Quick Answer
If you have read about Kabbalah and never read any Kabbalah, this is the book. Daniel Matt, who later spent eighteen years translating the whole Zohar, chose a few hundred short passages from a thousand years of Jewish mystical writing, arranged them by theme rather than by author, and translated them into an English that is both accurate and beautiful. It is under two hundred pages. It is not a guide to the tradition; it is the tradition, sampled by someone who knows it as well as anyone alive.
Key Takeaways
- Primary texts, not explanation. The Zohar, Luria, Abulafia and the Hasidim speak for themselves.
- Arranged by theme, so many voices meet on each question.
- Ein Sof first. The anthology begins where the tradition begins, with the unsayable.
- Matt's English is the reason to choose it over other samplers.
- Read it before Scholem, or beside him, never instead of the texts.
16 min read
What This Book Is
The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism was published by HarperSanFrancisco in 1995 as part of a series presenting the world's mystical traditions through their own texts.
It is an anthology. Daniel Matt selected several hundred short passages, from a sentence to a page, from the primary literature of Kabbalah across roughly a thousand years, translated them from Hebrew and Aramaic, and arranged them under thematic headings with a substantial introduction and a section of notes identifying every source.
The whole is under two hundred pages, and the passages themselves take up perhaps a hundred and twenty. The rest is Matt's framing, which is spare and precise.
Thirty years on it remains the anthology most often recommended as a first encounter with the texts, and it has not been superseded.
What it is not. This is not the Hermetic Qabalah of the Golden Dawn, nor the Kabbalah Centre's self-help, nor a systematic exposition of the Tree of Life. It is the Jewish mystical tradition in its own words, chosen by a scholar of that tradition. Readers coming from the Western esoteric side will find it both familiar and startlingly different, and that difference is one of the reasons to read it.
Who Daniel Matt Is
Daniel Chanan Matt was born in 1950, took his doctorate at Brandeis under Alexander Altmann, and taught for two decades at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
He is best known for the Pritzker Edition of the Zohar, the first complete annotated English translation of the central text of Kabbalah, published by Stanford in twelve volumes between 2004 and 2017, of which he translated nine. Before it he had produced a Paulist Press selection from the Zohar in 1983, this anthology in 1995, and God and the Big Bang, on Kabbalah and cosmology, in 1996.
He is, in short, the person one would want choosing the passages, and the anthology reads as the notebook of someone who had already spent twenty years in the texts and knew exactly which lines stayed with him.
The Thematic Arrangement
The editorial decision that makes the book work.
Most anthologies of a tradition proceed by author or by century. Matt proceeds by subject. There is a section on Ein Sof, one on creation, one on the sefirot, on Torah, on the soul, on contemplation, on ethics, on the Shekhinah, on evil, on the Messiah and the end. Within each section the passages are drawn from across the whole history, so that a thirteenth-century Zohar text sits beside a sixteenth-century Lurianic one and an eighteenth-century Hasidic saying, all on the same question.
The effect is to show the tradition as a conversation across time rather than a sequence of schools. It also means a reader can open the book at whatever interests them and get a complete short course on that theme.
The cost is that historical development is invisible unless one consults the notes. Matt accepted that cost deliberately, and the introduction supplies the chronology for anyone who wants it.
Ein Sof
The opening section, and the right place to begin.
Ein Sof, the Infinite, literally Without End, is the Kabbalistic name for God as God is beyond all revelation, all attributes, all names. The passages Matt gathers here are attempts to say the unsayable and to explain why it cannot be said: that Ein Sof is not even to be called One, since oneness is a quality; that no letter or word of Torah names it; that thought reaches its edge and stops.
He opens with Azriel of Gerona in the early thirteenth century, and with the Zohar's insistence that Ein Sof is neither in the Torah nor in the prophets, and lets the reader feel the vertigo the tradition intends. Everything after is an account of how the Infinite comes to be spoken of at all.
Creation and Emanation
The section on how the world arises from Ein Sof.
