Today there's a widespread interest in Kabbalah from many people of a Christian background. Some think they must convert to Judaism, because they declare Christianity as false, others don't want to give up there faith in Jesus. For many believers the question arises, do I have to keep the whole Torah to study Kabbalah. Do I have to keep kosher, etc.?
First, in Kabbalah there's no coercion. All the precepts of the Bible according to the Zohar are more recommendations rather than religious commandments. Those recommendations intend to purify one's own selfishness. The problem with many people in religion is that they confuse the path with the destination. Of course an orthodox Jew will always be obliged to keep up the 613 Mitzvot as best as he can, even if he has already found unity with God, but we elaborate now on how a Christian believer should apply Kabbalah in one's daily life.
A soul has a special root, and God places a soul into a certain environment to fulfill its mission in this life. That's why it's not necessarily recommended to change one's religion, even if one studies Kabbalah. Kabbalah intends to open one's subconsciousness, and to return to one's source, which is God. God in Kabbalah is the one transcendent reality, which we call the Ein Sof, which means 'without end', or 'without limitations'. The first 12 years of one's life play a special role in our further development, and we shouldn't seek to change our identity or root of our soul. At the end we will always return to from where we're coming from. At enlightenment the real childhood begins. In our former childhood we were connected directly with the source, but it was not a conscious connection. With the entering of puberty we fall out of this blissful state and duality begins. This is not just a bad process. This process makes us fit for our spiritual development. Only through the awareness of suffering we can choose the path of transformation rather than the path of ultimate pain and suffering which will lead us to the goal through incredible desperateness through self-recognition. We can select to realize our own weaknesses and failures and through fixing them we can walk the path with the least pain. This is called the path of Torah in Kabbalah.
In Christianity, especially in the view of Paul, who was the apostle for the gentile believers we know the concept, that Jesus would have fulfilled the Torah for us on the cross. When we look closer it might be a common Christian misconception, that he would have ended it, but we look now closer on the interpretations of the apostle Paul.
What he did through his special pathway was to transfer the external actions of Judaism into the inner spiritual dimension of man. He speaks of the Torah of the inner Adam. Gentile believers of Jesus should not bother themselves too much to observe the Torah in all its aspects, rather they should concentrate on the death of the Messiah and to perform good deeds, mostly on their brothers and sisters in faith. He sees the faith in Jesus as something that should lead to a new spiritual birth very similar as Kabbalah sees the birth in the spiritual world. When we're on the initial steps of spirituality we're only ready for milk, later we will be ready for meat or solid food.
The Torah would be inscribed now unto our hearts, and we would leave the astrological boundaries, and so we shouldn't force ourselves or others to keep all the Shabbats or Festivals precisely, because then the death of Messiah would have been for nothing.
The early Christian communities were examples for very sharing societies, where everyone gave the products of his work for the whole. Often we must consider that to really love thy neighbor as thyself is much harder than to perform all the ritual actions of Torah, and exactly this was the message of the apostle Paul. Someone can come also through simpleness to complete unity with God. Not is always a complex pathway with a lot of obligations for our advance, as Rabbi Hillel once stated, love thy neighbor as yourself is the entire Torah and the rest is commentary. And only through this love we can come to the highest precept to love God, because God hides behind everyone, and so Jesus said, the least you did to the least of this world, you did unto me.
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