Edward Hoffman’s intentions with his box containing “The Kabbalah Deck: Pathway to the Soul” were evinced on page 4 of 160 page booklet:

“I’ve increasingly felt the need for an entirely new resource – one that would make the Kabbalah more dynamically personal and interactive. This format would certainly not replace the classic study of the Kabbalah, but significantly complement it by providing a more experiential pathway into the proverbial “garden” of Jewish mystical guidance. To this end, I’ve created the Kabbalah Deck. It’s been designed for two specific and unrelated purposes. The first is for contemplation and sacred study, and the second is for divination.”

As you can conclude from the above the Deck consists of cards, 35 by number and a booklet in a nice blue box. The back of the cards al gold colored, with black print on them using Middle eastern motifs, a Magen David (six pointed star) with an eye at its center and two fish at the shorter end of the cards. The fronts of the cards fall into one of three categories, but all of them are mostly white with minimal golden prints on them. The cards corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alephbet have the letter’s English version on top in all lower case, the Hebrew version as you’d see them in the Torah scroll with their crowns in the center of the card. At the bottom of these and the three “Jolly joker” cards there is a line of barely visible six pointed stars as watermarks. The function of the three cards that simply have hamsa on them is to be used as any letter the user wants them to be, when spelling out something. This might be necessary if a word has a specific letter more than once in it. There are also ten cards, for each of the sephirot in the Tree of life. Each of these cards have the whole traditional chart of the Tree with one highlighted. Below the tree you will find the Hebrew and English name of the specific sephira.

The accompanying booklet has three major and several minor sections. After the acknowledgements and the introduction you find a seven page mini-essay on the wisdom of the Hebrew alephbet. About half of this is devoted to explaining how Abraham Abulafia’s repurposed it, but it also covers such roots of the topic as Ezra the Scribe, the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar. Then each of the letters get a two page treatment with 4-5 paragraphs each. These paragraphs explain the significance of the letter in Kabbalah. It is a great overview of the topic, although it never sites its sources fully. Often it talks about Kabbalah in general and sometimes he mentions that this particular explanation or that comes from the Zohar or from a Hassidic master. This kind of writing is in alignment with the intention I quoted above, but is not with my scientific or religious interest as both of these would want me to follow the sources and find out the original writings Hoffman incorporated. Nevertheless the content is truly remarkable. The last paragraph of each of these mini-chapters is about the purpose and method on how to meditate on that particular letter.

The second major section is about the Ten Sephirot. It follows the same patter of an opening 5-page mini-essay on their history and then two page of each of them. The last major section is titled “exercises for meditation and divination.” None of the twenty five exercises is longer than 14 lines. Some of them fall along the lines of team, family or trust building, but most of them are for introspection. As Hoffman is a clinical psychologist I am sure he harvested his knowledge of that field to combine it with Jewish mysticism to create something new. The exercises often include shuffling the cards and picking one. Then the deeper meaning of that card is the answer for the question you were supposed to focus on. It presumes of course that you are fully familiar with the meanings of the cards, the letters and the sephirot. The booklet will give you a good start to acquire the knowledge but it will not fulfill all the needs.

Hoffman’s book is full tiny nuggets of knowledge that are valuable I themselves for people interested in the connection of Kabbalah, psychology and (I am afraid I have to add) divination. He exposed the connection between the first two in one of his dozen books titled, “The Way of Splendor: Jewish mysticism and modern psychology.” The Kabbalah Deck is a splendid package for those who want to follow the divination path. Meanwhile I will go back and read his book instead.

The book at the publisher’s site (Chronicle Books)

The book @ Amazon.com

As traditional Judaism is against divination I was hesitant to read the 133 page book(let) accompanying the deck of cars in the box labeled “Ask the Kabala Oracle Cards.” The cards themselves are nicely designed. The front has one of the 22 Hebrew letters, along with English transliteration on how to pronounce them. Each has an image, often nonfigurative or with simple symbols, never more than with 8-9 colors, which give the whole seta simplistic feeling. The back of all the cards has the same drawing: a tree with a bird at its center surround by a reddish, wavy edge.

