Pardes Rimonim פרדס רימונים

Pardes Rimonim — "The Orchard of Pomegranates" — was completed by Rabbi Moshe Cordovero in 1548, at twenty-six. It was printed at Kraków in 1591, after his death.

The aim was to put things in order. By the sixteenth century kabbalah was a heap: Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, the Provençal and Gerona schools, Nachmanides, the Zohar, dozens of manuscripts at odds with one another. Cordovero himself explained that he undertook the work so as not to be "lost and confused" in the Zohar. Thirty-two gates treat the sefirot, emanation, the divine Names, the letters, the tzachtzachot — each concept in its place.

Cordovero's system is continuous emanation: a single descending flow from Ein Sof, the sefirot being both vessels and the essence itself. The question he answers is how the many issue from the One.

Twenty years later came Luria, and the question changed: not how the many issue, but why the world is broken and how it is mended — tzimtzum, the breaking of the vessels, the kelipot, tikkun. Lurianic kabbalah displaced Cordovero, and later kabbalists reconciled the two systems by assigning Cordovero the description of a lower order. But it was here that kabbalah first became an ordered book.