On the top of the pages of this site up till now you could see ads served up by Google. These text based advertisements were based on the words found on my website. However the spirit a lot of them represented was not exactly in alignment with the spirit of the site itself. This morning I changed this situation. I replaced the Google ad bar, with my own little creation. I wrote a script to select random books from the database behind the site that it had the cover image stored locally and was sold on Amazon.com. So from now on every time you load a page on the site you will see six different book covers on the top. Clicking on them will take you to the book’s Amazon page, from where you can order them. I know that the covers are small and sometimes hard to read the title. But if your mouse lingers over them it, along with the author’s name should show up.

Yesterday I visited the central branch of the local library for the first time. (In the past I usually went to the local branch.) They have about 30-40 books on or related to Jewish Kabbalah. I picked up a gem I haven’t seen or knew about before. It is an 1877 edition of Sefer Yezirah. The spelling was not a typo, although the modern transliteration is Yetzirah. The book is bilingual English and Hebrew. (The latter is pointed, i.e. the vowels are filled in for the reader.) I scanned in the cover and the title page, see below, click the images for larger version; it is worth it. The book also has six pages of notes and four pages of “Glossary of rabbinical words”, which looks like a basic Hebrew-English dictionary. The book was published and donated to the library by The Rosicrucian Order (of San Jose) and has an explanatory afterword describing them.

Rabbi Jonathan M. Case self-published a book titled, Journey to the Soul: Kabbalah’s Pathway for Your Present and Future through Outskirts Press. The publisher put up a webpage through which the book can be ordered and even issued a press release. The author has a blog and a website  and the book is available even at Amazon.com. One the blog he gives weekly drashot. On the website meditations are posted and a few nice images. One would think that through all these channels I could get a fuller picture what the book is about. But at every one of these places only these few lines I repeated. So I repeat them here too. Maybe it is helpful enough for some. I feel that I only got a vague teaser. That means nothing though about the quality of the book.

A hunger grips the world. It yearns to be filled by the answer to the ultimate question: Why am I alive? The voice is incessant. If it is ignored there will be consequences.

Sometimes climaxing as a “mid-life crisis” which can have dramatic implications; other times surfacing as an “existential crisis” at any age, this unspoken and unanswered question can form the core of wrenching sadness, deep angst and some awful choices. There is an answer. Through sources that span millennia and using examples from real lives, here is a richly woven tapestry using stories, lore, aphorisms and the mystic tradition of Kabbalah. Here are the answers you have been seeking.

Come, drink deeply and walk into life…

Magdelene, a blog dedicated to “Prayers and Reflections: Spiritual Inspirations from many traditions” posted introduction and two very short stories (related to the Golem/Maharal) from Howard Schwartz’s   collection of Gabriel’s Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales. The publisher’s (Oxford University Press) page lists the dozens of sources, eras and areas Schwartz collected the 150 stories for this book. Reading either the blog entry or the four and half stories available at Amazon I have to say that the style is delightful. It shows that Schwartz, who also wrote 8 children’s books, is a master of both language and content. This is a fun and deep collection.

The Ranger (from Texas) had an interview with James Dunn, the author of a new book titled Window of the Soul: The Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria. “Author” may not be the most correct term in this case, because most of the book are direct translations from the Hebrew, written by Luria and translated by Nathan Snyder. The interview is using only a few lines from what the author had to say and mostly repeating pop trivia about Kabbalah. The book is more. According to the publisher’s webpage it is “the first and only comprehensive selection of Isaac Luria’s.” “Comprehensive selection” is an interesting concept. In my book something is either comprehensive or a selection. I guess what they refer to is, that each major concept or section of Luria’s writing was covered in this book. According to the Amazon.com reviews because it is a direct translation it would need a lot of footnotes to make it decipherable to the modern people. Once I get my hands on a copy I will tell you my personal opinion. (A final note: The listing currently is incorrect on Amazon, because the foreword was written by Rabbi Ernesto Yattah, and not by Chayyim Vital.)

A few weeks ago Jay Michaelson wrote a double book review for Forward on two Mussar related books: Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar by Alan Morinis and A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar by Ira Stone. Michaelson summarizes Mussar as “the moralistic movement within Eastern European Judaism … focuses on rectifying the middot, or character traits, from within. The general contours of Mussar practice are straightforward: introspection and self-accounting.” The reviewer clearly refers Morinis’ more accessible book with its attention to the individual. While holding Stone accountable for not offering enough advice how to find the community that is needed to cultivate the technologies Mussar developed for self-betterment. The answer to the question in the title of the review and this post is no, because “it may be not spiritual enough for spiritual aficionados.”

An interesting debate is going on at Zeek magazine. Last December Boaz Huss argued in an article  that the word “mysticism” should not be used in relation to Kabbalah and it being a theological category should not be the subject of academic research. In the March issue of Zeek Shaul Magid posted  a detailed opposing opinion and Boaz Huss replied to that. It is worthwhile reading all four webpages (four because Magid’s is broken to two) to learn of the possible critical perspectives of this debate.

A few weeks ago the “Kabbbalah to Go” podcast restarted posting Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh’s lectures as podcasts. Last March the site posted 3 lectures in four parts. Then there was a big break and now, since early Feburary, a new podcast appears approximately every week. In the most recent one he explains “the prohibition to eat the blood and certain choice fats of a kosher animal.” The site can be reached both via http://kabbalahtogo.podbean.com/ and at http://kabbalahtogo.com/ Yes, I know that a podcats is not a book. But this Lubavitcher rabbi has been a long term teacher of Kabbalah and wrote a dozen books on the topic as well, so this deserved an entry here. His most recent book in English was The Art of Education: Internalizing Ever-New Horizons.

A few weeks ago a blog, titled Jewish Books, posted an overview of Richard Seidman’s The Oracle of Kabbalah: Mystical Teachings of the Hebrew Letters (with a forward by Lawrence Kushner). Clicking on the embedded link one gets to a page with the a similar length, but different overview (which confusingly removed all apostrophes) under a graphical  banner of Jewish Books. It is under the milechai.com domain a site operated by the author of the blog. Clicking on the banner takes us to one of the main pages of jewishbook.us. However the navigation of that site is limited. In order to get the full experience and list of books this site offers one should start on this page. From there the 50 books they offer on Kabbalah/Mysicism is nicely broken down by topic or author to 8 separate pages. I will add missing books listed there to Sefarim.net at the end of the month. Meanwhile here is the essential of what this item is about:

Divination–telling the future by magical means–is a dodgy business. Deuteronomy deemed it “repulsive to God.” And yet Jews have always attempted to discern the future in various ways, including the casting of lots and meditation upon the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Aleph Beit. Richard Seidman presents a primer for the latter form of divination in The Oracle of Kabbalah.

I just read a review of Lamentations of Youth in the New York Sun. . The subtitle of the work tells you whay I am mentioning this book on this blog, it contains “The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919“. These yeas cover the period of ages between 16 and 22. The reviewer laments that the editor, Anthony David Skinner, edited out too much in his focus to show Scholem’s personal life. Nevertheless we still learn from this very private diaries how he felt about his father, the Zionist movement, women, friends (including his closest with Walter Benjamin), anti-Semitism, art, mathematics, Kabbalah … The review touches upon lots of his topics, but only reading the whole book could give a full picture of the young budding mind and body.