Quotes from Bernhard Pick

The En Soph, not being an object of cognition, made his existence known in the creation of the world by means of attributes or mediums, the ten Sephiroth, or intelligences, radiations, emanations, emanating from the En Soph, and which in their totality represent and are called the Adam Kadmon, the "Primordial or Archetypal Man.

As to the Adam Kadmon which is shown in the following figure, the Crown represents the head; Wisdom, the brains; Intelligence which unites the two and produces the first triad, the heart or the understanding.

The Hebrew word Cabala (from Kibbel) properly denotes "reception," then "a doctrine received by oral tradition." The term is thus in itself nearly equivalent to "transmission," like the Latin tradition, in Hebrew masorah, for which last, indeed, the Talmud makes it interchangeable in the statement given in Pirke Abot I, 1: "Moses received {kibbel) the Law on Mount Sinai, and transmitted (umsarah) it to Joshua.

According to a later theorem four worlds proceed by an emanation in different gradations. This is expressed by Ibn Latif thus: As the point extends and thickens into a line, the line into the plane, the plane into the expanded body, thus God's self-manifestation unfolds itself in the different worlds.

There were two subjects about which the Jewish imagination especially busied itself,—the history of the Creation, and the Merkabah, or the Divine apparition to Ezekiel.

In the production of finite existence the first act was the evolution of the Memra, or the Word, which was the first point in the descending series of beings, and from whom in nine other degrees of manifestation emanated those forms which at once compose the universe and express the attributes and presence of its eternal ruler.

There can therefore be no such thing as annihilation. if evil exists, it can only be an aberration of the divine Law, and not as a principle.

If probation of final bliss he not accomplished or successfully achieved in one life, another life is entered upon, and then, if necessary, a third.

Every new thought suggestive or explanatory of it is crowned by him, and by it he forms a new heaven. It is said that whenever a man gives expression to such a word it ascends at once into the divine presence, who taketh and embraceth it and adorneth it with seventy crowns, all engraveth with his holy name.

but Rabbi Simeon was condemned to death, a sentence which he evaded and escaped by immediate and timely flight, accompanied by his son Eliezar.

Of great interest is the metempsychosis of the Cabala. How this doctrine, already espoused by the Egyptians, Pythagoreans and Plato, came into Jewish mysticism, is not yet fully explained.

In this consisted the sin of Korah and his company, which caused Moses, though of great meekness of character, to be filled with wrath and anger, not because of their rejection of him as a mediator, but on account of their adverse opposition and antagonism to the principles of reconciliation, the existence of which they failed to perceive or ignored as operating in the preservation of the world.

This was their philosophy as expressed by an old Arabian sago. "When my soul," said he, "shall become in harmony with the divine life, then will it be a reflection of nature's great and secret. truths.

It has become generally understood that the Cabala and Christianity are two different things.