Sense of Soul - Kabbalah and Ancient Text

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Today back on Sense of Soul I have Rabbi Matthew Ponak. He is a teacher of Jewish mysticism, a spiritual counselor, and the cofounder of the Mekorah Institute—an online spiritual center for embodied practice. Ordained with honors as a rabbi at the neo-Hasidic Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, he also holds a master’s degree in Contemplative Religions from Naropa University. Matthew lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is certified as a Focusing Professional to guide others to deeper self-knowledge and healing. He joined me back in February when he was launching his new book Embodied Kabbalah, Jewish Mysticism for All People. Our conversation was so insightful, I asked him to come back on and share more of his wisdom! In this episode I “drash” with the rabbi on ancient text and Jewish mysticism. Rabbi Matthew has courses available and is hosting a retreat in the late summer, so check out his website https://matthewponak.com Also follow his journey on his social media at https://m.facebook.com/groups/embodiedkabbalah @rabbimatthewponak Rabbi Matthew is a Sense of Soul affliate, he has created a special link for you to sign up for his course Introduction to Kabbalah.  https://matthewponak.com/senseofsoul/ Learn more about Shanna and Sense of Soul at www.mysenseofsoul.com Go can find all of our new Sense of Soul Network of Lightworkers at our afiliates page at https://www.mysenseofsoul.com/sense-of-soul-affiliates-page Join our Sense of Soul Patreon!! Our community of seekers and lightworkers who get exclusive discounts, live events like SOS Sacred Circles, ad free episodes and more. You can also listen to Shanna’s new mini series, about the Goddess Sophia! Sign up today and help support our podcast. https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Hey guys, my voice is slowly clearing up after a long two weeks of laryngitis, but I welcome my voice back as I do my next guest, Rabbi Matthew Ponag. Rabbi Matthew is a

spiritual counselor, a teacher, and author of the book, Embodied Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism for all people. I enjoyed my conversation so much with Rabbi Matthew and got so much insight that I wanted to have him on again. And I feel so fortunate that Rabbi Matthew has also become a Sense of Soul affiliate. If you want to uncover the mysteries of Kabbalah, you have an amazing opportunity to be mentored by Rabbi Matthew. If you listened to the prior episode we did in February, you know that he has a ton of wisdom to share. He is offering Sense of Soul listeners a special discount to take a deep and personal dive into the Kabbalah and the unfolding of your own personal journey. If you're interested, go to matthewponack.com backslash senseofsoul to learn more and sign up. You can also find this link in the show notes or go to

mysenseofsoul.com under the affiliates page. So today, please welcome once again, Rabbi Matthew to drash a little bit more with me. Hi, Shannon. Hey, nice to see you again. Yeah. I'm so excited. You know, this was like the first time I've ever had anybody on this quick like this. Oh, wow.

What an honor. Our listeners are going to be like, oh, you must be super special, which you are. And I actually got a lot of great feedback from our episode. Wonderful. It's good to be back. How's the book launch going? Good. Very nice.

Yeah. And I've just announced a retreat that's happening in September. It's really exciting. So lots of good things. And, you know, the work goes on. You know, I was thinking about this this morning after I did see that you released a retreat. It's so interesting to me that it's taken this long for people to awaken to this work. You know, not just this work, just awaken to a lot of things. And can you say more about what do you mean taking this long? Well, when I think about like how long it took for the Nagamati to be found or this has been around, you know, since the 13th century or whatever.

But like it's just now coming into people's consciousness. Right. People are just now able to get it. Maybe it's because of technology. You know, I guess that's a double-edged sword technology. Yeah, there's a lot of things, but I think a big part of it is the information age. I will say as much as there are people all over the world who are encountering Jewish mysticism for the first time, people in the Jewish world in the last couple of generations have encountered Buddhism for the first time and yoga. And it's it is a time of great sharing and these relationships that are being built.

There have been times like this in the past, but that was more like in the Jewish world, in Spain, in the 1300s. Right. You had a period of time or 1200s. People are sharing its It's Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like that was the sharing happening. And now it's global. These moments are precious. And they, at least, you know, historically, don't tend to last forever. You know, because things change. It is on some level astounding that people are just encountering some of these things. And on the other hand, there's a, I almost feel a sense of urgency when we can do this because there's no guarantees how long this will be going on for. And it's moments like these are really precious in human history.

Yeah. I feel like it is a very special time. You know, I think about where religious freedom happened for people. I think about the witch trials, right? I mean, like, or the Holocaust. And after that, yeah, just a lot of it's very interesting, because people are able to be seekers. Like, I think that's primal in us to seek, right? To seek source, God or whatever he calls it. Yeah, meaning there is a certain depth to humanity, which I know is not always, let's say instilled into our children. I've actually had many conversations and I've referenced you many times with a friend of mine and a few friends of mine in saying that, because this is the one thing I took from our past episode was that you can

still have like the family life and be busy and doing the things and still be spiritual, still, you know, as a family with your friends, your community still participate and celebrate your traditions and your spiritual life. Yes, absolutely. It is possible and it can be a fine art, but it is, I think, more the norm than the exception in a lot of traditional cultures. And really a lot of us forgot about spirits in general. And so part of the reclaiming on some level has to happen on an individual level, individuals leaving their families or their communities in that sense, in the values perhaps are moving towards something new, but there's another step in our reclaiming of

our wisdom, you know, in our wisdom traditions, and then the integration into the family life that, yeah, the seekers that they're very important. People need to go out because we haven't figured it all out and we've forgotten things and we're re-remembering and all of that. And there is a way in which the integration deepens when we bring it back home, when we can have the next generations having this part of I was in a place where I was very angry that day about my religion. But, you know, there's, of course, growing up and leaving the nest, and a lot of us right now are currently faced with also leaving our religion, which is a sad thing. I always think back to what Thich Nhat Hanh said in, I don't know if you ever read that book, Living Buddha, Living Christ. He wasn't trying to change anyone's religion. He said, in fact, he thought it would be a travesty for one to lose their religion.

And actually that's really been hitting me hard lately in the fact that I need to find peace with that and kind of let go of the anger of it. I think that's all part of the process too. One of my favorite teachers, Jewish mystics from the last hundred years, Rav Kook says, he basically says atheism is from God. And he says it arises in humanity to deconstruct false notions of God. And he sees it as a divine force. And so to leave one's religion or to have anger towards it in that perspective

is actually about breaking down what isn't true or what isn't serving humanity. But that's not the end of the story in Ralph Cook's view, or in my view, it's actually so that something else can be reestablished and built. So, and the other piece that comes to mind when you say that is, so in the Jewish culture, people can leave the belief system or the practices, but they're still Jewish. If you know what I'm saying, it's almost, it's an ethnicity. And, and I think about all the people I know who are here in Canada and they say, well, I'm don't have a religion. And I say, well, what do you do in December? They're like, well, we do Christmas. And it's like, okay, well, that's a secularized kind of post-Christian form,

but it sounds like you've taken what's still meaningful for you and left the rest. And to me, that's fine. As a Jew, I do that all the time. And I know a lot of people that's kind of a standard. It's, you know, we're a tribe, we're a culture, and we don't have to be not Jewish anymore just because we don't believe in stuff or we don't practice everything, but there's ways in which it can still be meaningful. I think in our lives, I kind of align with Thich Nhat Hanh on that. I haven't read that book in particular, but I really revered, I hope for people, for you and for others that

they can find those parts of their own lineages that they do connect with and that they can feel the permission to take what they need and leave the rest and build towards something that is meaningful for right now and for the future. Yeah. Do you know how many people are ignorant to the fact that Jewish actually is a nationality? Because I remember telling a few people and them going, what do you mean you have Jewish? And I was like, well, it's not just a religion, people. Yeah. You know, learning about other people's cultures and just, you know, we've only been told what our systems want us to know. And so going out of that box a little bit and discovering maybe true history, even for your ancestry will actually

give you more of a truth. Oh yeah. I really like a Vietnamese soup pho and there's a place close to where I work, where they serve that. And I speak to someone there sometimes he's when a manager is something. And he told me recently that he's an atheist and he didn't know I was a rabbi. It was sort of, I knew him as a customer and he says, well, you know, we can get along, you know, even though I'm an atheist and you're religious. And I, I sort of, I think I said something to him, like, you know, when a lot of people say they don't like religion, they just assume that every religion is the same. And I often feel like a lot of people who have, let's say, a blanket statement about how religion is bad, they probably mean the religion that they were raised with. And they've assumed that it's all

just that. And I was saying, most Jews I know who I grew up with don't have a particularly strong belief in God themselves and it's really about how you live in the world and not what you believe in my culture so the idea that someone can be an excellent Jew an excellent practitioner of Jewish wisdom and be an atheist that by and large those two things they're not particularly related you know and so in which Judaism doesn't fit the mold in a lot of ways. Right. So, yeah, you can have it ethnically, you know, or genetically and not have been raised with it. There's many categories. The whole idea of religion is a troublesome one to define. It is. But, you know, when I think about the study of the Zohar and the Kabbalah, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe this is just how I've received it.

