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עמוד:13
The Foundations Of Kabbalistic Thought 13 the Kabbalah . It attained the aura of supreme sanctity, taking its place beside the Bible and the Talmud . All later Kabbalists follow in its footsteps and attempt to ground their own doctrines in its dicta and exegeses . Late Kabbalah was crystallized and made its first appearance in the city of mystics Safad in the sixteenth century . From then onward, it continued to develop some fascinating new forms and transformations, surpassing in its vitality and influence the threshold of the new age of Jewish history and penetrating even into this new age . Our main concern will indeed be with Later Kabbalah in its various forms and transformations . But even within our narrow confines we cannot dispense with a brief discussion of the principles, or the foundations, of earlier Kabbalistic thought, since Early Kabbalah serves as the basis and foundation of everything which has developed from it in the later stages of the Kabbalah, whether through an interpretation of its sources or through the unravelling of hidden spiritual directions which were implicit in it from the beginning . We shall therefore, point out and describe in what follows, some of the more central points in the thought of the first Kabbalists . The Kabbalistic doctrine of God and of the Emanations is the most important speculative area in which the new kind of thought produced by Jewish mysticism revealed its originality, its boldness and its endeavor to ascend towards God . In this context, one should mark first the distinction usually drawn by the Kabbalists between hidden and revealed aspects of the divinity . The hidden aspect of God signifies the lack of any possibility to attain any comprehension of God’s pure being . In this respect, the divinity is utterly concealed and unknown, nor will it ever be known . This aspect of the divinity is called by the Kabbalists Ein - Sof ( “the Infinite” ) , and it expresses the absolute transcendence of God . Ein - Sof is beyond this world, immovably immersed in the recesses of its hidden being ; no motion ever occurs in its depth to make
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