Why is Kabbalah popular? The allure of allegory.

Aryeh Tepper wrote an article for Jewish Ideas Daily called Kabbalah and its Discontents (link), while Jameel reports that Ashton Kutcher dipped 151 times in a mikvah in Gush Etzion (what would he have done if he dipped 152 by mistake?) which got me thinking about the perennial popularity of Kabbalah by esoteric-wisdom seekers in all ages.

In Rabbi Berel Wein's Herald of Destiny: the story of the Jews in the medieval era , 750-1650 (pg. 237-38) in a section called The Influence of Kabbalah we read:

The spread of Kabbalah was not restricted to the Jewish people. During the Renaissance, Christian scholars exhibited great interest in Kabbalah. . . . Thus Kabbalah became a dominant strain of thought in Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. . .

³³ . . . For reasons undiscernible to later generations, early Protestantism was convinced that Kabbalah would vindicate the truths of its version of Christianity.

Actually there's nothing undiscernible [sic] about it. It is precisely for the same reason that Kabbalah so frustrates pashtanim: it's very congenial for making stuff up. Or to put it another way -

The Catholic mystic William Postel (whom I blogged about here, who was partially responsible for the very first printing of the Zohar) published a Kabbalistic broadsheet which he called אור נרות המנורה. Postel:



Here is the heading of אור נרות המנורה:



And here are the opening words:



There you have it: התורה כלה היא סוד ודרך משל מהדברי' העליונים כאשר נגלה ונראה למרע"ה בהר סיני. The Torah is entirely a mystery and allegory consisting of esoteric matters revealed to and by Moses at Sinai. This is the crux of the matter.