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I think what our generation seems to be living through is the realization that rationalism is only part of the answer.

I think I'm not the first one to notice this, that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were perfectly rational decisions and behaviors.

So there's this sense that religion has to be more than rationalism, and mysticism offers it's sort of like in the corner, psst.

Hey kid, how'd you like a direct experience of the divine? Would that help your religious life?

And a lot of people discover that they're mystics after all when they're given that offer.

This Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has written is a definition of a mystic.

A mystic is anyone who has the knowing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.

Kushner is a longtime student and articulator of the mysteries and messages of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.

He was influenced like every modern student of Kabbalah by a Jewish historian named Gershams Sholam, who was born in 1897 and died in 1982 and literally resurrected this tradition from obscurity.

I spoke with Rabbi Kushner in 2014 in honor of Gershams Sholam's legacy, and it's in the spirit of Kabbalah, which wraps teachings and teachings wisdom and wisdom life within life that we get to know Sholam through the living ideas of this Rabbi in his lineage.

I'm Krista Tippet and this is on being.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is the Emmanuel Scholar at Congregation in Manuel in San Francisco.

And he's written many books that touch on themes of Kabbalah, including a novel, Kabbalah, a love story.

Gershams Sholam suggested that the Zohar, the Kabbalah's core text, was itself a mystical novel.

He demonstrated that the Zohar was not written as had previously been assumed by a second century Galilean saint, but by the 13th century Castilian Kabbalist Moshe De Leon.

Still, it entered the spiritual bloodstream of Judaism, with new ways of understanding and describing the inner structure of reality, a feminine side of God, and the cosmic significance of each ritual and ethical deed.

According to Kabbalah, all being is rooted in the ensoff, the holy oneness of creation.

So when did Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism enter your imagination? And how did that happen?

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