Fort Wayne’s News Sentinel had a short summary of a workshpo in Ohio titles The Spark Within Me: My Soul. In the course of the straightforward account were these lines:

In his book “Practical Kabbalah,” the Rabbi Laibl Wolf devoted a section to describing the soul under the heading “Who Am I?”"You probably think of a soul as some deep point within,” he wrote. “This concept is quite foreign to Jewish mystical teachings.”

In the Kabbalah, your spiritual center is called the neshama. You can imagine this as a long umbilical cord running through you, from which emanates the life forces that animate us.

That kept me wondering what does this symbolical umbilical cord connect to. The original is between mother and child, the life giver and the new life, which cannot exist without its originator. If this metaphor is to be applied then the role of the mother can be paraleled only with God’s, or whatever name you choose to apply to the higher power. Does that imply that God’s in us? If yes, this is an example for the meaning of God created human in its resemblance.

Rabbi Max Weiman updated the list of books on his Kabbalah Made Easy website. It includes now 14 books, and a recommendation of all of R. Mattisyahu Glazerson’s works. I appreciate that his own books are not listed there, only on his store page.I cannot resist passing this usability comment. The button leading to the page reads: “further study”. The title on the page reads: “Kabbalah Made Easy Recommended Reading List”. And the title of the window says: “Kabbalah for Simpletons - Recommended Reading.” Ideally these three items should contain the same wording. They may confuse some people otherwise.