So… What Is Kabbalah, Actually?

What exactly is Kabbalah, that mysterious mysticism practiced by Jews and celebrities the world over, and what’s in it for you? If you’re curious, but can’t handle wellness sites selling courses, or don’t have patience for reading multiple volumes of arcane Hebrew texts, you’ve come to the right place. This is a primer on the ancient art, without any insanity about colonics or manifestation. 

Kabbalah is a form of study and mystic thought developed by sages around BCE 1000–1300, cemented into the labyrinthine book known as the Zohar. It’s an interpretation of the Old Testament and a collection of stories, dialogues and dreams, which cast Jewish tradition in an erotic, ecstatic new understanding. For me, studying Kabbalah has made the world come online, into an animystic, mesmerizing unified consciousness. I share some of what I’ve learned about this way of seeing the world, and give some guidance on where you can begin, and what you should look out for. And, as it’s May 20th, we simply must celebrate the birthday of the supreme Taurus herself, the one and only Cher. Prepare yourself to have your mind blown. 

Write to me at Ask@Heavenlybodiespodcast.com 

To book a reading with, go to DavidOdyssey.com and Davidodyssey.substack.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, Star Child. You've tuned into Heavenly Bodies, a trip through the Cosmos with David Odyssey. I'm David Odyssey, your personal astrologer and guide, cruising through the stars and down to Earth. Each week we'll seek life's meaning in archetypes, old and new. And now, let's drop in. Welcome to The Children of the Spheres, the uh the links between the planets, my fellow angels, practitioners, uh seekers, and ding dongs. Uh, this is going to be a trippy episode. I swear to God, this is a no bullshit episode. I know that when you re-read the title of this episode, you were like, where are we going? I just want to say before I say a single word about this week's topic, I do not live in West Hollywood. I have my shit together. I went to landmark forum, that was 15 years ago. And since then, I've done a lot of therapy. Everything I'm about to talk to you today is based on history and text and literature and faith, and not uh I will not be offering any cheap self-help encomiums, and I am not selling an online class, but I love Madonna. Okay. Before we even get into this week's topic, which is a non-lunatics introduction to Kabbalah, just me kind of telling you what this thing might be about so you have some grip on why it's a thing. We're gonna pull a card. If we're gonna talk about Kabbalah, we gotta talk about the world. The world is the 22nd card of the major arcana. The world is the kind of last of the major arcana. It's the jumping off point, it's the world at your shoulders, it is the egg hatching. Obviously, well, not obviously, if you pull the world card earlier in a pull, it's the egg needing more time to gestate, etc. But in the world, we see the world dancer, uh, this sort of woman in ecstatic movement, and she is poised between four cards, which uh stand for the four fixed signs of astrology. Uh, we see an angel, an eagle, a lion, and a bull. One is the angel is Aquarius, the eagle is Scorpio, the lion is Leo, the bull is Taurus. Each of those represents uh one of the four elements. She is in a dance with all four elements. She is bringing all together and being unleashed upon the world. The world represents the erotic, ecstatic, expansive opening, uh, which we are all entitled to, and which we are all going through different phases of, like I said, you might be in a gestation phase with the world, you might be in an egg hatching phase with the world, you might be uh in a the world is open moment, you might be one world is closed, we're in a death period before a new world opens, but that's what's at stake here. And it is saying that you kind of are you are the world dancer, and you are all of the elements, uh, you which is everything we love on the show. You're not any one thing. Uh, you are not some reductive Instagram reading of what your sign is. You're all the elements, you're all the signs. The world relates to this week's topic, uh, which is Kabbalah. I am giving you a very brief introduction because this is the sort of thing that you could study for decades and not even scratch the ice off the top of the iceberg. So I just want to tell you kind of what this thing was or is, and then you can go seek it out yourself. But the reason I pulled the world before I say anything else is Kabbalah and the Zohar, which is the text of the Kabbalah, are all about these creative, erotic ways of perceiving and appreciating the divine, rather than just, you know, sitting cross-legged and saying God is everywhere, which is fine and a sleigh. It is about storytelling and imagery and correspondences, which allow one to see the divine in everything and see a huge and create a sense of balance and interconnection, as with the chakras, as with the planets, etc. Once you can kind of open one gate, you then open the gate to the next and the next, and all the spheres come together, and that's what the world is all about. What is Kabbalah? Where to begin? If you go back to the first century Anodomini, first, second, third century Anodomini, we had the rise of a specific sort of uh Jewish study uh around the Bible and the literature of the Torah and Jewish mysticism, in which these sort of adherents or students or philosophers would wake up at midnight and spend the night walking and talking and telling stories and going into these sort of ecstatic trance states and connecting with a less literal and more sexual, more elastic version of faith. They were