' Kabbalah and Hasidism '...

Kabbalah is the most famous form of Jewish mysticism. It flowered in 13th century Spain with the writing of the Zohar, which was originally attributed to the 2nd century sage Shimon bar Yohai. The Zohar is a commentary on the Torah, concerned primarily with understanding the divine world and its relation to our world. According to ..................................................... , God as God — also known as Ein Sof or “the Infinite” — cannot be comprehended by humans. However, God can be understood and described as revealed in ten mystical attributes, or sefirot. ...................................................... Much of all future Kabbalah, including the important 16th-century Kabbalah of Isaac Luria–whose intricate theology of creation describes how God contracted to make room for the world — concerns itself with the sefirot. Abraham Abulafia was the most important of the medieval intensive mystics. He tried to achieve a state of prophecy through methods of experiential Kabbalah. Hasidism, a religious movement that emerged in the 18th century, spread mystical thinking and living to the masses of European Jewry by teaching that all people could have an experiential connection with God.