Tarot and the Tree of Life

by Isabel Radow Kliegman

  Let us turn our attention now to the heart of Kabbalah, Torah. Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is held by Kabbalists to be the blueprint of the universe. The idea is that God didn’t create a universe on the spur of the moment but first laid out a plan. Then He created the universe by that blueprint. Now this may sound like a very radical and strange idea, and in fact, it is a wildly exciting one. But it’s not unique to Judaism. How does the Gospel according to Saint John begin? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, it’s so exciting, this relationship between the Word, the Torah, and everything else that exists. As Rabbi Mordecai Finley puts it, “If the world was created by the word of God, we are God’s poetry.”

  There is as well a blueprint for all human beings, for all experiences, and for any system that one can imagine. This universal symbol, central to Kabbalah, is the Tree of Life. The original human, the blueprint of humankind, was called “Adam Kadman.” By this blueprint of the celestial human, human beings were created.

  The first thing we notice when we look at the Tree of Life is that it certainly is a strange-looking tree. Any one of us, regardless of our artistic capabilities, could draw a better tree than that. Clearly then, this is not meant to be a representational tree. The Tree is conceptual. What does that mean?

  What is of extreme importance about a tree is that it is a single organism. We can’t look at the beautiful crown of the tree with its brilliant green shining leaves and its bright pink-and-white blossoms and say, “Well, that part of the tree I like. But these filthy roots down in the dirt? I don’t see what we need those for!”

  We have the roots, the trunk, the bark, the branches; we have the twigs, the leaves, and the blossoms: what we see here is diversity in oneness. That’s the message of the conceptual tree. Isn’t that what the universe is, the uni being the oneness and the verse the diversity? So it is true that we are all one and that the universe is a single organism. It also true that there is great diversity.

  This is certainly true of ourselves as well. If I am walking from one room to the next at two in the morning and I stub my toe, where does the scream come from? Not from my toe, but from my head, from my mouth. I am one organism. This is true psychically and spiritually as well. What we are is a single wholeness, and we cannot separate out the parts of ourselves that we think are unworthy or that we don’t like or that we think are bad or evil. Our challenge is acceptance, recognizing that everything we have is a part of one whole and that everything we have enables us to function. Perhaps the aspects of ourselves we like least will turn out to be as valuable to us as the roots are to the tree. We are not in a position to judge. The conscious mind is not the brightest organ of the body.

  This is so very important because I don’t believe there’s anyone reading this passage who doesn’t secretly believe they could do a better job on themselves than God did. Each of us would like to sit down at a large dining room table—close the door—and spread it all out! We’d like to look over everything that’s inside of us and with a pair of tweezers, pick over and remove the things we don’t like, the things we think are unworthy, sinful, weak, or even disgusting. You know, disgusting, like those ugly roots down in the dirt crawling with worms and bugs! Let’s just get rid of the roots! Isn’t that a good idea? Let’s just chop them off. That’s not the part of the tree I like. And then what happens to the tree? The tree depends on those “disgusting” roots much more than it does on the beautiful crown. We have to remember that we, like the tree, have dark energies within us that we may nonetheless need in ways we can’t even suspect.

  Another cardinal message of Kabbalah, then, is integration. We are not here to get rid of anything. If it didn’t belong here, God wouldn’t have put it here. We are here to integrate everything we have and everything we are in order to put it to its best possible use. Whatever we feel guilty about or ashamed of or embarrassed about, we are challenged to think of in a new way—as an energy that has the potential for positive thrust. The challenge, as always, is toward oneness. We are challenged to be at one with God, at one with one another, and at one within ourselves. Perhaps this last is our most difficult endeavor.

  Before we begin examining the Tree and its relation to us, we must be clear that when we talk about right and left on the Tree, it is as if we are looking at the back of the Tree or at a mirror image of ourselves. Right and left refer both to the Tree and to ourselves. It is not, in other words, as if I am facing you, my right being on your left side. Let us now turn our attention to this great, universal glyph.