beginning to see clues and connections in every word of scripture, which to them revealed, you know, the Torah scrolls or the Bible, not as a static entity, but as a living uh feminine presence that is reading you as you are reading it. They began to tell stories uh and retell stories based on um the literature of the Bible and its commentaries and its uh accompanying mythology, stories which were more bizarre and certainly erotic, about a divine that isn't just old man god in the sky, but a sacred masculine and a divine feminine. The divine feminine we would call Shahina, that means the presence. She is everything, she's everywhere, uh, and Karush Baruchu, which is more like the masculine god presence. And they be they were contemplating in every part of life are these things facing each other, are these things cut off from each other? What happens when they connect? There's obviously a big Shiva Shakti scenario there, but the Zoharists had a few different ways of doing this. They had conversations, they had these sort of dialogues, these sort of studies. They had a text called the Zohar, which is this vast collection of book of stories and commentaries, which you know it could take decades for a person to get through. You can't, it's really like hard to read it, so you often need to get like the good commentary on it or the good translation on it, and that's where it gets interesting. But even the Zohar and Kabbalah itself, it's ascribed to different people, but it doesn't really fit any period necessarily. It's kind of out of time, it's not exactly O Koran for when it's allegedly written and based on who allegedly wrote it, it already has this element of like it's what it's like one of those albums that's not really in time or space. It's it trend it's transcendent. It's hard to even talk about what the core points of this are because it's huge, and like I said, you could be going through it for decades. But I think the reason that Kabbalah and Zohar are really popular uh and constantly becoming popular are it's they're basically saying this isn't about sitting down and studying the Bible and like learning a moral lesson, it's about accessing the presence of the divine and letting it surge out of the words and kind of come alive. In the Zohar, they really talk about the Bible or the Torah as if she is this beauty who's like in a castle waiting to be unveiled to you. A lot of that can be a little creepy and misogynist, but my Zohar teacher Melila Elnur Heshed, who I I really recommend her books, you know, if you have a great fucking woman teaching you Zohar, it's like, fuck yeah. Of course we're talking about the divine feminine and goddess of woman. So there's that aspect, which is to say, I think anyone who has had that experience with reading a book or their favorite album or that religious text where, or even looking at like an astrology chart, where you just feel the thing come alive and not like, oh, it felt real. Like you feel that the thing you're studying or reading has its own consciousness. That's the the joy of this. It's not uh about like, oh yeah, I saw a movie and I liked it. It's no, I was in communication with the divine presence when I sat in that theater. And Zoar is really about that when it comes to faith uh in God. It's also poetry, it's weird, it's dreams, it's these sort of strange myths that go, what the fuck was that? And it's a way of seeing all of the biblical characters as emblems of different aspects of the sacred erotic divine. Okay. The next like arena that makes the the Kabbalah, I think, appealing, the Kabbalah, the Zoar, conceptualizes the divine into ten spheres. These are ten circles that are linked up and form what is called the tree of life. There's ten planets in astrology, dot dot. There's seven chakras, and if you look at the way that the ten spheres are linked up, uh you'll start to kind of vibe with that. The ten spheres break down the divine into a sort of top to bottom, top being the divine in a way that's beyond conception, and bottom being us down here on earth and what we get to tap into. And it breaks it down in the way you think about astrology, where you're breaking something down so that you can understand the different aspects of it. This is very fun because again, you know, I I think you can go a long way with a monotheistic, non-visible, whole God is everywhere approach. I love it, I live it, I'm with you. But what the ten spheres do, what the tree of life does, is it creates an order and a story and a literal current that go as each sphere goes down to the next, down to the next, down to the next, and they're in a bit more of an ecstatic romantic dialogue. You know, the planets, each planet represents something, and the planets are in this constant orbit correspondence conversation where they're creating new things. And similarly, if you were learning about the spheres of Kabbalah, you wouldn't learn about just one and be like, oh, that's my favorite. I'm going with that. You're looking at the whole tree, and then you're understanding what each one is, and then you're trying to think about the balance. So I'll just kind of very uh let me just say before I even list them, the spheres, of course, have a million correspondences. Each of the spheres of Kabbalah is associated with a different theme, a different biblical character, a different element, dot dot, a different tarot card. So if you look at the court cards uh of the four elements, not the court cards, if you look at the numbered cards of the four elements of the tarot, swords, wands, cups, what's the other one? Pentacles. You have cards ace through ten. Those correspond to the spheres of the Zoar. The links, there are 22 links between