I feel like it's like one of those teachings that is for all mankind, for all humans. And it's a journey. And we don't know if anyone could ever like fully even understand it because it's a lie in some way. It's like one of those things. Have you ever like read a book? Actually, you know, a book does that to me. The Alchemist does this to me.

You know, it's like one of those things where you read it and it means so much to you. You have this profound experience with this book. And then the next time you read it, it's a totally different experience. You're basically summing up the Jewish understanding of Torah more broadly when you say that. Torah study, the whole Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, right, from Genesis to Deuteronomy are read on a cycle every year in synagogue. And you finish it and then you start it again. And people have the experience of finding new insights every time they go through it. There's an old saying, turn it and turn it again because everything is in it. So it is ever unfolding. And the Kabbalists

who wrote things like the Zohar, they were people who studied Torah, the literal Hebrew Bible, but also all of the prior teachings. So Kabbalah is like the latest expression in their world in the Middle Ages of that older tradition. But yes, exactly. It is ever unfolding. And the idea, even there's a teaching that I love, what I was one of the first things I ever heard as a teenager about this kind of study, the first letter in the whole Torah, right? What's translated in English in the word in the beginning, it's one word in Hebrew, it's bereshit. And the first letter of the whole Torah is the letter bet, which is the second letter of the alphabet. So it'd be like the greatest book in English,

starting with letter B instead of A. And, you know, in the Torah study mindset, they look for meaning and all of those things. And the, one of the explanations is because you can read the whole thing and you don't even know A, you don't even know olive, right? That like it is ever unfolding and there's always more. And so that's absolutely a core principle of both the study and maybe this is a bit more, I don't know, shocking to some, but that's the idea of the spiritual realization path too, is that we're here in our bodies. There's always more work to do. There's no permanent stage of ultimate realization. That we can experience in moments of Shabbat, right? When we're cultivating that joy and rest and celebration of all there is. But guess what?

The world's not whole yet and neither are we. So there's the idea of being a permanently perfected, realized, enlightened master is not very common in the Jewish system either. And it's like that study of Kabbalah. It's just infinitely unfolding like our minds. Okay. Yeah, I see that. And I like that kind of stuff. So, like, I seek that kind of stuff. Some people that, like, breaks their brain.

But I've always loved mystery, right? Just, and again, I feel like it's kind of primal in me and I think it should be in most humans, but we're so busy that we just forget that this needs to be part of our lives as well. We have built, you know, we, the broadest sense of built this society or this world that is really, as much as it has flaws, it's very good at instilling people with a sense of independence and freedom. And yeah, there are definite limits to people's opportunities, but there's also a lot of opportunities we have as a society compared

to a lot of our ancestors, right? There's things that we've done very effectively, and we haven't built a world that is particularly fostering a sense of a seeking of wisdom in that deeper way, that our universities, which are really places that could be that, are primarily places that are seeking, let's say, factual knowledge and objective assessment and all those kinds of things which are useful, but they're not, in my opinion, the end of where they could be. And there've actually been places that often exclude the seeking of wisdom because it could get dangerous or what happens if there's the wrong opinions that get forwarded in class and those kinds of things. So we all have that potential, but we haven't developed a society right now, which is really it's not all about that. It's actually about other things.

It's more about at the end of the day, people growing up, they care so deeply about their job. What will their title be and how big will their house be? Which look, it's important to have a, some degree of financial stability for wellbeing. That's always been true, right? We need a certain level, but we don't identify ourselves by our wisdom or our capacity to be aware or peaceful or kind as much as that's, those are all kind of secondary. When you were talking, I kept hearing in my head heresy, right? Which means choice. And really, is that what heresy means in English? That's so interesting. Choice. Are you serious? They took away choice, the choice. And I also feel with that went away with your voice, freedom,

when you don't have a choice to think for yourself for so long. And so people are still scared of that. You know, there's still like in our DNA, that fear of being able to choose. And so yeah, there are ways in which our, let's say, look, the American Constitution is an expression of a great empowerment of individuality and freedoms. Yeah. And there's also, I mean, I don't, I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm a dual citizen at this point. You know what I mean? I'm Canadian, but I'm also American. And I don't want to, look, it's very easy to get into a place of, let's say, cynicism around certain elements of America, whatever. There's no shortage of that. And what I really meant was, it's not a finished product, but there are ways in which, let's say, democracy in the West in the last few hundred years really are an expression of an empowerment of people to make choices, right? And there's more work to do there because we can swap out, let's say, a rigid view of the Bible for then what's the next value system we're going to view rigidly, right? What's the next way that we're going to become fundamentalists or non-thinkers? One of the things that I really do value about my own lineage, it's not always, let's say, embodied, but there is a really strong ethic for a long time of dialogue and discussion and conversation. The idea that any one person has the final say on how to interpret reality or how to interpret the Bible

or how to interpret wisdom is our foundational texts of really rabbinic Judaism, which is for all intents and purposes, what Judaism is. Last 2000 years, it's existed the rabbi lineage. It basically says when two rabbis argue and disagree, well, both of these are the words of the living God, meaning there's sacred scripture and two individuals, no wise people, but individuals, humans, have two completely divergent views on what that's about. And it says both are true simultaneously. Yeah, that is how today, definitely, and for a long, long time, the students of the wise, the students of the rabbis and all of that, who themselves are called students of the wise, that the art is learning a little bit. And then how do you see it? And let's hit you against someone. There's an argumentation there.

There's a debate, but it's really kind of sharpening the intellect vis-a-vis one another. And it is an expression of freedom, freedom to think. Like I said, when I read The Alchemist, two different, you know, 10 years apart, I was in a different place. So it's wherever you're at that you're going to receive what you're supposed to. So of course, perception will be different. Right. That in a sense, that's when the kind of text becomes like a tarot deck. Yeah. Or like an omen or it's an Oracle,, right? It's a very intuitive process. In fact, there's a lot of divination involved in reading text in that way. And the receiver, they're always going to be informed by who they are and their life experience.

The depth of one's teachings in that sense is really a reflection of who they are and how much spiritual experience and depth and self-awareness they've reached in combination with what they might know in that more intellectual sense. And so the teachers that I followed with the most passion in the Jewish world are ones who can combine that depth of study of the self. Yeah. That's where for myself, when I think about who we are today, right, this self, me today in 2023 and you, just like the Constitution, if you go and look at, I mean, we've evolved from that place. Okay, so it has to be amended, right? say in the Old Testament and in, you know, because I'm not really familiar with the Torah, but I assume it's the general same as the Old Testament. Oh, it's the first section of it.

First of all, there's many translations, but just Hebrew Bible. I wish I knew the number. It's I think 20, 30 something books in the whole Hebrew Bible. The first five books are called the Torah. And there's different translations, of course. But if you've read from Genesis to Deuteronomy, you've read the Torah. And there's different translations, of course, but if you've read from Genesis to Deuteronomy, you've read the Torah. Well, you know, it's interesting though, when I, and I know you listened to the episode when I had Rabbi Rosenberg and he had said that, you know, his stories were told differently a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting,

you know, again, perception, right. And how we've been taught and how we see it. But I mean, just that if you're reading the text and there's no commentary or teaching to it, if you're just reading the text, some of that stuff is really not for today. I mean, we live and we've evolved from that. And I heard you say earlier that you felt like the Zohar and the Kabbalah is more of a evolved. Did I hear that right? More evolved version of the Torah. I would say if we're using the metaphor of the American Constitution, instead of amending it, what the wisdom tradition traditionally in Judaism has done is reinterpret it and sometimes radically. Torah is both these five books, but also Torah in the broadest sense. It's used how the word Dharma is used in Buddhism. It means the whole wisdom lineage. It means everyone has Torah

within them and that all of our ancestors have written books that today are considered Torah because they're part of the wisdom lineage. So it's both, I guess, in a sense, capital T Torah or that is that those five books and then the lowercase T is just the evolving wisdom tradition. So Kabbalah, I don't, I hesitate to put a hierarchy on it. If you know what I'm saying, like evolve, more advanced and like, look, personally, I love Kabbalah, obviously. And I see it as a very special, there's a part of me for whatever reason, I could maybe feel into this a bit more, but there's a way in which evolved doesn't quite capture it. I, cause there is a sense in which it is more evolved. Yes. It was for a later time, closer to our day, more, let's say explicitly mystical than a lot of elements of the Torah. And, and I also feel like Torah itself is meant to evolve.