  First, we see that the Tree has three pillars. The right-hand pillar is called the Pillar of Mercy. It is the pillar of energy flow, and it is called male or masculine and positive. The left-hand pillar is called the Pillar of Severity. It is the pillar of form. It is called female or feminine and negative. (Here we must interpret “negative” in terms of a necessary “nothing” in the same way that a socket is a nothing, an emptiness which receives a plug.) A connection is required to make the energy flow. We need both the energy and the form. Again, if you want a drink of water, the water is the energy flow. But you can’t just have water. The water must be in something, even if it’s the banks of a river. You need something to give water form; for example, a cup. Yet what gives form also restricts. A six-ounce cup limits the water you can receive to six ounces, and if the cup didn’t resist the water, it couldn’t receive it. It would be a sieve. The left-hand pillar is called the Pillar of Severity because in giving form it brings limitation. The two are inextricably related. To give form is to restrict, and yet without form we can receive nothing at all.

  Put more simply, in our own lives we experience the need for balance between energy and form. People who have a tremendous amount of energy and no structure are very exciting to be around—but not for long. After a while they start to make us crazy because they’re flying off in all directions. These are the people who tend to be a little on the flaky side. They’ve got all kinds of wonderful ideas and great vitality and nothing ever gets done.

  On the other hand, people who have too much formative energy in relation to their energy flow are very solid and dependable and boring. Our own lives fluctuate between pillars. Sometimes we feel we’re bursting with enthusiasm to create and express a tremendous amount, but we’re not accomplishing anything because we’re lacking in discipline or structure. Other times when it seems everything is absolutely under control, but there doesn’t seem to be much point to getting up in the morning. So we need both energy and form; they’re equally valuable, which is why they’re represented on the Tree as being perfectly balanced.

  The central pillar is the Pillar of Harmony. It is the pillar of integration. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Once again, we encounter the radical! We are dealing with a worldview whose ethic is not binary but triune.

  When we are children, we are taught to be good, not bad. We are told to be generous, kind, compassionate, loving, clean, and polite. We are raised to believe there are rules we must live by, laws we must obey. We are to shun dishonesty, violence, selfishness, bullying, cruelty, hatred, and, in some traditions, even jealousy and anger. We are raised to seek the light and eschew the darkness: in short, to be positive and not negative.

  While these are indisputably worthy goals, they do not seem to have improved human conduct appreciably over the millennia. Further, it can be argued that the guilt and shame to which such a code subjects us have effects on our behavior contrary to those intended by its principles. In place of these polarities, Kabbalah suggests a view far more sophisticated and with far greater psychological validity, stemming, as always, from the message of the One.

  The right and left pillars of the Tree of Life are not called good and evil, but merciful and severe. As a symbol of the universe, the Tree represents what is—not what we wish were the case. In fact, those of us on a spiritual path have long known that it is
not ease and comfort but transformation and enlightenment that are our goals. Sometimes the lessons by which we attain higher ground are painful and severe. The Pillar of Mercy yields blessings of delight; the blessings of the Pillar of Severity tend to be less delightful, but the blessings are one—all propel us toward our chosen end; all are part of a single journey. Our task is to acknowledge the darkness—in the world, in ourselves—and, on the central pillar of the Tree, invent ways to balance and integrate it with the light.

  The Pillar of Harmony is the place where these energies come into perfect balance. Why don’t we just forget the Pillar of Mercy and the Pillar of Severity (which are extremes), get on the central pillar and stay there? Hey! Show me how to do that. I’ll do it. Show me how to do that and guarantee me that the phone will never ring at four o’clock in the morning with some very bad news. We would do it if we could, but we can’t.

