Reincarnation in Kaballah and mystical Judaism

Ajay0 · Feb 26, 2023

Interesting article on gilgul and reincarnation in Kaballah...

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/reincarnation-the-transmigration-of-a-jewish-idea/

In the Western imagination, reincarnation has long been associated with the religious traditions of the East. Transmigration — the journey of an individual soul through many incarnations — is something that religious seekers in the West often think of as samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth which is a core aspect of the great Dharmic religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Sometimes overlooked, both by Jews and by students of Jewish tradition, is gilgul, a concept that is described in great detail throughout the Kaballah . Very much in line with samsara, which is often depicted as a wheel in Buddhist art, the word gilgul comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to spin.” The soul, in the kabbalistic view, spins onward through a great many bodies, striving after a higher form of perfection.

While it occasionally happens that new souls may be created, most of us have been here before and will be here again. This particular life comprises but one stage on our path towards a perfected state when the small divine spark of our own soul will become reintegrated into the fires of the divine. This perfected state — i.e. the culmination of gilgul — can be understood as a cognate to the Buddhist notion of nirvana. However, where nirvana means literally “to blow out” — that is, to extinguish the flames of desire and greed — the kabbalists describe ultimate goal of transmigration as a kind of compounded flame, in which the soul’s spark is subsumed by the boundless light of God.
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