Here the reader meets the central Kabbalistic idea that creation is not a making but an emanation, a flowing out of the divine through successive stages, each more condensed than the last, until the material world appears at the far end. The passages describe the first point of light, the concealed thought, the letters of the alphabet as the instruments of creation, and the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum, the divine contraction that made room for a world.
The Sefer Yetzirah's letters and the Zohar's primordial point are both here, and the section is where a reader used to Neoplatonic emanation will recognise a cousin, and notice how differently the Kabbalists handle the descent.
The Sefirot
The longest section, on the ten emanations that structure the whole tradition.
The sefirot, Crown, Wisdom, Understanding, Love, Power, Beauty, Endurance, Splendour, Foundation and Kingdom, are the ten aspects through which Ein Sof reveals itself and the world is sustained. Matt gathers the classical descriptions: the sefirot as the body of the divine, as the colours of a single light passing through glass, as the branches of a tree with its roots above, as the names of God, as the stages of the soul's ascent.
The passages show the sefirot as living and interacting rather than as a static diagram. They love, withdraw, give birth, are wounded, are healed. Readers who know the Tree of Life from the occult tradition will find here the texts that the diagram was drawn from, and will see how much motion the diagram froze.
Torah as Living Body
A section that has no parallel in most other mystical traditions.
For the Kabbalists, the Torah is not a book about God but a form of God: the divine name written out at length, a body whose garments are the stories, whose limbs are the commandments, and whose soul is the secret meaning available to those who love it. The passages Matt gathers include the Zohar's famous parable of the Torah as a beautiful maiden who reveals herself gradually to the one who waits beneath her window, and the Lurianic teaching that each Jew has a letter of the Torah that is their own.
The section explains why Kabbalah is so relentlessly exegetical, why the tradition proceeds by reading rather than by vision, and why a Kabbalist meditates on words.
The Soul
The Kabbalistic anthropology, in its own terms.
The soul has levels, nefesh, ruah and neshamah, and higher ones still. It descends from the sefirot, is clothed in the body, and returns. It may be reborn. The passages here describe the soul's origin, its garments, its journey after death, and the doctrine of gilgul, transmigration, which the Lurianic school developed in detail.
Matt includes some of the most beautiful lines in the collection here, on the soul as a candle that must be lit, and on the moment of death as the reunion of a spark with its source.
Contemplation and Prayer
The practical section, and the one most readers turn to first.
It gathers Abraham Abulafia's instructions for the permutation of letters, in which the meditator combines the letters of the divine name in all their orders until the mind is loosed from the body; the doctrine of kavvanah, intention in prayer, by which each word is directed to its sefirah; the Hasidic teaching of devekut, cleaving to God in every act; and the instruction to pray with the whole body.
The passages are a sampler and not a manual. A reader who wants to practise will need Kaplan or a teacher. What the section gives is the range of the tradition's methods and the texts they come from.
One passage from the contemplation section shows what the whole book does. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, is quoted on prayer: that a person should put all their strength into the words, going from letter to letter until they forget their body, and that the letters themselves become the vessels of the divine. Matt places it a few pages after Abulafia's letter-permutations of five centuries earlier. The reader sees at once that the Hasidic master and the medieval ecstatic are doing the same thing, and that the tradition is one practice in many dresses. No amount of explanation would show this as fast as the two passages set side by side.
The Shekhinah
The feminine presence of God, and one of the tradition's most distinctive themes.
The Shekhinah is the tenth sefirah, Kingdom, the divine presence that dwells in the world and in exile with Israel, the bride of the Holy One, the moon to his sun. The passages describe her in exile, her union with her partner on the Sabbath, the role of human action in reuniting the divine couple, and the mourning for her that the mystic undertakes at midnight.
Matt does not soften the erotic and gendered language. The section is where the reader sees how far Kabbalah went in imagining God as a relationship, and how much of the tradition's devotion is directed at healing a divine separation.
Evil and the Other Side
The hard section, and an honest one.
