The fourth weekly installment of Jay Michaelson’s introductory series to kabbalah at Huffingtonpost has been posted a few days ago. It’s subtitle is a bit misleading: “Spiritual practice”. It is not entirely correct as he goes on discussing theosophical, prophetic (aka ecstatic) and practical (magical) kabbalah. These are indeed various types of practices of kabbalah, but to the extent they are spiritual is debatable. Otherwise the piece is excellent.

We created a new “store” on Amazon.com’s aStore site. Copied all the books from this site therre and organized by the same sections. The new store can be reached at:

http://astore.amazon.com/porgaborcom

Enjoy

Marc Nichanian, the author of “Our Place in al-Andalus: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters” (2002) has a new book out about genocide: “The Historiographic Perversion”. The Armenian Reporter summarizes Nichanian’s thesis this way:

Genocide is a matter of law. It is also a matter of history. And the denial of genocide – often called the last stage of genocide – attacks the foundations of both, argues philosopher and literary critic Marc Nichanian.

His Kabbalah related book

“addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts.“

Codex 632: The Secret of Christopher Columbus, written by Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos four years ago, got published in English two years ago, and the mass paperback edition came out this summer. Here is Booklists’s short summary:

Thomas Noronha, Portuguese history professor and cryptanalyst, receives a call from a shadowy American foundation, and before you can say Da Vinci Code, he’s deep into an investigation of the research done by a fellow scholar, recently deceased. Although ostensibly looking into the European discovery of Brazil, the other scholar was on the trail of a mystery related to Christopher Columbus, and Noronha’s own pursuit takes him to New York, Brazil, and Jerusalem, decoding clues from kabbalah and the symbology of the Knights Templar.

And the reason this book is mentioned here can be found on Israpundit’s blog/review:

Columbus was a Jew named Salvador Fernando Zarco and was among those expelled from Spain in 1492, a rare triangular Kabbalistic signet indicates.

Joshua Cohen’s review in Tablet magazine, of Georges Perec’s 1978 book, Life: A User’s Manual, just republished in a new translation, argues that Perec followed a kabbalistic tradition:

Forget that each chapter’s length is predetermined, that each chapter’s people are predetermined; forget each list of activities, of physical positions, and reading material; what’s most kabbalistic about Perec, and about the best of Oulipo, is not this technical aspect but the transmutation: the magical turning of one thing, a dead word, into another, a living person.

Kabbalistic practice—which, our sages hold, created angels and golems, animals for food and labor in the fields and even, once, in an experiment the Talmud attributes to Rabba, a walking talking human being—became, by the time fiction and poetry came to be written, a cultural act in which letters and words didn’t create life, but merely simulated it.

According to an Hour.ca review Adam’s Wall, a Canadian movie from last year, about the love story of a Lebanese woman and a Jewish man has kabbalistic references:

The rift between their two cultures deepens. Then bombs fall on Beirut, and Yasmine’s mother goes missing. The drama between Paul and Yasmine deepens. Winding through all this is an interplay of mystical secrets of Sufism and Kabbalah being kept by a bookstore owner named Mostapha (Tyrone Benskin).

Gershon Winkler edited a new book with a short kabbalistic quote for every day of a 365 days long year. This time it’s titled: Daily Kabbalah: Wisdom from the Tree of Life. His previous, similarly structured book, from five years ago was titled: Kabbalah 365: Daily Fruit from the Tree of Life. Here is the official description for the new one, from the publisher, North Atlantic Books:

From sorcery to animal totems, buzzard feathers to hawk spirits, talking trees to magical stones, sacred circles to healing rituals, the Kabbalah brings readers a rich body of ancient wisdom that has been long neglected and even longer misunderstood. The Kabbalah celebrates a quality of consciousness that enables one to experience magic in the ordinary, miracles in the natural course of events, and spirituality in the physical. Its roots are as old and rich as most aboriginal shamanic traditions, sharing in common with many of them the belief that all of creation is alive, from animals and plants to the sun and the moon.

The uniqueness of this book lies in its selections from this rare tradition of Jewish mystery wisdom. Culled from ancient and medieval Hebraic and Aramaic sources, much of this material has been hidden in dusty archives or obscure translations. These short selected readings are intended as contemplative, inspirational, and even entertaining extracts. As short as a few lines or as long as a page, they are translated and paraphrased here to render them accessible to readers of all backgrounds and spiritual paths.