Wicca and the Kabbalah

I'm one of those Wiccans that doesn't want anything Judeo-Christian in her paganism. To me, figures like Lilith, Eve, Sophia, Shekinah, and Mary are not goddesses and they are no more a part of my practice than Satan. Whether Mary Magdalene got it on with Jesus is any issue for the Christians to argue over. I could care less; I'm Pagan. Unfortunately, Wicca, Judaism, and Christianity are strange ménage à trois bedfellows.

One of the studies in Wicca that I've avoided for years is the Kabbalah. I do not understand the obsession with something that is obviously deeply rooted in Jewish mysticism and seems to be in sharp opposition to Wiccan teachings.

The Kabbalah is authoritative by most Orthodox Jews who claim that an intimate understanding and mastery of it brings man spiritually closer to God and as a result man can be empowered with higher insight into the inner-workings of God’s creation effectively enabling prophecy and even control over nature.

As a feminist, I try to use gender-neutral language, but my use of the word "man" here is not accidental. In contemporary Orthodox Judaism, a person must be a man, at least age 40, mature, married, and must have mastered the other branches of Torah to begin studying Kabbalah. This is really a minor issue nowadays. Kabbalah has become very trendy and more women are beginning to study it. I must point out, however, that the left side of the Kabbalistic Tree (which correspond to the levels of creation) is considered the female side. It is more destructive than the male, right side and evil is considered a harsh byproduct of the left side of creation.

A more important point is the idea that the study and mastery of Kabbalah brings one closer to God. This sounds good, but we're not talking about God in a generic whatever-that-means-to-you kind of way. Although friendlier than it's Christian evangelical cousins, Judaism has a purchase on truth. It is the one true way and while Kabbalah teaches that God is neither spirit nor matter, creator of both, yet himself neither, it still promotes a dualistic system holding that there is a good power versus an evil power.

To add to the cauldron, the Kabbalah contains a theologically framed hostility in its metaphysics of the human soul. Kabbalistic works assume that Jewish and non-Jewish souls are fundamentally different. The souls of non-Jews emanate from the left side of the Kabbalistic Tree and therefore have a dark or demonic aspect to them that is absent in Jews.

Some aspects of traditional Kabbalah are so deeply intertwined with Jewish religious beliefs and practices that they are meaningless outside of this context, but like everything else people have studied and interpreted other aspects of it for so long that they almost have a distinct identity of their own. I suppose this is how it ended up in Wicca, much like everything else, through Freemasonry and the Western Mystery Tradition.

I've learned to live with the fact that so much of Wicca has its roots in medieval esoteric Christianity. It hasn't been that hard to accept things like that the four cardinal points were invested with esoteric meaning following Biblical tradition, but that's mostly because Christians don't know that and there's very little in Wiccan cosmology, liturgy, and ritual that actually resembles those of modern Christianity. But Kabbalah? I don't know. This is something I'll be exploring as my studies in Wicca deepen.