And so Kabbalah really is just a natural expression of that lineage. Just like the Talmud is a natural expression, just like today's unfolding Jewish spirituality is a natural expression. So it's all Torah as well. And something might feel advanced for its era, but it may also be unadvanced for another culture at the same time that there's, it's an evolving, a growing outward, but there's also just a meandering and a traveling. It's not just a spiral. Let's say it's more like a, honestly, it's like a slinky that goes in various

directions and it's always kind of moving forward, but it's not necessarily better or worse depending on the era. Though I would say in many ways, I have more personal engagement reading the Zohar than reading some of the other texts, including some literal reads of the Torah. I mean, I feel like just the understanding is more advanced now, maybe like even where we started the conversation saying that, you know, people are more open or less programmed right now. Seems like it. Well, some people are. It's so interesting. It just in my world, I've always been sense of soul world. I'm talking to all these very conscious, enlightened people.

I'm trying to think of what my hesitancy here is around this. I agree with much of what you're saying. And yeah, there's a way in which I hope that our human species is evolving. And I know that sometimes it's really this sort of two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. And part of studying ancient sources, even if we completely disagree with them, even if they are objectively wrong, I would say, right? Like the, the Torah and the book of Leviticus talks about gay men is not something I at all agree with some of the violence in there. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, they're all, they're all hot topics. They're all very, but I can ask myself

one, it's not good to hide from one's own past. I really, you know what I mean? We all, it's very humbling to know that as much as let's say in Canada here, I'm really a strong advocate for reconciliation between indigenous communities and Canadians. And actually part of a embodied path is relating to our own primal instincts, not letting them overrun us, but coming to a place where we can actually feel them and be aware of them. And guess what? There's a whole lot of projection that happens. So I guess I don't have like an answer, but I, first of all, agree with you. There's a lot of, I don't know, nasty stuff written in ancient documents and you'll find it in every tradition, but the Kabbalists of the Zohar weren't necessarily speaking of that other

stuff. Like I just did, right? They might be, sometimes they reinterpret or sometimes they agree with elements of it. And it's not, they weren't all kind of awakened guru types either. There's ways in which the Zohar reinforces some of that stuff, but there's a new Kabbalah, right? And it evolves from there, but it all connects back to the nature of Torah itself which is to reveal itself anew in each era okay I love that just right there that was it because you know as much as I'm saying as as we've evolved in and can go to this higher wisdom I also feel that we need to embrace some of our ancestors traditions say like with holistic healing and

stuff they did that for generations and generations because it worked. And then all of a sudden we gave up our power and just handed it over to big pharma and all this and, and lost our power in, you know, the capability that we are powerful enough to maybe not heal an arm ripped off, but maybe sit with our pain a little bit. And I know a lot of times for myself, if I just meditate and breathe light into wherever the pain is, a lot of times it goes away. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, I completely agree with that. There are ways in which we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater to kind of go back to an earlier theme today, just the profits and how

they lived and the kind of the ways that they had deep insight and how that empowered them to lead and, and help and heal. In some cases, the other thing too, which I have an eye for, whether it's the Hebrew Bible or the rabbinic teachings, when Kabbalah came on the scene, there was a ton of already a ton of rabbinic writings. I mean, like way more in those writings than in the whole Hebrew Bible. And it's this massive system of law and discussion and wisdom and a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly, honestly, like a lot of ancient texts. We can look at any of that and say, if there's a prohibition on something, it probably means that on a grassroots level, people were doing it. And so if someone prohibits a practice that today we have liberated, actually, it means that people were doing it. And if they weren't in power,

they couldn't promote it. But that's actually a clue. If we don't have writings from the sort of everyday ancestors, but there's a prohibition there. Yeah. It means that's a clue into, wow, there were some basically pagan witch practices, Wiccan type stuff that our female ancestors were doing in the Jewish lineage that the rabbis were prohibiting and they describe these rituals. So if you want to know what a 12th century Spanish or Egyptian Jewish Wicca practice looked like? Guess what? It is described in details in the writings of Maimonides, who was prohibiting it. But he was saying it because it was being done. And so there's actually ways of looking at those things which are prohibited and knowing what, on some level, what everyday people were doing.

That's so true. The laws are created usually because they were having an issue. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also in the original language and maybe in some good translations, the Hebrew Bible is not a monotheistic text. And that can also be quite shocking to people to hear because, oh, monotheism, Bible, that is not the thing. Well, if you look, for example, when the Israelites are freed from Egypt and they're singing this celebratory song after they crossed the sea of reeds, right? Otherwise translated as the red sea, it's the sea of reeds. They erupt into song

and they say, who is like you, God, among the gods, who is like you? And that's just one of many examples that they they recognize in the authors of the torah certainly those sections recognized that there are other gods out there but they believed that you'd have a right they sort of ineffable the infinite was or the lord if you will was the god of the israelites and the best god perhaps or you know what i mean but they acknowledge that there were other powers out there. Like there's ways in which translations or just interpretations cloud us from the actual reality. I mean, in the Garden of Eden, God is walking in the Garden of Eden and looking for Adam and Eve because he can't find them. Does that sound like a bit more pagan? You know what

I mean? Like the God who has a body who's walking around the garden that can't find the humans because God is not all knowing in that particular moment. It's very interesting, especially if you read it, you know what I mean? Actually read it. You know, I found it very interesting recently. I read an article that this is actually kind of funny, but the Pope decided he was going to go down to the sacred archives and he was going to share with everybody now what the true name of God is for the first time. This was like only a few years ago for the first time. And so he did.

And he brought out, and it was a very old text. It was from like, I want to say like 70 something AD, like really old text. So he brings it out and he shares, he said before, you know,

only the Pope's knew the true name of God. And he shared it with J he shares he said before you know only the popes knew the true name of god and he shared it was jote vaje but i mean like and did you pronounce it um that i don't know because i read it so i don't know i just i'm curious because that's the the pronunciation is what some of the legends are. There's a pretty decent historical argument to say that there never was a pronunciation, that those letters were chosen specifically because they represented no sound. They were sort of, yeah, like marker letters. But there are other traditions, certainly within the Jewish writings of antiquity that say, you know, the high priest, which is what the pope sort of took a lot of inspiration from

right the ancient israelite high priest and the jewish high priest of judea they were pronouncing it once a year in the inner sanctum of the temple and it was known so i'm curious if there was a pronunciation so in hebrew there's so many names of god that are translated in a more uniform way sometimes in a lot of translations right like there's many names that are translated in a more uniform way sometimes in a lot of translations, right? Like there's many names that are translated God, many names that are translated the Lord, but there's dozens. But that was his secret. Right.

He felt he wasn't the only one who should know it. Recently, I had come across this woman. Her name is Elizabeth Schrader, and she's a Bible scholar. She found a very big discovery in the book of John. And it basically makes Mary Magdalene, not for Magdala, but Mary of Bethany, which changes everything. And she actually went before all the churches, and some churches are considering changing. I also want to point out that, you know, in the Christian religion, the Bible ends right there, but in the Jewish tradition, God never stopped speaking to you. This is something that rabbis and scholars continue

to write. So that's why you still have books and you still have scripture and text. you know, what happened? She was like, after the new Testament just ended, God just doesn't talk to us anymore. We don't write about him. You know what I mean? Yeah. To be honest, I don't know enough about, let's say like Catholic theology. So there's, there's a few things I want to share. One of them is that just to go back just for a moment and kind of give a little bit more clarity. I will never stop wanting to probe the depths of both the Torah itself, the five books of Moses and the interpretations, but there is very little, if any part of me that wants to, you know what I mean? I'm not trying to uphold the literal read of it whatsoever, but the interpretive tradition, I'll never read the

