Seven Secrets Discover the Torah Code

By James N. Schloner

Seven secrets reveals the deepest secrets of the Bible. The Ancients knew the power of Gods names and how Gods names are edited into the deep Torah text. On this subtle secret level, God lives in the book. Seven reveals this ancient teaching for the first time. These Seven Secrets awaken God in the text and enlivens Gods presence in our lives. Access these secrets and connect directly with Gods presence now. Make the connection now! Journey into the depth of the Torah. Discover the Secret Life of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483680767

James N. Schloner

James Schloner has practiced advanced meditation for 30 years. He is also author of The Kabbalah Code. James Schloner has practiced law in Minneapolis, Minnesota since 1983.

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Copyright © 2013 by James N. Schloner.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013914117

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4836-8075-0

Softcover   978-1-4836-8074-3

Ebook   978-1-4836-8076-7

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Rev. date: 08/19/2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Secret Number One: The Divine Fabric Of Names, God Conceals Himself To Reveal Himself; Connect With God’s Vibrant Names Which Until Now Were Exiled

Secret Number Two: The Torah Is The Adam Kadmon

Secret Number Three: The Unified Symbolism Of The Torah, One Author Of Genesis And Exodus: Nature And Its Source

Secret Number Four: The Torah Is An Allegory For Luria’s Creation Process

Secret Number Five: The Unity Of Science And The Kabbalah. Connect With The Source Of Mind And Matter To Restore Balance

Secret Number Six: Unity, God Is In All Things. Where You Stand Are The Higher Worlds. The Text Is A Technique To Swing The Awareness Between Opposites To Restore Balance

Secret Number Seven: The Binding Of Isaac, Tikkun, Repair Of The Godhead

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wanted to connect with the deepest secrets of the Torah?

In this rational, scientific age, we have lost our connection to the tradition which formed Rabbinic Judaism. This lost spiritual teaching was the cornerstone of an emerging Judaism and practiced by its conservative founders. Rabbi Akiba and Ishmael were the gold standard of legal interpretation, but they also drank deeply from the spiritual well directly experiencing the vision of the divine chariot described by Ezielkel. Later, the chariot vision inspired the Kabbalists to probe deeply into the Torah and rediscover the names of God reverberating like a fabric. These Jewish sages knew this garment of names and they taught how to ride the names back to the Source, or Ein Sof. They knew how the Ein Sof, the Source, or Spirit became matter; how God resides in the Torah and all things. In this materialistic age, we keep trying to consume more and more material goods in the hope that this will bring us happiness and peace, but they never do. Only a direct experience of pure spirit satisfies and provides what we seek. The 7 golden secrets show us how to reconnect with spirit, the Ein Sof and how to enrich and nourish our lives. Because the spiritual tradition has become lost, we have lost our connection to a vital part of Judaism—spiritual Judaism. Ironically, you cannot know the Torah writer’s world view without knowing the Kabbalah. The Kabbalists rediscovered this teaching, they did not invent it. What they rediscovered is the Torah writer’s view of reality.

I want to share a story with you that illustrates the importance of Kavanah, or feeling. I was at a seminar recently and we were talking about whether the Orthodox should impose dietary laws on non-Orthodox nursing home residents. One member of the group vigorously defended the practice. He said to me, Do you like any sports? I answered, golf. He replied, golf has a rule book, if you don’t follow the rules you are not playing golf. Judaism is the same way. There are set rules, if you don’t follow the rules it’s not Judaism. I answered him as follows: There are two rule books, a written one, and an oral one. Moses received both revelations at Sinai. The oral law explains and clarifies the written law. In fact, the written law can only be understood in light of the oral law. Ironically, this guy, like most Jews, never heard of the oral tradition because the rationalists purged it.

A couple days later I was watching the Today Show. The host was interviewing a Catholic priest. He started by apologizing for the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the church in recent years. But then he said, You have to keep your eye on the essential teachings of the church. God wants to share His life with us, which is joy. It’s like the golf swing. The rules of the golf swing exist so that we can experience the joy of hitting a golf ball well.

