BecomingJewish.Org, a site that “offers information about Conversion to Judaism” published a summarizing article no the Zohar and later mysticism in January. Its eight paragraphs (and short bibliography)  cover a lot of ground from a neutral point of view as possible.

Check it out.

Jay Michaelson’s musings related to the movie Avatar in Forward compares and contrasts its message to that of Kabbalah in the areas of  spiritual and practical environmentalisms. He connects mysticism and environmentalisms in two ways, namely:

“Avatar’s” deep ecology is interwoven with its pantheistic, quasi-kabbalistic notion of a “web of life.” Indeed, the latter necessitates the former: it’s impossible to believe that all life is deeply connected, and yet not be troubled when the sinews of that connection are frayed and destroyed…

A second convergence between “Avatar” and Jewish mysticism is the controversial point that while individual actions are important and individual responsibility remains a value, the communal matters more: the overall health of the system, the shared justice of a society.

Read the full article.

Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann, director of the Schottenstein Chabad House, has lost 60 pounds by following the teachings of Kabbalah. He developed a six-week class to help people look at food and self-control differently.

Full article in the Columbus Dispatch.

A newly discovered piece of stained, wrinkled paper conjures up the details of a Jewish exorcism that appears to have been performed sometime in the 18th or 19th century.

The ghostly document details the prayers that were performed on Qamar bat Rahmah to try to rid her of the spirit of her dead husband, Nissim ben Bonia. According to the handwritten but well-preserved Hebrew text, the rabbis asked the ghost to “leave this woman, Qamar bat Rahmah, [and forgo] all authority and control that it has over her; and Nissim ben Bonia shall have no more authority and control whatsoever over Qamar bat Rahmah in any form or manner at all.:

The 150-word text provides a haunting insight into the often forgotten world of the Jewish occult. While exorcisms are frequently described in Jewish texts from the Middle Ages on, this appears to be the first text that provides the prayer used in a specific exorcism.

“It has names, and you can kind of speculate as to some sort of story lurking behind the names,” said Yossi Chajes, an expert on Jewish magic and mysticism at the University of Haifa who was not involved in the unearthing of the text. “It’s an unusual document.”

Read full article

Professor Moshe Idel a leading professor of studying and teaching Kabbalah in an academic setting posted an entry on the Seforim blog about Kabbalah manuscripts kept in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library). It is an expansion of remarks delivered at the February 2009 symposium hosted at the National Library of Israel, in Jerusalem.

In the summer of 1280, Abraham Abulafia (1240- c. 1291), a Kabbalist who founded the special prophetic or ecstatic version of the Kabbalah, attempted to meet Pope Nicholaus III in Rome. This special effort came as the result of a revelation he had ten years earlier in Barcelona, which presumably consisted in a command to go to Rome at the eve of the Jewish New Year, in a mission reminiscent of Moses’ encounter with Pharaoh: namely to discuss issues related to redemption….

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What do you make of those who say they are “spiritual, but not religious”?

I can’t stand that. Spiritual often just means some kind of wishy-washy me-ism, where I’m having a lovely experience without much discipline. You know, designer Kabbalah in Hollywood or designer yoga.

Yoga is not about aerobic exercise or finding the lovely oceanic peacefulness about yourself; it’s about dismantling the ego. It demands hours of practice every day, not just a yoga class once a week. We’ve watered it down to be some kind of feel-good thing.

Source: uscatholic.org

Mel Alexenberg is working on a new book titled “Photograph God: Kabbalah Through a Creative Lens.” and he is documenting the process and the book at the Photograph God blog. Here is how the top of his blog looks like that reveals the links to be followed there:

In celebration of Yehuda Berg’s new book “THE POWER TO CHANGE EVERYTHING”, Kabbalah Publishing is partnering with Eco-Libris and inviting you to take action and balance out this and future book purchases by planting trees with Eco-Libris.

For every tree planted, you will receive an Eco-Libris sticker to display on your book sleeves. For every five trees planted on your behalf, one more tree will be planted on behalf of Kabbalah Publishing as an appreciation of their commitment to the environment.

Source and place to balance out: http://www.ecolibris.net/yehudaberg.asp

Talk about the theme of light and how that plays into it for you.

Well, in a nutshell there’s Kabbalah. The Kabbalah talks, Jewish mysticism talks about the creation of the world, and the basic idea is that God when he wanted to create the world withdrew His light from the center of His being. His light is like all being. Everything is consumed within God. So in order for Him to create like the other, He had to sort of pull out His core being, pull like out His light from the center, and then He created this sort of void or this sort of empty space within, and then the world basically exists inside of that empty space.

Source.

Sanford Lewis Drob has a blog devoted to the study of Jung’s “The Red Book“; that was published in October 2009. Drob is the author of four books on Kabbalah, including “Kabbalah and Postmodernism“, “Symbols of the Kabbalah: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives“, Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought” and his his latest, “Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism“. (you can read about these on his site at NewKabbalah.com.

His latest entry on the Jung blog is about shadows. Here is an example how Drob connects Jung’s words to the teachings of Judaism:

While in the Red Book Jung does not make explicit reference to the shadow archetype, his struggle with his own shadow as well as the ideas behind the shadow archetype are evident throughout this work:

“I have to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me” (233).

“You are entirely unable to live without evil” (287).

Jung’s thinking here is partly covered by the rabbinic dictum that “were it not for the yetzer hara (the “evil impulse”) people would not build houses, take wives, have children, or engage in business.” The idea here is that while one may reject and at times be horrified by one’s baser or animal instincts and desires (and indeed if such desires go completely unchecked they can be destructive and evil) without them one would not have the drive for life at all.