Jewish mysticism encompasses the Merkabah tradition of late antiquity, the medieval Kabbalah of the Zohar and Isaac Luria's system of tzimtzum and tikkun olam, and the Hasidic revolution of the eighteenth century — each a distinct flowering of the Jewish tradition's ongoing encounter with the mystery at the heart of Torah. Kabbalah offers a map of the divine in ten sefirot — emanations through which the infinite Ein Sof becomes the world we experience — and a vision of the human task as the repair and elevation of the cosmos through prayer, study, and right action. Hasidism democratized mystical Judaism, teaching that every person in every moment could touch the divine — through joy, through story, through the crackling spark of ordinary life fully attended to.
Each step builds on the last.