What Can We Learn From the Writing Style of Kabbalistic Source Books?
Many years ago, a Torah scholar speaking at a public gathering I attended said some strange things. Everything sounded fine until you spent a moment thinking about it. As an example, he insisted that “Rabbi S.R. Hirsch and the Baal Hatanya translated the word הלל identically.”
Now that’s simply untrue. R’ Hirsch’s translation of הלל is on the record and it bears no resemblance to the translation reported in the speech.1 It’s not as though there are any political points to be made here one way or the other, it’s just incorrect. I said nothing at the time, but I quietly wondered why that rabbi would have said such nonsense.
Some months later, I heard that that scholar was suffering from dementia and, in all likelihood, was already in the early stages of the disease at the time of the speech. This put things in an entirely different light.
Many people in dementia-fueled states scream obscenities or repeat embarrassing secrets. This rabbi also spouted gibberish. But his brand of gibberish reflected what had obviously been the passionate focus of his life. He might have created some bizarre pairings, but his mind - as it had always been - was still occupied with Torah.
My attention was recently directed to some chapters in R’ Chaim Vital’s Eitz Chaim. The writing is famously dense but, in isolation, the individual words and sentence fragments all make sense (at least within the context of Lurianic kabbala). However, the distinct stream of consciousness style of the writing and the loosely-framed conceptual connections contained just a hint of that dementia-inspired speech.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to waste everyone’s time with a silly attempt to diagnose a medical condition from the distance of centuries. But the stylistic similarities do suggest another possibility.
First though, here’s a brief example of what I’m talking about (from Eitz Chaim 49:3):
לכן יש חלב מהחזה ולמטה של הבהמות כולם חלב טמא וחלב טהור טוב ורע נגד נוקבא דנגה הנ”ל וכמ”ש בע”ה ובתקון מ”ג והנה אלו הם שיורי המלכים שמתו שלא נתבררו עדין ונקרא י”א סמני הקטורת וזה סוד מזבח אדמה בסוד מלכי ארץ אדום כנזכר פ’ תרומה וז”ס הכל היה מן העפר וז”ס אדמת עפר כנזכר פ’ משפטים
Therefore, there is fat below the chest of animals, some tameh and some tahor: good and evil corresponding to the female quality mentioned above…And these are the leftover kings who died without yet having been refined. They are called 11 incense ingredients. This is the secret of the earth altar in the mystery of the kings of the land of Edom…This is the secret of ‘everything came from the dust’ and this is the secret of ‘dust of the ground’…
I understand that the passage contains external references with which readers are expected to familiar (consult an AI model for details). I understand that סוד can be translated as “secret” - implying that we’re not even supposed to understand what’s going on. I also understand that kabbalists claim that the conceptual connections in these works are actually the products of a divine revelation of one kind or another (although they provide no evidence, and I’m reluctant to take their word for it2).
Nevertheless, I’m just not inspired by the many apparently unfounded parallels contained in this short passage.
In what way are the “tameh and tahor” of fats (where, in context, the words really mean “forbidden” and “permitted”) comparable to “good” and “evil”?
In what way are those comparable to the (eleven) kings of Edom?
In what way are those (unrefined) kings of Edom comparable to the eleven ingredients in the incense used in the Mishkan?
How does the fact that Edom (אדום) and earth (אדמה) share some letters connect the kings of one to the altar made from the other?
How does earth (אדמה) connect to soil/dirt (עפר) - which are completely different words?
Besides the claim that Eitz Chaim - along with its conceptual connections - is effectively the result of divine inspiration, there are a few other explanations for the apparent lack of intellectual vigor.
Perhaps people in that time and place thought and wrote in a style that’s more lyrical than analytical. Maybe they were aiming more for feeling and impression than logic.
Or perhaps the style was influenced by the consumption of psychoactive substances. I think I can “hear” a certain hallucinogenic flavor to the writing. The problem there is that, while psychedelics were definitely popular at that time and place, there is exactly zero evidence of anyone associated with the Ari and his students ever using them.
However, there’s one more possible explanation that’s a much better fit with everything we know about the early kabbalists. By their own accounts, the people who produced so many writings of this style were keen on fasting, meditation, and sleep deprivation.
Is there a plausible biological pathway between such practices and vivid visions? I asked an AI model for some ideas:
1. Sleep deprivation
Sleep deprivation is probably the most powerful factor.
Even moderate sleep loss can produce:
Heightened emotional salience
A sense of significance attached to ordinary events
Visual distortions
Auditory phenomena (hearing voices, words, music)
Dream-like imagery intruding into waking consciousness
After prolonged sleep deprivation, people can experience genuine hallucinations.
The Safed kabbalists frequently practiced:
חצות (midnight vigils)
All-night study sessions
Repeated disruptions of normal sleep cycles
A person studying sacred texts until dawn, night after night, can enter a state where the boundary between dreaming and waking becomes unusually permeable.
Modern researchers sometimes call this REM intrusion—dream mechanisms partially activating during wakefulness.3
2. Fasting
Fasting contributes in several ways.
Extended fasting can produce:
Lightheadedness
Altered sensory perception
Heightened concentration
Reduced inhibition
Emotional intensity
Historically, fasting has been used by mystics in many traditions because it tends to narrow attention and increase absorption.
Combined with expectation and religious devotion, a faster may become more likely to experience:
Inner voices
Symbolic imagery
Powerful intuitions
A feeling of direct revelation
3. Intensive meditation
Meditation can induce states that resemble some aspects of psychedelic experience.
Researchers studying experienced meditators have documented reports including:
Loss of self-boundaries
Feelings of unity
Brilliant inner imagery
Perceived encounters with entities
Distortions of time
The Lurianic system demanded extraordinary concentration on:
Divine names
Letter permutations
Complex symbolic structures
Multi-layered visualizations
Hours of concentrated attention can produce a state psychologists call absorption—the mind becomes so immersed in an internal representation that it acquires a quasi-perceptual quality.4
In other words, one no longer merely thinks about an image; one experiences it.
I’m not claiming to know that such kabbalistic writings are the products of “psychedelic” experiences. But it does seem at least plausible. The real question that I think we should be asking is whether the material generated by people in such impaired5 emotional states has any scholarly value.
Perhaps it’s finally time to fully accept R’ Hirsch’s thoughts on modern kabbala:
Had it been correctly comprehended, it might perhaps have imbued practical Judaism with spirituality; but, as it was misconstrued, the practice of Judaism was interpreted to be a form of magical mechanistic manipulation, a means of influencing or resisting theosophic worlds and anti-worlds.” (The Nineteen Letters: Letter Eighteen)
The translation used in the speech isn’t important and I don’t happen to know the Baal Hatanya’s translation - although I doubt it was a close match either.
If for no other reason that the authoritative divine revelation ended at Mt. Sinai (לא בשמים היא).
See Mahowald MW, Schenck CH. “Insights from studying human sleep disorders.” Nature (2005) and Kevin Nelson, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain (2011)
See Auke Tellegen & Gilbert Atkinson, “Openness to Absorbing and Self-Altering Experiences” (1974) and David Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary.
Would you allow such a person to fly a plane…or even drive a car?
It seems like your quote from Rav Hirsch undermines the main point of your article. Your point seems to be, this content is flawed in its origin and has very little meaningful ideas to teach. Rav Hirsch is saying that such ideas do have merit but only when understood properly; problems begin when they are misunderstood and taken as mechanistic instead of symbolic. In other words, you and rav hirsch end up in similar places - rejecting the importance of modern kabbalah - but for very different reasons.
Debating whether Rabbi Chaim Vital wrote Toras Emes or apikorsis is way above my paygrade so I won't touch that topic. What I can do is offer with relative certainty what Vital's kabbalistic writings weren't. They weren't ramblings of someone suffering from dementia, they weren't written during a psychotic episode, and they weren't a result of hallucinations.
Let's start with dementia. Vital stopped editing his kabbalistic works, I believe, when he was only 62 years old, long before dementia typically begins. He lived for another 16 years without showing any signs of cognitive decline. Dementia is a degenerative descent that people recognize. We all saw that with Joe Biden. Surely, if Vital suffered from that, people would've noticed and had him resign as a dayan. However, that never happened. He remained a respected dayan and community leader, I think, until he passed away.
Next, psychosis. True clinical psychosis is characterized by cognitive disintegration, and disorganized thought and speech. Etz Chaim is the exact opposite. Whatever it is, kosher or otherwise, Eitz Chaim is not simple. It is almost an encyclopedia of metaphysics or advanced cosmic calculus. A mind undergoing a psychotic break I believe is incapable of producing that level of complexities.
Finally, hallucinations. The ultimate proof that Vital was in complete control of his faculties is that he quarantined his actual hallucinations (induced by sleep, food, and social deprivation) inside a separate personal diary called Sefer HaChezionos, while keeping his kabbalistic writings strictly isolated inside Etz Chaim. He kept those two separated like basar v'chalav. Someone lacking mental control would lump those together into one big book of teyruvos, not create a great wall of separation between kabbalah and personal visions.
You wrote that Eitz Chaim requires "external references with which readers are expected to be familiar", but later you concluded that a lack of obvious logic equals a "hallucinogenic flavor." If I'm understanding you correctly, and please correct me if I am not, you're saying that when I am not familiar with a topic, my lack of understanding dictates that therefore the topic must somehow be hallucinogenic. If that is what you mean, I would respectfully disagree and conclude that my lack of understanding might say more about me than it does about the topic I don't understand. Let me illustrate my point.
L'havdil, consider Freddie Mercury's lyrics: "Water babies singing in a lily pool delight, blue powder monkeys praying in the dead of night." L'choyrah, a casual reader might conclude Mercury was tripping on psychedelics when he wrote those bizarre lines. But he wasn't. That imagery of "water babies" was lifted directly from Charles Kingsley's classic 1863 Victorian children's book, while "powder monkeys" was naval slang for boys carrying gunpowder on 18th-century warships.
The point is, writing style doesn't prove hallucination. Just as Mercury used his sober intellect to stitch together historical and literary references, so too Vital plausibly used his Talmudic training to map out complex cosmic stuff. Just because the connection between "11 incense ingredients" and "the kings of Edom" reads like a hallucination to an outsider, such as myself, doesn't mean it didn't make perfect sense to men that cross-referenced them. I'm ignorant of powder monkeys and 11 herbs and spices. I can conclude that the writers were flying on drugs, or I can do a deep dive into those references to learn what they actually mean.