On April 1 I received the first suggestion from a website visitor for a book to be included in this site. Joe Markel recommended The Key to Chassidus. The author was listed as Bitzalel Malamud. I tried to find out more about the book, but it was not listed on Amazon and searching for the author’s name Google gave me only 8 hits. One of those though led to lulu.com, where anyone can self-publish a book. The book’s page there includes this description:

An explanation and translation of  “The Gate of Unification” by the Mittler Rebbe. This book explains how the physical and spiritual worlds are emanated and created through the contractions of the G-dly, infinite light of the “Chain of Descent” from cause to effect.

Besides purchasing it at lulu.com one can download the entire book as a series PDF files from here. The first of these not just include an introduction, but also a detailed table of contents. Under each chapter heading there is a third/half page explanation of what the chapter is about. That should navigating the book for those who are ready to dive into it.

Let me show you how I stumbled upon to “Apples from the Orchard.” Sunday Bat Aliya posted an entry on “Books to Inspire You To Make Aliyah and Bring Geula.” One of her recommendations was “Mashiach: Who? What? Why? How? Where? and When?” by Chaim Kramer. The link in her post pointed to the book’s page  at Judaism.com. That book is not specifically about Kabbalah, so I will not include here in the listing. But there are plenty of others at that site which does fit the profile here. So I picked one that looked interesting to introduce.

This two year old book is a selection of Arizal’s (Rabbi Yitzchak Luria) rabbinic interpretation of the Torah, unfolding “before us a hidden dimension of the stories and laws of the Torah, showing how they reflect the inner dynamics of reality and how our knowledge and observance of the Torah is crucial to the proper functioning of creation.” At the Judaism link you can read the Table of Contents and the Preface by the translator, Rabbi Moshe Wisnefsky. At the book’s own website you can learn even more about it.

I just (re-)dsicovered the “10 best books” to study Kabbalah on Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum’s site (azamra.org). I found one on his list I was not familiar with: Mystical Concepts in Chassidism: An Introduction to Kabbalistic Concepts and Doctrines by Jacob Immanuel Schochet. Greenbaum’s recommendation reads, “[it] provides an excellent English-language explanation of the Lurianic system of the Kabbalah covering all its main terms and concepts by one of the leading Chabad scholars of our time.” One of the two reviewers at Amazon had this to say, “Exploring the revelations of the Tanya (a classic work of Jewish theology and mysticism that remains a core text of Chabad-Chassidism), and striving to integrate complex metaphorical and spiritual concepts in a manner accessible to readers of all backgrounds, Mystical Concepts In Chassidism is an immersion into a deeply held Judaic spiritual belief system.” Eventually, after I studied the Tanya in depth, I might venture to this book too. But for now it seems beyond my level.

This blog and site is about books published in English. Yesterday, however, I got into a little research that led me to some French books, I found worthy mentioning here. An online friend of mine asked me about Paul Vulliaud. I found a French Wikipedia page, but my knowledge of that language is not good enough to understand everything. It is clear that he was a French Catholic theologian, (Lyon, 1875-1950), who wrote a two volume book on Kabbalah in 1923 titled La Kabbale Juive: Histoire et Doctrine. (First volume is 516 pages, second 453.) According to a 1925 review of the book (published in the The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures) it is too full of jargon, difficult to read and decipher, but the author’s knowledge is vast. Here is an excerpt from the review, which might get us closer to the book:

M. Vulliaud undertakes to “defend” the Cabala. His “defense” consists in an astonishingly painstaking effort to prove: (1) that the Cabala is indigenous to Judaism or at least orthodox within Judaism; (2) that the Cabala is ancient and not of comparatively recent medieval origin as various Jewish writers claim; (3) that persons with an aversion toward the Cabala as well as those who negate its antiquity or its orthodoxy (he calls them “rationalists,” enemies of the Cabala,” etc.) are malicious and misguided.

The reviewer has his own negative perspective and the language in the above segment reflects that. But I think he is probably right on target about Vulliaud’s intentions. Another review (from a 1930 issue of The Jewish Quarterly Review) is trashing the book even more, calling it a “two volume causerie.’ …The first chapters contain an amusing florilegium of early writers’ profound ignorance.” As there is no English translation of the book I will not be able to study it myself, so I will leave it there.