end of. Even if I could read all day, every day for the rest of my life, the saying, the teachings of the rabbis, which interpret the Torah, I will never get literally to the end of that. It's impossible for me to study all of it, including Kabbalah, all the mysticism, but also the more, let's say, I don't know, pragmatic, legalistic, like all those takes, it's beyond me. But I don't want to say that I want to uphold any kind of literal reading, especially of the really, I don't know, problematic, nastier, you know, outdated, outmoded, but the interpretive tradition. Yeah. And so there is a story in the Talmud, which again, this sort of the real, like kind of, it's in a sense, the Bible of the rabbinic

tradition in many ways, it mirrors the significance of the New Testament in Judaism, because it instead of being a new covenant, what it is, is a drastic rereading of the Bible. And it really paves the way for what Judaism is in the subsequent era. It was finalized, so to speak, 1500 years ago, give or take. But in a real sense, it was never finalized, right? Like it all it all keeps going. But there's like the Talmud itself. I'm not writing sections of the Talmud. I'm writing other things, right? Like it all, it all keeps going, but there was like the Talmud itself. I'm not writing sections of the Talmud. I'm writing other things, right? But it, it all, it's part of

that discussion lineage of the rabbis. In the Talmud, there's a story about the ancient, I think it was the priests, the Kohanim in the old temple that wanted to get rid of the desire for idol worship. The legend goes that they did some kind of magic or something, and they drew forth from the inner sanctum of the temple, this fiery lion cub, which came out and they trapped it in some way. And at that moment, simultaneously, the desire for idol worship ceased in the world. That's their, basically on some level, that legend comes from a time of like, why aren't people bowing down to idols or statues like they used to and there's a whole thing about how to interpret that but simultaneously idol

worship ceases and so does prophecy that there was a connection that the author of that story drew between the desire to kind of have this really i don't know visceral connection to let's say nature or trees in the sense of or stars of worshiping them and the ability to be a prophet in that biblical sense. And then, so they say, okay, well, we can, we can handle that, but we want to get rid of adultery. We want people to stop cheating on each other and their spouses. And so they did some other incantation and, and adultery ceases, but then they realized that all the animals in the world are stopping having babies because think about that as a metaphor. And so they like they put it back. They're like procreation on that fundamental level, right? The sexual urge with God, but it's so strong. It also leads people to go elsewhere,

to cheat on God, right? Those are intimately connected. So this is all to say rabbis, any Jewish practitioner can forward the Torah lineage, right? The insights, but we differentiate that. And maybe it's a false differentiation, but classically that's different than what a prophet would do. Right. And I believe there's a shamanic prophetic capability within every person. And I see a lot of prophetic in a more, let's say formal sense. there's a lot of messages within, you know, classic Judaism that say, well, the prophetic era has ended. Thank you for sharing that story because it made sense.

But I have always wondered that, like, did God just stop talking to us? You know, did he just stop working through man or woman to write books, you know, on his behalf? Like what happened? Which God, I think, did work with you, you know, on his behalf, like what happened, which God, I think, did work with you, you know, to put this together in a few ways, right? Yes. But I do feel like, and actually, I really like your book, by the way.

I really do. I'm so glad. Last time I didn't actually have it in my hand. I didn't get to read it. And it's a great study. I would absolutely recommend this to anybody who wants to learn about Kavala because it helps you understand it, helps you study it. It gives you great questions to kind of ponder on, commentary. So this is like where I was going. Here we have these, this old wisdom. Okay. And now we are more advanced in maybe our

world technology. So now maybe we can evolve with the commentary. Like this is what it means for man today, right? This is how we can use this practice in our lives today. This is how we can be embodied in Kabbalah today. For sure. Yeah, it is the commentary method, essentially, that in the same way that, right, in my book, the primary sources are in the center. And then there's commentary all around, which explains it, expands on it, offers comparison to other things. That is what jewish tradition has been since the rabbis came on the scene and well i could show you on camera right now but people listening wouldn't see it but if you look open up a page of talmud which i have behind me okay so one more time i know you just explained where it came from but it was after the torah it was you said it was

finalized in the 1500s. Is it a bunch of authors or is it just one? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's much like yours. Yes. In the center of the page, essentially there's hundreds of rabbis in here. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. And these are the first rabbis and what they're doing is commenting on each other over the course of about 600 years. And it was a multi-generational project that started off probably orally and was eventually written down. And it's building on each other. It's quoting earlier rabbis, but they're all going back to the Bible and the Torah. And essentially, yeah, hundreds of rabbis over the course of many generations, which are building a new structure.

This happened after the temple was destroyed and the which was the central. It was it was a place based religion. Today, we think about Judaism as a maybe holiday based religion or a customs based religion. But it's a diaspora. We've, well, we've kind of reclaimed in the last 75 years, but there's a way in which Judaism still is, it's not based on place. There's no temple, there's no central offerings. We go to individual synagogues, but basically the rabbis recreated what Judaism could be when the temple was destroyed. And it became more about customs and prayers than about offerings into a particular place.

And so it was a paradigm shift. And that they took, actually the Talmud is taking earlier writings from other rabbis and commenting on those and then bringing in the Torah. And there's versions of the Torah where you have like a single verse and then the rest of the page is commentary. Basically, it allows the original text to be preserved. And there's a part of me that wants to rewrite the whole Torah, by the way. I want to take out the bad parts. Right. But that's not been the way. And so to preserve wisdom across generations in Judaism, it's done essentially by keeping, it would be like taking the American constitution in its original form. And instead of making

amendments, making commentary, but the commentary can be binding, right? We don't need to change how it started in that sense. Like it is the, it's the central document of this thousands of year old lineage because paradigms do change that story about why prophecy ends in a way articulating a paradigm shift, like at the end of the Lord of the Rings, when everyone leaves Middle Earth, there, all of the magical beings are going. And it's this is the age of man, they have this great accomplishment, but something shifts on a fundamental level. And that's like what our world has done, that a lot of the magic has left. And it's not like it's gone permanently, but there's a way in which stories like that about the end of prophecy or in our age, the end of meaning on some level, the end of magic in the world. A lot of people feel that in our era, but it can be reanimated and brought back again. And I think in many ways, that's the project that Embodied Kabbalah is. It's like a reanimation, a re-resurrection, but a re-enchantment of our world is what I think a lot of mystical teachings are pointing at right now.

Or a discovery of just finding it within. Absolutely, yes. That we have it within, right? Absolutely. That before, maybe it was outside of us and maybe we hadn't evolved to the place where now, you know, everyone can find it within. Oh, for sure. Yes. And yeah. And I guess there is a way in which I was speaking where I was kind of thinking about the world outside. And yes, that the re-enchantment, it happens in both planes and within us, outside of us and also community it can happen between us right when practitioners meet there's a way in which the space right in those moments can be animated with

that magic and i like one of the most beautiful things people can experience are shared spiritual experiences where there's a presence right that's the word shekhinah in hebrew means presence that presence can arise and arrive actually between us in the space I love in the book of Thomas one of the Gnostic gospels it says the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you and when you find it within then you are known and that always stuck out to me of course you, that's in the Gnostic Gospels. Right. It didn't make it in there. It didn't make it into the critical edition of the Council of Nicaea. Yes. Didn't make the cut for sure. So there is a few things that when I listened to our episode a few times, actually, I liked it. You know, 22 has always been a number that stuck out to me.

Can you tell me the significance of 22? Since everybody that's listening probably knows that that's like my number. What's 22? Why 22? So in the same way you were describing the unfolding nature of Kabbalah and how it's an infinite study. 22 is a lot of things. Yeah. And so the first thing that came to mind is the two letters. Like if each Hebrew letter is a number, you can imagine that different words can like different numbers can be

spelled differently. Yes. In English, the number six, let's say could be, could be the letter F and It's the sixth letter in the alphabet, but let's say it could also be ABC. You know what I mean? Because that's one plus two plus three. So you can add up different letters to equal different numbers. So there's a most, I guess, direct way of spelling it. And that would be the letter that equals 20 and the letter that equals two and that is kaf is 20 and bet is two and so if you were to turn that into a word bet kaf is bach which means or bacha which

means within you so you were just talking about within yeah so 22 means within within you like literally that is what the word means uh which I think is amazing. It is amazing. And how about this one? Last time, the first thing we talked about just about was the letter Vav, right? Because it sounds like your last name and it's a meaningful letter for you. So if you were to spell the letter Vav, it would be spelt Vav Yud Vav. And that is 6 plus 10 plus six, which equals 22. No way. So one of the ways of spelling Vav equals your favorite number.

