thought you were going to say she was in the audience.

No, no.

But look, I don't stand in critical judgment for those who get involved in whatever way they get involved.

But it's clearly a sharp distinction.

between what they're calling Kabbalah and what I understand Kabbalah to be.

Okay, in terms of from a scholarly point of view, You know, the term Kabbalah means that which is received, a tradition, and it begins to be used for specifically mystical traditions, which again encompasses both beliefs and practices in the second half of the 12th century, and then picks up with quite vigor in the 13th and then the 14th centuries.

Now, it's common for scholars these days to distinguish between two forms of Kabbalah, The origin of this distinction actually can be traced to one Kabbalist in the second half of the 13th century, whose name was Abraham Abelafia.

Tell me yours.

So what is Jewish mysticism? Mm.

Yeah.

So, uh, I regularly taught a class, an introduction to Jewish mysticism for 40 years, and I always would start by saying, "The topic of this course, uh, is two different subjects, Jewish and mysticism, and it will take a lifetime to learn what Jewish does not in- entail, so I'm gonna just go to mysticism, and then w- uh, go back to how Jewish modifies mysticism." So mysticism is a notoriously difficult term to define, and in fact, there are debates whether or not we can think of mysticism in a cross-cultural way, or it's sometimes referred to in a, in a, a perennial or essentialist way, versus those who argue that it must always be understood in terms of context, Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and so on.

But for our purposes, I'm gonna assume something of a commonality, and I would say mysticism has several major features, uh, as it is expressed in different religious cultures.

One would be, uh, having a kind of direct experience of the divine or what is considered to be the absolute.

Even more, uh, profoundly would be the emphasis on a unit of experience that one has with that absolute, which would break down the distinction between the self and the divine.

Um, mysticism also often entails, um, meditational or contemplative practices that bring the individual to that ecstatic state, either of being in the direct presence of the divine or actually becoming one with the divine.

Does the mysticism view men and women as the same?