The most common metaphor for how Crowley used the qabalah is as a kind of "filing cabinet" wherein all experience is organised and split into this different categories. There's some interesting accounts of of the subjective experience of doing this in his Magick Without Tears. Everything was kinda cross referenced - all the Gods, spirits, herbs, trees and so forth. His big "phone book" of correspondences is called 777 which apparently is the number you get if you add up the spheres and the paths. Each of the 10 qabalistic spheres is attributed to a planet and each path to a a tarot trump. This stuff is the basis of the Western magical tradition since the Golden Dawn and Crowley. Dion Fortune would be another big conduit for this stuff - SOL, Servants of the Light being her organisation.
I don't know anything about traditional rabbinical qabalah but writing this now, it occurs to me the Western take is in a long tradition of occultists "borrowing" symbols from traditions that they're not part of and don't understand, and spinning their own universes out of them. Theosophy and their reworking of chakras would be another one. They would really get away with it now I don't think - we're too attuned to issues of cultural appropriation.