Kabbalah

This is the tree of life. There are ten steps in the tree. The first three is the Trinity. Then you work up to 10. 10 equals God. To be a full magician of Kabbalah, you have to reach 11. Which means you have the ability to manipulate reality.

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A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. - Thomas Jefferson

It's very deep. Something you can't understand from the jump. Madonna has been studying for decades it seems. Britney tried to follow her footsteps but went f'n nuts. Madonna still tries to help her with studies though.

Manly P. Hall writes about Kabbalah. I've read some of his work.

Hi, hope you don't mind my commenting on an older thread, but I found this interesting and I'd like to comment on it from a Jewish perspective.

(BTW, even without the whole Kabbalah thing going, I've always had very little tolerance, respect or admiration for Madonna except as a very skilled and shrewd business woman and marketing guru with herself as the product she's marketing, and with a bit of talent for figuring out what's danceable and just controversial enough to make her lots of money.)

I originally wrote this last but decided to make it my key point: What Madonna and the Kabbalah Center does is no more representative of Kabbalah than the Unification Church (remember them, the Moonies?) was representative of Christianity, despite their claim that Sun Yun Moon was chosen by Jesus to carry on His work.

The analogy I typically use is this: Some white middle class hippy guy from California can put on face paint and feathers and bang a drum and burn sage and chant a bunch of words that he learned from books or from his "studies" from another white middle class hippy guy who decided thirty years ago to call himself Flies With Eagles, but that doesn't make him a Native American Shaman. He can get together with a bunch of folks and they can put on saffron-dyed robes and meditate and chant and shave their heads but that doesn't make them Buddhist monks. They can put on white collars and black robes and learn a bunch of prayers in Latin and vow celibacy but that doesn't make them priests. This so-called Kabbalah Center (the money-making and recruiting center of Madonna's version of Kabbalah) is all about profit and cultural appropriation - to my belief, to the point of cultism.

Does that mean that there's nothing good in what she and others are learning and doing and saying that people need to do? No, not at all. But how they're doing it and what they're claiming is just b.s. For her and other followers of "Rabbi" Berg to declare themselves Kabbalahists is just cultish junk religion at its finest. Even a cursory scrutiny of the Kabbalah center's practices show them to use simplifications of Kabbalistic principles in a pop-religion structure, together with high-pressure tactics to get folks to buy things, donate money, and recruit others, which actually goes firmly against one of the key principles of Judaism which says that attempting to convert someone from another belief system is NEVER allowed. Their so-called Rabbi was never ordained as a Rabbi and never studied extensively with any credible rabbinical school; he also claims to have a doctorate but he keeps saying different things about what it's in and won't say where it's from or produce any evidence that it exists.

My personal bottom line is that while I feel that everyone's personal belief systems can potentially be strengthened by studying and understanding more about other belief systems, its just plain b.s. to grab basic elements of something that is ancient and sacred, and sell those things (literally sell them for a profit) in an over-simplified pop-culture format.