The last page of the booklet gives information about the three authors, but doesn’t indicate who drew the cards. I think that’s a shame because it made it look like that half of the package’s content was disregarded, while some people might spend much more time with the visually pleasing cards than with the text. My guess is that the design was created either Charles McStravick, who is listed as responsible for “design” on the inside page of the book, or maybe Tracy Walker, who made the “interior illustrations”.

The headliner of the three authors is Deepak Chopra. He is much better known than the other two authors, so I suspect that’s why we have his name on top and bigger letters. I wonder thought how much of the book he has written and to what extent he just gave his name to the project. The only piece identified as written by him was the 11 page long introduction, mind you this is a small format book, so 11 pages aren’t that long. The second author mentioned on the cover is Michael “Zappy” Zapolin, the person behind the kabala.com website and a “lecturer to celebrities.” I never heard of him, but maybe his association of celebrities was a good enough selling point to include him. Finally, listed as “with,” we have Alys R. Yablon, an editor and ghostwriter according to her website. She might have done the majority of the writing.

Chopra’s introduction starts of with a comparison of his own, Vedic tradition and Kabbalah. After finding similarities he briefly characterizes the domains of the physical/mental/spiritual world, then he goes off to dive into the third that he calls the Theosphere’s domains: personal/collective/universal. That’s were he connects to the Kabablistic concepts of Atzilut/Beriya/Teyzira/Assiya and the sephirot again. He attempts to tie it a together with suggesting that you can ask Kabala a question and get an answer with the help of the cards, but you need to do the interpretation itself. He makes references to lots of people, concepts and theories in the attempt to show that they are all connected and how knowledgeable he is. He might, be but for me this section felt like a mixing good pieces of content with each other in lieu of putting attention and original thought to it.

Next there are two pages on how to use the booklet: shuffle the cards, focus on question/problem, pick one, meditate on the letter, read the story, listen to your intuition and find the answer. Then the impossible task of introducing the history of Kabala on 6 pages with a heavy focus on the Zohar is accomplished. Before we get into the stories themselves we get a surprisingly good and comprehensive ten page treatise on the mysteries of the aleph-bet.

The majority of the booklet is made up by the text corresponding to the 22 letters and the 22 cards. Each has 4-5 pages to itself, including a smaller, black and white replica of the appropriate card, a quote from the Torah (with citation) and an explanation of the quote and the story behind it along with a focus on a human issue, question, problem or moral dilemma. These chapters have nothing objectionable in them, they often follow traditional rabbinic discourse no a topic, always ending with a lesson we can all relate to and learn. But then each chapter ends with a clearly separated paragraph or two, that connects the letter to the lesson or feature, which doesn’t always connect to traditional interpretation. E.g.

Aleph – begin again
Bet – conflict
Gimmel –judgment
Dalet – paradox in relationship
Heh – transition
Vav – accept responsibility
Zayin – stillness
Chet – let go
Tet – appreciation
Yud – forgiveness
and so on

Depending on your stance, persuasion and interest, you may want to look at or not, use or not the pretty cards. Similarly you can read the whole booklet if you wish or just focus on the 22 Torah stories as that could be kosher for almost anybody.

The first third of Tobsha Learner’s historical fiction, The Witch of Cologne, contains enough references to Kabbalah to grant a mention in this blog. The latter part of the books contains less though.
Here is the beginning of the Publishers’ Weekly review:

In a sensuous 17th-century saga set in German Catholic Cologne, Learner (Quiver) transports readers to a time when studying the ancient Kabbalah could prove deadly for a young Jewish midwife. Ruth bas Elazar Saul is the headstrong daughter of the chief rabbi of Deutz, Cologne’s Jewish ghetto. She undertakes the forbidden course of mystical study, her Sephardic mother’s legacy, before absconding to Amsterdam to escape an arranged marriage. There, Ruth acquires the contemporary midwifery skills she will combine with her sacred learning, and upon her return to Cologne she delivers wealthy burghers’ babies using new lifesaving methods, earning a reputation for more than medical genius.