Wow. That's great. Okay. I'm aligning. 22 also I've heard is in our DNA. And the one thing that is different in the 23rd part of the DNA is what distinguished the process male and female. Absolutely. Yes. That's a good one. I mean, you're not going to find that in the Hebrew numerological system, but that's still, yeah, no, no, no, not even, but still, but I love incorporating things like that.

The word in Hebrew is a drash. It means a sort of like a, where the intellect meets the soul. It's an interpretation, but it comes from that wellspring. And that's what ideally, that's what rabbis do. That's what every Jewish practitioner, or I would say anyone who encounters Jewish wisdom and wants to can do. And you can incorporate things from genetics. You can incorporate things from outside of the Jewish canon. It's just the question of like, does it generate that wisdom and that insight? And the answer is yes, go for it. I drash Buddhism. You know what I mean? I'll drash Wicca, I'll drash all these kinds of things. As far as I'm concerned today, it's really about the cultivation of wisdom with what we access, but that method is deeply within the Jewish canon.

So here's a good one, so to speak. The word tova, which, so in Hebrew, every word is feminine or masculine, not every single word, but many words like a lot of languages. Right. In English, we don't have a particularly gendered language, but in Hebrew, you can have a masculine goodness or a feminine goodness. And the feminine goodness is the word tova, which tova, it's like, it's like goodness, but it's like, it just happens to be the feminine, you know, because if I was going to say, or even the word, the adjective good, like this male dog is good versus this female dog is good. I would use the masculine good for the, the male dog and the feminine anyway, which is the feminine form of goodness or good as an adjective equals 22. It's interesting.

Now here's here. So here's my drash of what's come up so far, right? The interpretation is there's a sense of these 22, right? And the 23rd is chromosomal. And that is this differentiation between feminine masculine, right? And so here's tova, which is a specifically feminine word, but the word within you, becha, because of the way that word appears it can be depending on what vowels someone would put in there could be bach or bacha which could be within

you feminine or within you masculine it has the dual nature of it it is a just the letters in and of themselves are non-gendered so there's a whole interesting way in which there's a sort of gendered element and a non-gendered element but it means feminine thus far right if you don't know what i'm saying because is the feminine and so i'll just add i think this we'll add this last one the word yachad which means it's to be united to come together like union oneness i'm just even trying to think if there is a feminine version of this i guess in some context that they would be but it is a it's almost like a preposition you know it's like uh maybe that's the wrong grammatical term but i don't think it's often gendered in any case

it equals 22 yeah and it means together or oneness or unity and it again has that sense of a unification beyond gender the star of david as well because one time when I was researching the Bob, that popped up and I was like, what? And then it said. Oh, six pointed stars. Yes. Yes. Yeah. No, you're right.

Yes. And so, and you're saying, oh, it's a masculine and a feminine simultaneously. Yeah. Absolutely. And there's a lot of Kabbalah is a fairly non-binary system. As much as the different Sepphirotic elements the different divine manifestations are gendered in a lot of cases they also switch and so the divine feminine what's usually called the divine feminine it's really one of many sort of feminine archetypes within

that system it's called the shekhinah and it's like kind of classically feminine but it's also king david so king david becomes this representation of the feminine but it's also King David. So King David becomes this representation of the feminine, but it's also masculine in that case. And now he's uniting with the upper divine masculine as well. There's a great complexity there. And so that is all, well, they would, Kabbalists would say it's all one mystery. Yeah. Exactly. There's a differentiation and a unification happening simultaneously. i had also i found this one to be great that the merkaba has 22 triangles of course how did i not that is yeah i almost want to like apologize and that's like the six pointed star as in 3d the merkaba right

well the yeah merkaba can mean different things in different contexts, but it's 22 letters. And it is, in that sense, this great completion number. It's crazy. Because from, yeah, Aleph to Tav, like from the beginning to the end, it's the whole thing. Like that's, yeah, that's great. I can't believe it didn't even occur to me. Absolutely. 22.

Yeah. And then 22 for the Sephiroth. Is it the sephirot there's 22 lines which connect the different 10 but each one of them is a hebrew letter right that's yes i'm actually right now i have a class i'm teaching on the 32 paths of wisdom and that's the 22 letters plus the 10 sephirot in the sort of ancient writings. Those are the 22 paths of wisdom, but it's 22 plus 10. This is an example of why it's hard to do some of these interpretations without some knowledge of Hebrew, or at least without someone who is explaining the Hebrew,

right? Because it doesn't make it into the translation. Like in my book, I really tried to relay some of these kinds of interpretations which aren't accessible otherwise. There's a word in Hebrew that doesn't exist in English because it's really a not needed. We have words in English like that, too, like the word do. If I say, do you believe in this? In most languages, I would just say you believe in this. The do, it's extra. We have it and we say it, but we don't actually need it.

And so Hebrew has words like that, too. Except, of course, they're interpreted as meaningful, right? It's like, why is that word there? Well, it must mean something deep. And so the word is it's just it. And it basically it's used. What's it announces the object of the sentence in some context. So basically the first line of the whole Torah in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Okay. In Hebrew, that would be in the beginning, God created at the heavens and the earth or heavens and at the earth. And basically it's like, we don't need that in English, but what is it? It is a two letter word that starts with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And the second letter in that word, the final letter is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So one of the mystical interpretations is in the beginning, God creates the Hebrew alphabet, right? From the first letter to the last letter, right? That et is a symbol. That's the first thing God creates.

And it might not have even been letters. It might have been the sounds, right? Kind of like the vocal, like the prequel C.S. Lewis wrote about the Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan, the God figure, right? The line sings the world into being, right? It's like a sonic creation. These different letters are different sounds

and the infinite is singing or articulating with sound like mantra almost the world is created. So that, and that's the whole alphabet symbolizes all of the sonic or just the energetic building blocks of all reality so that's amazing and yeah there's those two little letters just i agree with the frequency and vibration of the earth that's how it was created i believe that so but you know what here's another crazy thing that i heard i don't know where i heard this though but it always stuck to me and I started adding up all these things in my brain put them somewhere there was 22 major pyramids built and they it was like a I don't remember

where it was it was this guy and he was talking about his ancestors and it was like a story that was passed down and i want to say he was basque or something it was it was not anywhere you know near you know the holy land and he had said that it was passed down that they had made the 22 pyramids because it was going to make some merkkabah, and that would be the vehicle or something. And that's what they needed to do to be able to leave or go back home or whatever. Yeah. So here's an example. I was just thinking, I was like, oh, I wanted to return to the difference in the stories that I tell versus someone like Rabbi Rosenberg that you had on. And this is a good example. So I am very informed by archaeology and history, and I intermix that with my understanding of the traditional Jewish stories. So, and I don't even know what Robert Rosenberg would say about this in particular, because Jewish people were not around, like the Israelite tradition didn't exist when the pyramids were built.

Right? Like there's a legend, some people, even I was kind of raised on it on some level that the Jewish Israelites were involved in building pyramids were built, right? Like there's a legend, some people even, I was kind of raised on it on some level that the Jewish Israelites were involved in building pyramids. That wasn't the case. Pyramids were built before that. If there was an existence of what became Israelite Jewish wisdom, there's no evidence of it, right? And so something, a story like that, it's an interesting story, but I put that in the realm of legend in the sense that it's unprovable. In the same way, the traditional Jewish Kabbalistic, let's say, view of where Kabbalah comes from, they would say it goes all the way back to Moses on Mount Sinai, right? I would not say that. I would say Kabbalah, wherever it was first spoken of, does not appear on the scene until the Middle Ages ages really. And there might be indications

that it, you know, you can trace it back a little bit further, but there's no evidence. Let's say that Kabbalah was, would be in the Mirkavah in that sense, right. Would have been around at that time. And so I would put that in the realm of maybe, you know what I mean? But like, for me, I, the stories that I am aware of, right. They don't articulate that message. And there are traditions within Judaism of Kabbalah being around in the biblical times, but no one in the Bible is talking about Sefirot. No one's talking about the tree of life in that way. It's all being, that Kabbalah is an interpretation. It's a draft of the Torah in light of the tree of life cosmology. And it's a beautiful one. And it's so good. It makes me wonder how far back does this

go? But in that way, I understand it as a new interpretation from that era, which is incredibly helpful and beautiful. But on some level, I don't need it to be biblical. I don't need it to be Moses to be profound. And I would never also, Shanna, take away that story for you if it's meaningful. I'm just, I don't think there's a way of proving it. Right. Well, maybe if you look from the stars and you look down and saw them all and they all aligned. Well, maybe, maybe, yes, it could be wonderful and beautiful. And there is a little bit of a history in starting in the Theosophical Society from the 1800s of saying that Kabbalah was appropriated by the Jews. And that is, I would call, a form of anti-Semitism.

And it was Madame Blavatsky who started Theosophical Society in the 1800s. She basically said the Jews appropriated Kabbalah. And Kabbalah was very important in early theosophy. And she said they appropriated it from the Greeks and the Egyptians. Really? And there is zero evidence for that. Right? Interesting. And it is a way of stealing Kabbalah for her own purposes.

And she was saying that she was teaching the true Kabbalah, but she wasn't. She was appropriating it from the Jewish lineage. Which version was she teaching? Do you know? Her Kabbalah was largely informed by Christian Kabbalah. Was it like Alistair Crowley? No, no. Alistair Crowley was like after her.

Alistair Crowley was like a student or around the same time. But basically, Theosophical Kabbalah was largely drawn from Christian Kabbalah, which had existed since the 1400s, but was drawn from Jewish Kabbalah, a.k.a. Kabbalah. And so she said, oh, no, no, no, we have the real deal here. The Jews have taken it and basically corrupted it. And she somehow had access to the true Kabbalah, but she invented the story of it. There was no evidence. Right. And so there's a certain element in which the Kabbalah, which comes from Egypt, which precedes Israelites, is there's a way in which there's a certain, I don't know, it makes me a little nervous. And I'm sure you were unaware of everything I just said, but I just want to say that there's a way in which kind of tracing it through Jewish lineage to me is important because that's the only evidence we have. And so, but yeah, Aleister Crowley, which then used the 32 in his book, 777. He broke off from theosophy, but he was of that camp. And so his Kabbalah also is coming through the theosophical Christian Kabbalistic kind of filter. And some of that stuff I read and I love. Some of it I don't. But just to say the stories about it, not only do I

have a different story, I disagree with their story. Okay. So I've studied both of them. And I've read many of Helena Blavatsky. I'm really aligned with her on a lot of things. Alistair Crawley, at first, I thought that, Oh my God, what is this? Oh no. You know, actually I think that I pretty much was already thinking that about Alistair Crowley. It really was about a life of slave. I, that I first really aligned with this stuff and then kind of was like, Oh my God, I don't know. So it's interesting. I haven't felt that way about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky yet. I really would like to look into that. And just to say, I'm not, I don't know. So it's interesting. I haven't felt that way about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky yet. I really would like to look into that. And just to say, I'm not, I don't want to discourage people from reading and loving what they love, right? I would, I'm not dismissing

teachers entirely. I personally have some caution around Aleister Crowley because of some of the, let's say dark arts that he was promoting. And. And I was just talking about this with Torah. I take what I love and I leave the rest, right? And I think people should explore and be aware of some of those things. And so in this one instance, I don't know much of Madame Blavatsky. I really don't. I know that the way that she portrayed Kabbalah was disingenuous. And I feel that.

I'm not someone who's quick to call it appropriation. I really am not. I don't even like how much it's used, that term. But if somebody takes something from another culture and then makes a bunch of money off of it and then doesn't give credit to that culture or shares the spoils, so to speak, that to me is pretty classically appropriate. And so that's all I was pointing to. But if you love her teachings and writings, I don't want to discourage that.

You know, she was a woman, you know, in her time that should not have been doing the things that she was doing. You know who I really admire? Speaking of women, actually, she read under a pseudonym was Dion Fortune. And she writes about Kabbalah and she writes about Dr. Taverner, this sort of like under a pseudonym as well, this doctor she studied with who was doing like magical, mystical things. She knew about Kabbalah. She wrote the book, Psychic Self-Defense. And again, I think her history is a little off perhaps. And she definitely changes Kabbalah when she describes

it in my experience, but these are profound teachers and I've learned a lot from them. And they were writing often in a world where there weren't a lot of jews doing kabbalah like kabbalah was in the modern era was kind of wiped away in outside of a few circles and so the esophageal kabbalah helped kind of re-inspire some of the reawakening like a lot of it was academics i have a blog article on my website where i get it it's called the 12 types of Kabbalah. And I describe basically, I mean, I could have said the 20 types, but these are 12 and it traces the ways in which these relate. So if you see Kabbalah with a C is Christian Kabbalah, Kabbalah with a Q is Theosophic Kabbalah and Kabbalah with a K is largely Jewish, but in these days it's changed. And so the Kabbalah

center is a particular Jewish lineage from a particular teacher of the 20th century who wrote a book called the Sulam. There's a whole, but like that is one branch of Kabbalah today that went quite universal. And it is one articulation. That's one of the 12 types I talk about. It's sort of like a new formation in our era, but it is one articulation of the living tradition of Kabbalah, just like new age Kabbalah is one articulation, just like there's, but it's a living lineages and there's many different forms you'll find. And the most universal ones, well, the most established, I'll say I teach a universal form, but it's not an Ashlag form. The Ashlag is where the lineage

of the Kabbalah center goes back to. I am more coming out of a combination of the Jewish academic, the liberal Jewish, and the, I'm quite influenced by the new age movement as well. Like that's kind of my subset, but there's anyways, there's different forms. And so the 12 types of Kabbalah, it's on, it's on my blog. There's ways of tracing the relationships, but yeah, the Q is the theosophical version originally. But OK, people are everything's evolving from there. Yeah. So, you know, some people I've heard the C cabal. Right. Where does cabal come from? You know, people, have you ever seen the fall of cabal?

Oh, that's interesting. And there's lots of interpretations that can come from false etymologies. Cabala, which means like le cabal, it means to receive. That's where the word comes from. A cabal means like a secret political movement. And I hear that, you know, now that we're on the topic, what comes up in my mind is the fear of antisemitism. What comes up for me is just that your society, when you think about like Illuminati, cabal. Appropriation, antisemitism, these are things which are every jewish person i think today knows the experience and it's sad i didn't know it growing up really and i things are changing and there's just whatever

i get messages and people harassing me online you know about my judaism and it's it's just an experience i know of wow and so i become more maybe sensitive. And then in the same way, like I had relatives that didn't make it out of Europe. They died in the Holocaust. And that's that's a very common story for Ashkenazi Jews. And so there's you know what I mean? But I don't make it a central focus. Well, I think it is to be talked about. If I have read and heard that the sea is from the cabal word is from Kabbalah, which is not, you know, to be honest, here we are, here we are. And I just said, those are etymologically not related. Certainly cabal doesn't come from the Hebrew originally, but there is seems like a decent argument that it was

derived the word derived into, let's say perhaps Latin or french from the hebrew word right the hebrew word which means to receive or receiving tradition or receiving like divine insight becomes kabbalah and then someone outside of the jewish world creates the word kabbal from that i like i i would have to do more research to be honest i might have been mistaken but it could be that that one was derived from the other but here's why my why my anti-Semitic spidey sense was activated. It's because there is hundreds, if not thousands of years of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about Jews collectively secretly running things. And there's the book, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Like there's books that are made up. It's a lie. And a friend of mine said, well, if there's a Jewish conspiracy,

I've never seen one nickel of it, right? Like there's no, there's no, there's no organization that has ever given me money that we've stolen from the world or, you know what I mean? It doesn't. Yeah. And, and so I hear a cabal as a secret group of people with political power and those kinds of things yeah and it's how derived from the word Kabbalah which is a Jewish mystical term and I I it's there's a lot of resonance there and that's why that's why it came up for me now I don't know you know how people use it or you know what I mean there's right tracing the Illuminati, let's say, in the negative sense of the Illuminati who control things and all of that. Like, I wouldn't

be shocked if one could trace that, I don't know, fear back to people who have fear of Jewish practitioners in the world. And I don't know, but there's anyways, that to me, I see that linkage. And even took some of their mysticism practices right all right no those folks too yeah yeah yeah whoever the i don't know because illuminati's use the different ways it ranges from the enlightened who are the true teachers in our world i've heard it used like that to the people who are secretly controlling everything right right and i i don't know how that's right but you know what i do feel like there's so many conspiracies and i i've looked at them and a lot of times you'll get a little bit of truth

a little bit of truth and that gets you and then a bunch of propaganda basically well that's any good conspiracy right i mean like if you're going to design a conspiracy you have to base it on some little piece like of truth. People are very reticent to believe something that is completely, completely, you know what I mean? Yeah. But if you can even just imagine like instead of saying it, if the Jewish conspiracy was there are these people that you've never even heard of that don't actually exist that control things, right? Just say like there's people who control things and they happen to be this group you've heard about and are written in your foundational religious texts. You know what I mean? Like then you've already already you've linked it to a group. Right.

And guess what? This group was somehow relating to the members of this group relating to the Roman authorities, which led to this event. That's really important. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, just there's some real tangible quality which conspiracies need to be related to in order to be believed at all and so yeah that's it's just things and i you know and just thinking going back to like eliphas levi i tell you what i think everyone even if you know they've never heard of them should like look at some of these you know bigger people that we've mentioned like alistair crawley helena and all that because it's very interesting what I discovered with like even in the story of Baphomet right the horned devil that's like half

like it's a um uh what's it called a transgender um horned god well what was interesting though he's the first person that ever put in print this drawing he made it's just basically to show dualism but what's interesting is that arthur waite who did the tarot used that for the devil card ah right yes right. Yes. So yeah, things can get, kings can get taken. And if you have not heard of this individual, I think you really, I'm very impressed, Shanna, with how much you read and like your sort of knowledge of these different figures in history. This guy is named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. And he seems to have perhaps unwittingly created Christian Kabbalah. He lived in the 15th century in Italy. I believe his book was the first book ever to be universally banned by the Catholic church. He was Christian and he wrote a book called the 900 theses.

And he included Kabbalistic stuff because he learned Kabbalah from a rabbi, like a rabbinic Kabbalist who taught him. This guy must have been somehow universal. I don't know much about the rabbi, but this guy created 900 theses. I think he was one of these guys. He died pretty young, but Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is attributed with creating Christian Kabbalah, even though he might not have thought of it like that, right? He was just one of like a few of the writings, a few of these theses he produced within these 900, which were so radical and controversial that it was universally banned. And you just might really enjoy reading about him. I will.

Yeah, basically, he learned from a Kabbalist rabbi and then created this whole spark, which basically fueled itself and evolved over the years and eventually fed into theosophical Kabbalah. That's so interesting. So, you know, I feel like I won't keep you forever. I could keep you forever. I literally could talk to you for hours, but I feel like just the basis of this conversation has really been like, you know, you have to appreciate the old and, but you do have, you need commentary. You need today's commentary, right? Absolutely. I go to Catholic school sometimes and I could give a talk of, you know,

for high school students. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I'm, and I believe in this and I've had a relationship there for a few years and it's like kind of almost community service. And I sometimes get the question of like, it takes a brave child or a brave teenager to ask this, but why is the New Testament so about love? And you have all this violence in the Hebrew Bible and God is vengeful and you know what I mean? And the answer is the Hebrew Bible is massively reinterpreted by the Talmud. The Talmud's main name for God is the compassionate one. And in the same way that Jesus and the gospels and Paul and all of that, they took this

turn towards this loving God. And they really reinterpreted and also said, there's a new kind of covenant around now. Rabbis did that by interpretation. So we can look at the Torah and say, I don't know, some version of wow. And some version of really or even yuck. Right. But and we can say I'm going to reinterpret or I'm going to comment or whatever. We can also understand that that commentary has been going on for thousands of years. And in fact, the later books of the Bible reinterpret some of the earlier teachings. Sometimes people have been doing it forever. And so, yes, looking at modern modern commentaries but also engaging with older ones too if we can find them and many of them are translated in english today and it's this great unfolding and the last piece that really relates into the embodiment stuff is that we should be drashing we should be interpreting our

body and our sensations and our minds, that the same attitude towards the ancient texts, that all reality is a text. All our bodies are a text. If we feel something in our stomach that feels like pain, guess what? We can look a little closer. We can investigate that. And maybe we're going to find some deep truth there that didn't quite know how to articulate itself. The drash, this interpretive, where the intellect meets the soul is also where awareness meets the body, the heart, where it meets nature and relationship, where it meets society. The world is a text and we need to be interpreting it and adding our commentary because there's so much wisdom hidden underneath. Okay. So guess what what just this past week

i was reading a book and every time she spoke of there's a lot of different archetypes that are connected to the dark mother right khalima is wonderful mary magdalene oh khalima the black madonna yes yes okay these are all the dark mothers. Okay. Well, guess what? As I'm reading it, for some reason, my mind just kept on seeing dark matter. Well, dark matter is scalar energy. Matter is mother. Yes. Rooted.

Oh, I love that. Do you know everything I've been studying is giving scalar energy and Sophia, my whole mini series is about the two of them. And they just went full circle together. Everything I was like the creatress, the dark mother, this is hidden scalar energy and Tesla and everything I've gone through, okay, full circle. And I was like, what in God's name just happened it was amazing so finally my mini series can be finished oh wow yeah no I that is that yeah reality no everything you just said though too I was like yes so yes wisdom is embedded in creation it It's everywhere. And our world is in many ways, is just God's ability to hide really well. Yes. And you know what, without dark matter, we would be invisible. We wouldn't have a physical body. It is the plasma, the scalar energy in between every single cell. And they say in Kabbalah that if you could truly encounter true reality, you would disappear,

right? You would cease to exist. If you can make contact with that antimatter, right? Or whatever, there's a way in which, yeah, there's, you would actually disappear. And I have a tendency to interpret it metaphorically, but I also love the idea that the Kabbalists really meant that. You would actually cease to exist. So crazy. Okay, I might need to just send me that. I am citing an untranslated text right now, but I can, world, situating herself within this great kind of feminist empowerment, mother figure. Yes, I love that.

And the older interpretations where the first stories of the legends of Lilith, you could argue that it was all just patriarchalized, you know, but the oldest stories of her, she was, she was a demoness. She was not a goddess mother like Kali. And I love the new way that it's the direction that it's going. I'm totally supportive of that. And in the same way, as a very historically oriented person, the oldest teachings of Lilith, she was like scary. She was robbing babies from the cradle. She was, she was in the Zohar. If you read the Zohar on Lilith, they're not talking about her as the divine feminine. They're talking about her as the demonic. The dark mother? Yeah. And I love how you're putting that.

Yes, she absolutely. Well, the Tree of Life also has a flip side. And the Shekhinah has dark Shekhinah. She's dark Shekhinah in the Zohar, at least in the sections I've seen. The demonic version of the divine presence. Everyone can be refined through their interaction with the demonic, but I know Kali has these major old liberation qualities

to her, just like Mary and all of those things. And just, I want to just nuance that a little bit. She was seen as a demonic figure who is being reclaimed and liberated today. I had a dream about a Lilith, like a few weeks, and I haven't shared this yet with, I mean, I've shared it with some other scholars just by email because I didn't know anything of Lilith. So I had this crazy dream. It was so, I woke up and I wrote it all out. I

forced myself because I knew it just had one of those feelings that it was an important dream. So I forced myself and it was, I was at a wedding and I had these men bringing me gifts and one of them I just didn't trust. So then like the next thing I remember in the dream, I'm in like this cave area and there's this woman there. She was hiding and I had this knowing, or I heard that guy say that he was going to come for her and put her back into the ground where she belonged. And here's how I knew her name. We both saw in the grain of the wood and L and we have like this knowing we looked at each other, you know, silly dreams, you know, and we're like, that's great. And I straight up left my husband that I just married. And I went with

her to hide her. It was the most interesting dream. Well, Lamed in Hebrew, Lamed, the letter Lamed, look into that one. It is the only one that goes all the way from the heavens to the earth in the Hebrew alphabet. It goes, it's the highest letter and connects to the baseline. And it's similar to a Vav in the sense that it's a connector symbolically. It goes, it's the highest letter and connects to the baseline. And it's similar to a vav in the sense that it's a connector symbolically. It's related to the word learning and teaching in the number 30, the lamed. And that's the first letter of Lilith.

So you might wanna check that out. Oh, there's a part of me. I'm just like, Shanna, can you write a story or a book about Lilith and about how she was lost? And the only way she was given as a gift was by like a patriarchal figure that the earliest records to my knowledge that we have of her were from the male rabbi teachings

about her being evil and a demon. But maybe there's an older teaching there that could be imagined at least, you know what I mean? Or dreamt of. But just to say there's Lilith in the sense of, I don't know. That she was freed from her demons.

