Should You Study Sufism or Kabbalah?

I recommend both. Two places to start studying Kabbalah online: KabU and Kabbalah Centre.

Before I explored Sufism, I took classes in Kabbalah starting in the late 2000s. I thought the theory behind Kabbalah was really interesting, but I wasn’t quite understanding how exactly it worked in terms of my personal life or practice. For this reason, I drifted away.

If you live in the United States, you have few options for learning Kabbalah that I know of. Back when I started exploring it, Kabbalah had become famous because of Madonna’s involvement with the Kabbalah Centre, based in Los Angeles.

Of course, many people will do an eye roll at Madonna having any sort of spiritual interest, and completely write off Kabbalah simply because of her involvement in it. However, I don’t think that’s entirely fair to the thousands of years that Kabbalah existed long before Madonna released Like a Virgin.

I have studied Kabbalah with two completely different nonprofit Kabbalist organizations. One is a more conservative, traditional school that focuses on the basics of Kabbalah, The Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute, and their online school KabU. By conservative, I don’t mean politically conservative. In fact, some of Bnei Baruch’s teachings are actually quite liberal politically. However, I called them conservative, because they are into a no-frills version of Kabbalah.

KabU calls their Kabbalistic teachings “authentic Kabbalah” and their “professors” pronounce the word with the emphasis on the last syllable: KabbaLAH.

In KabU Kabbalah, there is no mysticism or magic. Meditation isn’t even necessary. This is what I struggled with when I took their classes many years ago. I was wondering how on earth would I ever attain a connection with the creator if I wasn’t doing something? In their system, I believe it’s simply the process of studying the kabbalistic theory and texts that helps to open you up to perception of the creator. In fact, you aren’t really doing anything...the “light” is simply being sent down to you because of your desire for it.

At the time, however, this was not enough for me. Perhaps my “point in the heart” wasn’t strong enough. (In their version of Kabbalah, the point in the heart is that desire that we have to connect with God.)

That said, they explain some complex concept exceptionally well, as in this video talking about the nature of reality:

The more pop culture Kabbalah comes of course from the Kabbalah Centre, which is where Madonna went. Back when they became well-known because of the Queen of Pop, I ordered some free books from their website, and eventually took an in-person class soon after I moved to Austin, TX in 2010. I liked a lot of what they said, however, it felt a little dumbed down compared to what I was learning at the other school. I was also concerned that they were focusing too much on using Kabbalistic ideas and techniques to manifest money or things, as opposed to focusing on God.

In 2019, I started reconnecting with the more intellectual KabU and started taking their online classes as a refresher. Alas, I got busy and then forgot about it. Recently, I have been guided to reconnect with the Kabbalistic tradition, and since I have now been studying Sufism, I am finding a lot of similarities. The KabU videos are very well done, and with my grounding and Sufism, I am less bothered by their dry, academic approach. I already have a daily practice with Sufi zikr (a mantra practice), which helps me to clear out my ego connections and connect with the qualities of God.

Out of curiosity, I also got a membership at the Kabbalah Centre website, which offers a gazillion classes for a reasonable monthly fee. It is your choice as to what to pay because they allow you to choose your scholarship level. You can partake in their teachings for as little as $12 a month, which is a huge bargain.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the online classes that I dipped my toe into at the Kabbalah Centre website. Something had changed with the energy of this school. It just felt like it was less cheesy than before. I can’t quite completely articulate it, but it seemed like they were more sincere, less marketing driven, and providing a lot of value that would be very helpful to people.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still a pop psychology aspect to Kabbalah Centre teachings that the Bnei Baruch/KabU people would probably wrinkle their nose at. The Kabbalah Centre is also still selling red string and promoting astrology, which the people at KabU consider to be forms of idolatry.

That said, the Kabbalah Centre seems more serious now. I was wondering what the difference was and realized I was not seeing one of the previous main teachers on the website: Yehuda Berg. Now, I want to be as generous as possible to this person, who may have repented and regretted his past behavior. But apparently, he left the organization in 2014 because he hit on a student. There was actually a lawsuit and he had to pay damages.

Berg was not charged with or convicted of rape, but what apparently happened was this: she went to see him privately, and he gave her some Vicodin because she supposedly complained of having kidney stones. He also gave her some alcohol. Then he hit on her aggressively, she rebuffed him, and thus she filed the lawsuit.

Yehuda Berg left the organization in 2014. I have some opinions about this story that I won’t get into, such as, why the hell would you take pain pills from someone instead of going to your doctor if you have painful kidney stones? Weird. Suffice to say I’m not trying to paint Berg as an incorrigible or unredeemable evil person, so much as a potentially (previously? we hope) arrogant and not-practicing-what-he-preaches person.

It is clear from Berg’s behavior, because apparently he was married at the time, that he wasn’t living in integrity with his teachings. After he left the organization, and some other monetary scandals had also occurred at this time, the Kabbalah Centre has apparently done a lot of soul searching.

I have to say honestly that I think that what they’re offering now is much better than what they were offering in the past – it feels less hyped up to me and more genuinely concerned with helping people.

In taking some of the classes online at the Kabbalah Centre, I have found a wide variety of teachers and levels of instruction. In my view, some of the teachers may be more spiritually advanced and providing genuine, heartfelt spiritual teacher teachings.

But take Kabbalah Centre with a grain of salt. Some of the basic teachings slide into that spiritual pop psychology realm where the focus is on using the spiritual principles to try to create yourself a happy life, where God is kind of a means to an end instead of the end. I hate to break it to you, but the point of genuine spirituality isn’t to manifest things for yourself so much as to let go of your egoistic desires, including the desire to create a happy life for yourself.

This isn’t to say that the end result of genuine spirituality is that you’d be unhappy; actually it’s the reverse. But if you’re using Kabbalah to try to manifest yourself a mansion, you’ve completely missed the point. The true end goal of Kabbalah – and Sufism – and virtually every genuine spiritual tradition, including authentic yoga – is God. (I’ll get into more about why this is in future articles.)

My recommendation, if you’re looking to learn more about Kabbalah, is to study it from various sources so you can get a wider picture of it. I think both of these extremes of Kabbalah – the strict, “no red string variety” and the pop psychology variations – are simply different wings of the same spiritual structure. You can use Kabbalah at a very basic level without any frills or overt mysticism to reach God in a more intellectual, “scientific” way, ala KabU. You can also use Kabbalistic ideas to live a better life, be a better partner or parent, and learn how to be less reactive, ala Kabbalah Centre.

For me, Sufism fills a bit of a gap here, in that it basically teaches the same thing at its core, only it provides a bit more devotion and ecstatic experience, which for some, may feel more soulful and heart opening than dry lectures about the principles of Kabbalah or pop psychology shortcuts.