With the Cabbalah Maasith, or the practical Cabbalah, I did not succeed so well as with the theoretical. The preacher boasted, not publicly indeed, but to everybody in private, that he was master of this also. Especially he professed roeh veeno nireh (to see everything, but not to be seen by others), that is, to be able to make himself invisible.
About this trick I was specially anxious, in order that I might practise some wanton jokes on my comrades. More particularly I formed a plan for keeping my ill-tempered mother-in-law in check by this means. I pretended that my object was merely to do good, and guard against evil. The preacher consented, but said at the same time, that on my part certain preparations were required. Three days in succession I was to feast, and every day to say some Ichudim. These are Cabbalistic forms of prayer, whose occult meaning aims at producing in the intellectual world sexual unions, through means of which certain results are to be brought about in the physical.
I did everything with pleasure, made the conjuration which he had taught me, and believed with all confidence that I was now invisible. At once I hurried to the Beth Hamidrash, the Jewish academy, went up to one of my comrades, and gave him a vigorous box on the ear. He however was no coward, and returned the blow with interest. I started back in astonishment; I could not understand how he had been able to discover me, as I had observed with the utmost accuracy the instructions of the preacher. Still I thought I might, perhaps, unwittingly and unintentionally have neglected something. I resolved, therefore, to undertake the operation anew. This time, however, I was not going to venture on the test of a box on the ear; I went into the academy merely to watch my comrades as a spectator. As soon as I entered, however, one of them came up to me, and showed me a difficult passage in the Talmud, which he wished me to explain. I stood utterly confounded, and disconsolate over the failure of my hopes.
Thereupon I went to the preacher, and informed him of my unsuccessful attempt. Without blushing, he replied quite boldly, "If you have observed all my instructions, I cannot explain this otherwise than by supposing that you are unfit for being thus divested of the visibility of your body." With great grief, therefore, I was obliged to give up entirely the hope of making myself invisible.
This disappointed hope was followed by a new delusion. In the preface to the Book of Raphael, which the angel of that name is said to have delivered to our first father Adam at his banishment from paradise, I found the promise, that whoever keeps the book in his house is thereby insured against fire. It was not long, however, before a conflagration broke out in the neighbourhood, when the fire seized my house too, and the angel Raphael himself had to go up into heaven in this chariot of fire.
Unsatisfied with the literary knowledge of this science, I sought to penetrate into its spirit; and as I perceived that the whole science, if it is to deserve this name, can contain nothing but the secrets of nature concealed in fables and allegories, I laboured to find out these secrets, and thereby to raise my merely literary knowledge to a rational knowledge. This, however, I could accomplish only in a very imperfect manner at the time, because I had yet very few ideas of the sciences in general. Still, by independent reflection I hit upon many applications of this kind. Thus, for example, I explained at once the first instance with which the Cabbalists commonly begin their science.
It is this. Before the world was created, the divine being occupied the whole of infinite space alone. But God wished to create a world, in order that He might reveal those attributes of His nature which refer to other beings besides Himself. For this purpose He contracted Himself into the centre of His perfection, and issued into the space thereby left void ten concentric circles of light, out of which arose afterwards manifold figures (Parzophim) and gradations down to the present world of sense.
I could not in any way conceive that all this was to be taken in the common sense of the words, as nearly all Cabbalists represent it. As little could I conceive that, before the world had been created, a time had past, as I knew from my Moreh Nebhochim, that time is a modification of the world, and consequently cannot be thought without it. Moreover, I could not conceive that God occupies a space, even though it be infinite; or that He, an infinitely perfect being, should contract Himself, like a thing of circular form, into a centre.
Accordingly I sought to explain all this in the following way. God is prior to the world, not in time, but in His necessary being as the condition of the world. All things besides God must depend on Him as their cause, in regard to their essence as well as their existence. The creation of the world, therefore, could not be thought as a bringing forth out of nothing, nor as a formation of something independent on God, but only as a bringing forth out of Himself. And as beings are of different grades of perfection, we must assume for their explanation different grades of limitation of the divine being. But since this limitation must be thought as extending from the infinite being down to matter, we represent the beginning of the limitation in a figure as a centre (the lowest point) of the Infinite.
In fact, the Cabbalah is nothing but an expanded Spinozism, in which not only is the origin of the world explained by the limitation of the divine being, but also the origin of every kind of being, and its relation to the rest, are derived from a separate attribute of God. God, as the ultimate subject and the ultimate cause of all beings, is called Ensoph (the Infinite, of which, considered in itself, nothing can be predicated). But in relation to the infinite number of beings, positive attributes are ascribed to Him; these are reduced by the Cabbalists to ten, which are called the ten Sephiroth.