Kabbalah has a developed account of evil, the sitra ahra, the Other Side, a domain of husks or shells that draws its life from the holy and imprisons sparks of light. The passages describe its origin in the excess of divine judgment, its structure as a parody of the sefirot, and the human task of extracting the sparks from it.
The Lurianic doctrine of the breaking of the vessels, in which the first attempt at creation shattered and scattered divine light into the shells, is given here in the words of Hayyim Vital, and the reader who knows it only from summaries will find it stranger and more vivid than expected.
The Lurianic Passages
Worth singling out, because they are the hardest to find in English.
Isaac Luria wrote almost nothing. His system survives in the writings of his disciples, above all Hayyim Vital, whose Etz Hayyim has never been fully translated. Matt's selections from Vital on tzimtzum, the breaking of the vessels, the repair, and the soul, are among the few reliable renderings a general reader can reach, and they make the anthology valuable to people who already know the rest.
The Lurianic system is the most influential form of Kabbalah and the least accessible in the original. This book is one of the doors.
The Hasidic Voices
The last major layer, and the one that brings the tradition into the modern world.
Matt includes the Baal Shem Tov, Dov Baer of Mezritch, Nahman of Bratslav, Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl and others, on joy, on serving God in the ordinary, on the presence of the divine in every thing, on the raising up of the material. The Hasidic passages are the most immediately usable in the book and the most quoted.
He closes with Abraham Isaac Kook, the twentieth-century chief rabbi and mystic, whose passages on the expansion of the soul and on the holiness of the secular carry the tradition to the edge of the present.
The Messiah and the End
The closing thematic section, and the one that shows how far the tradition's cosmic picture reaches.
Kabbalah is not only a doctrine of origins. It has a doctrine of ends: the repair of the world, tikkun, by which the scattered sparks are gathered and the divine union restored; the coming of the Messiah as the completion of that repair rather than its cause; and the transformation of the world that follows. The Lurianic passages here are the most striking, since Luria placed the whole burden of redemption on human action, so that every commandment performed with intention lifts a spark and brings the end nearer.
Matt sets beside them the Hasidic softening, in which the Messiah is also an inner state and the redemption happens in each person who cleaves to God, and Kook's vision of a redemption that includes the secular and the scientific. The section leaves a reader with the sense, which the tradition intends, that the cosmos is unfinished and that the reader is one of the hands finishing it.
The Translation
The reason to choose this anthology over others.
Matt translates for the ear. His English is rhythmic, spare and clear, and it makes the texts sound like what they are, poetry as much as doctrine. He condenses sometimes, and a scholar wanting every word of a passage should go to the source the note gives. For the general reader the condensation is a mercy.
The notes identify every passage by text, section and edition, and the bibliography points to the full translations where they exist. Nothing is unattributed.
Beside Scholem
The comparison most readers will make, since Scholem's Major Trends is the other book everyone recommends.
Scholem explains. He tells the history, defines the schools, argues about origins and influence, and writes as a historian who was also, privately, a seeker. Matt presents. He lets the texts speak and keeps his own voice to the introduction and notes.
They are not rivals. Scholem is the map; Matt is the territory sampled. A reader who takes both will understand the tradition better than one who takes either alone, and if forced to choose, the texts should come first, since the map can be drawn later.
Where to Go Next
The anthology is designed to send a reader onward, and the notes make the path clear.
To the Zohar itself, in Matt's own Pritzker translation or in his earlier selection. To the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir, both short and both translated. To Cordovero for ethics and to Kaplan for practice. To Scholem and Idel for history and argument.
Most readers will find, after this book, that they know which door they want. That is what a good anthology is for.
The Limits
Three, and they follow from the format.
It is short. A hundred and twenty pages of passages from a literature of thousands of pages. The selection is superb and it is a selection.
History is submerged. The thematic order hides development, and a reader can finish the book without a clear sense of who came when.
It does not argue. Matt presents the tradition as the tradition presents itself. Readers who want the critical questions, about origins, about gender, about the relation to philosophy, must go elsewhere.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have read about Kabbalah and never read a line of it.
Read it if you know the occult Qabalah and want to see the Jewish sources it grew from, unmediated.