  When we talk about Kabbalistic meditation, there is a way of working the Tree that is called the Way of the Arrow. From the base of the Tree we shoot up to the very top! Of course we just want to stay there forever. It’s a place of ecstasy and union and oneness and serenity and perfection. Why don’t we stay there? Why doesn’t the arrow stay in the sky when we shoot it from our bow? Because that’s not the law of gravity, and that’s not the law of the universe. We all know from experience that when we catapult up that fast, we come down almost as fast, and we usually land on our heads. That’s the way of the arrow. We’ve all had ecstatic experience listening to music, walking on a beach, witnessing the birth of our first child, making love, reading and understanding something critical for the first time, or having a powerful religious experience in a church or a temple. But the experience fades.

  Ram Dass makes this point with his usual power and humor. He talks about working on his spiritual growth and going to church at Christmas time, singing the wonderful hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and feeling that he “just loves everybody so much” and that he’ll always be in that place of loving union. He says that feeling lasts until “we sit down to Christmas dinner, and somebody else gets the drumstick.…” We can be thinking of ourselves as holy, spiritual beings, and over food, we can be reduced to feeling competitive and resentful. “He got the drumstick last time too! Why didn’t they pass the plate the other way this time?”

  We would like to stay in what we think of as a spiritual place, a high place, a holy place. We would like to remain on the central pillar in a state of perfect balance. But life doesn’t work that way. We have to work the Tree in the way that is called the Way of the Serpent, which winds all around the Tree and slowly, gradually, and patiently experiences and integrates every energy on the Tree.

  As we continue our examination of the Tree of Life, we can best direct our attention to the series of circles that make up these pillars. As you will recall, these are called sefirot, the singular of which is sefirah. A sefirah is a vessel, created to contain the divine energy that emanates from the godhead. The Tree may be perceived as a many-tiered fountain. As God allows His energy to flow forth, the energy is caught up in the first sefirah. When that overflows, it fills the next two sefirot, and when they overflow, they fill the following two sefirot, down into the sixth sefirah, and so on.

  We can imagine that the sefirot at the top of the Tree are lighter, thinner, more transparent and more fragile; as we move down the Tree, we move into sefirot which are thicker and stronger, but through which the light (God energy) shines more dimly. When we’re down on this earth plane, we need the stronger vessels to contain the divine essence, because we know what it’s like on the freeway if we’re driving in Baccarat crystal. We’re going to get shattered. In order to get to the clearer energies, the sefirot through which the light shines more easily, we need to do our meditations working up the Tree. But the most important thing to remember is that the light at the base of the Tree is the same light as the light at the height of the Tree. The light itself is unchanged. The difference is in the container, but Dom Perignon tastes the same in a Baccarat crystal goblet and an earthenware mug.

  There is a place between the first sefirah and the sixth sefirah in which there seems to be an empty space. There is, in fact, an uncreated sefirah there, which is called Daath. (That is the sefirah that God is waiting for us to create.) But you can see very clearly that if there were a sefirah in this place, we could fold the figure any way we chose and the number-six sefirah would always be in the center of it. Again, the message that we get from the Tree of Life is that of balance and symmetry.

  We can see that the Tree of Life also forms three triangles, each described by three sefirot, with a single remaining sefirah at the base. These triangles delineate three olams—realms or worlds. There is Atzilut, made up of the first three sefirot, which is the realm of emanation. It is an upward-pointing triangle. The second triangle forms the olam called Beriah, the world of creation. Next on the Tree come the three sefirot that form the realm of Yetzirah, the realm of formation. Finally, all by itself, we have Assiyah, the world or olam of action. We should be starting to wonder right now why there is only one sefirah or vessel in this realm.

  So we have now looked at the Tree in terms of its three vertical pillars and its four horizontal olams or worlds. We can see that there are ten sefirot or vessels. Additionally, there are twenty-two paths which connect these sefirot. As we shall see, each aspect of the Tree relates to the Tarot.

  In fact, the sefirot of the Tree of Life have been related to everything from pagan gods to scents, wild flowers, curative herbs, and gem stones. These represent a great departure from Jewish mysticism and complicate our original intention. We will therefore limit the correspondences we explore as we talk about the sefirot of the Tree to two modalities that have long supported the spiritual seeker—the chakra system of the East and the planets of astrology.

