Kabbalah is an ancient spiritual wisdom which teaches the individual and the world as a whole how we can improve our lives. We believe at the core of the world’s great religions and spiritual traditions are truths that we call the wisdom of kabbalah. Our goal at the Kabbalah Centre is to disseminate this wisdom as widely as possible to improve our individual lives, but also the collective and the world.
Revealed more than 2,000 years ago, the Zohar is a spiritual text, originally written in Aramaic. The Zohar is credited to kabbalist Rav Shimon bar Yochai and was revealed to him during the 13 years that Rav Shimon spent hiding from Roman Emperor Hadrian in a cave in Peki’in, Israel. Rav Shimon’s writings remained hidden in manuscript form and were taught only to a select few until it was first printed in 1558. Around this time, the Zohar was discovered by Rav Isaac Luria, who through his teachings and writings decoded the ancient text. In 1945, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, the founder of the Kabbalah Centre, translated the ancient Aramaic text into modern Hebrew so that even more people could benefit from its wisdom, and in 2001, Kabbalist and Kabbalah Centre co-director Michael Berg published the first ever unabridged 23-volume English translation. Today the Kabbalah Centre is translating the Zohar into many languages and has made this ancient text available to the world in hardcover and now digitally as well.
The Zohar explains the secrets of the Bible, the Universe and every aspect of life. On a physical level, the Zohar is a set of twenty-three books, a commentary on biblical and spiritual matters in the form of conversations among spiritual masters. It is a voluminous guidebook to the lost divine nature of our souls and a compendium of virtually all information pertaining to the universe — information that science is only beginning to verify today. Its vast and comprehensive commentary on biblical matters has captivated spiritual and intellectual giants for over two millennia.
But its codes, its metaphors and its cryptic language are not given to us purely for understanding. They are designed as channels for energy. Like all holy books, the Zohar is a text that not only expresses spiritual energy, it embodies it. To merely pick up the Zohar, to scan its Aramaic letters and allow in the energy that infuses them, is to experience what kabbalists have experienced for thousands of years: a powerful energy-giving instrument, a life-saving tool imbued with the ability to bring peace, protection, healing and fulfillment to those who possess it.