“The Zohar claims to be very old, but its origin might be more contemporary than previously thought.”
Somewhere in the last twenty-five years, Kabbalah became a red string. I remember a time when we were told if we read anything about it, we could go crazy. My, how times have changed!
Tie this red string around your left wrist, pay somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-six dollars for the privilege, and you’ve supposedly warded off the evil eye. Heck, I have a Greek evil eye pendent on my front window. You never know. Madonna wore hers on magazine covers starting in 2004. A wave of celebrities followed. For most people who’ve heard the word “Kabbalah” at all, that’s the whole of it — a wellness accessory with a mystical backstory, sold by an organization called the Kabbalah Centre.
Underneath that marketing sits something older, stranger, and considerably more demanding than a bracelet.
What the Word Means
Kabbalah comes from the Hebrew root QBL — to receive. And this word does not mean to acquire, or purchase. It means to receive. And this means a sense of a teaching passed down, mouth to ear, from one generation to the next. You know, this whole lineage concept we mentioned here. That etymology alone tells you something the red string doesn’t: this was built as an oral tradition, transmitted deliberately and slowly, not packaged for mass distribution.
Historian William Wynn Westcott, writing in 1888 after years of study within a society of Hermetic scholars, traced the roots of Kabbalistic thought back to the Hebrew rabbis of the Second Temple period, roughly 515 BCE. He was candid that its origin before that point is, in his words, “lost in the mists of antiquity.” In other words, there are no single founder known to this day, or unless not divulged. There are no founding date carved in stone. It is a body of esoteric interpretation growing up alongside mainstream Jewish law and commentary, the way the Upanishads grew up alongside the more exoteric Brahmanas in Indian religious literature — related, but running on a separate, more hidden track.
“A tradition doesn’t stop being real because someone sold a cheap version of it.”
The Zohar’s Real Author
The central text of Kabbalah, the Zohar, tells its own origin story: that it was written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a revered sage of the 2nd century CE, and preserved in secret for over a thousand years before resurfacing.
However, many modern scholars don’t support that story. Gershom Scholem, a 20th century’s foremost historian of Jewish mysticism, built a detailed case — comparing the Zohar’s Aramaic prose style against the signed Hebrew writings of a 13th-century mystic named Moses de León — and concluded that de León himself was the Zohar’s principal author. Accordingly, de León wrote it in Castile, Spain, in the final two decades of the 1200s. De León claimed to have copied it from an ancient manuscript. Some scholars now regard that claim as one of the more elaborate examples of pseudepigraphy in religious history: attributing your own work to an ancient authority, deliberately, to give it weight it wouldn’t otherwise carry. We’ve written an article about that, does the message mean more than the message? You decide.
This isn’t a minor footnote. It reframes what the Zohar is and questions the smuggled message from the 2nd century. It is now considered to be the work of genuine mystical genius from the 13th, albeit, one so persuasive in its voice it influences readers and interpreters for seven hundred years.
Safed, and the Second Great Reshaping
Kabbalah didn’t stop developing with the Zohar. In the 16th century, a mystic named Isaac Luria settled in Safed, a hill town in the Galilee that became, briefly, the intellectual center of Jewish mysticism. Luria taught for less than three years before his death, left almost nothing in his own handwriting, and was interpreted almost entirely through his students’ notes — yet his ideas reshaped the tradition more thoroughly than anything since the Zohar itself.
Three concepts in particular: tzimtzum, the notion that God had to contract, to withdraw, to make room for a universe to exist at all. Shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels meant to hold divine light, scattering sparks of that light throughout the material world. And tikkun — repair — the idea that human beings, through conscious action, participate in gathering those scattered sparks and mending what broke.
That third concept is intriguing and can be found in many more ancient wisdom system around the planet. Lurianic Kabbalah doesn’t frame human life as incidental to some cosmic drama happening elsewhere. It frames repair as the entire point — a task assigned, not a metaphor offered.
“Kabbalah means, literally, ‘to receive.’ Not to buy. Not to wear. To receive.”
How We Got From Safed to the Red String
The organization responsible for Kabbalah’s modern visibility, the Kabbalah Centre, was established by Philip Berg in the 1960s. In many ways, we owe the Kabbalah’s fame to him, although many rabbis disagreed with his ways. Beginning in the 1990s, the Centre began marketing the red string bracelet as a simple, sellable form of protection against the “evil eye”. This was a rehash of an old folk superstition with real roots in Jewish and Mediterranean culture. It was repackaged as a $26 product with a blessing card. Madonna’s public embrace of the practice, starting around 2004, took it mainstream. For a few years, the string was the accessory of the celebrity spiritual moment.
None of this makes the underlying folk belief fraudulent, or the people who wear the string insincere. But it does mean that most of what circulates in popular culture as “Kabbalah” is a late-20th-century commercial adaptation. This is several steps removed from the tradition Westcott studied, that de León wrote, and that Luria’s students carried out of Safed. And after all, didn’t the movie The Secret spark interest in the minds of many and brought many others to do their own research? We can only hope.
What’s Worth Your Attention
Strip away the merchandise and one structure remains, old and worth learning in its own right. The Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life — ten interconnected spheres, called Sephirot, mapping a path from the most abstract, unknowable aspect of the divine down into ordinary material existence. Kabbalists have used it for centuries as a map of consciousness itself: where a person’s attention lives, and what it would take to move it somewhere higher.
That map is where this series goes next.
The red string promises protection from something outside you. The tradition it borrowed its name from was never really about that. It was about learning to see clearly enough to recognize which parts of your own experience still need repair — and having the patience to receive an answer that takes longer than a bracelet to put on.