Read it if you have Scholem on the shelf and want the voices behind his history.
Read it a section at a time, on whatever question is live for you, since that is how it was built.
The book's arrangement teaches something the tradition itself teaches. Set the thirteenth century beside the eighteenth on a single question and the centuries fall away; what remains is a conversation that has been going on for a very long time among people who were, in the end, trying to do the same thing. Kabbalah is not a doctrine to be learned but a way of reading, of praying, of paying attention, and Matt's anthology shows it in the act rather than describing it from outside. The reader who finishes it has not learned Kabbalah. They have overheard it, which is the older and better way in.
A thousand years of Jewish mysticism in its own words, chosen by the translator of the Zohar.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the anthology's brevity and its submerged history are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Essential Kabbalah?
A 1995 anthology of short passages from the primary texts of Jewish mysticism, translated and arranged by Daniel Matt, with an introduction and notes. It covers the Zohar, the Lurianic school, Abulafia, Cordovero, the Hasidic masters and more in under two hundred pages.
Who is Daniel Matt?
An American scholar of Kabbalah, formerly professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, best known for the twelve-volume Pritzker Edition of the Zohar, the first complete annotated English translation, which he worked on for eighteen years.
How is it organised?
By theme rather than by source or period: Ein Sof, creation, the sefirot, Torah, the soul, meditation, ethics, the Shekhinah, evil, and the like, so that a reader meets many voices on one subject before moving to the next.
Which texts are included?
Passages from the Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, Azriel of Gerona, Abraham Abulafia, Moses de León, Moses Cordovero, Isaac Luria as recorded by Hayyim Vital, the Baal Shem Tov, Dov Baer of Mezritch, Nahman of Bratslav and Abraham Isaac Kook, among others.
Is it a beginner's book?
Yes, in the sense that it assumes no Hebrew and little background. It is not simplified, though: the passages are real primary texts and some are dense. The introduction and notes carry a beginner through.
What is Ein Sof?
The Infinite, the Kabbalistic name for God beyond all attributes and all description, from which the ten sefirot emanate. Matt opens the anthology here, because everything else in the tradition is a way of speaking about what cannot be spoken about.
What are the sefirot?
The ten emanations or aspects through which Ein Sof reveals itself and sustains the world, arranged in the diagram called the Tree of Life. The anthology gives the classical descriptions of each and the ways they interact.
Does it cover meditation?
Yes. A section on contemplation gathers Abulafia's letter-permutation techniques, the Hasidic teaching on cleaving to God, and instructions on prayer with intention, though it is a sampler rather than a manual.
How accurate are the translations?
Matt is among the most respected translators of these texts alive, and the renderings are both scholarly and readable. He favours a lyrical English and sometimes condenses; the notes indicate sources for anyone who wants the full passage.
How does it compare to Scholem?
Scholem explains the tradition from outside, historically. Matt lets the tradition speak in its own words. They are complementary: Scholem for what Kabbalah is and where it came from, Matt for what it sounds like.
Is it for Jewish readers only?
No. It was published in a series on the world's mystical traditions and is written for any reader. It does assume interest in the Jewish sources and does not attempt the Hermetic or occult versions of Kabbalah.
Who should read it?
Anyone who has read about Kabbalah and wants to read Kabbalah, readers of Scholem who want the texts behind the history, and anyone who wants the Zohar without committing to twelve volumes.
Overhear it
Pick one question you actually have, about the soul, about evil, about why prayer works or does not, and open the book to that section. Read the passages in order without stopping to look anything up. You will be listening to a dozen people across seven centuries answer your question to each other. That is a different thing from being told the answer, and it is the thing this tradition has always believed is the only way to learn.
Sources & References
- Matt, Daniel C. The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.
- Matt, Daniel C., trans. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Stanford University Press, 2004 to 2017.
- Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
- Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives.
- Kaplan, Aryeh. Meditation and Kabbalah.
- Vital, Hayyim. Etz Hayyim, as excerpted and cited in Matt's notes.