Download or read book A Kabbalistic View of History written by Z'Ev Ben Shimon Halevi and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of humanity and the purpose of Existence are described in terms of kabbalistic principles. As evolution moves from savagery to civilisation, different levels of mankind emerge with their personal and collective karma. Cosmic cycles are taken into account as they influence history, while the development is monitored by Providence.

Download or read book A Kabbalistic View of History written by Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi and published by . This book was released on 2013-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kabbalistic View of History describes the story of humanity and the purpose of Existence in terms of kabbalistic principles. As evolution moves from savagery to civilisation, so the vegetable, animal and human levels of mankind emerge. The Gilgulim or Wheels of Reincarnation teach young souls how to live on Earth, while their elders either dominate or illuminate the course of history. Cosmic cycles are also taken into account as they influence historic periods, while critical choices generate personal and collective karma. The development of humanity is monitored by Providence within a vast Divine plan.

Download or read book A History of Kabbalah written by Jonathan Garb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Garb's A History of Kabbalah: From the Early Modern Period to the Present Day is a lucid and sophisticated account of the multifaceted nature of Jewish mysticism, focusing on its development from the spiritual revolution that took place in Safed in the sixteenth century until the present. Opening the secrets of the kabbalah to a wider audience, Garb judiciously argued that how important the mystical and esoteric tradition has been in Jewish history and in the cultural and intellectual life of Europe more generally. One of the more methodologically innovative aspects of Garb's book is his contention that kabbalah became a major factor in the religious life of Jews in the modern age due to print and others forms of rapid communication, a process that has magnified significantly in recent years due to the digital revolution. Informative and provocative, A History of Kabbalah will surely be of interest to a wide readership.

Download or read book Zohar the Book of Enlightenment written by Daniel Chanan Matt and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first translation with commentary of selections from The Zohar, the major text of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. This work was written in 13th-century Spain by Moses de Leon, a Spanish scholar.

Download or read book Kabbalah and the Founding of America written by Brian Ogren and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the influence of Kabbalah in shaping America’s religious identity In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he called the mystical theology of the Jews. Around that same time, one of the leading Puritan ministers developed a messianic theology based in part on the mystical conversion of the Jews. This led to the actual conversion of a Jew in Boston a few decades later, an event that directly produced the first kabbalistic book conceived of and published in America. That book was read by an eventual president of Yale College, who went on to engage in a deep study of Kabbalah that would prod him to involve the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and to give a public oration at Yale in 1781 calling for an infusion of Kabbalah and Jewish thought into the Protestant colleges of America. Kabbalah and the Founding of America traces the influence of Kabbalah on early Christian Americans. It offers a new picture of Jewish-Christian intellectual exchange in pre-Revolutionary America, and illuminates how Kabbalah helped to shape early American religious sensibilities. The volume demonstrates that key figures, including the well-known Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather and Yale University President Ezra Stiles, developed theological ideas that were deeply influenced by Kabbalah. Some of them set out to create a more universal Kabbalah, developing their ideas during a crucial time of national myth building, laying down precedents for developing notions of American exceptionalism. This book illustrates how, through fascinating and often surprising events, this unlikely inter-religious influence helped shape the United States and American identity.

Download or read book The Secret History of the Zohar written by Michael Berg (Rabbi.) and published by Kabbalah Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Berg’s overview of the Zohar is a virtual timeline showing its connection with great historical figures and events throughout time. He addresses the myths surrounding this sacred work, and covers who first revealed it, who wrote it down, and who studied it — not just Jewish scholars, but Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, the Knights Templar, and other inquisitive thinkers. Berg clearly demonstrates the profound influence Zohar and Kabbalah have had on all the major disciplines, from literature and art to medicine and science.

Download or read book As Light Before Dawn written by Eitan P. Fishbane and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Light Before Dawn explores the mystical thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, a major medieval kabbalist whose work has until now received relatively little attention. Through consideration of an extensive literary corpus, including much that still remains in manuscript, this study examines an array of themes and questions that have great applicability to the comparative study of mysticism and the broader study of religion. These include prayer and the nature of mystical experience; meditative concentration directed to God; and the power of mental intention, authority, creativity, and the transmission of wisdom.

