Kabbalah is the mystical tradition within Judaism that addresses the nature of God, creation, and the human soul. The word means "received tradition" in Hebrew. Its core teachings center on Ein Sof (the infinite divine), the ten Sefirot (divine emanations), and Tikkun Olam (the repair of the world).
- Kabbalah means "received tradition" in Hebrew, referring to an oral wisdom passed from teacher to student within the framework of Jewish religious life.
- Its three foundational texts are the Sefer Yetzirah (2nd–6th century CE), the Sefer Bahir (12th-century Provence), and the Zohar (13th-century Spain, attributed to Moses de Leon).
- The central Kabbalistic concepts are Ein Sof (the infinite divine), the ten Sefirot on the Tree of Life, Tzimtzum (divine contraction), and Tikkun Olam (repair of the world).
- Lurianic Kabbalah, developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria in 16th-century Safed, introduced the most complete account of creation, cosmic rupture, and the soul's redemptive role.
- Jewish Kabbalah is inseparable from Torah and halakha; Hermetic Qabalah is a Western esoteric adaptation that grafted the tradition onto Tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic from the Renaissance onward.
Of all the currents within Western esotericism, Kabbalah is one of the most intellectually rigorous and one of the most consistently misrepresented. It has been called the secret heart of Judaism, the source code of Western magic, a self-help philosophy for celebrities, and an ancient science of consciousness. Some of these claims have more grounding than others.
This article aims to give Kabbalah the clear treatment it deserves: beginning with what the word actually means and what tradition it actually names, working through the historical development from the earliest texts to the school of Safed, laying out the core concepts with precision, and then honestly addressing how those concepts have traveled beyond their Jewish home into the wider stream of Western esoteric thought.
What Is Kabbalah?
Kabbalah is the mystical tradition within Judaism. It is not a separate religion, not a self-contained philosophy, and not an esoteric system that can be cleanly separated from the broader practice of Jewish religious life. At its core, Kabbalah is concerned with three questions that run through all Jewish thought but which Kabbalistic texts address with unusual directness: What is the nature of God? How did the world come into being? And what is the purpose of the human soul within creation?
The tradition is not monolithic. Over roughly two thousand years, different schools of Kabbalistic thought have produced very different answers to those questions, and the internal disagreements are substantial. What unites them is a shared set of concepts, a shared canon of texts, and a shared commitment to reading Torah as a document whose surface meaning conceals an infinite depth of symbolic and mystical significance.
Kabbalah should be distinguished from two things it is frequently confused with. First, it is not the same as general Jewish mysticism. Jewish mystical experience is very ancient, and includes traditions like Merkabah mysticism (the chariot mysticism of the early centuries CE) that predate Kabbalah as such. Kabbalah proper names a specific medieval development, rooted in Provence and Spain from the 12th century onward, that synthesized earlier mystical currents with a new systematic vocabulary centered on the Sefirot and the Tree of Life. Second, Kabbalah in the strict sense is not the same as the Hermetic Qabalah of the Western esoteric lodges. That distinction will receive its own treatment below.
The Word Itself: "To Receive"
The word Kabbalah (קַבָּלָה) derives from the Hebrew three-letter root K-B-L (Qof-Bet-Lamed), meaning "to receive." The nominalized form, kabbalah, means "that which has been received" or "received tradition." This etymology is not merely linguistic decoration. It expresses the tradition's self-understanding in a pointed way.
Kabbalistic teaching has always understood itself as transmitted wisdom rather than invented doctrine. The knowledge was held to be received: passed orally from master to student, generation by generation, tracing a chain of transmission that the tradition attributed to Moses on Sinai and ultimately to a divine source. A Kabbalist is, in this framework, not someone who figured out a new system but someone who received what their teacher received from their teacher.
This emphasis on transmission has practical implications. It means that in classical Kabbalah, studying the texts without a living teacher was considered incomplete at best and dangerous at worst. Certain teachings were held back until a student had demonstrated the necessary preparation, both intellectual and ethical. The oral dimension of the tradition was not merely practical; it was intrinsic to the nature of the knowledge itself.
Historical Development
The Foundational Texts of Kabbalah
The Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Formation") is the oldest text associated with the Kabbalistic tradition, though its dating is genuinely disputed: scholarly estimates range from the 2nd to the 6th century CE, and some researchers place it even later. Attributed by tradition to the patriarch Abraham, it is a short and cryptic work that describes creation as proceeding through 32 "wondrous paths of wisdom": the ten Sefirot Belimah (primordial numbers or emanations, described without the Tree of Life diagram that later tradition would develop) and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sefer Yetzirah is the conceptual seed from which much of later Kabbalistic cosmology grew, planting the ideas of the Sefirot, the three letter-categories (mothers, doubles, and simples), and the notion that God creates reality through language.
The Sefer Bahir ("Book of Illumination") appeared in 12th-century Provence and was attributed by tradition to Rabbi Nehunia ben HaKanah, a 1st-century sage. Modern scholarship treats it as a medieval composition that drew on earlier mystical fragments. The Bahir was the first text to use the word Sefirot in the sense that later Kabbalah would standardize, and it introduced symbolic imagery for the Sefirot that would become foundational. It also developed the concept of the Shekhinah as a feminine dimension of the divine, laying groundwork for the gender dynamics that pervade the Zohar.
The Zohar ("Book of Radiance") is the masterwork of Kabbalistic literature. It appeared in late 13th-century Spain, presented as an ancient Aramaic Midrash by the 2nd-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Gershom Scholem's research demonstrated that the Zohar was in fact composed primarily by the Spanish Kabbalist Moses de Leon around 1280–1286 CE, though it draws on earlier traditions and may have had multiple contributors. Written in the elevated and archaic style of a rabbinic Midrash, the Zohar is an immense multi-volume work of mystical commentary on the Torah. It presents the fullest classical account of the Sefirot, the dynamics between the divine masculine and feminine (the Holy One Blessed Be He and the Shekhinah), and the mystical significance of the commandments and the Sabbath.
Lurianic Kabbalah, the most influential school of the post-Zoharic period, crystallized in 16th-century Safed (in what is now northern Israel) around the figure of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572), known as the Ari ("the Lion"). Luria himself wrote almost nothing; his teachings were transmitted and recorded primarily by his student Rabbi Chaim Vital in a work called Etz Chaim ("Tree of Life"). Lurianic Kabbalah introduced a new cosmological myth built around three pivotal concepts: Tzimtzum (the divine contraction), Shevirat HaKelim (the shattering of the vessels), and Tikkun (the process of repair). These concepts gave Kabbalah a dynamic, historical, and urgently redemptive quality that previous formulations had not fully developed.
The Safed circle of the 16th century was extraordinary by any measure. In addition to Isaac Luria, it included Rabbi Joseph Karo (author of the Shulchan Aruch, the definitive code of Jewish law), Rabbi Moses Cordovero (whose Pardes Rimonim is one of the most systematic pre-Lurianic Kabbalistic compendia), and Rabbi Solomon Alkabetz (author of the Shabbat hymn Lecha Dodi, still sung in synagogues today). The concentration of scholarship and mystical intensity in this small Galilean town during this brief period has no obvious parallel in the history of Jewish thought.
Kabbalah continued to develop after Safed. The Shabbatean movement of the 17th century, centered on the messianic claimant Sabbatai Zvi, drew heavily on Lurianic Kabbalah and ended in catastrophe when Sabbatai Zvi converted to Islam under Ottoman pressure in 1666. The 18th century saw the rise of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, which took the Lurianic framework and democratized it, shifting the emphasis from complex theosophical speculation toward devekut, cleaving to God through prayer, joy, and daily life. Hasidism remains one of the living branches of the Kabbalistic tradition.
Core Concepts
The Architecture of Kabbalistic Thought
Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף, "without end" or "infinite") is the Kabbalistic name for the divine in its absolute, incomprehensible aspect. Ein Sof is not a being among other beings, not a person with intentions and emotions in any ordinary sense, and not a God who can be named, prayed to, or described. It is the ground of all being, prior to all differentiation, utterly beyond the reach of human thought or language. The Kabbalists were clear that anything said about God in the Torah and in Jewish prayer is said not about Ein Sof directly but about the Sefirot, the faces or modes through which the infinite divine becomes accessible.
Tzimtzum (צִמְצוּם, "contraction" or "withdrawal") is the Lurianic answer to a question that had long troubled Kabbalistic thought: if God is infinite and fills all reality, how is there any space for a world that is not God? Luria's answer was that the infinite divine contracted or withdrew into itself, leaving a primordial space (the Tehiru) within which creation could take place. This act of self-limitation was the precondition for anything other than God to exist. The concept has been enormously influential, not only within Kabbalah but in broader Jewish theology and in Western philosophy, where it has been read as a metaphor for the divine act of making room for genuine human freedom.
Shevirat HaKelim (שְׁבִירַת הַכֵּלִים, "the shattering of the vessels") describes a primordial catastrophe in the Lurianic account of creation. After the Tzimtzum, divine light flowed into the space of creation and was channeled into ten vessels corresponding to the Sefirot. The lower seven vessels, however, were unable to contain the intensity of the light, and they shattered. Their fragments, still bearing sparks of the original divine light, scattered throughout creation and became embedded in the material world. This cosmic rupture is the origin of evil, suffering, and the sense of divine absence. It also establishes the central task of human existence.
Tikkun Olam (תִּיקּוּן עוֹלָם, "repair of the world") names that task. Human beings, through righteous action, Torah study, prayer, and the proper intention (kavanah) behind every deed, participate in the work of gathering and elevating the scattered divine sparks and returning them to their source. Tikkun is not a project that any individual can complete alone; it is a collective and multigenerational work in which every Jewish soul has a part. In its Lurianic form, Tikkun Olam has a specifically messianic dimension: the completion of the repair is associated with the coming of the messianic age. In contemporary usage the phrase is often applied more broadly to social justice, which is a legitimate but distinct use of the concept.
The Ten Sefirot
The ten Sefirot (singular: Sefirah) are the ten divine emanations through which Ein Sof makes itself accessible to creation. They are not ten separate gods or ten separate beings. They are ten qualities, modes, or attributes of a single divine reality, arranged in a specific pattern on the diagram known as the Tree of Life (Etz Chaim). Each Sefirah names something true about the nature of God and, equally, something true about the structure of the human soul.
The ten Sefirot in descending order are: Kether (Crown, pure being), Chokmah (Wisdom, the initial flash of divine thought), Binah (Understanding, the womb that gives form to wisdom), Chesed (Mercy, divine lovingkindness and abundance), Geburah (Severity, divine judgment and limitation), Tiphereth (Beauty, the harmonizing heart of the Tree), Netzach (Victory, emotion and the creative impulse), Hod (Splendor, intellect and precise formulation), Yesod (Foundation, the astral and unconscious mediating plane), and Malkuth (Kingdom, physical reality and the immanent divine presence).
The three upper Sefirot (Kether, Chokmah, Binah) form the supernal triad, which is separated from the lower seven by a conceptual threshold called the Abyss. The Abyss marks the boundary between the divine in its pure transcendence and the divine as it enters into relationship with creation. It is associated with Daath (Knowledge), a non-Sefirah that appears in this position in some traditions as a point of synthesis and crossing.
For a complete treatment of each Sefirah, its qualities, its position on the three pillars of the Tree, and its correspondences, see our dedicated article on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
The Four Worlds
Kabbalah does not treat the ten Sefirot as a single flat plane. The entire Tree of Life, with all ten Sefirot, exists at four levels of density or proximity to the divine source. These four levels are called the Four Worlds, and they represent the graduated process through which divine reality steps down from pure spirit into physical matter.
Atziluth (אֲצִילוּת, "Emanation") is the highest world, the domain of pure divine being. The Sefirot in Atziluth are still so close to Ein Sof that they are not yet properly differentiated as distinct principles. This world is associated with the divine name YHVH and with fire as its element.
Beriah (בְּרִיאָה, "Creation") is the world of the divine throne and the archangels. The Sefirot here have differentiated enough to be truly distinct. This is the level of pure intellect and divine archetypes, prior to form but after the first differentiation. It is associated with the divine name Elohim and with air.
Yetzirah (יְצִירָה, "Formation") is the world of the angels and of what the tradition calls the astral plane: the level at which the patterns established in Beriah take on specific form and begin to move toward material expression. The 72 angels of Jewish mystical tradition inhabit this world. It is associated with the divine name YHVH Tzvaot and with water.
Assiah (עֲשִׂיָּה, "Action" or "Making") is the material world in which we live, the world of physical reality, embodied existence, and sensory experience. It is the world of Malkuth in its most manifest form. Yet Assiah is not separate from the divine; every physical object in Assiah has its counterpart in the higher worlds, and the divine sparks scattered by the Shevirat HaKelim are present throughout this world, waiting to be raised. It is associated with the divine name Adonai and with earth.
The Four Worlds framework gave Kabbalistic cosmology both a vertical and a horizontal axis. The vertical axis is the ascent from Assiah through the worlds toward Ein Sof; the horizontal axis is the movement across the Sefirot within any given world. The soul's work takes place across both axes simultaneously.
Practical Kabbalah: Gematria, Divine Names, and Amulets
Alongside the theosophical Kabbalah concerned with the nature of God and creation, there has always existed what scholars call Practical Kabbalah: the application of Kabbalistic principles to direct spiritual and material ends. The two dimensions are not cleanly separable, since the theoretical understanding of divine structure is precisely what makes the practical applications possible, but the distinction is useful.
Gematria is the practice of assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters and words and finding meaningful equivalences between words or phrases with the same numerical value. Because Hebrew letters serve simultaneously as letters and as numbers (Aleph = 1, Bet = 2, and so on through the full alphabet), every Hebrew word has a numerical value. If two words share a value, the tradition reads a symbolic connection between them. The word chai ("life") has a value of 18, which is why giving gifts in multiples of 18 remains a widespread Jewish custom. Deeper gematria analysis forms a significant part of the Zohar's interpretive method.
The divine names in Practical Kabbalah are not merely descriptions of God. They are understood as having inherent spiritual power, capable of invoking or channeling specific divine qualities when used with proper intention and preparation. The 72 names of God, derived from a specific reading of three consecutive verses in Exodus through a method of letter arrangement, form the basis of a large body of practical instruction in Jewish mysticism and, later, in ceremonial magic.
Amulets (kamiyot) bearing divine names, biblical verses, or specific Kabbalistic formulae have been used throughout Jewish history for protection, healing, and blessing. The production of amulets was a recognized rabbinic activity, with detailed discussions in the Talmud about their validity, and the tradition continues in some communities today. The most widely known Kabbalistic amulet is the Hamsa, the open hand, which predates Kabbalah itself but was absorbed into Kabbalistic protective symbolism.
Christian and Hermetic Qabalah
One of the most significant events in the intellectual history of the Renaissance was the encounter between Christian humanist scholars and the Kabbalistic texts that became available following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was among the first Christian scholars to argue systematically that Kabbalah provided evidence for the truth of Christian theology, particularly for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. His 900 Theses (1486) included a substantial section on Kabbalistic propositions, and his Oration on the Dignity of Man drew on Kabbalistic ideas about the human being as a microcosm of the divine structure.
Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) carried the Christian Kabbalistic project further in his De Arte Cabalistica (1517), arguing that Jesus's name in Hebrew (Yeshua) was itself a Kabbalistic formula derived from the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) by the addition of the letter Shin, the mother letter associated with fire and spirit. This kind of argument was characteristic of Christian Kabbalah: using the structure of Jewish mystical thought as evidence for specifically Christian doctrinal claims, while detaching the Kabbalistic concepts from the halakhic and scriptural context in which they were rooted.
By the 19th century, this process of detachment was largely complete. The French occultist Eliphas Levi synthesized the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with Tarot, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy in works like Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855). The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, built an entire initiatory system on a fully elaborated version of this synthesis, assigning planets, Tarot cards, divine names, archangels, colors, and correspondences to every Sefirah and path on the Tree. This system, transmitted through Israel Regardie's publications, became the structural backbone of much of 20th-century ceremonial magic.
The resulting tradition is what is usually called Hermetic Qabalah (with the alternative spelling marking its non-Jewish character). It is a genuine tradition with its own lineage, its own internal logic, and its own accomplished practitioners. It is not, however, Jewish Kabbalah, and the differences are not merely superficial. Jewish Kabbalah is inseparable from the halakhic life of the Jewish community, from Torah as a living inheritance, and from a specific covenantal relationship between the Jewish people and the divine. Hermetic Qabalah takes the Tree of Life's structural framework and places it in an entirely different religious and philosophical context.
Kabbalah in Contemporary Culture
Kabbalah entered mainstream Western popular culture most visibly in the 1990s through the Kabbalah Centre, a Los Angeles-based organization founded by Philip Berg (1927–2013) and his wife Karen Berg. The Kabbalah Centre promoted a universalized, non-denominational version of Kabbalistic teaching accessible to people of any background, most famously attracting high-profile celebrity students including Madonna, who publicly identified with its teachings throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The organization sold products including Kabbalah water and red string bracelets, and at its peak had centers worldwide.
Academic Jewish scholars and rabbinical authorities were largely critical of the Kabbalah Centre's approach. Critics argued that the organization decontextualized Kabbalistic teachings from their essential Jewish moorings, commercialized sacred concepts, and presented a simplified version of the tradition that bore little resemblance to authentic Kabbalistic scholarship. The distinction between pop Kabbalah of this kind and the rigorous academic and traditional study of the subject is significant and worth understanding.
The academic study of Kabbalah was transformed in the 20th century above all by Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) established the field of Kabbalah studies as a serious scholarly discipline. Before Scholem, serious academic engagement with Kabbalah had been limited partly by the assumption, common among Enlightenment-influenced Jewish scholars, that mysticism represented a deviation from "authentic" rational Judaism. Scholem argued the opposite: that mysticism was a central and creative force in Jewish history, not a marginal embarrassment. His student Moshe Idel extended and in some respects challenged Scholem's framework, emphasizing the experiential and ecstatic dimensions of Kabbalistic practice alongside its theosophical structures. Daniel Matt's ongoing Pritzker Edition translation of the Zohar into English, published by Stanford University Press, has made the primary text of the tradition available to English readers for the first time in a rigorous scholarly edition.
A Practice: Contemplating Ein Sof
A Simple Kabbalistic Meditation on the Infinite
The following is a basic contemplative practice drawn from the meditative dimension of Kabbalistic tradition. It requires no special equipment, no initiation, and no prior knowledge beyond what has been presented in this article. Its value lies entirely in the quality of attention you bring to it.
Preparation: Sit in a quiet place with your spine upright. Take several slow, even breaths, allowing the pace of ordinary thought to settle. You are not trying to empty the mind; you are simply reducing the urgency of its usual activity.
The starting point: Bring to mind a simple object: a stone, a candle flame, a glass of water. Hold it in your awareness and consider: this object exists. It has a cause, which also had a cause, and that cause had a cause. Follow this chain of causation backward in your imagination. Each cause was itself caused. The chain extends backward without obvious limit.
The turn toward Ein Sof: At the limit of this chain, there is something that the Kabbalists called Ein Sof: that which simply is, without prior cause, without beginning, without end. Not a thing, not a being in the ordinary sense, but the condition for the possibility of anything at all. You cannot think Ein Sof directly. The moment you try to form a concept of it, you have already made it into a thing, which it is not. The practice is to hold this limit of thought as an open question rather than collapsing it into an answer.
The quality to hold: Sit with the sense of what it would mean for something to truly have no beginning and no end. No birth, no death, no before, no after. Not empty, but not any particular thing either. The Kabbalists described this as dwelling at the edge of human comprehension. That edge is precisely where this practice lives.
Duration and approach: Five to ten minutes is sufficient. The purpose is not to achieve a particular state but to train the mind to hold genuinely open questions without prematurely resolving them. This kind of negative capability, to borrow a phrase from a different tradition, is considered foundational to serious Kabbalistic contemplation. A short, regular practice of this kind builds more than occasional longer sessions.
Context: If you are approaching this from within a Jewish practice, this meditation complements Shema recitation, where the declaration of divine unity is understood Kabbalistically as pointing toward the Ein Sof behind all the Sefirot's multiplicity. If you are approaching it from outside Jewish practice, the meditation stands on its own as a rigorous exercise in contemplating the nature of existence.
The Kabbalistic meditative tradition is broader than this single exercise. It includes methods of letter contemplation (iyyun), visualization of divine light, the ascent through the Sefirot in imagination, and the systematic use of divine names as contemplative anchors. Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (1240–c.1291) developed a particularly elaborate system of meditative techniques involving the permutation of Hebrew letters, which he held could induce prophetic states of consciousness. Abulafia's school represents the most explicitly experiential strand of classical Kabbalah, and Moshe Idel's research has done much to recover it from relative scholarly neglect.
Kabbalah as a Living Tradition
What distinguishes Kabbalah from many other mystical traditions is the insistence that the highest spiritual knowledge does not pull the practitioner out of the world but more deeply into it. The Lurianic concept of Tikkun Olam places the weight of cosmic repair on the embodied, historically situated human being: in Assiah, in the material world, through concrete action and intention. The sparks of the divine are not found by departing from ordinary life but by engaging it with the full structure of the Tree alive in one's awareness.
Kabbalah has survived persecution, diaspora, the catastrophe of Shabbtai Zvi, the upheaval of modernity, and the popularizations of mass culture. It has done so because the questions it asks are not sectarian questions. What is the nature of the infinite? How does the world come to be? What does it mean for a finite creature to participate in a process of cosmic repair? These questions have no expiration date.
Whether you approach Kabbalah through its Jewish roots, through the Hermetic Qabalah of the Western esoteric tradition, or simply as a student of the history of ideas, the tradition rewards patient, serious engagement. The depth is not a secret that is eventually revealed to the sufficiently persistent. It is the actual character of the thing: inexhaustible, because it is an attempt to think carefully about the inexhaustible.
What is Kabbalah?
Kabbalah is the mystical tradition within Judaism concerned with the nature of the divine, the structure of creation, and the soul's relationship to God. The word derives from the Hebrew root meaning "to receive," pointing to an oral tradition passed from teacher to student. Its foundational texts include the Sefer Yetzirah, the Sefer Bahir, and the Zohar, and its most systematic development occurred in 13th-century Spain and 16th-century Safed under Rabbi Isaac Luria.
What does Kabbalah mean?
The word Kabbalah derives from the Hebrew root K-B-L, meaning "to receive." The name points to the tradition's character as received wisdom: knowledge transmitted orally from master to student, as opposed to knowledge derived by individual speculation. The implication is that Kabbalistic insight is not merely intellectual achievement but a living transmission within a chain of teachers going back to antiquity.
What is Ein Sof in Kabbalah?
Ein Sof (Hebrew: "without end") is the Kabbalistic name for the infinite divine prior to any self-disclosure. It is not a personal God with attributes but the absolute ground of being, beyond all names, descriptions, and human concepts. Because Ein Sof is completely beyond comprehension, the Kabbalists taught that the God we encounter in prayer and Torah is not Ein Sof directly but the ten Sefirot, the divine emanations through which the infinite makes itself knowable. Ein Sof itself remains forever beyond thought and language.
What is the difference between Kabbalah and Qabalah?
The spelling "Kabbalah" typically refers to the Jewish mystical tradition rooted in Torah study, rabbinic tradition, and texts like the Zohar. "Qabalah" (or "Cabala") is often used to indicate the Western esoteric adaptation of these ideas, developed from the Renaissance onward by Christian Kabbalists and later systematized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Qabalah in this sense incorporates Tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic alongside the Tree of Life, and is not embedded in Jewish halakhic practice. The distinction is not absolute, but it is a useful marker of lineage.
What is Tikkun Olam in Kabbalah?
Tikkun Olam, meaning "repair of the world," is a concept developed in Lurianic Kabbalah to describe the spiritual purpose of human life. In Isaac Luria's cosmology, the divine light that flowed into the vessels of creation shattered them, scattering sparks of holiness throughout the material world. Human beings, through righteous action, prayer, and Torah observance, participate in gathering and elevating these scattered sparks, restoring the original unity. In contemporary usage the phrase has been broadened to mean social justice work, though this broader meaning departs significantly from its Lurianic origins.
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