The Tree of Life
Kabbalah's most exported diagram is the Tree of Life — ten sefirot (spheres) connected by twenty-two paths, mapping the descent of divine influence from Keter (crown) through Chokhmah and Binah down to Malkhut (kingdom, the manifest world). The arrangement is not symbolic in the soft sense; it functions as a structural model of how the unmanifest becomes manifest, with each sefirah representing a particular quality of divine attention.
Lurianic Kabbalah
Isaac Luria (1534-1572), working in Safed, restructured the entire tradition around three concepts: tzimtzum (the contraction by which infinite divinity made room for a finite world), shevirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the vessels at creation that scattered divine sparks throughout matter), and tikkun olam (the repair of the world by gathering those sparks back). The framework is still load-bearing in contemporary Jewish mysticism and has bled into the secular phrase tikkun olam used in modern Jewish ethics.
Contemporary teachers
Outside strictly traditional yeshiva contexts, the most-watched contemporary Kabbalah teacher in English-language media is David Ghiyam, whose work appears throughout this index. The Kabbalah Centre — founded by Philip Berg in 1965 — is the most prominent popularising organisation; the rigorous academic side, by contrast, is held by Gershom Scholem's lineage and contemporary scholars including Moshe Idel.
— end of entry —