The wikipedia article mentions Vulliaud’s work on another Kabbalah related book: “Les Textes fondamentaux de la Kabbale.” This page mentions the book by Jean de Pauly
title “Etudes et correspondance relatives au Sepher Ha-Zohar” which was annotated by Paul Vulliaud. And this is all the time I had to find out about him.

I just found out about a book on Kabbalah for children (grades 4-8) from the blog entry of new acquisitions of the St Joseph County Public Library in Indiana. It is Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams’ The Secret World of Kabbalah. The concept is simple as the publisher says: “Rabbi Abrams introduces young people to major kabbalistic concepts and shows how much of what seems mystical is really hidden in plain sight.” Amazon puts it similarly: gives rudimentary explanations of it in kid-friendly language under intriguing chapter headings… This book may be the first of its kind to address and simplify this complicated subject for a young audience.”

A message on the Kabbalah Tribe board pointed me to Rabbi Abner Weiss’s book “Connecting To God: Ancient Kabbalah and Modern Psychology” It sounds interesting. Here is a segment from the Amazon description:

In sharing his findings, he gracefully tempers his academic approach with dozens of examples (taken from patients and congregants, as well as the Bible) that illustrate the links between common and rare psychological disorders and imbalances within the development of what he has termed the “spiritual genomes” within all of us. Not for the red-string, pop culture set, this serious examination of psychology and spirituality includes references to and discussions of the ancient and contemporary Jewish sages…

The author’s website also has a nice introductory page to it.

Last summer’s issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture has an indepth review of Joel Hecker’s Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah, “the first book-length study of mystical eating practices and experiences in the kabbalah.” Here is the most interesting sentence from the review: “An essential insight in Hecker’s study is the recognition that the metaphor of eating was used in Zoharic Kabbalah to signify the flow of energy from Israel to the divine and vice versa.” And I liked this segment form the publisher’s site:

Using anthropology, sociology, ritual studies, and gender theory, Hecker accounts for the internal topography of the body as imaginatively conceived by kabbalists. For these mystics, the physical body interacts with the material world to effect transformations within themselves and within the Divinity.

The basic description of Yitzchak Ginsburgh’s (Body, Mind and Soul: Kabbalah on Human Physiology, Disease and Healing) book sounds new agey and simplistic:

This healing manual explains Kabbalah’s centuries-old perception of human physiology, its view on how to maintain overall health, and how this is dependent on our spiritual well-being.

But for me he is authentic. His background, lifestyle and humility is far more sympathetic than other popularizers, marketers of Kabbalah.

The ever prolific popularizer of Kabbalah , Yehuda Berg, published a book on “Kabbalah on Love“, with the subtitle “Technology for the Soul.” Digital Cubics’ blog copied the summary from Amazon: “Berg makes the distinction between love and need — which is a selfish product of ego — and reminds readers that only after connecting with the love within, and learning to love themselves, can they truly love someone else.” According to Amazon’s listing it was published in December 2006, but the official description suggests it was done for Valentine’s Day. I wanted to agree the latter, because it looks red enough to fit in the theme of the event. (Yes, I do judge a book by its cover, at least partially.) But with a little search I found that in the UK it was published in 2005 November. Look how the covers of the two versions differ. The one on the left is the newer US edition, while the right is the older from the UK. The one and only review at Amazon says it is “simple to read and to understand.” I have no doubts. The cover is made simpler for the US audience too.

Oyve, the Daily Southtown told me the plot of a new book:

In ‘The Book of Names,’ a fictional, nefarious offshoot sect of the ancient Gnostic tradition known as the Gnoseos has learned the identities of 33 of 36 lamed vovniks and has systematically assassinated them to hasten the end of the world.

Sounds like we’ve got a Kabbalistic Da Vinci Code on our hands. And not just on ours, in Germany, where it was published last December, the book was on the bestseller list. In the US the book came out last month. The linked article quotes one of the authors’ hope ” that they [the readers] have a better understanding of Kabbalah [after reading the book] and some of the beauty that is inherent in Judaism, like the appreciation for life.” I hope she is right, but I would need to read the book to form an opinion whether it helps or not. Will do.