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In thinking about a mystical theology of Judaism for the current age, our claims will be somewhat different, less sweeping and more modest. We need to assert them with a combination of spiritual openness and intellectual honesty. When we do this, we will find ourselves with a religious life unlike that of the past, though one deeply nurtured by its legacy. As postmoderns we cannot simply appropriate a premodern system and expect it to work for us, even if the terminology and metaphors are updated.2 We do not, and should not expect ourselves to, believe in the same way as our premodern forebears. We do not have, and are not about to have, all the “answers” to the nature and meaning of human existence that our ancestors used to think they possessed.

Spiritual openness means the humility to acknowledge that we do not understand all of existence. In ways renamed by modernity, we share this admission with earlier generations. Despite the great gains in scientific understanding, we are all too aware of modernist hubris in thinking that we have “it all” figured out. There are realities semi-acknowledged by scientists (Other dimensions of being? Senses unknown to us? “Dark matter?” “Channels” and “charges” of unknown sources of energy?) that we do not comprehend, but that may shape existence in very profound ways. These possibly account for many phenomena that cannot be otherwise explained; they may be part of the mysterious and unknown realms frequently invoked by the religious language of prior eras (the “other side,” “worlds without number,” and so forth). We do not claim knowledge of these, but we understand that they may play some part in mystical insight and teachings. The channels that lead back and forth between nothingness and being surely belong to these hidden realms. Our own experience and the accounts by mystics in many traditions help us to know that the distinction between “Nothing” and “nothing” is surely no mere semantic game. The turning away from externals toward inwardness, from variety and multiplicity toward inner oneness, exposes us to dimensions of reality unknown to the superficial senses. These hidden realms may exercise great influence over our psychic lives, in ways we are hardly able to articulate. Our “Kabbalah” includes our acknowledging these mysterious aspects of existence. When we appropriate Kabbalistic language, we have an eye toward these domains of the unknown.

On the other hand, we cannot claim, as the Kabbalists once did, to have mastery over these realms. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit to being Western-shaped. This includes a commitment to open-mindedness and the importance of questioning dogmatic assumptions, no matter where they originate. We are seekers of a new postmodern path into areas neglected by the rationalist and scientific mind that has so dominated thinking in recent centuries. But that does not mean that we can or should leave all of our modern baggage behind us. We understand the power of myth and symbol, their ability to transport us to deeper states of mind, to realities not given to discursive or scientific description. We accept and embrace those realities as such, but we also do not submit to them fully, which would require giving up our critical faculties. However attractive these deep insights may be, we do not make a literal or historical truth claim for the sources that proclaim them. A literalist or simplistic reading of the premodern Kabbalistic maps and teachings makes no sense in our day. We do not have an infallible guide to those unknowable aspects of existence. Rather, we have a set of tools (or perhaps multiple sets) by which we can struggle to achieve insight into these unknown realms as well as into ourselves. The distinction is an important one. Kabbalah as a “science” or an all-embracing truth system was rightly trounced, along with alchemy and other prior cosmologies, in early modern times. Many of the claims once made for Kabbalah, including those that veer close to the edges of magic, should