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.

The Oxford University Press just published Pinchas Giller’s third book titled Shalom Shar’abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El. Giller  is a popular professor at the American Jewish University (formerly University of Judaism). (I base my assumption on his popularity at the ratings and comments on his Rate My Professor page. ) Here is the book’s description from the publisher,

The Jerusalem kabbalists of the Beit El Yeshivah are the most influential school of kabbalah in modernity. The school is associated with the writings and personality of a charismatic eighteenth-century Yemenite Rabbi, Shalom Shar’abi, considered by his acolytes to be divinely inspired by the prophet Elijah. Shar’abi initiated what is still the most active school of mysticism in contemporary Middle Eastern Jewry. Today, this meditative tradition is rising in popularity not only in Jerusalem, but throughout the Jewish World.

Pinchas Giller examines the characteristic mystical practices of the Beit El School. The dominant practice is that of ritual prayer with mystical “intentions,” or kavvanot . The kavvanot themselves are the product of thousands of years of development and incorporate many traditions and bodies of lore. Giller examines the archaeology of the kavvanot literature, the principle aspect of which is the meditation on God’s sacred names while reciting prayers, the development of particular rituals, and the innovative mystical and devotional practices of the Beit El kabbalists.

In the short segment from the History Channel’s program on Shabbati Tzvi we learn a bit about why the restrictions on who should study Kabbalah was created.

Cherub Press  just published its 22nd volume in their “Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism” series titled, “Lurianic Kabbalah: Collected Studies by Gershom Scholem, edited by Daniel Abrams” (440 pages, ISBN 1-933379-09-X). Unfortunately (for the purposes of this site/blog) it is all Hebrew. Below is the official blurb.

This volume celebrates the groundbreaking work of Gershom Scholem on Kabbalistic literary and mystical activity from the end of the fifteenth century, just prior to the Expulsion from Spain and until the rise of Sabbateanism. At the heart of this collection are all of Gershom Scholem’s detailed studies on R. Isaac Luria, his teachers, students and the works that emerged from Safed, including numerous texts which he introduced and explained. All sixteen studies are reproduced here, re-typeset, along with a Hebrew translation of the chapter on Isaac Luria and his School, from his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism - all updated with Scholem’s post-publication hand notes from his personal library and annotated with full bibliographic references, manuscript identifications and followed by a complete bibliography in all languages of all studies about Kabbalah from the periods treated in this volume. The volume is introduced with a typology of the various methods and scholarship that emerged from Scholem’s foundational work. This volume is an essential research tool for the serious study of Jewish mysticism.