those ten spheres. Guess what those correspond to? The major arcana. There are some pieces done on how, like I said, they correspond to the chakras. I definitely think you could link all of them up to the planets with Pluto, Pluto being at the top and the moon being at the at the very bottom. So you already can do a lot with that, which is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, everything is connected. I have insane notes for my my Zohar seminar I took in school last semester, but just to give you kind of a very brief review of this, the first sphere is called Ketev, which is the crown, and that is all the way up. That is there's it's nothingness, it's it's the endlessness that we can't even comprehend. That then feeds into Chokmah and Binah. Uh Chmah is wisdom, and Bina is the sort of basis. It's the Binah, I Binah, which corresponds to Saturn, is kind of hold on, I just it's understanding of that wisdom. It's kind of the conception of that wisdom. Okay, so now we're we're already in kind of masculine feminine, then that goes into chesed and gvua. Uh, chesed is uh mercy or kind of loving kindness, and gv is strength. Okay, I swear I'm gonna put all of this together. Those feed into Tiferet, which is um this sort of solar life force that it's glory, uh, it's it's Jacob in the Bible. That then feeds into Netzach and Hod. Those are like victory and splendor. So now we're already in the seventh and eighth sphere, so we're coming down, we're coming down into the world of the intellect, what's seen, what is felt. Each of these, by the way, does have a corresponding archangel, and then uh more angels that correspond to all of them. Then we go into the dick of the tree of life, yesod. Uh yesod is the base, the foundation. And then from that we go into the chalice, which is Malkut. Malkut is the divine feminine, it is the dance of life, it is music, it is reflection, it is humanity. That I this could take hours, if not years, to get through. So I just listed them really quickly. But this is what I want to say that that will before you even get into like, well, what what do I do with all of these? Where am I? Which one, which is which? Each of these spheres represents a different aspect of lived experience. One is, you know, gvula is about strength uh and power, tiferet is about kind of glory and life force and vitality. Then you have mah, which is order and wisdom. All of these, you know, this all sounds lovely. When any of these are out of balance, we then have chaos. What happens when you have too much intelligence but not enough mercy or dignity or grace? You have a fascist state. What happens when you have too much strength and not enough beauty? You have a brute uh martial state. What happens when we are only here in the base lived experience and we're not, you know, what happens when you're in first chakra but no connection to seventh chakra? When you're cut off from the higher elements, and what happens when you're, you know, during my I've had a lot of readings where they're like, look, you can get up to these higher chakras. It's hard for you to stay down low and to connect. You can be up in the clouds, but you don't really know what it is to be like in your body. As with the chakras or the planets, what studying the spheres does or helps us contemplate is what in ourselves, in our microcosmic orbit, and in the macro, in the society and world around us, is out of balance. Balance within itself and balance with the other spheres. For that reason, I had a great Zoho teacher, and she really made every lesson about what is going on in the world we're in right now, and in what is happening on a war human level, how people see and treat each other. And her whole thing was like, look, you gotta we gotta get them all kind of not her whole thing, but her thing was like, we gotta get these all locked up, locked, you know, aligned. What the Zohar really has given me in a lot of ways is it's nice to contemplate all of the spheres. The sphere that we exist in and that we have access to is Malkut. Malkut is the queendom, it is the divine feminine's world. The divine feminine is not something that you need to like go into a meditative state to discover. She's in everything, she's in every song you listen to, in every poem you read, every time you move your body, anything you feel or see or touch on or reflect on or or which touches you. She's in this, she's in the shit that we're in. And that is like the Zohar, and I think Kabbalah is not rejecting reality. I think an issue with a lot of this stuff is you'll meet these practitioners or healers who want to not be here or who want to be in the um in the fascist world of supremacy or wisdom or the perfectly optimized healed body and self. What we get about the divine feminine is like she's here. You don't need to go anywhere. She's with us now. The elevation is is at hand. You don't, you know, you just kind of need to if you pick up a musical instrument and play it, whoa, something just went through me. She's here. There is the Malkut is associated with King David, who is hello, basically a fag. Am I allowed to say that? So there is this aspect of the king who writes music and who dances and who gets naked and who like looks at himself in the mirror that has this kind of dune embodiment of this divine feminine power. The other aspect that I really loved about that I've loved about learning about Zoa is I think we think about religious people or people who wrote our religious texts or people who are devoted, we think of them as these sort of sad ascetics who are boring. And you know, in the world we live in now where everyone is many religions are dominated, and you know, I can speak about