How do you practice kabbalah

The heightened profile of the L. Then the IRS stepped in. Madonna, left holding a book, seen here in Tel Aviv, enrolled at the Los Angeles center in at Sandra Bernhard's suggestion. When Philip Berg decided in the early s to teach kabbalah to the masses, he predicted that orthodox rabbis would stone him and his wife, Karen. For a long time, that seemed a pompous overstatement. Few people had even heard of the kabbalah school they ran out of their living room in Jerusalem and later in Queens.

But Philip knew that revealing the secrets of the Torah to any Jew who wanted to learn them -- spiritual teachings once open only to elite rabbinical scholars -- would be controversial. It also proved wildly popular. He had the education, she had the nerve. Two decades later, the Kabbalah Centre had become an empire with branches in major cities, a publishing arm and scores of passionate young volunteers. Then in March , the center caught the attention of a council of rabbis in Toronto.

They didn't stone the Bergs, but they publicly disputed the validity of Philip's teachings of ancient Jewish mysticism and took exception to the center's aggressive fundraising. The letter was circulated among Jewish groups around the world. In Jewish enclaves where the center had long gone door-to-door soliciting donations, there was sudden hostility.

People ordered members off their front porches and sometimes out of their neighborhoods. The repercussions reached the Bergs' two sons, who were students at an orthodox yeshiva in New York. Their teachers told them to abandon their father, according to a former member who at the time was close? The rabbis' denunciation might have been fatal to a more traditional Jewish organization.

But the Kabbalah Centre taught that the closer a person drew to the light -- God -- the more the forces of darkness would target him. Followers saw the criticism as proof that the Bergs were on the right spiritual path. They hailed them as prophets. Members of the chevre, the center's religious order, discussed the intense level of spiritual development one would need just to be Karen's assistant and lined up to eat Philip's leftovers as a way to show their devotion, former members said.

The center's synagogues around the world had special chairs for the Bergs' exclusive use, even though they might visit only once a year. It became standard practice to address the Bergs in the third person. A large painting at the Toronto branch showed Philip in what struck one visitor as a classic Christian pose: Jesus leaning against a rock. An inner circle of very wealthy donors -- the "close people" as they were known at the center -- gave hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars in tax-deductible tithes and donations.

Big donors were rewarded with seats at the Bergs' table at Sabbath meal, invitations to intimate prayer services and personal conversations. Those who grumbled were chastised by officials or other students. Adored inside their organization, the Bergs continued to be vilified outside. Rabbis in Israel, Philadelphia and Queens condemned them publicly. At a religious conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, an orthodox rabbi gave a speech criticizing the center's practices and Philip's "scandalous" personal life, an allusion to the breakup of his first marriage.

The center responded with a defamation suit, which it later dropped. The Bergs were spending more time in Los Angeles, running the center from a converted year-old Spanish-style church on Robertson Boulevard.

The location, which became the center's world headquarters in , was near the heart of the city's orthodox community, but more significant was its proximity to Westside neighborhoods the entertainment industry calls home. The first celebrity drawn to the Kabbalah Centre was Sandra Bernhard, who began studying in Bernhard was a raunchy stand-up comic who'd posed nude for Playboy.

She dove into kabbalah classes with a charismatic Israeli teacher, Eitan Yardeni. In the Bergs' decades of challenging tradition, the center had remained fundamentally Jewish.

The conflict with the orthodox establishment had always turned on whether kabbalah study was permissible for certain Jews -- women and men without yeshiva training. Gentiles were never even a consideration, and were a rare and generally unwelcome presence, according to former members. Gentiles at Sabbath services were expected to stay in the back and not participate.

That changed with the arrival of Bernhard's diverse circle. Gentiles flocked to an introductory course she arranged in Manhattan. It was difficult for some former disciples to square the ecumenical approach with the Kabbalah Centre they had known.

Jeremy Langford, an early follower who left the center in over concerns about its authenticity, said reports about gentile celebrities attending classes confirmed his belief that the Bergs were teaching "pop, light, quasi New Age, ersatz kabbalah.

Nothing garnered bigger headlines for the center than the arrival of Madonna. She enrolled at the L. To the surprise of her detractors, Madonna stuck with her studies. She attended Sabbath services, had one-on-one study sessions with Yardeni, enrolled her daughter in the center's Sunday school and chose a Hebrew name, Esther. The experiential dimension of Kabbalah involves the actual quest for mystical experience: a direct, intuitive, unmediated encounter with a close but concealed Deity.

In their quest to encounter God, Jewish mystics live spiritually disciplined lives. Although neither formal nor informal monasticism is sanctioned by Jewish mysticism, experiential Kabbalists tend to be ascetics. The practical dimension of Kabbalah involves rituals for gaining and exercising power to effect change in our world and in the celestial worlds beyond ours.

The true master of this art fulfills the human potential to be a co-creator with God. Historians of Judaism identify many schools of Jewish esotericism across time, each with its own unique interests and beliefs.

As noted above, Jewish mystics are not like monks or hermits. Kabbalists tend to be part of social circles rather than lone seekers.

From these mystical works, scholars have identified many distinctive mystical schools, including the Hechalot mystics, the German Pietists, the Zoharic Kabbalah, the ecstatic school of Abraham Abulafia, the teachings of Isaac Luria, and Chasidism. These schools can be categorized further based on individual masters and their disciples.

Most mystical movements are deeply indebted to the writings of earlier schools, even as they add innovative interpretations and new systems of thought to the existing teachings. In contemporary Reform congregations, the observances of Kabbalat Shabbat, havdalah, and the Tu BiShvat seder derive from Kabbalistic traditions.

Rabbi Geoffrey W. Intensive mystics use nontraditional religious activities, including chanting and meditation, in an attempt to commune with God. Origins The first forms of Jewish mysticism emerged in the early centuries of the first millennium.

Merkavah mysticism was the most common early form. Merkavah mystics aimed at understanding and experiencing the vision of the divine throne discussed in the first chapter of the biblical book of Ezekiel. Another form of early mysticism focused on exploring the mysterious methods that God used to create the world. Sefer Yetzirah , the most important work of creation mysticism, describes the creation of the world through the arrangements of letters and numbers.

Kabbalah is the most famous form of Jewish mysticism. It flowered in 13th century Spain with the writing of the Zohar, which was originally attributed to the 2nd century sage Shimon bar Yohai. The Zohar is a commentary on the Torah, concerned primarily with understanding the divine world and its relation to our world. However, God can be understood and described as revealed in ten mystical attributes, or sefirot. Much of all future Kabbalah, including the important 16th-century Kabbalah of Isaac Luria —whose intricate theology of creation describes how God contracted to make room for the world—concerns itself with the sefirot.