicated and is really only suitable for the advanced student.China Cat Sunflower said:How many Partzufim are there? I had thought it was just five or six.
i understand your reaction. sometimes i may come across as a bit like this, but really i'm just trying to get people to study a bit and not discount what the traditional approaches say (note the plural) before becoming familiar with them.Raksha said:I truly hope you aren't the kind of person I call a "Gatekeeper," i.e. a self-appointed guardian of the mysteries, because we're going to have problems if you are. There is nothing I despise more than a Gatekeeper, no form of human life lower than a self-appointed spiritual nanny who takes it upon himself to determine who may enter the inner sanctum and who may not.
which is part of the reason that it's a bit pointless trying to be a "gatekeeper" in this age of hyperabundant information - however, i am sure you understand the difference between mere information, knowledge and wisdom. and please don't take this the wrong way, but you could, i am sure, read and to some extent understand a technical manual on brain surgery, but it don't make you (or me) a brain surgeon. i'm not saying this to dump on anyone, but there are levels here and i don't claim to be an "initiate", much less a "mekubal". have you heard of the "nazir"? he was a great yerushalmi mekubal and he taught my teacher. he used to lock up his nigla books, but leave his nistar (mystical) books open for anyone to read. the point is that someone can leave an MRI machine lying about, but it doesn't mean i know how to use it.As you see, I entered the inner sanctum a long time ago. I didn't need your permission then and I don't now either!
the good news of course is that there's kabbalah and kabbalah. lighting shabbat candles is one of the most mystical acts one can undertake if one understands the inner dimension. it's not all about doing advanced abulafian ecstatic letter meditation and fasting, or studying the ar"i's "unification of the left inner nostril" (yes, it does exist!). there are levels.
you're right, i posted that too fast, thank you for pointing it out."Receptive" is a much better descriptive word for Binah than "passive."
gershon scholem published quite a lot earlier than that, i believe. look, i'm not dumping on the GD, i've got a lot of time for the WMT; i just find it a little too forced into the theoretical and universal by virtue of needing to not be too jewish and allow room for a christian cosmology and, of course, i don't find that terribly credible. once you add in stuff like tarot and the egyptian "godforms" or enochian tablets it all starts to disappear up its own fundament a bit in its effort to be all things to all people whilst still being essentially an elite activity like all mystical pathwork.I think you're being a little too hard on Westcott and the rest of the Golden Dawn types. I first got interested in Kabbalah in the mid-1960s when there was very little material available in English, and virtually NOTHING from Jewish sources.
harrumph. firstly, it's not anyone's job to democratise kabbalah for reasons of which we are both well aware, look at the kabbalah centre for a start. secondly, regardless of what you may think, advanced study can be quite damaging if you try to grow leaves without having your roots in the ground of a jewish lifestyle and indeed a qualified teacher. with that said, i think many of the traditional experts are far too restrictive in almost all respects. people want to learn - the good news is that in a post-kaplan age, we all have a right to at least know this stuff exists. in fact, the ba'al sulam, one of the greatest hasidic mekubalim of the C20th, said (and i've read this directly) thatAnd you can blame that entirely on the despicable and shortsighted Gatekeepers within our own tradition!
if you can't go down the Talmud path, it's obligatory to study the "direct" path. the problem of kabbalah needs to be understood within the context of the enlightenment and most of all of shabbetai tzvi.
they don't let *anyone* in, not, you, not me, not anyone who's not from th yeshiva world. it's a bigger problem than just kabbalah as you ought to know. i don't use words like that and i don't like other people using them either. of course you don't need my permission for anything. i'd rather you asked the questions than not.Can you really imagine them allowing a "shiksa" Reform Jewish female like me into the inner sanctum?
it still doesn't have anything to do with how we see G!D. i'm sorry we're getting in the way of your cosy little system. i'm not really interested in your insistence that you know what we're praying for and to better than we do, you lot have long worn out my patience with your longwinded essays, so that goes straight in the box marked "arrogant longwinded theosophical nonsense", as it would if you told me jesus kept popping up in the book of genesis or muhammad was prophesied in isaiah.Bruce Michael said:The designation "moon" does not refer to the physical luminary but to a spiritual sphere.
there are unfortunately a lot of idiots who like to parrot the party line even when it doesn't make sense. it doesn't mean you couldn't hurt yourself by playing with some of the serious stuff. i know people it has happened to. as for the inner sanctum, i don't think more than 30-40 people in the whole world get to play there. if you read rambam's "guide for the perplexed", it's inside the "castle", in the "presence of the king".Raksha said:I think I meant two things at the same time by the phrase "the inner sanctum." The first one would be the esoteric aspect of any religion, such as Kabbalah in Judaism. Occasionally I would run into people on the Judaism board I frequented on another forum who would always make a point of warning me that I could hurt myself or even kill myself by getting into Kabbalah if I didn't know what I was doing.
there are a whole lot of people who love to make out how they've got the inside track and orthodox jews are no exception. your point about supersition and bluenoses is well made. and, frankly, new agers, neo-pagans, occultists, theosophists and just about everyone else cannot resist the temptation to play the superiority card from time to time.Also, I got the feeling that the mostly Orthodox bluenoses who issued these warnings didn't actually know that much (if anything) more than I did, and were just repeating what they had heard from someone else. It all seemed kind of superstitious to me, as though the intent were to scare me off for no good reason.
and me, although i don't think that removing the differences between men and women will help in the long term, rather it will, as it has done in liberal denominations, cause its own issues. equality need not mean homogeneity. and, yes, i'm aware that's an excuse not to do anything for most people but i am very much in favour of women's tefillah groups, women rabbis (for those who want them) women teachers (especially for those who don't want them) and female experts in halakhah, like the lindenbaum programme for taharat hamishpacha. however, we will always need rules and structure; i am not a religious anarchist; nor are hermetists.Women of course were systematically excluded in virtually all religions until fairly recently, and even now that this is starting to break down it's still a very big issue with me.
er, there are jewish equivalents of these concepts. come across the "primordial Torah"?There is no concept of "the Logos" in Judaism, for one thing. That's a Greek philosophical concept--which is not to put down on it in any way, but I don't see anything "Jewish" about it.
b'shalom
bananabrain