Mystic Teachings of Jesus
April 25th, 2006
I was reading an article in Newsweek about the Gospel of Judas and was struck by this sentence: “This Gospel tells us that Judas was Jesus’ only true disciple, to whom he imparted secret mystic knowledge…” To me, at least, it seems clear that the mystic knowledge is the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah. Rav Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar, the canon of Kabbalah, lived around the same time and led a school of great mystics. My father the Rav always said that there is a lot in the story of Jesus that has not yet been revealed or understood…
5 Responses to “Mystic Teachings of Jesus”
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April 27th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Not only that.
the years that Jesus “disappeared” in the desert, he went to Qumran and Egypt where he learned his skills among the mystical Jewish groups (Therapeutae).
The Therapeutae would read the Torah “symbolically” seeking wisdom from their ancestral philosophy by taking it as an allegory, since they think that the words of the literal text are symbols of something whose hidden nature is revealed by studying the underlying meaning.
Isn’t that what Kabbalah does?
Jesus tried to do that, to EXPLAIN the hidden codes in the Holy Scriptures, he did not created a NEW religion, that was done 300 years after his death.
April 28th, 2006 at 8:15 am
Jesus and the kabbalah Center
One of the greatness of the Kabbalah Center (KC) is that it brings together ” Jesus’s People”, Jews and Christians come from the same root, they are part of the same tree.. Anything happening to one branch affects the rest of the tree.
All branches must be in armony in order for the spirit and health of the tree to be OK..
April 28th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
If Jesus was who he said he was, and in turn we are what is insinuated by that (i.e. “brothers and sisters”) by virtue of being on The Path, then I think the wisdom could only have been from the True Source, naturally and namely Kabbalah.
The events with Judas are controversial, and the reports of them to us are questionable going with either interpretation, but consider the point: what greater sacrifice of ego than to become “the villian” for generations to remember? If this was the motive, then Judas truly gave up EVERYTHING to help his teacher accomplish his purpose, and he not only received zero glory, but his person, his “good name” and his reputation and even his life were destroyed.
On completely the other hand, should the traditional interpretation be the truth, we still learn all the more about Kabbalah through Jesus. If Judas was the villian, we could equate him with the “erev rav” and parallel the coming out of Egypt, in that he would have been a person who did not want the message of love and the wisdom of Kabbalah Jesus was pubically teaching to leave the exclusive circles of the esoteric or their particular school or the even traditional Jewish male over 40 etc. He was given the secret teaching and like the erev rav stirred up opposition, agenda, and entitlement. This is similar even to draw a parallel to Rabbi Akiva’s students who we learn in the Zohar were giants in Kabbalah but yet were plagued for lack of unity and were destroyed. Getting back to Judas though, the over-arching lesson being that in the end, even after he was set up, sabotaged and betrayed, Jesus showed us we can defeat death with Kabbalah.
It’s interesting to parallel the coming out of Egypt this way and interpret the “new testament” somewhat allegorically - Jesus is like the personification of the Torah or namely the tablets of the Ten Utterances given by God to Moses, and Judas is like the personification of the erev rav. The erev rav stir up impatience, fear, etc. and the creation of the golden calf occurs, in just the way Judas plots to betray and hand over Jesus to the authorities. Then Jesus, like the tablets, is “broken” and he is killed and the darkness gains a foothold. Finally, like Moses writing the new tablets as dictated by God, Jesus uses Kabbalah “as dictated by God” to metaphorically write a new body (maybe even rewriting genetic code with the “DNA of the Soul” and other 72 names), and is raised from the dead, departing earth in a similar fashion to Elijah. This leaves us today in the same place as the Children of Israel on Sinai, with the choice of what we will do with the Way that Jesus embodied with his life.
I would love to see/start more dialog on the topic of Kabbalah and the Christian/Jewish connection, because I too highly appreciate that the Kabbalah Centre is a place where both can study and communicate side by side.
August 12th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I have been teaching a class to Christians call a day in the life of Christ. I was raised Jewish, and I am a decendent of the tribe of Levite. I try to teach Christians what it is to be Jewish, How Christ would have prayed in his daily life. As I research my lessons and read your daily & weekly tune-ups I see the teachings of Jesus written all over your information.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo