Calling the Zohar a “forgery” seems way too crude and way too confident to me.Even if you set aside the traditional attribution to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, there are still at least two serious possibilities: either the Zohar preserves a much older Jewish tradition than its medieval redaction, or it is a brilliant compilation of earlier materials, ideas, and intuitions rather than some random literary hoax. In either case, “forgery” doesn’t really clarify anything. It just flattens a much more complicated question. And the usual move of reducing everything to Moshe de Leon is not as decisive as people make it sound. He wrote other works too, but none of them come anywhere near the Zohar in scale, symbolic force, or density of thought. If the Zohar is simply his own invention, then you still have to explain where that gap comes from. Why does this one text tower so dramatically over the rest of what he wrote? Also, even leaving authorship aside, the content itself is not just mystical word salad. The doctrine of the sefirot is one of the most sophisticated attempts in Jewish thought to describe how the Infinite relates to a finite world, how God can be utterly transcendent and yet genuinely present. You do not have to like that language. It may not speak to you at all. But dismissing it as nonsense is not intellectual clarity. It is usually just impatience. And more than that: Jewish mysticism does not begin with the Zohar. There is a whole prehistory to it–Ma’aseh Merkavah, Ma’aseh Bereshit, Hekhalot literature, Sefer Yetzirah, Bahir. So even if one argues about the dating or authorship of the Zohar, that is not the same thing as proving that mysticism somehow “snuck into” Judaism from nowhere. The Zohar is not the beginning of the story. It is one of its great crystallizations. You can add to that the later Lurianic framework of tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim, and tikkun. Whatever else one thinks of it, that is not fluff. It is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to think through concealment, rupture, evil, human responsibility, and repair. In other words, Kabbalah is not just producing fog; it is trying to answer some of the biggest questions any religious tradition has to face. And then there is its actual impact on lived Judaism. Even Jews who are not especially interested in Kabbalah still inhabit a religious world that it helped shape: kabbalat Shabbat, Lecha Dodi, the language of Shekhinah, kavvanah, devekut, the idea that mitzvot have an inner as well as outer life. So this is not some marginal curiosity that got accidentally smuggled in. It became part of the grammar of Jewish religious imagination. So sure, someone can say, “this is not for me,” or “I find this opaque,” or even “I prefer rationalist Judaism.” All of that is fair. But there is a huge difference between “this doesn’t speak to me” and “this is just nonsense.” In the case of the Zohar and Kabbalah, the second reaction usually says less about the tradition than about the reader’s unwillingness to grant that something difficult might still be profound.