by David H. Levy

In the autumn of 1976, my first, “practice wife” and I visited Safed in northern Israel. In addition to being shown a 400-year-old Torah, we were introduced to the idea that Jewish mysticism, known as “Kabbalah”, got its start and flourished there. A lot of that mysticism had to do with connecting Jewish (and later Christian) ideologies with the night sky.

Kabbalah comes from a Hebrew root word, which means to receive; the ideas were originally passed on from parent to child, from master to disciple. In this article I explain what Kabbalah means to me. Several writers have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to compare Kabbalah with the origins of modern cosmology and with the formation of the universe. I agree that there may be a valid argument here, but for me, Kabbalah has taken on a deeply personal connotation.

I am not a scientist. At McGill University in Montreal, I flunked twice in two successive years in my attempts to master physics. During a third try at Acadia University in maritime Canada, I very nearly failed again, this time in Geology. It wasn’t until I transferred out of science altogether into the world of English literature that I finally started to do well. I still have never taken a course in astronomy. Everything I know about the Cosmos, about planetary science, about double stars, and about clusters of galaxies comes from my own reading, and my own observations of the night sky. I am in it because my heart and soul are forever linked to the magic and wonders of the night sky. I am much more at home with Kabbalah than I am with any scientific thoughts about the cosmos. I believe that the heart and soul of Kabbalah derives from personal experience, failure, and a sense of wonder.

In Psalm 36.10, We are told “By your light will I be enlightened.” As each of us tries, in her or his own way, to comprehend our world and the universe in which our world resides, we are struck by how complex, yet how simple, it can be. Einstein himself said that “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.” It can work. We can understand. All it takes is a little patience, some intelligence, and the passion involved in looking up at a darkening sky.