I cannot say I fully understand what Zohar has to do with Kabala.  I do know that it is a work that was written in the first centuries of the Common Era and is a compendium for the mystical ideas and statements that make up Kabalistic information and understanding.

In our lesson created for those of us who study Torah on Saturday mornings, by Bob Sugarman who is a superb teacher, we read a tiny portion of the story of Noah and then launched into a page of Zohar to sample the intricacies of what almost every word meant after the Flood receded and Noah proceeded to offer up a sacrifice to God. What does this mean as we approach the transformative election of the twenty-first Century? It means to me that our Faith Based Presidency is mired in a narrow reading of the NEW TESTAMENT. Those wholly immersed in the story of Jesus miss out on an electrifying entry into a different world of meaning. Trying to extract understanding from single words in just a few pages illuminates the problem we moderns have with the story of Noah, a good man saved from the destruction of the world, trying to deal with a capricious and deadly God.

I need to reread the Tanach (Five Books of Moses) each year.  We never get very far into the text of the weekly portion because there are so many interesting byways suggested by members of our group and our experience with a world that has lost its way since the last Great War, World War II and the Holocaust.

If just a few words can occupy a fifth of a hundred people for an hour and a half and not really plumb the depths of the mystical impact of words from an ancient variant of Biblical commentary and exegesis, what does this say about our daily immersion in a world of commerce and entertainment rather than being involved with discovering our own souls?  It seems to me that discovering what is meant by a word or two placed in a specific context is very important but just might be important for modernists and Classical Reform Jews who shrink from the turn to the kipot and Judaizing of the present Rabbinate who seem to endorse more Orthodoxy than that with which we have been comfortable.

But, this is about the Zohar where you can learn about Kabala.  It is supposed to be “The Book of Enlightenment”. My slight knowledge tells me that kabalistic mysticism and numerology are as foreign to me as the Arabic script we increasingly see illustrating works by the descendants of Ishmael who have become as numerous as the grains of sand on the earth promised to the Jews but who are a tiny minority as compared to its offspring religions. I have so much to do that I am conflicted about reading more pages than can be provided by Bob Sugarman.