Hekhalot literature

These were the enemies.

It's hard to imagine that this would have been directed against universal forces of evil, which will only develop much later, because after the first century, we were still in Hechalot and Merkava literature, which was angelology and demonology, and only from the time of the Tsar, which came out in the late 13th century, did we start developing this notion of evil, and you've got Spirot, and they're opposed by negative energies and the notion of evil it seriously doesn't seem that Rabban Gamliel and Shmuel HaKatan would have had a kind of Zoharic approach or a later Hasidic mystical approach or a Lurianic approach to the forces of evil and Klippa they were dealing with very real enemies who were actually trying to inform on them and to destroy them and to kill them and they had already killed and destroyed Multitudes of Jewish people have, of course, destroyed the temple and the Jews were in exile.

So they had real enemies on their minds, not mystical concepts.

It seems as if this prayer was directed against a real concrete enemy who were posing a real and serious physical threat to Judaism.

Through, through the, through the correct path, we can, you know, unlock these aspects of our being and awaken in this world so that we can sense, experience, and perceive more than just the physical.

And in a lot of these ancient traditions, sort of a pipeline t- through, through this sort of esoteric, initiatic work was what eventually became known as, um, Hekhalot mysticism or Merkabah mysticism, where at one point they, you know, they called it that, and what it essentially was, was going through a, a, a body of a, a, a series of development to eventually lead to contact with divine angelic beings.

So you can look up like Merkabah mysticism, things like that.

This was a thing in the ancient world.

So this is acknowledged as the antecedent from which all these books draw their formal inspirations.

Uh, the document has striking similarities to a possible antecedent from a lesser Hekhalot or the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva, which in turn, uh, seems to recall a style of a responsa by his students, of y- uh, y- J- uh, Joshua Ben Levi, in Tractate of Shabbos.

So the Sefer Yetzirah is a brief document of only a few pages that was written some time between the 200s to 600s, and then many centuries before the highly medieval works, detailing the alphanumeric, uh, vision of cosmology, and may be understood as a kind of prelude to the major phase of Kabbalah.

Interesting.

Uh, the Jewish, Jewish mystic- Jewish mystical/esoteric traditions existed before the medieval Kabbalah.

The Maaseh Merkavah, which you know as the Divine Chariots, um, which we will be getting into.

The Maaseh Bereshit, which is the works of creation, and the Hekhalot which we'll talk about, God's chambers, and other streams precede the medi- the medieval movement normally called Kabbalah.

So academic scor- sor- surveys explicitly distinguish those earlier from later medieval Kabbalah.

Okay.

However, it appears all over the mystical Hechalot literature.

So the Hechalot literature is this body of esoteric works from late antiquity.

It's kind of like Kabbalah before we had Kabbalah.

God, I've never even heard of that before.