The profound commentaries that have been composed usually explain it against the background of Lurianic kabbala, which is of later authorship, and don’t help the reader to understand the most basic meaning of the Zohar’s homiletics. Remarkably, to this day, no comprehensive commentary on the Zohar has been written from the standpoint of its pshat, its literal meaning, which would provide a fundamental understanding of the text. A perusal of the Zohar necessitates prior knowledge of kabbala, skill in deciphering the various codes and a close acquaintance with the mechanisms of the Zohar’s homiletics.
The first lock is the Zohar’s homilies and the kabbalistic background required to understand them. But for the contemporary reader, hundreds of years after the coalescence of the Zohar literature, the tension between revealed and concealed has been determined regretfully, this canonical composition is sealed with secrecy for the average reader by three “locks.” The Zohar entered the Jewish canon alongside the Talmud and the books of the Bible (in fact, more manuscripts of the Zohar have come down to us than of the Talmud, which indicates its circulation and centrality in the pre-print age). The depth of its conceptual, psychological and religious ideas, which arise from its splendid homilies and from its dynamic stories, have made the Zohar one of the pillars of Jewish culture for hundreds of years. The Zohar is the crowning peak of Jewish mysticism, and is in many senses the cornerstone of kabbala – the place from which it emanates and to which it returns. The use of the term “holy ring” allows a glimpse into the consciousness of the authors, who are bent on creating a text that is fraught with a deep element of the “secret.” Indeed, the tension between the revealed and the concealed is a theme that runs through the Zohar, and the Zoharic dialectic around it is one of the most beautiful and gentle dances of Hebrew mysticism. This is the well-known pseudepigraphic setting that the Zohar, which was written in 13th-century Spain, chose to assume: a circle of cognoscenti gathered around Rabbi Shimon in the Land of Israel of the first centuries of the Common Era. In one of the dramatic passages of the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the work’s protagonist author, declares that the secrets now being uttered are worthy of being revealed only between the “Companions, who are in this holy ring” – that is, the group of those who possess the secret, namely, Rabbi Shimon’s pupils (Zohar 3: 132b Vol.
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