Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence.

The immediate consciousness of the interrelation and interdependence of things, their essential unity which precedes duality and in fact knows nothing of it, the truly monistic universe of man’s mythical age, all this is alien to the spirit of mysticism.

The finite word of man is aimed at the infinite word of God.

The ten “holy” Sefiroth have their counterparts in ten “unholy” or “impure” ones; the latter, however, are distinguished from the former in that each one has a highly personal character.

Darkly it stood in their path, the ally of forces and tendencies in whose rejection pride was taken by a Jewry which, in Steinschneider’s words, regarded it as its chief task to make a decent exit from the world.

Thus the exodus from Egypt, the fundamental event of our history, cannot, according to the mystic, have come to pass once only and in one place; it must correspond to an event which takes place in ourselves, an exodus from an inner Egypt in which we all are slaves.

principles, and his character, there cannot exist any longer

After all, a misunderstanding is often nothing but the paradoxical abbreviation of an original line of thought.

To a certain extent, therefore, mysticism signifies a revival of mythical thought, although the difference must not be overlooked between the unity which is there before there is duality, and the unity that has to be won back in a new upsurge of the religious consciousness.