The contrast between the two positions is beautiful. The first view of golf is legalistic. The priest’s picture of golf is experiential—joy oriented. Catholics, of course, do not have a monopoly on connecting with God and experiencing the inner joy that flows from this union. But the priest points out an element that is missing all too often in most branches of Judaism—joy. The Kabbalists were masters of both rule books—the written and the oral. While they were experts in halacha, the law, they also practiced meditation to reconnect with God and to experience inner joy that comes from contact. The Kabbalah is part of the oral revelation that was purged from Judaism in the 19th century. Rank and file Jews have no idea that for centuries Jewish sages practiced meditation to nurture their inner experience of Judaism. The Kabbalists inner experience connecting with God is the universal experience of joy. The purpose of our journey together is to show you that we are experiencing only a small percentage of what’s possible.

In this journey together we explore the Torah text intimately using seven golden keys. First, we will go deep within the heart of the text to explore the Kabbalists’ claim that the entire Torah is the name of God. The same text that gives us the surface meaning, also forms God’s names reverberating like a fabric. This is what the Kabbalists call the meaningless of revelation, the story within the story. Beyond the surface meaning of the book’s stories, the letters and words of the Torah text—the deep Torah—form God’s names. This is the fulfillment of Jeremiah: A new law will emerge from me.

Second, we will explore the Kabbbalists’ doctrine of the Adam Kadmon—the Great Adam—that God uses to create the universe. The Covenants of Abraham, Jacob and Moses secretly flesh out the body of the Great Adam. These covenants enliven the Adam Kadmon connecting and raising the narrative to cosmic status.

Third, we will investigate the symbolism of the Torah’s use of the number three and draw comparisons with Eastern traditions.

Fourth, we examine the doctrine of the Lurianic Kabbalah—how God emanates the world from the Ein Sof, the infinite Nothingness which is the source of everything. The Torah displays the mechanics of Luria’s of creation.

Fifth, we explore the nature of speech in the creation process and how the fabric of names form the surface meaning of the text; and we see how Jacob’s divine vision leads to unity—and repairs the world from the effects of Adam’s sin; and how the text swings between opposites: YHVH and Elohim and male and female energy.

Sixth, science, which is thought to be hostile to religion, reveals a created world structured in layers—from concrete to abstract. The layers peeled off by science parallel the Kabbalah’s description of nature.

Seventh, we investigate the binding of Isaac and how it repairs the fractured Godhead.

Before we begin this journey, let’s look briefly at the work of Arthur Green because he discusses issues which serve as a beginning point of departure. In his book Radical Judaism, Arthur Green points us in the right direction to begin our journey into the heart of the Torah. Green’s analysis is helpful, but not really radical. He asks us to look to both the new and the old to reinvigorate Judaism. He relies heavily on the teachings of Kabbalah and Hassidism. But these old pathways of knowledge can only revitalize us if we travel on roads that speak to us today in this scientific dominated age. Green’s journey is our journey: The search in our noise filled world to discover an inner place of silence where we can encounter the mystery of God, who is divine silence, the source of language and creation. Green reminds us that this God is not outside of us; the journey is not to a distant heaven but an inner journey within the depths of the heart. God’s most fundamental name, YHVH, is a name crafted out of the divine Silence which is God’s essence: This name is nothing but a breath… The silent potential for speech which animate(s) all of speech. ¹

This being of divine Silence engages humanity through the eternal dance of silence infusing language. ² The Torah of Sinai in its essence is simpler than we can imagine because all of Torah is contained in the aleph of anokhi, I am, the first letter of the Commandments. ³ Aleph in Hebrew is silent. This means that all the Torah originates in aleph or silence. Green points out that the claim to a source in divine Silence, precedes different schools of thought in Judaism and the divide between religions, taking them back to that inner place that precedes them and underlies them all. ⁴ Aleph is the number 1 in the Hebrew counting system. The aleph takes us back to that which we were seeking: a Jewish language for expressing the Oneness of all that is. God is the underlying One behind and within all existence. Torah is the underlying One behind and within all language. ⁵

