Q&A: The Christian Trinity and Kabbalah
The Christian Trinity and Kabbalah
Question
Does the Rabbi think there is a connection between the Holy Trinity in Christianity and the central partzufim of Atzilut? After all, the Father resembles Arikh, the Son resembles Zeir Anpin (which are also called father and son in Kabbalah several times), and the Holy Spirit resembles the Nukva, both of which are described as a feminine element?
And if there is a connection, who took it from whom?
Thank you
Answer
There is definitely a connection, and I don’t know which is the original source. It is possible that the Gnostic currents at the time Christianity was formed are responsible for this both on their side and on ours. There is no need to rely on this or that set of labels. The partzufim in the Kabbalah of the Ari are explicitly called Abba (Wisdom), Imma (Understanding), and Zeir Anpin (the next six sefirot).
By the way, at the beginning of the modern era there was also Christian Kabbalah, and there was a phenomenon of Jews and Christians studying Kabbalah together.
So I’m also not especially impressed by theological analyses of Christianity that try to prove that it is idolatry. Almost everything you find there you will also find אצלנו. For example, “The Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one” is a version of the Trinity (the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah). Theology is open to different interpretations and is not always precise in its formulations, so it is very dangerous to draw conclusions from it. For the same reason, the similarity to Christianity also does not disqualify these approaches and terms.
Discussion on Answer
Yehuda Liebes wrote an article about the mutual influences that took place between kabbalistic triads and tithes and Christian triads here
יש ללחוץ כדי לגשת אל hashpaot.pdf
But I do not understand why that should serve to validate both of them rather than disqualify them
It serves neither to validate nor to disqualify. My claim is that the idea of a trinity is complex and open to interpretation, and it is not right to deal with it using overly simplistic tools.
Of course it’s complex. The greatest theologians dealt with it. A fine invention. But still an invention. One that has no basis in reality or in a reliable revelation about reality. The Holy One, blessed be He, reveals His word tens of thousands of times, if not more, throughout the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in the singular first person and with singular verb forms, repeatedly warning us through His prophets how much He detests idolatry—and then He supposedly passes private information to those initiated into esoteric wisdom, that there is divine element A and divine element B and divine element C, and each one by itself is divine or God?
In ordinary situations we would say: an act of fraud.
But when it comes to theology, the ink tolerates everything.
I don’t understand the topic at all, but I’ll just note that today it is already fairly accepted among scholars of Kabbalah (unlike what Scholem thought in his time) that the source of many things in Gnosticism is the mystical traditions of Second Temple Jews, and not that Kabbalah was the one based on Gnosticism. See Haviva Pedaya’s notes on the new edition of Gershom Scholem, and also in the book Research of Kabbalah in Israel by Moram Gam HaKohen.
Why does it matter so much who was influenced by whom exactly?
That was only a response to Michi’s sentence: “There is definitely a connection, and I don’t know which is the original source. It is possible that the Gnostic currents at the time Christianity was formed are responsible for this both on their side and on ours.”
L