The Kabbalistic Tree of life seems as much as anything else to be a framework of different aspects of the psyche and the conditions therein. There is perhaps a reason why psychiatry is such an eminently Jewish science and also perhaps again an example of the practitioner imposing his view on a phenomenon for reasons known only to himself. Just as the psychiatrist imposes his own definitions so too, the Kabbalist impose his own definitions on God.
The Zohar is the central and most important book of the Kabbalah. Much of its discourse is based on secret interpretations of the Torah in such a way to bend, change or even contradict the original meaning. It does this by creating a whole secondary study on the meaning of the words used in the Torah by interpreting and ascribing some kind of mystical interpretation to the Hebrew letters themselves.
I have previously written on the fascinating origin of the alphabet as pictographic symbols, a fact many people are completely unaware of today except for students of linguistics; this fascinating study opens up vistas into our most remote past and confronts us with some intriguing mysteries. For instance, learning that the letter C represent a ‘Gamal’ or ‘throwing stick’ we might wonder how this ancient Egyptian hunting tool found its way to the Australian Aborigines. The word ‘Gamal’ is the Arabic word for camel and it is possibly the distinctive bent, or arched shape of the throwing stick and also the word for ‘bridge’ in Aramaic is ‘Gamla’, no doubt the distinctive ‘arched’ shape of the camel back being the inspiration but all of these words have their origins with the Ancient Egyptian word for a ‘throwing stick’ and the verb QMR or ‘qamar’ which meant ‘to throw’. We can see how with the passage of years consonantal shift may slightly obscure the origins. So ‘q’ and ‘g’ and ‘r’ and ‘l’ are largely equivalent and phonetically very close when it comes to the movements of the tongue and the mouth for their articulation.
The Study of the letters of our own alphabet also betray the Middle-Eastern, ancient Semitic origins of our letters. The alphabet we may consider to be Greek since the letters of ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’ are known, but the ‘Aleph’ and ‘Beet’ of the Hebrews may be less widely known. The Semitic ‘Beet’ represents the floor plan of a house and our letter B still shows us the two rooms of this house. Every letter in fact is a picture of something and often correlates with words which use that letter to convey that meaning.
Over the years the letters may have transformed somewhat by flipping either to the left or right or upside down. So the letter A, known in Greek as ‘Alpha’ and in Hebrew as ‘Aleph’, was originally a pictogram of an ox’s head. If you turn the letter upside-down and return it to its original orientation as an Egyptian hieroglyph and the two horns and face of an ox appear. In the Hebrew alphabet ‘Aleph’, like all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is supposed to have mystical significance. ‘Aleph’ is composed of two yods with a diagonal letter waw (or f) connecting the upper, hidden qualities of God and the lower visible presence of God in the visible world.
In some instances, some of these symbolic interpretations may actually contain something genuinely insightful or even revelatory. The letter ‘Yod’ for instance or ‘Iota’ in Greek, as in ‘not one iota’ or ‘not one jot’ as the smallest letter represents the immense power of God and the single, smallest point of the microcosm from which all creation emanates; it is also significantly, the first letter of the ‘tetragrammaton’ YHWH or ‘Jahweh’.
In his book The Palm Tree of Deborah, Shelomo Alfassa describes the attainment of the highest level of the tree of life, Kether or Crown, though like so much of the Kabbalah this in itself is an inconsistent claim since it was said that in the Zohar that Moses himself had only perceived as high as Tiferet and the Patriarchs Malchut, so from this we are to assume that the higher Sefirot are probably off limits to humanity, yet Shelomo apparently is able to explain the attainment of Kether, the highest emanation closest to the infinite and unknowable Ain Soph.