The JTA reported a study of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. It found that “younger Jews are more spiritually inclined than their forbears” and that “Orthodox Jews and Jews who have fewer than two Jewish parents score higher than other Jews on spirituality indexes.” The article mentioned the “Institute for Jewish Spirituality“.

One of IJS’ practices is text study:

“The texts that our participants study are selected primarily from the corpus of the Hasidic tradition. We have set this priority because we believe it supports contemplative study, and because it expresses a fundamental element of the spiritual orientation of the Institute….The second reason that we focus on Hasidic texts is their theological orientation. The central teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, even when filtered through that of the Maggid of Mezritch, is that the whole world is filled with God’s glory – literally.“

A new video by the Jewish Agency‘s Jewish Partnership Online focuses on the value of “Jewish Soul Renewal” through the activity of the Tzahar – Palm Beach Partnership, with a special focus on the Kaballah project in the Mystical City of Safed, (“The International Center for Tzfat Kabbalah“) combining spiritual growth with tourism development.

The relevant part starts around 1:30.

The always excellent Seforim blog‘s latest entry analyzes a letter that was presented by Chaim Bloch in 1923 as from the Maharal himself on the Golem and its creation. Through literary comparison and other methods they conclude it is a forgery. Well worth to read the whole piece.

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.

Hava Vottera wrote and directed a documentary titled, The Tree of Life, about her journey to discover his family tree.Her search yields great results as she could trace back her family on both of her parents’ side to several centuries. The documentary shows how history touched her family. Forward has a detailed review of the movie.

One of her forefathers was the Ramhal, Rabbi Moshe Haim Luzzatto, a well-known 18th century Kabbalist. His most known work probably is Way of G-d: Derech Hashem.

Last June Jay Michaelson wrote up a quick overview of recently published books on Kabbalah for Forward. The nominal occasion for the article was that it has been ten years that Madonna got interested in Kabbalah, hence the title “Kabbalah: Ten Years After Madonna“, and brought limelight on it along with all the consequences. Michaelson introduced numerous introductory books, describing each with a sentence or two. He also covered the academic books and what he called “next-generation scholars.” This last category is not as cohesive as the others, it would have been better to call it miscellaneous. It also would have been proper to disclose that he himself wrote a book “God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice” and at the time of writing the article was working on another one: “Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism.” Nevertheless the article is a good overview of the field’s development

Being focused on Kabbalah I have to mention that there is a new movie out, which incorporates some Kabbalistic themes into its horror story: The Unborn. Here is the Wikipedia synopsis:

“The Unborn is a supernatural thriller that draws upon the legend of a dybbuk, a malevolent spirit that refuses to leave the human world and inhabits the body of a person. Protagonist Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) is plagued by merciless dreams, visions of strange looking dogs, and an evil child with bright blue eyes. After being hit with a mirror by her neighbor’s son, Casey’s eyes begin to change color and she learns she had a twin brother who died in the womb. Casey begins to suspect that the spirit haunting her is the soul of her dead twin, being possessed by a dybbuk, wanting to be born so it can transfer to the world of the living. Casey meets a woman named Sofi, who is revealed to be her grandmother. Sofi explains that she had a twin brother who was killed in Nazi experiments in Auschwitz when they were both just children. The boy was brought back to life by a dybbuk who intended to use his body as a portal into the world of the living. Sofi killed her twin to stop the dybbuk, and now it haunts her family for revenge. Sofi refers Casey to Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman), who can perform a Jewish exorcism to remove the dybbuk. The exorcism is performed, but things go awry as the dybbuk tries to stop Rabbi Sendak from completing the ritual. The dybbuk disappears after the exorcism and the death of Casey’s boyfriend. Soon afterward, Casey learns she is pregnant with twins.”

Rotten Tomatoes (a good movie review aggregation site) gave the film a rather low 14% score.

AP posted a story about how Chabad managed a US judge to issue “a restraining order telling Russia to protect the documents and return any that may already have been removed from the Russian State Military Archives.” The 12,000 books (including the first editions of Tanya) and 50,000 documents were “formerly held by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, a leader of Chabad-Lubavitch who was born in Russia but forced by the Soviets to leave in 1927.” If the AP story expires at Yahoo, read at Chabad.

Taiwanonymous pointed out that the title of Rabbi Nilton Bonder‘s “The Kabbalah of Money” has been translated to Chinese as “The Jews’ Art of Getting Rich.” Details at his post.

The JTA announced in May the opening of the Jerusalem Kabbalah Museum. It opened in June and its director is Rabbi Chaim Dalfin. Having the director’s name helped me to identify its website, because that was the main connection that made me sure it is indeed JewishCulturalMuseum.com (, which was the main result when I searched for it online.) The museum must have changed its name, because in Google’s cache the pages talk about Jerusalem Kabbalah Museum, while on the current and live pages I found only information about “Jewish Cultural Museum”. To make it even more confusing under chasidicjew.com and you would find the same site as well. It is less surprising that kabbalahmuseum.org also leads to it. On the website there is a list of areas the museum “will” feature: Kabbalah Timeline, Jewish Cultural History, Garments, Artifacts, Holy Books, Manuscripts, Amulets, Reincarnation, Non-Jews, Gift Store, Cultural Art, Youth Education. These are mostly mentioned in future tense, albeit the museum seems to be open, because they have tours. On the websiteit was impossible to find such details as opening hours and entrance fee and the museum’s well-designed brochure is more helpful in this regard.