Even though the oldest Jewish legends are of her being a demon. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The reclaiming of her really, there's something else there. And maybe there's someone who listening to this, who says, Oh, I've read other sources and I can find older teachings of Lilith or whatever. But to my knowledge, it's been a reclaiming of an imagined Lilith from the ancient world. And I, again, I don't want to put too much on your plate, but like there's some way, or maybe someone listening, is there a way in which Lilith could be described in a legendary form, like the legend of Lilith? Maybe it was then robbed of that in this like false gift kind of way you're describing, like he didn't really trust the

man giving the gift. Yeah. Well, when I had to search for understanding of lilith because i didn't know zohar was the first thing that i found there's not a lot of anything on lilith in fact the christians don't speak whatsoever of lilith because it's a jewish a jewish legend she doesn't exist in the christian world until quite recently to my knowledge that the midrash is where she's articulated. It's like rabbinic teachings. Yeah. But Jesus preceded midrash. Okay. Like the midrash are the stories that the rabbis tell. And there are legends that may well have developed after Jesus, right? In the same sense, the different things evolve. Like Jesus lived at the time when the temple still stood the rabbis did not become a thing right he's called rabbi once i believe in the book of john perhaps but that means my teacher

he wasn't a rabbi in the formal sense of someone in the lineage of rabbis you know what i'm saying he did not possibly know about that right and nor did the people around him. That legend may have come later. So was in the story that you've been told of Lilith, she was Adam's first wife and she didn't want to be laid down or something like that. So if you read the literal reading again in Hebrew, which is often not translated because it's so strange, the literal reading is the first chapter of the Bible. It's almost like, oh, this is what the academics are saying today. It's up for grabs. But that's a different creation story than the Adam and Eve story. The first chapter is, it just sounds like the creator deity, Elohim, creates all humanity. And then it doesn't say Adam.

It just says, male and female, he created them. Male and female, he created them. Okay. And then the second chapter, starting in verse four or five, it begins the story, which it's actually, if you read it independently, is a different creation narrative that is arguably from a different like subsect of ancient Israelite culture. That's the theory. And it is a different name of God. It says Adonai Elohim. It's a different name of God there. And so Adam and eva then described and so commentators have the task of saying why are these two things kind of different why is it say adam is created and then eve is created from adam's rib or you could also translate it as adam's side so some brilliant

drasher comes along and says this is the same story but the first created being was a male female blend male yes and that was the original adam and then when eve was split off that was actually the side of adam it wasn't the rib it was literally this sort of like dual gendered being. I've heard clone. Like conjoined twins. Also, in any case, somewhere in there, there's, now I've given you this whole story, which I love. And I'm like, where does Lilith fit in?

I've heard that Lilith was like the initial mate and then Eve comes later. She's not mentioned, but again, Lilith appears probably in the book of Isaiah, but it means a different, it's like the word Lilith is there, but it probably means something else. It was from that one line in the book of Isaiah, but it means a different, it's like the word Lilith is there, but it probably means something else. It was from that one line in the book of Isaiah that the early commentary on this, the early storytellers take that one line and then they combine it with this story as it's literally

written in Adam and Eve. And I believe that's how Lilith comes to being. But Lilith probably in the book of Isaiah had another meaning around it was some kind of animal perhaps, or a plant, or there's some other word that it used to mean. And it becomes this core kernel for this whole story. A midrash is called that that that the rabbis tell to explain these elements and share wisdom and their perspectives of what else is happening under the surface. And her consort sometimes is known as being Samael yeah that's in the zohar samayal which means god's poison arguably or just it's somehow it's kind of the devil maybe yeah but in

judaism generally the under generally the understanding is everything comes from god the light and the dark like isaiah says god forms light and creates darkness makes peace and creates evil like everything's from God. And that's a very common theology, including in a lot of Kabbalah. And so Samael is an angel. But if Lilith is the dark side of Shekhinah, Samael is the dark side of Tiferet, the dark side of the Holy Blessed One. So in Kabbalah, the central axis of Tiferet is the dark side of the Holy Blessed One. So in Kabbalah, the central axis of Tiferet

is the mate of Shekhinah, the heavens and the earth, they're called. And in the subversive universe, like the dark tree of life, if you will, or the underworld demonic really is how it's described. Samael is the dark king of that, you know, the central masculine element of Tiferet, the central axis, and his mate is Lilith. of T-Ferret, the central axis and his mate is Lilith. And there's other demons too, and demonesses and there's like, so that's one of the ways they're articulated. Thank you so much. I wasn't even going to bring it up until, I don't know how Lilith came out. Another weird thing was there was this one time Mandy and I, when she was podcasting with me, we had on Catherine Hargraves and we played this game that

she made it was cards and we had to give each other all a name we had a like it was just like you know let's focus on a name and see what we came up with and she came up with for me Lily Bear which was just silly you know Lily Bear so I looked up Lily and what was interesting is Shanna, even that you spoke of different versions of that, but Shanna means Lily or something like that. And I was like, wait, what? That's so weird. Well, it's it's called. Yeah, we can do reclaiming. That's part of Drash is looking at old characters and reclaiming them. Like the way you talked about Lilith amongst all these other goddess figures, that's a reclamation for the sake of the divine feminine. Despite all this demon talk we're having, like I'm really supportive of that kind of thinking that every era we can look back and say, well, this character was in the shadows.

But guess what? They don't have to be right like there's different eras of judaism in which the men valorize different figures yeah they used to be religious heroes and then they became sort of everyday good people or warrior heroes or like there's different the mythology i mean i'm kind of uh i'm kind of a frodo baggins kind of guy but like apparently tolkien really liked sam ganji? And like the movie really cherished Aragorn, but I love Gandalf. And you know, it's like, how did these, and in every era we can actually look back and we can reclaim and relate to people anew. Serach Bat Asher was

this forgotten kind of figure from the Bible, one of the grandchildren of Jacob, the patriarch. And in the Midrash, I didn't learn about this until recently, Serach Barashir is a Jewish immortal. She never dies. And I had only heard that there was like Elijah the prophet who never died. Elijah is this immortal who never dies in the Bible. But Serach Barashir is mentioned in several generations and then in the legends of the rabbis. And she is this wisdom keeper across many generations. You know, she's badass. The ever unfolding and the massive library just in my own tradition allows this whole thing to move forward because we can uncover, right? Reveal hidden names of God, so to speak, hidden texts, hidden wisdom, and include archeology and history. Like this is how it moves forward. And maybe to go back again, that's why I don't want to throw

out the baby with the bathwater because I haven't even learned what the bathwater is yet. There's so much there. Once I, once I learn everything, then I could decide, you know, when you finally get to the top of the train, you're done. Exactly. I'll just disappear. Thank you so much. I appreciate you returning. You're full of wisdom. You've just like connected so many dots for me today. I can't wait to share this and even listen to it again. So for sure. I really appreciate it, Jenna. And I'm inspired by your seeking also. And you're just I feel like opening up to so many things. And you know, may it continue. May you continue to be an inspiration for others around you. Thank you so much. And anytime you want to come back inspiration for others around you. Oh, thank you so much.

And anytime you want to come back on, if you have anything new, let me know. In fact, tell everybody what you have going on, where they might be able to join you on some of your classes, retreat and find your book. Absolutely. So MatthewPonac.com is the best place to learn all about my offerings. I have a lot of courses every month. Starting in July, I'm teaching an online course looking at Lurianic Kabbalah, which is a beautiful system that comes from the 16th century. And we're looking at that. We're doing meditation, facilitated learning, and it's eight weeks. I'm co-facilitating it with a somatic spiritual counselor. And then we're going to be meeting on Vancouver Island over Labor Day weekend for three full days, I believe, or at least four.

And two of those are full days. And we're going to go deeper. And we're learning divine names there and studying and connecting and more practice. And it's body-centered. It's really about reclaiming people who have Jewish ancestry, especially I'm encouraging to check this out because learning our ancestral wisdom languages are tremendously important and powerful for helping us reclaim who we are at our most fundamental level. And I would, and I mean, your book, I would say literally it says for all on the front of it. And I really, truly a hundred percent got that from it.

And I thought it was, it's awesome. It's an easy read for something that is very difficult. Usually if you were just to go on your own to try to explore this, it is very difficult. I tried, knocked my head against the wall. So this was awesome. All of my offerings are open to all people. Just to say, if someone is just has a yearning for Jewish wisdom, they can come on their retreat for sure.

But I want to give a special nod around connecting to ancestry. But as anyone is welcome and we teach explicitly to all people because this is the age we're in. We're all in this together and we need to be collaborating and helping each other as much as we can to learn and grow and help our world get a little bit better. Yay. All right. Well, thank you.

I'm sorry I kept you so long. I appreciate it. No worries. Pleasure is all mine. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast.

And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com, where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.