The book @ Amazon

The book at the publisher’s site

Thank you Jo for your review that pointed my attention to the book.

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.

In 1992 Hebrew University’s Magnes Press produced a limited edition Zohar. It was a facsimile edition containing Gershom Scholem’s annotations. The publisher describes the artifact with these words:

[…] at the end of each volume, follow notes which were found in the books, on loose slips of paper. Scholem deals with expressions which are singular to the Zohar. He points to their origin in the Midrashim or in medieval literature or in foreign languages. Scholem’s comments are not confined to pointing our parallels. Sometimes Scholem himself interprets a statement of the Zohar, occasionally he continues the logic of the Zohar, deriving from it theological conclusions. Other times he relies in the work of others, referring to the scholarly literature.

A couple of weeks ago The Iconic Books Blog reviewed this book and found it a Pseudo Relic. What disturbed them was the fact that Scholem’s handwritten notes were reproduced in their handwritten form, making the “book pretending to be a relic by way of mass reproduction.”

Hot Indie News‘ review of Heather Mendel’s new book, “Dancing in the Footsteps of Eve: Retrieving the Healing Gift of the Sacred Feminine for the Human Family through Myth and Mysticism”, devotes one paragraph to the description of the book after the intorudction and three contains the review itself. The majority of the entry is made up of the six endorsements; from Thomas Moore, Riane Eisler, Lawrence Kushner, Rami Shapior, Alice O. Howell and Bettina Aptheker. This is the description section:

There are four sections in the book that represent the Four Worlds of Kabbalah— Intuition, Thought, Emotion, and Action. The interaction of the archetypes that correspond to each of these levels reveal that the Sacred Feminine is present in the Jewish texts, moving elusively in and out of our awareness, both revealing and concealing clues to the mysteries of our past and future and our understanding of God.

More details abut the book is at its own site: dancinginthefootstepsofeve.com

Bibliofreak points out in his review of Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language in August:

Chapter one discusses Bible stories, and chapter two gets into Kabbalah and Gematria.  People interested in Gematria and it’s mathematico-linguistic mysteries should not miss this.  I think I just “mathematico” up…but don’t you always us “o” and not “al” in the first word in a double adjective hyphen?  Sadly, Eco does not answer this.  Chapter six will pick up on Kabbalah again.

There is a short description and recommendations by three known (non-Chabad) authors (Lawrence Schiffman, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Arthur Kurzweil) about the newly published book at chabad.info:

This volume brings together classical Jewish discussion of Maimonides’ sixth and seventh principles dealing with the phenomenon of prophecy and the prophecy of Moses.  Gathered here are the views of classical Jewish thinkers on the issues raised by Maimonides and the detailed discussions of these questions by the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

The combination of this material with Rabbi Chaim Miller’s pedagogical, analytical and translation skills presents the reader with an entrée into the lively dialogue on Jewish theological issues that has bridged the difficult gap between rational philosophy and a religion of faith for Jews throughout the ages.

Back in July The Jewish Publication Society posted an entry in which “Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi recommends ten books about Jewish spirituality.” They are:

1. Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow, by Arthur Green
2. The Path of Blessing: Experiencing the Energy and Abundance of the Divine, by Marcia Prager
3. Jewish Views of the Afterlife, by Simcha Paull Raphael
4. Inner Space: Introduction to Kabbalah, Meditation and Prophecy, by Aryeh Kaplan
5. The Tanya: Bi-Lingual Edition, by Shneur Zalman of Liadi
6. Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer, by Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz
7. Jewish With Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
8. Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism, by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
9. Meditation and Kabbalah, by Aryeh Kaplan
10. God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism, by David Cooper