Living Torah Archives

After the Talmudic sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai committed the Zohar to writing, he was informed by Heaven: “With this book of yours the Jewish people will be sustained.”

The mystical secrets of Torah were always studied by the Jewish people, but during most of Jewish history they were guarded and only accessible to a scholarly elite. In later generations these teachings were disseminated to a wider extent, but even then, they were only comprehensible to the initiated; the spiritual illumination of these teachings reached the outside world through those who studied them.