The Christian Trinity and Kabbalah
In the Rabbi’s opinion, is there a connection between the Holy Trinity among Christians and the central figures of nobility? After all, the Father is similar to Erich, the Son to Za’A (who are also referred to in Kabbalah as Father and Son several times), and the Holy Spirit to Nok, both of which are described as a piercing element?
And if there is a connection, who took from whom?
thanks
There is definitely a connection, and I don’t know who the source is. It is possible that the Gnostic movements at the time of the formation of Christianity are responsible for this both with them and with us. There is no need to resort to such and such titles. The faces in the Ari’s reception are explicitly referred to as Abba (wisdom) and Amma (intellect) and Za (the next six Sefirot).
By the way, at the beginning of modern times there was Christian Kabbalah and there was a phenomenon of Jews studying Kabbalah with Christians.
That’s why I’m not really impressed by theological analyses of Christianity that try to prove that it’s a “Z” (Zech.) Almost everything you find in them you’ll also find in ours. For example, the “Koveh Yisrael” and the “Orita Chad” are versions of the Trinity (Koveh Yisrael and the “Shekinah”). Theology is subject to different interpretations and is not always precise in its formulation, and therefore it is very dangerous to draw conclusions from it. For the same reason, the similarity to Christianity does not rule out these approaches and terminology.
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Yehuda Liebes wrote an article about the mutual influences that swirled between the Trinitarians and the Twentieth-Century Kabbalists and the Christian Trinitarians here
https://liebes.huji.ac.il/files/hashpaot.pdf
But I don't understand why this would qualify them both instead of disqualifying them
This is neither validating nor invalidating. My argument is that the idea of the Trinity is complex and open to interpretations, and it is not right to treat it with overly simplistic tools.
Certainly complex. The best theologians have dealt with it. A beautiful invention. But still an invention. It has no basis in reality or in reliable revelation about reality. God Almighty will reveal His word tens of thousands of times if not more throughout the Bible in the first person singular and the verb form of the singular, and more to His early Son and through His prophets how much He abhors idolatry and then will convey private information to those who supposedly know that there is a divine element A and a divine element B and a divine element C and each one in itself is divine or God?
In standard situations we would say: an act of fraud.
But when it comes to theology, the ink tolerates everything.
I don't understand the subject at all, but I will only point out that it is now quite common to say among Kabbalah scholars (contrary to what Shalom thought at the time) that the source of many things in Gnosticism is the mystical traditions of Second Temple Jews, and not that Kabbalah was based on Gnosticism. See Haviva Pedia's comments on the new edition of Gershom Shalom, as well as the book Kabbalah Research in Israel by Moram Gam HaCohen.
Why does it matter so much who exactly was influenced by whom?
This was just a response to Michi's sentence, "There is definitely a connection, and I don't know who the source is. It is possible that the Gnostic movements at the time of the formation of Christianity are responsible for this both in their country and in ours."
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