Judaism, there's so much fundamentalism and so much literalism where they really take the fun out of it or the creativity out of it. What my teacher really wanted us to understand was these men, such as it is, these men would get up at midnight and kind of walk and talk. And when we're learning about these men who are having these sort of high on life and probably high on some other things, conversations, uh, some in Spain, some in modern-day Israel, there was a sense of a raver in them. There's a sense of those who love the nightlife and love to boogie. You know, that sense of I want to wait for the night and see what we can create or what comes alive before dawn. That made me understand that all of my years on the dance floor, I think there was some sort of an erotic spiritual quest. I mean, I I've always known that, but I I think there there was a spiritual quest, and there has been, and there is a spiritual quest of I want to see what happens after midnight, and I want to see if I can just dance with this stuff. What can emerge? A lot of the stories in the Zohar that I was exposed to so far are not really meant to be like, and that was the lesson. They're a bit more okay. We've just introduced you to some very cuckoo imagery um in which a river is a snake, which is a deer, and the deer is awake at dawn, and the and the light of dawn is God, and you know, there is just this aspect of when you're reading something beautiful or taking in what gives you that spiritual res resonance, you don't need to say, and this is what it's about. You're it's a different way of of taking things in. You're taking it in and you're just trying to see beyond time. It has that trippy aspect to it. A big theme of the Zohar is uh shells. Um, the idea is that this world we are in are these are the shells of the world that was. A big theme is that we're kind of in in the dregs or in the shit. As my my rabbi, Rabbi Browse uh in Los Angeles has said, you know, God only likes to dine off of broken dishware. There is this sort of recognition of the inherent brokenness. There's this idea that we're here at the bottom and there's this whole tree of life that we don't even get access to. We are really in the dregs. That sounds dark, but it's quite liberating because it's saying anything that we're accessing is the emanation of the emanation. It is um it it's a it's a representation of something bigger. You know, we we were doing this one lesson where they were talking about the spheres aren't it. The spheres are the thing in front of it. And I was talking with someone in my class, my study partner, and I was saying, like, yeah, you have the spice girls. There's the five spice girls, they all have their. Different personalities and wardrobes. They are the conduits of the music that is spice that goes through all five of them. And through the five of them, we create some new composite power. By the way, if you know, if you have to take one to be Malkut, it's obviously Mel C Sporty Spice. But it's not about any one spice girls. It is this entity they are which represents this music and this movement and this feeling that you need all five of them to be together for. I think when the Kabbalah is not in a like creepy Whole Foods on Fairfax place or a creepy Errowan place. It's basically saying like this is it. We're in the we're in the shells right now. We are we are those hags in Labyrinth with Jennifer Connolly who have the shit on their backs and want to scavenge. We are the the old ladies in the episode of Hoarders. This is divine. Let's just go from here. Rather than you're never going to you can study and seek the exaltation of the higher worlds, but we're here now, so we can just do it from here rather than if I could have had a different life that was more pure or whatever or more optimized.

unknown 23:13

No.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

We were learning, you know, a big concept in Judaism is the world to come, uh, the next world, the better world, the world of redemption, whatever that is. And in the Zoar, they just, you know, they say the world to come is a river that is flowing from the Garden of Eden, and it's constantly lapping up on you. It's not one thing that's gonna come someday. It's already here. The Zoar studying Kabbalah as I have so far, it just it made me feel like I want to pursue the consumption of and the creation of art and companionship and communality in which the sacred masculine and the divine feminine are coming together and facing each other. It made it so that every movie I watch or every book I read, if they're not doing that, you can feel something's missing. And I just watched I I've I've mentioned this, but like I was watching Room with a View with Ana Bonham Carter, and I was like, oh, she's obviously the Shina, she's the divine feminine, and the whole movie is about if we can get her to face her true love, she will come alive. Her talent, her creativity can finally be unveiled. And then I just watched Pillion, which I loved. Pillion, uh, which I wrote about on my substack, has a beautiful Persephone story, but Pillion is so much about Harry Melling coming into his Shekinah power and saying, I'm with Pluto Incarnate. Why won't he look me in the eyes and kiss me? And what what will happen if he does? What gets unleashed? So it I just really recommend it for that reason because I think it makes life delicious. Where to start and what to avoid with studying Kabbalah. I, you know, I can't speak for what you should do. I really recommend my Zohar teacher, Malila Elner Hashed. She has uh two books in English, A River Flows from Eden and Seekers of the Face. She would say, like, find groups or books or studies where you're actually