The roots of Kabbalah predate rabbinic Judaism by centuries.
Talmudic-era
Rabbinic Judaism of the early centuries CE comprised the Halakha or religious law and the imaginative theological and narrative
aggadot or narratives. Alongside references to early Rabbinic
Jewish mysticism, unsystematised philosophical thought was expressed in the Aggada, as well as highly anthropomorphic narrative depictions accentuating the
personal God of the
Hebrew Bible in a vivid loving relationship with the Jewish people in Rabbinic Judaism. Among such visual metaphors in the Talmud and
Midrash, God is said to wear
tefillin, embody the lover seeking for Israel's bride in the
Song of Songs, suffer with Israel's suffering, accompany them in exile as the
Shekhina or female divine presence, appear as a warrior at the
crossing the Red Sea and a wise elder at
the revelation at Sinai.
Jacob Neusner shows the chronologically developing anthropomorphism in classic Rabbinic literature, culminating in the personal, poetically embodied, relational, familiar "God we know and love" in the
Babylonian Talmud.
Gershom Scholem describes the
Aggadah as "Giving original expression to the deepest motive-powers of the religious Jew, a quality which helps to make it an excellent and genuine approach to the essentials of Judaism" The
Middle Ages saw the development of systematic theology in Judaism in Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, both reinterpreting classic rabbinic aggadot according to their differing views of
metaphysics. Kabbalah emerged in the 12th-14th centuries parallel to, and soon after, the rationalist tradition in medieval Jewish philosophy.
Maimonides articulated normative theology in his philosophical stress against any idolatrous corporeal interpretation of references to God in the Hebrew Bible and
Rabbinic literature, encapsulated in his
third principle of faith: "I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His Name, has no body, and that He is free from all the properties of matter, and that there can be no (physical) comparison to Him whatsoever," and
legal codification of
monotheism. He formulated the philosophical
transcendence of
God through
negative theology,
allegorising all anthropomorphic references as metaphors of action, and polemicising against literal interpretation of imaginative myth.
Kabbalists accepted the Hidden Godhead, reinterpreting it in mystical experience and speculation as the transcendent
Ayin "Nothing". However, seeking the personal living God of the Hebrew Bible and classic rabbinic aggadic imagination, they formulated an opposite approach, articulating an inner dynamic life among divine
immanent emanations in the Four Worlds. These involved medieval Zoharic notions of divine personas and male-female powers, recast in the 16th century
Lurianic Kabbalah as
cosmic withdrawal,
exile–redemption and Divine
personas. Lurianic Kabbalah further emphasised the need to divest its heightened personification from corporeality, while lending its messianic mysticism to popular social appeal which became dominant in early-modern Judaism. ==See also==