I studied Kabbalah for years before I realized it was making me a better writer. Not because mysticism gives you magic powers of description or anything like that. But because Kabbalah teaches you to look at the world in layers, and good stories have layers too.
Let me explain what I mean.
Four Levels of Everything
In Kabbalah there’s this idea called PaRDeS. Its an acronym for four levels of understanding any text: Peshat (the plain meaning), Remez (the hint), Drash (the deeper interpretation), and Sod (the secret or mystical meaning). Jewish scholars have been using this framework for centuries to study Torah, but it works for fiction too.
Take a story about a guy who loses his car keys. On the surface level, peshat, its about a man searching for his keys. Pretty boring on its own. But the hint, remez, might be that he keeps losing things because hes not paying attention to his life. The drash could be about how we spend all our time searching for small things and missing the big things right in front of us. And the sod, the hidden layer, might be about the human need to feel in control of something, anything, even if its just knowing where your keys are.
Thats four stories in one. The reader who just wants a funny tale about a guy tearing apart his house gets that. The reader who thinks about it later gets something else entirely.
The Hidden Light
Theres a concept in Kabbalah called Or HaGanuz, the hidden light. The idea is that God created a special light on the first day of creation, then hid it away for the righteous to find later. Its light thats present in the world but concealed.
I think every good story has hidden light in it. Something the writer put there that not everyone will see, but the people who do see it feel like they found something meant just for them. Its the detail that makes a character feel real. The line of dialogue that sits with you for days. The ending that means one thing the first time you read it and something completely different the second time.
When I wrote my Kabbalah Kronicles series, 36 weekly essays about trying to live a spiritual life while being a thoroughly imperfect person, I tried to put hidden light in every one. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I was just a guy typing at midnight hoping the words made sense.
Why 36?
Theres a reason I wrote exactly 36 Kronicles, by the way. In Jewish mysticism, 36 is a significant number. The Talmud says there are 36 hidden righteous people in every generation, the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, whose goodness holds the world together. Nobody knows who they are. They might be anyone. Your neighbor, the woman at the grocery store, the guy who fixes your car.
I liked the idea of 36 dispatches about ordinary life that might, if you squinted, contain something worth finding. I’m not comparing myself to the Lamed Vav. That would be both arrogant and probably disqualifying. But I like the idea that meaning hides in ordinary places.
And thats really what Kabbalah gave me as a writer. Not fancy concepts or mystical language. Just the habit of looking at a situation and asking, what else is going on here that I’m not seeing? Every time I sit down to write a story, thats the question I start with.
Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes I’m just writing about a beard.
But sometimes there’s something there. And finding it is the best part of the whole process.
More from the Kronicles