Kabbalah: Encyclopedia II - Kabbalah - Criticisms

Kabbalah - Criticisms

Kabbalah - Dualism

One of the most serious and sustained criticisms of Kabbalah is that it may lead away from monotheism, and instead promote dualism, the belief that there is a supernatural counterpart to God. The dualistic system of good and of evil powers, which goes back to Zoroastrianism, can be traced through Gnosticism; having influenced the cosmology of the ancient Kabbalah before it reached the medieval one.

• Some early mystics believed in a heavenly being called Metatron, a lesser Adonai-"God", that worked in concert with the greater Adonai. While this essentially Gnostic belief was never a mainstream trend within Jewish thought, and very few Kabbalists accepted it.

• Later Kabbalistic works, including the Zohar, appear to more strongly affirm dualism, as they ascribe all evil to a supernatural force known as the Sitra Ahra ("the other side".) "The dualistic tendency is, perhaps, most marked in the Kabbalistic treatment of the problem of evil. The profound sense of the reality of evil brought many Kabbalists to posit a realm of the demonic, the Sitra Ahra, a kind of negative mirror image of the "side of holiness" with which it was locked in combat." [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 6, "Dualism", p.244]. However the Zohar indicates that the Sitra Ahra has no power over God, and only exists as a creation of God to give man free choice.

• Rabbi Dr. David Gottleib notes that many Kaballists hold that the concepts of, for example, a Heavenly Court or the Sitra Ahra are only given to humanity by God to give humanity a working model to understand His ways within our own epistemological limits. They reject that a Satan or angels actually exists. Others hold that non-God spiritual entities were indeed created by God as a means for exacting his will.

• According to Kabbalists, no person can understand the true, unknown nature of God. Rather, there is God that makes Himself known to man, and a hidden Ein Sof that is totally removed from man's experience. One can have a reading of this theology which is totally monotheistic; however one can also have a reading of this theology which is essentially dualistic. Professor Gershom Scholem writes "It is clear that with this postulate of an impersonal basic reality in God, which becomes a person - or appears as a person - only in the process of Creation and Revelation, Kabbalism abandons the personalistic basis of the Biblical conception of God....It will not surprise us to find that speculation has run the whole gamut - from attempts to re-transform the impersonal En-Sof into the personal God of the Bible to the downright heretical doctrine of a genuine dualism between the hidden Ein Sof and the personal Demiurge of Scripture." (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Shocken Books p.11-12)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Criticisms", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki