The Kabbalah

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith began his prophetic career penning a pious forgery intended to stir up faith in the living God: "For the fullness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved." (Book of Mormon, Nephi 6:4). He ended by teaching how "the gods" organized matter into the worlds. What on earth happened? Where does all this stuff come from? The reader of the King Follett Discourse lands in unfamiliar territory. Joseph Smith's Hebrew translations, indefensible though they may be, are not altogether original. Some of the themes that appear in his late work are familiar from the Kabbalah, such as worlds within worlds:

The Kabbalah, which appeared in medieval times but incorporates prior gnostic material, begins with an anthropomorphic analysis of God's bodily geometry. This distinctly unpromising line of inquiry has a long history, stemming from an intensive analysis of Ezekiel's vision of God's chariot-throne:

"And above the firmament over their heads was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like a sapphire stone; on the likeness of the throne was a likeness with the appearance of a man high above it." (Ezekiel 1:26).

From the original undifferentiated infinity, Ein Sof, emanated ten sefirot, powers or attributes, and from thence the created universe. Every existing thing is incorporated into this chain of emanations:

Possible transmission routes for this material include Joseph Smith's two Hebrew teachers, one of whom, Alexander Neibaur, was an adept of this esoteric science. Freemasonry is another candidate. Brigham Young would later express another strikingly distinctive Kabbalistic theme, that Adam is God. The very eccentricity of this material makes it unlikely Joseph Smith and his comrades discovered it independently. Joseph's reading of the first verse of Genesis climbs way out on a limb, reading 'elohim' as object rather than subject. He is convinced this reading is authentic to the Hebrew original, because the Kabbalists had already pioneered it:

Joseph is not faithful to the Kabbalist interpretation of the passage, though he does follow their lead in inverting the grammar. Where are the Kabbalists going with their concept of a "created" God? Their preferred theology elevates Ein Sof, a featureless infinite, the Liebnitzian Monad, the God beyond God. They present the God of the Bible: the God who loves, who hates, who talks to humankind,-- as a collaborative project between man's imagination and emanations from Ein Sof. The God of the Bible is left diminished, shown up as the man behind the curtain, the God who wasn't there, having been unveiled as an illusion. This is not where Joseph wants to go; a polytheist with a low conception of deity, he portrays a heavenly conference:

"It read first, 'In the beginning the head of the Gods brought forth the Gods,' or, as others have translated it, 'The head of the Gods called the Gods together.'" (Joseph Smith, Sermon On the Plurality of Gods).

Because Joseph elsewhere reduces everything to matter, perhaps eternal and indestructible matter is the Ein Sof of his conception.

Return to Answering the Latter-Day Saints. . .

God's Sex Life

From the start, Kabbalah represented itself as ancient wisdom rediscovered. When he wrote the Zohar in the thirteenth century, Moses de Leon pretended he was copying ancient texts. When 'ancient wisdom' marketing schemes such as Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism set up their stands, Joseph Smith stood in line and believed every word. Joseph's education was limited by opportunity, not aptitude, but his lack of grounding in critical thinking left him gullible and naive. They wouldn't say it was 'ancient wisdom' if it wasn't, now would they? Dan Brown is another who happily sent in his box-top to learn the 'ancient wisdom' of Shekhinah's femininity:

The reader of classical fables is not surprised to read about Zeus and Hera's sex life inasmuch as these were participants in an unabashedly polytheist pantheon. What is surprising is to recall that the Kabbalists belong to a nominally monotheistic tradition.

This way of thinking is undeniably ancient,-- students of pagan idolatry are familiar enough with phallic symbols,-- but it is not anciently part of the religion of Israel. What procreative function does this coupling serve?:

"One might ask: what comes into being from the sacred marriage of Tsaddik and the Shekhinah? The Zohar's answer is: the souls of the righteous. Thus, a unique element is emanated into the substance of life -- the Tsaddik procreates the righteous." (Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,' pp. 114-115).

Biblically, God does not procreate people but creates them:

"The burden of the word of the LORD against Israel. Thus says the LORD, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him:. . ." (Zechariah 12:1).

"For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would fail before Me, and the souls which I have made." (Isaiah 57:16).

As should be apparent, we have left Biblical religion far behind.

Glorified Man

Kabbalah's influence in the present day goes far beyond Hollywood starlets. Some of this material has entered into mainstream Judaism: "Much of what now passes for normative Judaism (Hasidism included) essentially is Jewish Gnosticism. . ." (Harold Bloom, 'Omens of Millenium,' p. 230). Renewal movements that are commonly but erroneously thought Biblically-based, like the Hasidic movement, eagerly devour this material. What is so bad about Kabbalistic theology? First there is the crass anthropomorphism of the starting concept, a map of God's physical body to various bodily parts of which are assigned divine attributes. Some students of this science insist this sketch is intended as metaphor. It may indeed be intended as mockery:

Kindly note the blasphemy is in the conception illustrated, not in this artist's heart. Incidentally, the stage directions for this homunculus ("right arm," "left thigh") are invariably given in terms of a man looking in the mirror, not facing the figure depicted. Those who invented this form of 'spirituality' want a man looking in the mirror to see God. The one constant in this imaginative system is its imperative to elevate man, while dragging down God.

Two millenia of Christianity have left the question 'What does God look like?' to the kindergarteners. Yet people well aware of the Westminster Confession's God "without body, parts, or passions," including Joseph Smith, Finis Dake, who wrote a popular Pentecostal Bible commentary, and Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole, son of a Baptist preacher), have rejected 'the spook god of the Christians' in favor of a corporeal deity. To materialists, proclaiming God's corporeality reclaims His reality, and Mormon doctrine is materialist: "All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;. . .We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter." (Doctrine and Covenants No. 131). Joseph Smith was a great believer in the Kabbalist 'insight' recorded in the above sketch:

"If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world its in orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible -- I say, if you were to see him today you would see him like a man in form -- like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another." (Joseph Smith, King Follett Discourse).

Is this what the Bible teaches?:

Kabbalist writers offer the Shi'ur Komah, the measure of God's stature, without hinting it is anything other than matter-of-fact information about the world meant to be taken literally: "[Rabbi] Akiva is presented as receiving such visions, saying that God is 'virtually like us, but is greater than anything; and this is His glory which is concealed from us.'" (quoting Hekhaloth Zutrati, p. 21, Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead.'). Observers of bad religion cannot safely conclude that, if a given teaching is absurd, it cannot be seriously tendered: this is to say that, since the 'deportation of the moon' is absurd, Elijah Muhammad cannot have taught it.

Enemies of religion such as Bishop Spong refer often to a certain vision of God and the world, as of a snow globe at whose summit sits a very large white-bearded man seated upon a throne. The earth in this conception is flat and small. This concept, which has persisted down through the centuries in the face of active educational efforts by a variety of religious traditions to stamp it out, is not original to the atheists. The Kabbalists are heirs to this tendency: "The key figure in the measurements of the body of the Creator, which appears repeatedly, is 236,000,000 parasangs." (Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,' p. 23). This may be the oldest feature of this system. As noted, the Kabbalah claims antiquity for itself, though its real heritage lies, not in the Talmudic rabbis whom it 'quotes,' nor, God forbid, in Moses and the prophets, but in gnosticism, an 'international style' of religion popular in the early Christian centuries.

Philo Judaeus, writing in the first century A.D., shares the Christian conception of God's incorporeality:

"For if the living God has a face, and if he who desires to leave it can with perfect ease rise up and depart to another place, why do we repudiate the impiety of the Epicureans, or the godlessness of the Egyptians, or the mythical suggestions of which life is full? For the face is a portion of an animal; but God is a whole, not a part: so that it becomes necessary to invent for him other parts also, a neck, and a chest, and hands, and moreover a belly, feet, and generative organs, and all the rest of the countless number of internal and external faculties. . .But the living God has need of nothing; so that as he does not at all require the assistance to be derived from the parts of the body, he cannot possibly have such parts at all." (Philo Judaeus, 'On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile,' I. 1-4).

Commenting on Numbers 23:19, Philo says,

"But God, inasmuch as he is uncreated, and the Being who has brought all other things to creation, stood in need of none of those things which are usually added to creatures. For what are we to say? Shall we say, if he is possessed of the different organic parts, that he has feet for the sake of walking? But where is he to walk who fills all places at once with his presence? And to whom is he to go, when there is no one of equal honor with himself? And why is he to walk? It cannot be out of any regard for his health as we do. . .Once more, he had no need of eyes, the organs without which there can be no comprehension of the light perceptible by the outward senses; but the light perceptible by the outward senses is a created light; and even before the creation God saw, using himself as light. And why need we mention the organs of luxury? For if he has these organs, then he is fed, and when he has satisfied himself he leaves off eating, and after he has left eating he wants food again; and I need not enumerate other particulars which are the necessary consequences of this; for these are the fabulous inventions of impious men, who represent God, in word indeed only as endued with human form, but in fact as influenced by human passions." (Philo Judaeus, 'On the Unchangeableness of God,' XII.)

So this carnal way of thinking is by no means a consequence of lacking John 4:24, "God is a Spirit. . ." Where, then, did the 'God is a glorified man' theory originate? What is incomprehensible as piety is fully comprehensible as mockery.

Biblical difficulties with the idea include God's omnipresence, which cannot belong to a body present at only one place:

"Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me." (Psalm 139:7-10).

Bad Theology

To continue on the theme of bad theology, next there is the concept of a needy, dependent God, who requires human assistance to maintain and restore his mental health, his sexual satisfaction, the equilibrium of his various component parts, or indeed his very existence. For this theology, 'God' is a collaborative project between man and worlds beyond:

Those whose knowledge of these matters comes from the Bible understand the power a human has to build and destroy God is nil. God requires no such assistance:

"For every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the mountains, and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world is Mine, and all its fullness." (Psalm 50:10-12).

"Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket, and are counted as the small dust on the scales; look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor its beasts sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before Him are as nothing, and they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless." (Isaiah 40:15-17).

The resentment of a religious tradition deserted by God drives man to fill the void left by the departed God, even creating angels:

In the Bible it's not man but God who creates angels:

"Praise Him, all His angels; praise Him, all His hosts!. . .Let them praise the name of the LORD, for He commanded and they were created." (Psalm 148:2-5).

Much of this literature is so strange as to defy analysis. The Bible principles to bear in mind include the fact that the Bible has nothing positive to say about men who make themselves to be gods:

"Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD:
“Because your heart is lifted up,
And you say, ‘I am a god,
I sit in the seat of gods,
In the midst of the seas,’
Yet you are a man, and not a god,
Though you set your heart as the heart of a god. . .
Because you have set your heart as the heart of a god,
Behold, therefore, I will bring strangers against you,
The most terrible of the nations;
And they shall draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom,
And defile your splendor.”’" (Ezekiel 28:2-7)

Reincarnation

Like the Buddhists, Hindus, Platonists and Pythagoreans, the Kabbalists believe in the transmigration of souls:

As should by now be apparent, Kabbalah is a recycling operation, polishing up discarded bits of refuse from other religious traditions, including the living Cathar tradition of its place of origin. The doctrine of reincarnation is absent from the Old Testament, specifically denied in the New: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:. . ." (Hebrews 9:27). Kabbalists defend this doctrine, called gilgul, with proof-texts whose relation to the concept could best be described as whimsical, like Ecclesiastes 1:4: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh:. . ."

In light of this belief, the Kabbalists retell the Bible stories as the interaction, over the generations, of the same players:

If they truly think David was a great sage, they should take his comments about his dead son to heart: "But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." (2 Samuel 12:23).

Many Bible verses are incompatible with this concept of reiteration, like "Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them." (Psalm 139:16), which suggests the story is not an old one but a new one. Moreover the frequent contrast between God's endurance versus human transience loses much of its force if human beings also endure to all generations:

"All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, because the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever." (Isaiah 40:6-8)

or, "My days are like a shadow that lengthens, and I wither away like grass. But You, O LORD, shall endure forever, and the remembrance of Your name to all generations." (Psalm 102:11-12).

Job, who knew that his redeemer lived, makes the same point in his complaints:

"As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, so he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, nor shall his place know him anymore." (Job 7:9).

Almost proving reincarnation in its own self, this bad idea just will not go away, but keeps coming back, most recently in a pastor who imagines Christ has 'integrated' with him:

Metatron

The angel Metatron is the "lesser Yahweh:"

The scriptures here cited are familiar to those Christians who believe that the angel of God's presence who accompanied Israel in the wilderness was the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ.

After Israel's apostasy in the wilderness, God threatened to send the people on their way, without His presence:

"And I will send My Angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanite and the Amorite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people." (Exodus 33:2-3).

There are many travelling angels who could accompany the people, created beings who rejoice to praise their Creator:

"Praise Him, all His angels;
Praise Him, all His hosts!. . .
Let them praise the name of the LORD,
For He commanded and they were created." (Psalm 148:2-5).

None of these creatures is God; He is their Creator. But as it would turn out, these created angelic hosts were not Israel's companions. God's own presence, His face, led them on:

"And He said, 'My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.' Then he said to Him, 'If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.' So the LORD said to Moses, 'I will also do this thing that you have spoken; for you have found grace in My sight, and I know you by name.'" (Exodus 33:14-17).

From the logic of Moses' prayers and response, the reader may conclude that no angel led Israel. Yet an angel did lead Israel, and continued on with them:

"When we cried out to the LORD, He heard our voice and sent the Angel and brought us up out of Egypt; now here we are in Kadesh, a city on the edge of your border." (Numbers 20:16).

'Angel' simply means messenger or ambassador. While God sends many created angels, there is one eternal and uncreated messenger who is also God's face, His very presence:

"In all their affliction He was afflicted,
And the Angel of His Presence saved them;
In His love and in His pity He redeemed them;
And He bore them and carried them
All the days of old. . .
As a beast goes down into the valley,
And the Spirit of the LORD causes him to rest,
So You lead Your people,
To make Yourself a glorious name." (Isaiah 63:9-14).

Who is this Angel of His Countenance? Who stands in the midst of the throne, not in human speculation but in the Bible?:

'Meta thronon' can mean, as suggested, 'beyond the throne,' or 'behind the throne,' or indeed 'in the midst of the throne.' A similar concept is expressed in Revelation 5:6: "And I looked, and behold, in the midst ['mesos'] of the throne ['thronos'] and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain,. . ." (Revelation 5:6). This vision of God's throne, written by the apostle John around 62-63 A.D., is the closest New Testament approach to Ezekiel's great vision by the river. No 'wheels' are mentioned, though 'kuklos' in Greek means 'circle' or 'ring,' and the adverb 'kuklothen' is found in 5:11. 'Kuklo' (in a circle) occurs in 4:6: "And in the midst of the throne, and around ['kuklo'] the throne, were four living creatures full of eyes in front and in back." These large structures are made up of other living creatures, which is why they are full of eyes.

Sparks

Aurelius Augustine devoted his early years to the Manichaean faith. One of the odder doctrines the Manichees taught him was that scattered dismembered bits of deity lay about the world, which the saint could heal and reunite by munching:

"And if some 'saint' ate this fig -- providing, forsooth, that it was picked not by his but by another's sinful hand -- then he would digest it in his stomach, and from it he would breathe forth angels! While he groaned and retched in prayer, he would even breathe forth bits of God! And those bits of the most high and true God would have remained bound up in that piece of fruit, unless they had been let loose by the teeth and belly of an elected saint!" (Augustine, Confessions, Book 3, Chapter 10 (18).)

Wondrous to relate, those sparks of deity are still sizzling in the frying pan, waiting to be liberated by the hungry saint:

How did little bits and pieces of God get into the food? An industrial accident:

Lucky for God that the Kabbalist masticators have picked right up where the Gnostics left off, so that His scattered and damaged sparks have some hope of restoration and repair.

In the Bible, it is God who heals and man who is sick and broken, not the other way around:

"There He made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there He tested them, and said, 'If you diligently heed the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the LORD who heals you.'" (Exodus 15:25-26).

God the Sinner

It is a familiar Bible teaching that man was made after the image of God:

"Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'" (Genesis 1:26).

An unfamiliar development of this teaching is that the man of clay, the man made after the image, the man who fell: he is our God:

The God to Whom Christians sing hymns is no sinner; He is holy and undefiled:

"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God;' for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. . .Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." (James 1:14-17).

"This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5).

Where could such an identification have come from? This inversion, substituting the first man for the God who made him, is already underway in the Kabbalah. Adam's fall does not only, as in the Bible, separate Adam from fellowship with God; it induces an existential catastrophe within God, who emits Satan as an independent being (having previously been inherent in God):

"Satan's independent being is thus a consequence of the decision made by Adam who, by his improper contemplation of the Divine, caused a separation within the Godhead that had a baleful effect on all of Creation. When he plucked and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he allowed the power acting in the Tree of Knowledge from the north (i.e., the principle of Severity) to operate upon it in isolation." (Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,' p. 70).

This principle of 'Severity,' which is one of the sefirot, has thus gotten loose in the world and is now running amuck. Finding the origin of evil within God is a Kabbalistic innovation which can never be reconciled with Biblical religion, for which God is only holy:

The Kabbalah promises also God's salvation, though it had not been known that He, like His creatures, stood in need of it:

"The Zohar too takes the position that the crux of the redemption works itself out in the uninterrupted conjunction of Tiferet and Malkhut, and that redemption of Israel is one with the redemption of God Himself from His mystic exile. The source of this belief is talmudic and can be found in both the Palestinian Talmud, Sukkah 4, 3 and in the Midrash Lev. R. 9, 3: 'The salvation of the Holy One blessed be He is the salvation of Israel.'" (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 166)

Tsaddik

The reader has already encountered "the sacred marriage of Tsaddik and the Shekhinah." Having discovered that this system is based on a mapping of divine potencies to a human/divine stick figure, as sketched above, the reader can exercise his imagination to discern which of God's body parts is the Tsaddik. This bodily part also makes peace within God, ensuring His unity, or rather such divine unity as this system permits:

"As the Tsaddik awakens the world to repent or to fix that which is not whole, this attribute is called Peace, mediating for good between YHVH and Adonai, making peace between them and bringing them near to dwell together without separation or breaking up in the world; and at that hour we find that God is one." (Sha'arei Orah, f. 22b, quoted p. 104, Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead.')

Tsaddik is also the righteous man, praised by the rabbis as the foundation of the world. At times there is confusion between this righteous man, a created being, and the bodily part/power or logos of God, the divine Washington Monument so to speak. The two are effectively identified in this passage:

"What is the eighth? The Holy One, blessed be He, has one righteous man in His world, and he is very precious to Him, because he maintains the whole world and he is its foundation. . .He is loved and treasured above, loved and treasured below; feared and sublime above, feared and sublime below; comely and accepted above, comely and accepted below; and he is the foundation of all souls. You say that he is the eighth [logos] and that he is the foundation of all souls?" (Sefer ha-Bahir, quoted p. 94, Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead.')

Is the Tsaddik here a man created in the image of God, or a divine potency/body part? That it must be read as both strikes me as the whole point of this enterprise, which drags God down from heaven and exalts man to the heavenlies.

In the present day atheists rail against God, pointing to every deformed child as evidence of His cruelty and/or incompetence. When asked, 'Why are you so angry at God?, the atheists object, plausibly enough, 'How can I be angry at Him when I don't believe He exists?' Today's atheism attracts the 'I hate God' constituency, but then leaves them perplexed at their own irrationality. In days gone by there was a religion which fit this constituency's needs far more closely than atheism: gnosticism. This tendency portrayed the God of the Bible, the God with whom humanity has to deal, the God who rules our world, as fallen, incompetent, and unworthy of worship, holding up in His place a stranger God far, far away as the God after man's own heart, the God who deserves our love and worship. The Kabbalah adopts the gnostic attitude and fits it within the confines of Jewish piety. The Deist god, 'Ein Sof,' is allowed to be God, but for the rest Israel's God is unveiled as man writ large. This religion is atheism wearing a broad-brimmed hat.

Those who understand this convoluted and elaborate system best understand it intends to deconstruct the God of the Bible: "Was God originally anything more than the Adam Kadmon?" (Harold Bloom, 'Omens of Millenium,' p. 205). The Kabbalists dislike being expected to bow down to a party who has absented Himself; thus the battle-cry of their religion: 'Hear, O Israel, your God is. . .Yourself.'

If this seems harsh, consider the Kabbalistic ideal of prophecy. In Kabbalah, the prophet encounters. . .himself:

"'The deeply learned Rabbi Nathan, of blessed memory, said to me: Know that the complete secret of prophecy to a prophet consists in that he suddenly sees the form of his self standing before him. . .And the learned sage R. Abraham ibn Ezra, of blessed memory, said "The one who hears [at the time of prophecy] is a human being, and the one who speaks is a human being."'

. . .This is the experience of the prophets, whose own pure 'self' conveys to them the prophetic tiding. What they encountered was not essentially different from themselves; what was sent to them was not a divine apparition or an angel, but their own pure form." (Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,' pp. 253-254).

Pot, Kettle

There have been Christian Kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola, addicted to looking on the sunny side. Most would be appalled. But Christian complaints about Kabbalistic theology may strike some as unfair. If three powers/hypostases in God are fine, then what is the problem with ten sefirot? The number ten may reflect the decalogue, the ten creative words, or this number's sacred status in the Pythagorean system. So what is the problem?

In Biblical theology, God always is what He ever was and ever will be: He does not change:

"For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob." (Malachi 3:6).

Certain heresiarchs, such as Sabellius and Arius, sought to understand the triune God by giving God a history: by hypothesizing a time when God's original monad 'dilated' or expanded into a triad. Orthodoxy rejected this approach, because God's nature does not change. Yet in the Kabbalah, God was not always surrounded by the sefirotic superstructure; the sefirot were emanated by a process in time, and indeed can be deflated by human activity or inactivity. . .and will ultimately be destroyed:

"In the 'Great Jubilee,' after 50,000 years, everything will return to the bosom of the Sefirah Binah, which is also called the 'mother of the world.' Even the other sefirot, through which God guides creation, will be destroyed with the destruction of creation." (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 336).

Yet if these attributes, which include all the personal qualities of the God of the Bible, came to be, then they are not God.

While in trinitarian theology, God does have an internal life, there is nothing in Christian theology remotely resembling the Kabbalists' ongoing R-rated romantic fling between Tsaddik and Shekhinah. One must look to pagan polytheism for exemplars.

The glorification of man which is the one constant of this ever changing, ever shifting, ever profilerating system, may strike some as an unfair target for Christian critics who proclaim that God became a man. Yet the incarnation was not just puddle jumping, but vast condescension on God's part:

Christ's journey out of the ivory palaces down into a filthy stable was not a small adjustment. Christian theology fully appreciates the gulf in nature between God and man: "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent." (Numbers 23:19). In the Kabbalah, the proportion between God and man is seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

As to elevating the Congregation of Israel into the heavenlies, Kabbalists may object that Christians do the same in making the church the body of Christ. But making God dependent, for His health, integrity, and happiness, upon a specific group of people, as the Kabbalists do, ought to excite John the Baptist's rebuke: "For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones." (Matthew 3:9). How can God be held hostage in this way? And as for Shekhinah's jaunts on the dark side:

"When these forces of the Left Side become stronger, primariliy due to human erring and sinning, the Shekhinah becomes the executrix of the powers of judgment which have entered her. But at times the Zohar goes even further: the Shekhinah actually comes under the sway of the Other Side, which penetrates and becomes entrenched within her, with disastrous consequences for Israel and for the entire world. This may be caused by the weakness or helplessness of the Shekhinah, because it is lacking the impetus created by man's good deeds; or it may be caused by the preponderence within her of those forces that, because of their stern and punitive nature (Din Kasheh), have an affinity with the Other Side. Overwhelmed by these dark forces, the Shekhinah herself becomes dark and destructive:

"'When the righteous multiply in the world, Kennesseth Yisra'el [i.e., the Shekhinah] emits sweet fragrances [like a rose], and is blessed by the holy king, and her face is radiant. But when the wicked people increase in the world, Kenesseth Yisra'el as it were does not emit sweet fragrances, but tastes of the Other, bitter Side.'" (Gershom Scholem, 'On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,' pp. 189-190)

. . .do not the Christian gospels represent Christ as tempted in the wilderness by Satan? Yes, but futilely! He does not go for a walk on the wild side, strolling the Other side hand in hand with the Kabbalists' Shekhinah, but is "holy, harmless, undefiled" (Hebrews 7:26).

Much of the Kabbalah, as cannot be denied, comes from gnosticism. To its apologists, the Kabbalah has squared the circle by incorporating dualistic material, presupposing a good god and a bad god (the minimum god-census in gnosticism is two), into a monotheistic system. Yet the monotheism is only nominal; they have made God a composite being, mixed of both darkness and light, leaning now to the dark side, now to the good, awaiting rescue and redemption by man.

Jewish apologists explain that the Kabbalah is not so bad because mainstream Judaism encourages Jews to study this material only after grounding themselves in the Talmud and other sources. This is like saying Mormonism would not be so bad, if Latter Day Saints first grounded themselves in Christian fundamentalism before studying it. If they grounded themselves in the Bible, their response to the Kabbalah would be to run away.