Where do we find this place of Oneness? This leads us to Green’s second point: the natural world which science analyzes, and the Torah text are structured in layers. We can "remove the veil of surface impressions, go deeper, and you will find there something profound and holy." ⁶ This reminds me of the saying, if we could cleanse the doors of perception, everything would appear as it is—infinite. Green leads us to a deep truth—that the scientific method and the process of textual analysis, both reveal a common source and truth. In their essence, science and religion joins hands. Drawing on the Kabbalah, Green challenges us to find the hidden dimensions of Torah not yet apparent to us. How? We may find that simple concentration on the Hebrew letters themselves can lead into deeper states of mind. Study of the Hebrew language’s system of roots and the patters of association… can… serve as a powerful source of insights used by the masters of the Midrash over many centuries. ⁷ In this quest, we must become intimate with the Torah text. Only through this intimate devotion will the Torah reveal her secrets. Green is right, the secret way is revealed by the letters and words. Green makes clear that there are hidden secrets waiting to be discovered at the heart of the text. This journey to the depth of the text is really an inner source revealing deeper parts of ourselves—deep states of mind. The more we cultivate that place of inner silence, the more we will make the connection to the lost secrets of the Kabbalah which is the Torah Code.

In the River of Light Lawrence Kushner discusses Jewish renewal in light of physics. He says, Here is a vision of a new kind of physics working toward a ‘unified field,’ in which all manifestations of reality are ‘scientifically’ interrelated. ⁸ In our journey we build on the work of others—ancient seers and modern ones. We will explore the connection of science with the Kabbalah and the Torah.

In 1492, Spain sent out three ships to explore the vast unknown ocean. Yet, for hundreds of years before Jewish Kabbalists in Spain were embarking on a different journey—an inner one, to explore the channels and pathways of life revealed in the oral law and imprinted in the heart of the Torah text. Join me on this journey of inner exploration to rediscover the lost knowledge of the Kabbalah written into the heart of the Torah—the Torah Code. We will explore the connection of science with the Kabbalah and the Torah.

Jewish tradition describes two revelations at Sinai: The written law in the form of the Torah; and, an oral law containing secrets like the merkabah (chariot) mysteries and the Kabbalah. Moses received both revelations. The rediscovery of the names of God at the core of the text that we will explore is within the oral tradition. This shows the power of the oral revelation: the names reverberate at the core of the text and also the names create the surface of the text in their image.

The Seven New Assumptions of the new/old paradigm are:

1) The plain meaning of the Torah’s stories are like the tip of an iceberg. The real story resides under the surface.

2) The names of God are embedded in the deep text.

3) The covenants flesh out the cosmic body of the Adam Kadmon, the first Adam created by God in Genesis, who God uses as a template to create the universe.

4) The Torah author’s world view is symbolic, not literal.

5) God lives in the Torah.

6) Reading the text transforms the reader.

7) The Torah is one unified text written by one author. It is not a hodge podge of different strands.

Gershom Scholem discusses the power of the hidden names when he says: There is an ancient Midrash to the effect that anyone who spends the whole day reading the verse (Genesis 36:22) ‘and Lothan’s sister was Tinna,’ which strikes the reader of the Torah as particularly meaningless and irrelevant, will attain eternal beatitude. The Kabbalist Azulai offers the following explanation of this aphorism: ‘When a man utters words of the Torah, he never ceases to create spiritual potencies and new lights, which issue like medicines from ever new combinations of the elements and consonants. If, therefore, he spends the whole day reading just this one verse, he attains eternal beatitude, for at all times, indeed, in every moment, the composition [of the inner linguistic elements] changes in accordance with the condition and rank of this moment, and in accordance with the names that flare up within him at this moment.’ ⁹

I would like you to join me on a journey to the very heart of the Torah. We will explore a place where the rules are very different from everyday life. It is a place that the greatest Jewish sages knew intimately. But, with the passage of time this tradition has become lost. Now in this scientific age a new set of rules, a new world view, predominates. It says the plain meaning of the written Torah is all that there is. And so it has been for over five hundred years. However, I want you to suspend your assumptions about what we call reality. So that together we can rediscover that place of pure potentiality where God has a secret life. This is the place where God’s names reverberate and God lives in the Torah. It is a place which fulfills the promise of Isaiah 51:04: A new law shall go forth from me.

And this place of magic also connects us to the cosmic body that God used to create Adam and Eve. In this sense, this journey fulfills the promise of Jeremiah 31, 31-34: Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, but this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts and in their heart will I write it; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. In this place the Torah shows us not only the living presence of God, but reveals a cosmic body in which God can write his law in our hearts and inner organs.

What prevents us from going to this place? Only a lifetime of conditioning from our teachers and society who inevitably see the world with the glasses of the old paradigm.

