David Shasha in an article written for the Huffington Post argues that

The vertical-authoritarian model reflects an atavistic, anti-modern approach that relies on superstition and magic to express Jewish values, while the horizontal-dialogical model encapsulates the wisdom of Talmudic-Maimonidean tradition in a form of critical inquiry which seeks to empower human beings to free themselves of the shackles of magical irrationality.

Before he gets to this conclusion he lays down the arguments using quotes from Moshe Idel’s “Kabbalah: New Perspectives” and from his own teacher’s Jose Faur’s “The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism.” Shasha juxtaposes the democratic nature of language (everyone can speak and use it if given the the right tools (alphabet and grammar) and the top-down nature of revelatory ad mystical testimonies.

Zalman Velvel, “writer, storyteller, speaker” has a comedy CD out titled Kabbalah You. I wish you Shabbat Shalom with a segment from it:

Stanford University Press put up a page in May for a book they will publish in November:

“From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener ” by Mikhail Krutikov is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe.

Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.

The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com

Patricia Waldygo created this meditation painting in the early 1980s, based on the viewpoint of an early theosophist, Dion Fortune. She issued a press release last week announcing that the prints of the paintings are available again. I am sharing this news, because  Samuel Weiser, Inc., the publisher, used it as a book cover for “The Mystical Qabalah” by Dion Fortune and as the cover of Weiser’s 1984-85 catalogue.

Moshe Idel’s article on Abraham Abulafia appeared last week on the Hartman Instistute‘s website’s  “reflections” section. The opening paragraph servs as its abstract:

The kabbalist Abraham Abulafia journeyed to the Land of Israel at the age of 18, following the invasion of the Mongolians, risked his life attempting to meet the Pope, declared himself a prophet and Messiah, and was ultimately banned and isolated. Professor Moshe Idel’s survey clarifies how even amongst self-declared messiahs, the 13th century Abulafia was a unique figure; his thought focused on individual rather than national redemption and his techniques integrated intellectual and physical elements, some of which recall Eastern schools of thought.

When I watched the movie Avatar the tree the Na’vi live in and by reminded me of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. I didn’t explore the idea, but Rabbi Arthur Waskow did. He wrote a column in Tikkun Magazine this March that connects the movie to this concept and also draws parallels between the Exodus story. Here are a few quotes, but you should read the whole article to get the context:

…AVATAR echoes two major strands of religious wisdom that began in Jewish thought … the Kabbalistic metaphor of God as the Tree of Life, unfolding through successive emanations from the Infinite to the Incarnate so that its roots are in Heaven and its fruit is our world. This wisdom is notably “spiritual,” but has as its roots a political vision of sharing food among the whole community, and sharing God’s abundance with all living beings.

The Tree of Life, God’s greatest plentiful abundance, had vanished from human ken when the humans tried to gobble up all they food they saw, and thereby banished themselves from Eden. That banishment is what the Earthians of Avatar have done to themselves. By gobbling up the earth they live in, they have killed it and driven themselves to seek another in Pandora. But they have learned nothing. In the winter of their discontent, despair, they glimpse the Tree of Life, the Garden of Delight.

Like any film, AVATAR is meant for seeing. But unlike most films, it explicitly makes the act of seeing into a spiritual discipline. The watchword of the Na’vi is, “I see you.” For Pandora’s people, these words express what in Hebrew is “yodea,” interactive “knowing” that is emotional, intellectual, physical/ sexual, and spiritual all at one

MacWorld posted a description of the application for the iPad, iPod touch, & iPhone that contains Adolph Franck‘s “The Kabbalah or the Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews” from 1926. The three paragraphs don’t say anything about the features of the free application. Instead they asking for reviews in exchange for a chance to win a $50 card to iTunes. The page  contains three screenshots though. The full text of the book has been available online already at sacred-texts.org.

Pinchas Giller‘s third book titled Shalom Shar’abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El came out two years ago as I wrote about it at the time. Today I found that abstracts of each of the nine chapters have been posted on the Oxford scholarship site. You can purchase access to the full text version as well. But for now here are the abstracts:

1. Shar’abi and Beit El
This chapter introduces the spiritual progenitor of the Beit El School, Shalom Shar’abi and presents the highlights of his picaresque career. Shar’abi did not found Beit El, which predated his arrival by some years, but he galvanized the school to the extent that its members considered his interpretation of Kabbalah to be the only acceptable one. This position was adopted more widely in the kabbalistic world and even beyond it, so that many prominent Talmudists of the 19th century also accepted Shar’abi’s hegemony. In the contemporary period, there has been an upsurge of interest in Beit El kabbalah and it is widely recognized as a dominant and authoritative school of Kabbalah.

2. Kavvanah and Kavvanot
The kabbalistic practice of prayer intentions, or kavvanot, derives from the general theological problem of proper intention in observing the laws of Judaism. The experience of kavvanot practice is otherwise hard to quantify and has been the subject of much discussion by scholars. With regards to ethics and the other devotional aspects of religious life, the Beit El kabbalists were largely dependant on earlier sources and produced little of their own. For the Beit El kabbalists, linguistic mysteries served the same purpose as symbolism and mythos in earlier kabbalistic systems. Nonetheless, they retained the traditions of erotic union with the Shekhinah and other hallmarks of classical Kabbalah. The contemporary scholar J. Garb as argued that these processes are techniques to harness sacred power, although the Beit El practice developed past the models presented in Garb’s typologies.

3. The Names of God in the Beit El Kavvanot
Shar’abi’s principal innovation in the development of his prayer intentions was to utilize a particular composition in the Lurianic canon, the “Gate of Names” which recast the entire kabbalistic mythos in terms of the development of sacred names. The actual texts of the Beit El kavvanot consist of sacred names of God to be meditated upon as the adherent’s lips recite the prayer service. The traditions that underlie these sacred names are very ancient and in some respects predate the development of classical Kabbalah. The sacred names encompass a number of traditions: numerical coefficients, rewriting, substitution, and other linguistic strategies. Names are thought to represent aspects of the sefirotic mythos. Ultimately, the effect of the name traditions is to engender a kind of obscurantism, in which the technical construction and contemplation of the names overwhelms any other possibilities for noetic experience.

4. Kabbalists in the Community
The Beit El circles, from their inception to the present, have seen themselves as practicing the most essential and avant-garde form of Judaism. To this end, the Beit El tradition developed specific models of behavior for its adepts. The contemporary Jerusalem kabbalist Ya’akov Moshe Hillel has presented a revamped set of rules for the aspiring acolyte. There is an inherent tension in the role of the kabbalist in the community, as Beit El acolytes are drawn from an economic and social cross section of the Israeli religious community. In urban areas, the kabbalists live as mendicant pietists supported by the largesse of the public. Hillel also is compelled to resolve the role of the Yeshivah in the milieu of ultra-orthodox Jerusalem, particularly the relationship to Talmud study, which is an article of power in the economic life of that community. Insofar as the kavvanot practice of Beit El is the apex of prayer, the kabbalists also have an ambivalent relationship to exoteric prayer.

5. Beit El Practice
Beit El thought and practice eschews “classical” Jewish mysticism in favor of a worldview entirely based on Lurianic Kabbalah. In some cases, Beit El kabbalists are at a loss when non-Lurianic practices do enter their culture. One exception to this rule is the ongoing reference to the vicissitudes of the Shekhinah. Otherwise, Beit El is distinguished by their specific doctrines attached cycles of time, such as the atonement cycle. The Beit El kabbalists practiced flagellation and other mortifications, assuming a special responsibility for the fate of the people Israel. These rites of self-mortification reflect an ancient pietistic suspicion of the efficacy of Halakhah. Another time-based practice was the observance of the Sabbatical year, which was the object of much controversy in Beit El, and the counting of the Omer. The Beit El kabbalist are notable for their practice wearing double sets of phylacteries as an act of piety, and practice the rite of ascent through the four worlds of existence during their morning prayers.

6. Shar’abi’s School
The Beit El “school” consists of a particular lineage of sages, drawn from the Jews of the Orient, from Jerusalem to Aleppo and thence to Baghdad, with contributions from the “sages of Tunis.” Acolytes of Shar’abi’s teachings also dominated Sephardic chief rabbinate of Jerusalem for much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shar’abi’s immediate heirs assumed the initial leadership of the circle and also produced a substantial number of books. Among the Beit El kabbalists, the sages of Aleppo have great authority and credibility and are considered to have preserved the most authentic version of Shar’abi’s kavvanot. One of these, Hayyim Shaul Dweck, moved to Jerusalem and precipitated a split in the community, moving part of the community in the Bukharian quarter of Jerusalem’s New City. Dweck also began to publish Shar’abi’s kavvanot. The third center of Beit El activity was Baghdad, which was dominated by the personality of R. Yosef Hayyim, the Ben Ish Hai. The Beit El school included many European kabbalists, as well, so that it may be seen as an early cross-over institution.

