If you would judge a book by its cover my choice would go for the newer book, because its cover incorporates elements from a painting by one of may favorite Hungarian painters Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry. (And the back cover has a piece from another of his paintings.) This is not to belittle Sara Dismukes‘ work, who designed the cover of the other book, but I am partial to Csontváry. However, we are not supposed to judge a book by its cover, so I won’t either.

One more word about the Schachter-Shalomi version. The back cover gives the website for the publisher (albion-andalus.com), but the URL leads to a parked/under construction site. I do judge an operation by the quality of its site. It’s OK to be under construction, happens to the best of us. But at least put up your own under construction page and not default to your ISP’s. That seems too unprofessional.

Nevertheless looking forward getting my hands on a copy of both books.

Dr. A Nyland

With this book Dr. Nyland has finished the translation of all three volumes. They are all available on their own or the three as a single volume, both as printed books and ebooks. I am providing links not just to the paperbacks Kindle version but to the Smashwords pages as well, because there you can buy the books in a variety of eBook formats and you can read a 15% long sample from each. Considering that the 3 books combined is only 262 pages long, you may just want to get that. The official description is under each book’s listing below.

May his memory be for a blessing

The vertical-authoritarian model reflects an atavistic, anti-modern approach that relies on superstition and magic to express Jewish values, while the horizontal-dialogical model encapsulates the wisdom of Talmudic-Maimonidean tradition in a form of critical inquiry which seeks to empower human beings to free themselves of the shackles of magical irrationality.

Before he gets to this conclusion he lays down the arguments using quotes from Moshe Idel’s “Kabbalah: New Perspectives” and from his own teacher’s Jose Faur’s “The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism.” Shasha juxtaposes the democratic nature of language (everyone can speak and use it if given the the right tools (alphabet and grammar) and the top-down nature of revelatory ad mystical testimonies.

“From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener ” by Mikhail Krutikov is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. His dramatic life story offers a fascinating glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe.

Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. His intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.

The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com

The kabbalist Abraham Abulafia journeyed to the Land of Israel at the age of 18, following the invasion of the Mongolians, risked his life attempting to meet the Pope, declared himself a prophet and Messiah, and was ultimately banned and isolated. Professor Moshe Idel’s survey clarifies how even amongst self-declared messiahs, the 13th century Abulafia was a unique figure; his thought focused on individual rather than national redemption and his techniques integrated intellectual and physical elements, some of which recall Eastern schools of thought.

…AVATAR echoes two major strands of religious wisdom that began in Jewish thought … the Kabbalistic metaphor of God as the Tree of Life, unfolding through successive emanations from the Infinite to the Incarnate so that its roots are in Heaven and its fruit is our world. This wisdom is notably “spiritual,” but has as its roots a political vision of sharing food among the whole community, and sharing God’s abundance with all living beings.

The Tree of Life, God’s greatest plentiful abundance, had vanished from human ken when the humans tried to gobble up all they food they saw, and thereby banished themselves from Eden. That banishment is what the Earthians of Avatar have done to themselves. By gobbling up the earth they live in, they have killed it and driven themselves to seek another in Pandora. But they have learned nothing. In the winter of their discontent, despair, they glimpse the Tree of Life, the Garden of Delight.

Like any film, AVATAR is meant for seeing. But unlike most films, it explicitly makes the act of seeing into a spiritual discipline. The watchword of the Na’vi is, “I see you.” For Pandora’s people, these words express what in Hebrew is “yodea,” interactive “knowing” that is emotional, intellectual, physical/ sexual, and spiritual all at one