Joshua Genuth

If you’ve ever looked at a kabbalistic ilan, one question presents itself almost immediately: Why a tree? Why did generations of kabbalists choose this particular form to express some of Judaism’s most profound and complex teachings? The answer is rooted in the challenges kabbalists faced when attempting to represent the divine world. The tree offered a way to express complex relationships, convey symbolic meaning, and make abstract teachings more accessible to study and contemplation. The...

Detail of The Panoply Tree, 17th century An ilan is a kabbalistic tree. At its simplest, the word ilan means “tree” in Hebrew. But beginning in the late Middle Ages, it came to refer to a distinctive type of kabbalistic artifact: a visual representation of the divine world, typically organized around the ten sefirot and rendered in the form of a tree. The surviving examples range from modest diagrams to monumental parchment scrolls several meters long. Some contain only the basic structure of...