Zohar study group

The Zohar study group is a Jerusalem-based forum for studying the Zohar, the central mystical text associated with Jewish Kabbalah. Its decisive significance lies in the contrast between its apparently narrow religious purpose and its wider role in the novel: the group becomes a meeting point for Chaim Lerner’s theological arguments, haredi institutional power, political hostility, and Hannah Loeb’s eventual movement toward Jewish spirituality. Across the narrative, the group changes from a small, demanding class in the Kotel tunnel into a substantial public institution, while its teachers and students carry forward different versions of Chaim’s questions about God, grief, and responsibility.

Origins in the Kotel Tunnel

The group first appears as a small class held in the Kotel tunnel. Judah Loeb initially misunderstood Rabbi Kaplowitz’s function, taking the young haredi assistant for a bodyguard or secretary rather than recognizing him as part of the teaching circle. Kaplowitz and another similarly dressed assistant served the rebbe by fetching coffee or mint tea, gathering papers blown away by the wind, and glaring at students who interrupted or seemed insufficiently attentive. The class therefore combined mystical learning with a visible hierarchy: a teacher at the center, attendants protecting the conditions of study, and students expected to submit to the discipline of concentrated attention.

Chaim Lerner’s explanation of the group’s intellectual method gives its study a larger philosophical meaning. While discussing a passage from the Zohar, Chaim explained that the Hebrew word for “who” could also function as a name of God. The question of who created the universe thus becomes both a statement and an inquiry. In Chaim’s account, invoking God’s name means asking a question and searching for an answer; spirituality is therefore inquiry rather than passive certainty. The group’s subject matter is mystical, but its underlying practice is argument, interpretation, and sustained questioning.

The same lesson connects mystical wordplay to collective grief. Chaim described how the rabbis move from the question of creation to the devastation of losing a war to Rome and the destruction that followed. A biblical question about what can offer comfort is ordinarily understood to mean that no comfort exists, yet the rabbis use the question to reveal another name of God. Within the Zohar study group, theology emerges not by escaping suffering but by forcing language to remain active inside it.

From Small Circle to Public Institution

By the time Rabbi Kaplowitz had inherited his late father’s titles and duties, the group had expanded dramatically. The old arrangement of roughly a dozen folding chairs in a circle had become an auditorium with plush, movie-theater-style seats. At least one hundred male participants attended, divided broadly among black-hatted bearded haredim, men in suits with knit yarmulkes, and more casually dressed participants in jeans and T-shirts. Schoolboys in developing haredi dress also attended, some absorbed in the lesson and others as bored and lost as Judah.

The new setting is equipped like a modern media institution. A camera records Kaplowitz from the back of the auditorium, and his teaching is delivered from a lectern to a large, heterogeneous audience. He smiles frequently, and the crowd laughs every few minutes, indicating that the class is not merely a private study session but a public performance with a recognizable teacher and an organized following. The coexistence of sacred texts, mass seating, recording technology, and multiple forms of religious dress shows the group negotiating between traditional authority and contemporary institutional scale.

Kaplowitz’s office makes the same contradiction visible in material form. In the Kotel tunnel, he occupies a gleaming black desk with two computers, a laser printer, a copier, a fax machine, leather couches, an oak conference table, and high-backed chairs. He regards this abundance as a kind of punishment, saying that he belongs in the beis midrash with his books rather than in offices in the tunnel and Pisgat David. The study group has acquired administrative infrastructure, yet its leader experiences that infrastructure as a displacement from learning itself.

Chaim Lerner, Threat, and Competing Authority

The group is tied directly to the unresolved question of Chaim Lerner’s death. Judah remembers meeting Meir Alon in the Kotel tunnel during a Zohar class. Alon, who was associated with political and religious authority, repeatedly instructed Judah to stop Chaim. When Charlie later presented Judah with Alon’s photograph, Judah recognized the scowling, bearded man from the class and recalled the warning as threatening. The study group thus becomes one of the places where Chaim’s theological disputes acquire a political edge.

Chaim’s relationship to the group’s intellectual world is not simple. At a book talk for Modern Orthodox rabbis, he presented himself as an admirer of the tradition’s scholars and suggested that, under different historical circumstances, he might have become a Modern Orthodox rabbi. Yet his theology was also radically unsettling. He argued that God was not all-powerful: God wanted to help humanity but lacked the power to do so. For Chaim, this limited-God theology offered a framework capable of addressing the Holocaust without preserving an image of divine omnipotence that made human suffering incomprehensible.

Rabbi Kaplowitz later described Chaim as a storyteller, thinker, teacher, and, above all, theologian. Chaim was secular in practice, yet Kaplowitz insisted that he understood God to be at the center of Jewish consciousness and that there could be no Judaism without the covenant with God. In that account, Chaim’s urgent task was not primarily political nation-building but the creation of a theological framework adequate to the Holocaust. The Zohar study group therefore stands near the center of a conflict over who may interpret Jewish suffering: a secular writer trying to rescue God, haredi teachers guarding mystical tradition, and political figures who regard Chaim’s public theology as dangerous.

Kaplowitz’s Succession and Hannah’s Spiritual Formation

Rabbi Kaplowitz’s rise transforms the group from a background element of Chaim’s world into a continuing institution. He becomes both teacher and administrator, with duties inherited from his father and offices in more than one location. His personal manner remains intensely welcoming. He greets Judah with embraces and kisses on both cheeks, ignores the many disciples competing for his attention, and leads Judah and Charlie into his office after class. His warmth contrasts with the austere authority associated with other haredi figures, especially Meir Alon, making the group a place where religious power can appear intimate as well as disciplinary.

Kaplowitz’s influence eventually reaches Hannah Loeb. He gives her books, including Returning for the Answer: A Guide to Coming Home for the Young Jew, which he believes may serve her spiritual life. Seven years later, when Hannah applies to rabbinical school, she identifies that book as her most important religious influence. The path from the Kotel tunnel to Hannah’s religious vocation is therefore not presented as a sudden conversion but as an intergenerational transmission: a class, a teacher, and a book provide the materials through which a younger person forms a new identity.

Hannah later becomes a rabbi and publicly urges consideration of Chaim’s theology of a God with infinite love but limited power. Her religious development does not simply replace Chaim’s secular questioning with orthodox certainty. Instead, the Zohar study group’s influence helps carry Chaim’s central problem into another generation, where it can be taught, debated, and placed within a renewed Jewish spiritual life.

Narrative Significance

The Zohar study group functions as both setting and interpretive model. Its lessons insist that religious language remains alive through questioning, while its institutional growth shows how questions become organized into communities, offices, recordings, and public authority. The group’s changing scale also mirrors the novel’s movement from private memory to competing public accounts of Chaim Lerner.

Its symbolic importance comes from the tension between mystical tradition and modern mediation. The Zohar is studied in an ancient sacred site, but the class is held in a technologically equipped auditorium and transmitted through a camera. Kaplowitz longs for the beis midrash while managing offices and machines; Judah cannot understand the Hebrew or Aramaic lesson while Charlie laughs along with every joke; Hannah receives a book from the group and later makes Chaim’s difficult theology part of her own rabbinical vocation. These contrasts prevent the study group from becoming a static emblem of tradition. It is instead a living institution in which inherited texts, political struggles, personal grief, and new forms of spiritual belonging continually collide.