The best way to know what is kabbalah is to learning from the authentic sources themself.

Baal HaSulam, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, the great Kabbalist of the twentieth century, gave one of the clearest definitions:

“The wisdom of Kabbalah is no more and no less than a sequence of roots, which hang down by way of cause and consequence, in fixed, determined rules, interweaving to a single exalted goal described as ‘the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world.’”

Kabbalah deals with the structure of reality and the way everything unfolds from a higher root. It’s about cause and effect, and the ultimate goal of those causes: that the Creator becomes revealed to the creature, here and now, not in some far-away afterlife.

The next question could be then what is the Creator that Kabbalah is talking about? Well, that is actually what we need to discover.

Rav Michael Laitman, continuing Baal HaSulam’s path in our generation, explains it in words that are more approachable for us today. He says:

“The wisdom of Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator to a person in this world.”

That short sentence contains it all: 

The word method is key. Kabbalah is not only a description of the universe - it is a practical path. It is a guide for transforming the way we perceive  the world. By changing our inner attitude, we start feeling the deeper layers of reality.

In this sense, the wisdom of Kabbalah is not meant for a chosen few. It was always meant for humanity. Baal HaSulam wrote in his essay The Teaching of Kabbalah and Its Essence that “only through the expansion of the wisdom of Kabbalah in the masses will we obtain complete redemption.” He saw it as a remedy for the crises of his time - and our time too.

This is why the wisdom of Kabbalah is often called "the wisdom of reception."  (Kabbalah in hebrew come from the word Lekabel - to receive). Not reception in the ordinary sense of grabbing what we can, but how do we receive the reality, how to receive what come from the Creator.

When we change the intention behind our desires, we can actually receive what flows from the higher root, which is also called to attain the root of our soul, meaning to reach the corrected way to relate what is outside of ourselves.

That is why Baal HaSulam considered Kabbalah the most exalted science. It doesn’t reject the other sciences - it unite them. They study fragments of reality. Kabbalah studies the root of all fragments, and leads us to their unification.

In today’s world, when people feel increasingly disconnected and unsure of where things are going, the voice of the Kabbalists is more relevant than ever. They are telling us that there is meaning, there is direction, and there is a method to discover it.

Kabbalah is not about escaping the world. It’s about revealing the depth of the world while living in it. It’s about opening our perception until we can see that behind every event, every relationship, and every challenge, there is a single guiding force, inviting us to know it.