Zohar: Genesis: Chapter LVIII. Rabbi Jehuda's Discussion with the Merchant, on Jacob's Pillar

This is a passage from the Zohar, the foundational text of Jewish Kabbalah, presented as a dramatic narrative dialogue. It depicts Rabbi Jehuda rising at midnight at an inn to study the "secret doctrine" (Kabbalah), where he awakens a fellow Jewish merchant who becomes his unexpected interlocutor. The central dispute concerns whether the stone Jacob used as a pillow at Bethel — which he later anointed and set up as a sacred pillar — is identical to the mythic foundation stone (Even HaShetiya) at the center of the world, upon which the Jerusalem Temple was built; the merchant challenges this identification on geographical grounds, noting Jacob was at Bethel, not Jerusalem. Rabbi Jehuda frames the discussion with the distinctly kabbalistic insistence that studying the secret doctrine requires both intellectual rigor and reverent spirit, citing biblical verses to this effect. A notable mystical claim embedded in the passage is that the Shekhinah (divine presence) accompanies any earnest solitary student, and that God himself walks in the celestial Eden alongside the righteous who study Torah from midnight until dawn. The text is characteristic of the Zohar's style: weaving scriptural exegesis, metaphysical cosmology, and idealized rabbinic encounter into a single scene designed to model and elevate mystical study as a spiritual practice.

Zohar: Genesis: Chapter LVIII. Rabbi Jehuda's Discussion with the Merchant, on Jacob's Pillar

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