7. The Literary Tradition of Beit El
The Beit El kabbalists root their practice in Shar’abi’s theoretical writings, which are uneven and call for much interpretation. Shar’abi produced a number of mystical prayers and also formalized penitential rituals of self-mortification. Much of the literary activity of the Beit El kabbalists is devoted to resolving the desiderata and discrepancies remaining in Shar’abi’s writings, The most widely known evidence of Shar’abi’s activity is “his” prayer book, the Siddur ha-RaShaSh, which was compiled posthumously by many hands. As a result of these factors, there are many versions and editions of the prayer book. In order to reinforce Shar’abi’s authority and spiritual hegemony, the Beit El kabbalists continued the Lurianic limitations of the kabbalistic canon.

8. The Kavvanot in Hasidism
Beit El is cited in the earliest records of the Hasidic movement, although the kabbalists were culturally and geographically disparate. The founder of Hasidism, the Ba’al Shem Shem Tov, moved among groups of pietists that the earliest manuscript prayer books, which in turn formed the basis of the “Nusakh AR”I,” the order of prayers in the Lurianic style. Of these, the edition by Avraham Shimshon Rashkov was most influential. Menachem Kallus as demonstrated that the Ba’al Shem Tov was an avid practitioner of kavvanot. Nonetheless, in subsequent generations the leaders of Hasidism moved to ban the practice. Nonetheless, they devised an order of prayers that they called “Lurianic,” which has become normative today.

9. Conclusions: Mysticism, Metaphysics, and the Limitations of Beit El Kabbalah
This book is a combination of a historical survey of a kabbalistic school and a study of a “lived tradition” that is, a living community of Kabbalists. Beit El has maintained a direct historical link to earlier schools going back to the Safed revival. It is assumed that Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism and that, as “mysticism,” it shares common properties with other mystical traditions in the religions of the world. There seems to be little of the mystical experience in Beit El Kabbalah. The metaphysical object of the practice is clear, however. Beit El kabbalah is obviously an authentic form of Jewish esotericism. Boaz Huss of Ben Gurion University has addressed these reasons with a bracing clarity in recent years. The terms of the “study of mysticism” originated in Christology and have often retained an appropriationist dimension. These anxieties have blinded scholars to certain new developments in the history of Kabbalah. Beit El kabbalah may serves as a wedge to distinguish Kabbalah from “mysticism.”

Rabbi Simcha Weinstein wrote a column on his blog (and crossposted on Algemeiner) After introdcuing and summarizing the movie and cracking a few jokes he goes on to the “Kabbalist teaching that while we sleep, our souls leave our bodies and ascend to their heavenly source in order to replenish energy.” He also noticed “Yusuf, a chemist who formulates the drugs needed to enter the dream world. According to the biblical story, Joseph (or Yusuf) was blessed with the ability to interpret dreams, a rare skill that was highly valued.” He ends the column with this advice:

Kabbalah considers our physical world an illusion, a temporary residence, and not true reality. So stop existing and start dreaming!

IMDB’s summary of the movie: In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job till date, Inception.

Its trailer:

Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, the British author fo many books on Kabbalah and the man behind the “Kabbalah Society” published his autobiography in April. Here is the description from his site:

In his autobiography, Halevi sets out his spiritual journey amid the drama of life, which he perceives as a process of development, indicating how his unfolding fate is part of a Providential scheme. This book traces the story of how an artist and poet became a writer about and a teacher of Kabbalah. Many of the illustrations are the author’s own work. So too are several of the diagrams, which are a modern interpretation of the Tradition. The Path of a Kabbalist is also a first-hand account of how Halevi’s books came into being and inspired many people and study groups worldwide.

A side note. When I was in London last December, the first time after more than a decade, I visited one my favorite bookstores, Watkins Books. Looking through their Kabbalah section I realized that Halevi is republishing his books under his own company name and design. I took a photo of the shelf dedicated to his works, with the uniform covers.