The Zohar and the Mystery of the Sabbath
On Friday evening, as the sun goes down, observant Jewish families light candles, and in many synagogues the congregation turns toward the door to greet the Sabbath as one greets a bride. The custom is not ancient in the way many suppose.
It owes much to the mystics of Safed in the sixteenth century, and it draws on an older book that spoke of the Sabbath as a royal wedding between heaven and earth. That book is the Zohar, "Radiance," the greatest work of medieval Kabbalah.
A Book That Appeared in Spain
The Zohar first came to light in Castile, in northern Spain, in the last decades of the thirteenth century. It is a vast commentary on the Torah, written in a strange and poetic Aramaic and set in the form of a story: the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai wanders through the hills of Galilee with his students, discussing scripture and its hidden meanings.
The man who circulated the book was Moses de León, who lived in Guadalajara and died in 1305. He said that he was copying an ancient manuscript. The great scholar Gershom Scholem concluded in the twentieth century that de León wrote most of it himself, while later researchers have proposed that a group of authors worked together.
Traditional Kabbalists hold that the book comes from Rabbi Shimon. The question is still open to debate, and the work has been honored by Jewish readers regardless.
The Ten Emanations
The Zohar rests on a vision of God as unknowable and infinite, called Ein Sof, "Without End." From this hidden source, the text says, a divine light unfolds through ten stages or powers called the sefirot. They are often drawn as a tree or as a figure of ten spheres.
Among them are Wisdom, Understanding, Mercy, Judgment and Beauty, and the last, Kingdom, is called the Shekhinah, the presence of God dwelling in the world.
The sefirot are not separate gods. Kabbalists insist that they are aspects of the one God, as a single light seen through colored glass. The book also pictures them as masculine and feminine powers whose union keeps the world in balance, and whose separation produces exile and sorrow.
The Queen of the Sabbath
The Sabbath holds a special place in this scheme. In the Zohar, the Shekhinah is the Queen or the Bride, and on the Sabbath she is united with her divine partner, the sefirah called Beauty. The day is not only a rest from work but a meeting of the upper and lower worlds, and human beings take part in it through their prayers, their meals and their joy.
The Talmud, long before, spoke of the Sabbath as a bride and queen, and said that on that day a person receives an "additional soul." The Zohar gives these older images a deeper layer. Sabbath songs describe the day as a foretaste of the world to come, an idea the Talmud also states, calling the Sabbath one-sixtieth of the world to come.
Safed and the Welcoming of the Bride
In the sixteenth century, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many Kabbalists settled in Safed, a town in the hills of northern Galilee. There, a circle around Rabbi Isaac Luria and Rabbi Moses Cordovero developed the practices that spread through the Jewish world. One of them was to go out into the fields at sunset on Friday to greet the Sabbath Queen.
The poet Solomon Alkabetz, who lived in Safed, wrote the hymn Lekha Dodi, "Come, my beloved, to meet the bride," which is still sung at the Friday evening service by Jews of every background. Its verses welcome the Sabbath as a bride and a queen, and it is probably the best-known piece of Kabbalistic poetry in daily use.
Printing and Reading
The Zohar was first printed in Italy in 1558 and 1560, in editions in Mantua and Cremona. It became a source of reverence and study, and it also stirred controversy, as some rabbis questioned its date and its authorship. In recent years an English translation with commentary, by Daniel Matt, has made the text available to general readers.
A Word of Care
Kabbalah has traditionally been studied within a community, under a teacher and after a grounding in the Torah and Talmud, and not as a stand-alone fashion. Some modern organizations sell charms and courses under its name, such as red strings or bottled water, and they are criticized by many Jewish scholars.
Look for sources grounded in scholarship and in the community, and be careful about spending money on anything described as a secret power.
Closing
At the end of the week, a family lights two candles and sits down to a table set with bread and wine. For the mystics, something larger happens at the same moment, a meeting of the nearest and the farthest. Whether or not one shares that belief, the idea that time itself can be a guest to be greeted and honored is a very old and gentle thought.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Bahir: The First Book of the Kabbalistic Brilliance
- The Zohar and the Section on the Palaces: The Hierarchical Heavens
- The Zohar and the Section on the Chariot: The Anatomy of the Merkabah
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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