In order to experience the new world, to see with new glasses, you must first discard assumptions about the Torah. These assumptions form the foundation of the material world view. They are:

1. That the stories in the Torah are what they appear to be with no hidden deeper meaning written into the text.

2. That an editor took different strands or sources written by different constituencies favoring different names of God and wove these stories into one narrative.

3. That proof of this editing are contradictions in the book between one strand and another.

4. The names Elohim and YHVH represent different strands and themselves do not have unique attributes.

5. The meaning of the text is literal, not symbolic.

6. Names, number and speech are rationally based, not symbolically based; God does not live in the book through his names.

7. The stories do not form a cosmic body or any kind of body. They are merely stories.

At the end of his life, Isaac Newton turned from studying the physical world, to probe the Torah in Hebrew looking for encrypted messages. Newton the greatest scientist of his age had an intuition that the Torah held deep forgotten secrets in its depths. In this quest to discover the Torah’s secrets let’s see what clues the ancient Kabbalists left for us.

SECRET NUMBER ONE

THE DIVINE FABRIC OF NAMES, GOD CONCEALS HIMSELF TO REVEAL HIMSELF; CONNECT WITH GOD’S VIBRANT NAMES WHICH UNTIL NOW WERE EXILED

The first secret is that the Torah text is a divine garment made of hidden reverberating names of God. The text is alive with God’s energetic vital presence. God creates the world in His image and enters creation by living in the Torah. The Torah is God in disguise, dressed up in the garments of this world. God dresses up in letters, words, sentences and stories. But beneath the surface the same narrative forms God’s names. The text shows us how to get back home, back to the Source. Peel back the meaning of the text and the divine names reverberate without reference to meaning. This is the essence of the Torah, the spirit which animates the Book. The physical book with its stories is the body, but the names are the spirit; and that spirit points back to the Source, a place without content, a place which is pure potential, but nothingness. This spirit becomes the physical universe. Spirit becomes matter and disguises its essential divine nature. The text also plays this charade, dressing up the Ein Sof or Spirit into concrete stories.

The names of God lead back to the Source, serving as a bridge between the body (the written Torah) and the one Spirit, the Ein Sof. This is a place of magic and mystery. It is a connection with the unformed and void that God uses to create the world in Genesis. It is a place of inner bliss that is the source of all religions and precedes them all, a place of transformation to those lucky enough to taste it: ‘there is light in my heart like lightening;’ ‘the world changed into purity around me and my heart felt as if I entered a new world!’

A member of the rabbinic academy in Cesearca writes, The Holy Scriptures are like a house of many, many rooms, and outside each is a key—but it is not the right one. To find the right keys that will open the doors—that is the great arduous task. ¹⁰ The first golden key to unlock the doors of our journey together is that the Torah holds a supreme secret written into its heart millennium ago. The secret is that the letters that form the story’s ordinary meaning, simultaneously create names of God reverberating in the depths of the text. This forgotten teaching is the Torah Code. The Torah Code reveals the mind of the author because the Code displays an author who extraordinarily fashions the book’s letters to form hidden names of God.

This golden key is much older than the Kabbalah of the thirteenth century. Ironically the early rabbis of an emerging Judaism held this key, but this knowledge with time has become lost. In an early Midrash Commentary on Job 28:13: No man knoweth its order. Rabbi Elezar declares: The various sections of the Torah were not given in their correct order. For if they had been given in their correct order, anyone who read them would be able to wake the dead and perform miracles. For this reason, the correct order and arrangement of the Torah were hidden and are known only to the Holy One! ¹¹

One book from the early rabbinic period, the Shimmushe Torah, describes how Moses went up to heaven to receive the Torah, and how finally God gave him not only the text of the Torah as we know it, but also the secret combination of letters which represent another, esoteric aspect of the Torah. ¹² The Kabbalists of Spain came to know this book. Nahmonides, one of the most prominent and early Kabbalists refers to this book in his famous commentary on the Torah. The Ramban says, We possess an authentic tradition showing that the entire Torah consists of names of God and that the words can be read in a very different way, so as to form names. Thus, the Torah as given to Moses, was divided into words in such a way as to be read as commandments. But, at the same time, he received the oral tradition, according to which it was to be read as a sequence of names. ¹³ The Ramban makes clear that oral tradition, the oral revelation, involved how to read the Torah to reveal divine names hidden within it. This shows the power of the oral revelation: the names reverberate at the core of the text and also the