reading from the fucking Zohar and you're not being like lectured at. And I happen to agree because she gave me that gift. If you can get in there where you're the texts are really weird. It's like reading Ulysses by James Joyce, where it's like, you can't just like sit and read Ulysses and be like, that was a fun read. You kind of want to do it in a group where you're all like, what the hell was that? So if you can do that where you're reading like a translation of the Zohar or a commentary on it, and you can zoom into like one story on, you know, our classes with Malila would be three hours on one little thing. I recommend that. I think it's really fun to look at what the spheres are and just play with them. You can do a lot of deep dives into the spheres in the same way that you can do a lot of fun deep dives into astrology and the chakras of like, what does that sphere do? What is it connected to? Whoa, that sphere is associated with all of these things that I find so fascinating. Oh, that sphere is feminine, that one's masculine, that one is connected to those angels and to that element and to that character from the Bible. Crazy. I think that's the best place to start, which is like just play with the spheres. In terms of the self-help aspects of Kabbalah, I don't think it's a bad thing. I would just say, you know, as with anything, like, who's the teacher? Who the hell is this person? Why are they teaching you? If it's someone who you feel is really like hitting it, fuck yeah. If they're just kind of like talking about nothing, I would be warned. And you know, I think the thing with Kabbalah that I would just say any teacher should be revealing is this is not something that any one person can learn or teach in a lifetime. It is something that is a could be a lifelong pursuit, and your teacher needs to be very, very humble. I think if they're promising to reveal to you the secrets of the universe, you might be in the wrong Bikram Yoga studio. But if there is a sense of my first lesson of the Zohar, she said to us, like, you guys are never gonna get this, so don't bother and just let it wash over you. And it was like, alright, I can enjoy this now. I hope this gives you some framework just to know what this is when people are talking about it. It's really fun to study. Um, and if you can look up Melila's uh YouTube interviews, that's a really great place to start. And look, Kabbala gave us ray of light. Kabbalah even gave us um confessions on a dance floor. Like we can't say no to that, okay? No. Uh this is a May 20th episode, which means that we have to celebrate this week's high priestess, the woman born on this day, May 20th. Who else but Cher? If you're gonna pull the world card of the tarot, you're talking Cher. Talk about literally the Taurus to end all Tauruses. She's born on the last day of Taurus season. Cher is like the ten spheres of the Kabbalah, Cher is all. I think that there are many Cher quotes that have stayed with me forever, but one of them, you know, when she's on Graham Norton and he says to her, So every morning when you wake up and you're putting on a different wig or a different costume, are you thinking I'm gonna be this share or this share? Is it a different persona, a different aspect? And Cher says to him, It's all Cher. I'm Cher. It's all me. That's the world. Um, that is the ten spheres of Kabbalah, it's all one. You don't need to, I'm going through this phase, I'm this sort of a person, I'm this sort of an artist, this is who I am. No, it's all Cher. It's all you. You can be the Oscar-winning star of my favorite movie, Moonstruck. You can be a rock star, you can be a fashion icon, and it doesn't, not any one of those needs to mean anything. You are one, you are whole, as you know, whatever it is you do, whatever phase you're in, whatever the multiplicity of that is. Cher is a true Taurus in that. This is a very Taurian thing, which is that she obviously is that bitch. She takes herself very seriously, she's a diva, she's the one. She also kind of doesn't really give a shit. And as she said to Graham Norton, like, I'm not the biggest Cher fan, which I thought was profound spiritual truth. You know, where to begin, and uh where to begin with Cher, obviously Moonstruck. You should watch Wig the documentary because you'll get to see Charlene and Carnette Taurus doing uh shares, the ballad, I think it's the ballad of of uh Jesse James uh on a huge stage. But um Mermaids, come on. Mamma mia, here we go again. Yeah, all right. Uh before this turns into a share podcast, I would love to hear your thoughts on the spheres, on the Zohar, on any of this, on Share herself. Please send an email to ask at Heavenly Bodies Podcast.com. Post. We are at Heavenly Bodies Podcast on Instagram, if you would even believe that. You can find me on Substack David Odyssey and David Odyssey.com. You can even book a reading with me. And I think I'm gonna start doing sphere readings. I'm not really sure what that's gonna be, but let's do it. If you like this podcast, please leave a glowing review wherever you get your podcast. We will be back next week. Share, rate, review, etc. And we will see you next week. Thank you so much for being here. Au revoir. Thank you for listening. This podcast is part of Pride House Media, hosted by David Odyssey and produced by Matthew Breen and Josh Rosensweig. With original music composed by Nell Balaban. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, leave us a rating and review. It really helps others discover the show. I'd love to get to know you, so email questions and visions to ask at heavenly bodies podcast.com and book a reading with me at David Odyssey. Until our next trip, keep looking up.