  Let us now turn our attention to the sefirot themselves. The first sefirah is called Keter, and Keter means “crown.” It is the first place where divine energy enters the Tree, and in terms of our own bodies, it represents the crown chakra. (This explains why orthodox Jewish men wear yarmulkes, the little skull caps, all the time. You don’t bare the crown chakra to the entrance of divine energy without preparation. You show humility by covering your head. What is not explained is why only men wear yarmulkes.) Keter carries the energy of absolute unity. It is the first something of the universe. It represents pure existence and perfection, and, astrologically, it represents the swirling nebulae, the entire cosmos.

  We move from Keter to the number-two sefirah, which is the first sefirah on the Pillar of Mercy—the right-hand, masculine pillar. This is Chochma, which means “wisdom.” Chochma represents the full potential of creative energy, infinite expansion. It is dynamic, the stimulator of the universe. It is also the supernal father. It is associated with the right temple and the right lobe of the brain, and astrologically it represents the entire zodiac.

  The first sefirah on the Pillar of Severity is called Binah. Binah is sefirah number three, and Binah means “understanding.” The more alert among you will have guessed that Binah is called the supernal mother, since she balances the supernal father on the top of the right-hand pillar. She is the giver of life and of limitation. We can’t take those two apart. The mother who gives life also pronounces our death sentence.

  No one gets out of this world alive. Once we enter into life, it is with the understanding that life will come to an end. So at the same time that we are given form, we are given restriction. This is always the case. If electricity is going to pass through a wire so it can be of some use, the amount of electricity will be limited by what the wire can conduct.

  Binah is the first place on the Tree where we have rest from force, which has come swirling down into Keter from the Ein Sof Ohr, the limitless light, and continues tumultuously into Chochma. Binah, then, is receptivity and resistance. Astrologically, Binah is naturally associated with Saturn, the planet of constriction and restriction. Like the birth canal
through which we all must be squeezed into birth only to find ourselves human and therefore mortal, Saturn disciplines and limits us. In terms of our bodies, Binah is associated with the left lobe of the brain and the left temple. If we bring the right temple and the left temple, Chochma and Binah, together at the central pillar, we arrive at the third eye. Certainly third-eye insight depends on our balancing wisdom and understanding.

  In these first three sefirot, we have been in the olam of Atzilut, the world of emanation, which is called the supernal triangle. These are the most mysterious of the energies on the Tree. In fact, there is a special meditation beginning on the second night of Passover in which we move energies around the body according to the bottom seven sefirot on the Tree. This is because the supernal triangle is far beyond what we can achieve alone. Even among the sefirot themselves, the unattainable nature of these three is recognized.

  We now move back to the Pillar of Mercy and to the fourth sefirah on the Tree. This sefirah is Chesed, sometimes called Gedulah. It means “loving-kindness and mercy.” Since it is the central sefirah on the Pillar of Mercy, and since we’re dealing with issues of balance, it is the most merciful place on the Tree. It is associated astrologically with Jupiter, the planet of expansiveness and expansion. It can be thought of in Catholic terms as the state of grace. It brings a flow of blessings and compassion and sweetness, goodness without end. And in terms of our own bodies, it refers to the right shoulder and arm.

  Stephan Hoeller has described Chesed as the soft-ice-cream machine that never turns off. There’s just all this rich, sweet, creamy, delicious, gooey stuff that keeps flowing into our lives forever, and we all know what happens when we have too much soft ice cream. If we don’t actually get sick on it, it at least becomes sickening. And obviously what we are going to need, in order to keep the Tree in balance, is something as difficult as Chesed is merciful. So we kind of know we’re in trouble here. If Chesed represents the energy that is entirely positive and wonderful and compassionate and loving, then what are we going to need to balance it?