Download or read book Kabbalah For Dummies written by Arthur Kurzweil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-11-06 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See how ancient Jewish mystical traditions and rituals can transform your life Kabbalah For Dummies presents a balanced perspective of Kabbalah as an “umbrella” for a complex assemblage of mystical Jewish teachings and codification techniques. Kabbalah For Dummies also shows how Kabbalah simultaneously presents an approach to the study of text, the performance of ritual and the experience of worship, as well as how the reader can apply its teaching to everyday life.

Download or read book Origins of the Kabbalah written by Gershom Gerhard Scholem and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of The Origins of the Kabbalah in 1950, one of the most important scholars of our century brought the obscure world of Jewish mysticism to a wider audience for the first time. A crucial work in the oeuvre of Gershom Scholem, this book details the beginnings of the Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Spain, showing its rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God. The Origins of the Kabbalah is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism, but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general. Now with a new foreword by David Biale, this book remains essential reading for students of the history of religion.

Download or read book Leibniz and the Kabbalah written by A.P. Coudert and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The general view of scholars is that the Kabbalah had no meaningful influence on Leibniz's thought. } But on the basis of new evidence I am convinced that the question must be reopened. The Kabbalah did influence Leibniz, and a recognition of this will lead to both a better understanding of the supposed "quirkiness,,2 of Leibniz's philosophy and an appreciation ofthe Kabbalah as an integral but hitherto ignored factor in the emergence of the modem secular and scientifically oriented world. During the past twenty years there has been increasing willingness to recognize the important ways in which mystical and occult thinking contributed to the development of science and the emergence 3 of toleration. However, the Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic Kabbalah with its monistic vitalism and optimistic philosophy of perfectionism and universal salvation, has not yet been integrated into the new historiography, although it richly deserves to be. On the basis of manuscripts in libraries at Hanover and Wolfenbiittel, it is clear that Leibniz's relationship with Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614- 1698) and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689), the two leading Christian Kabbalists of the period, was much closer than previously imagined and that his direct knowledge of their writings, especially the collection of 4 kabbalistic texts they published in the Kabbala Denudata, was far more detailed than most scholars have realized. During 1688 Leibniz spent more than a month at Sulzbach with von Rosenroth.

Download or read book Mystifying Kabbalah written by Boaz Huss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most scholars of Judaism take the term "Jewish mysticism" for granted, and do not engage in a critical discussion of the essentialist perceptions that underlie it. Mystifying Kabbalah studies the evolution of the concept of Jewish mysticism. It examines the major developments in the academic study of Jewish mysticism and its impact on modern Kabbalistic movements in the contexts of Jewish nationalism and New Age spirituality. Boaz Huss argues that Jewish mysticism is a modern discursive construct and that the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as forms of mysticism, which appeared for the first time in the nineteenth century and has become prevalent since the early twentieth, shaped the way in which Kabbalah and Hasidism are perceived and studied today. The notion of Jewish mysticism was established when western scholars accepted the modern idea that mysticism is a universal religious phenomenon of a direct experience of a divine or transcendent reality and applied it to Kabbalah and Hasidism. "Jewish mysticism" gradually became the defining category in the modern academic research of these topics. This book clarifies the historical, cultural, and political contexts that led to the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish mysticism, exposing the underlying ideological and theological presuppositions and revealing the impact of this "mystification" on contemporary forms of Kabbalah and Hasidism.

Download or read book Between Kant and Kabbalah written by Alan L. Mittleman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length, systematic study in English of Isaac Breuer, a founder of Agudat Israel, whose intellectual achievements reflected the world of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber in an Orthodox mirror. It sheds light on an often neglected aspect of German Jewry's last phase and reclaims Breuer as a paradigmatic figure in the Jewish encounter with modernity.

Download or read book Kabbalah and Postmodernism written by Sanford L. Drob and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kabbalah and Postmodernism: A Dialogue challenges certain long-held philosophical and theological beliefs, including the assumptions that the insights of mystical experience are unavailable to human reason and inexpressible in linguistic terms, that the God of traditional theology either does or does not exist, that «systematic theology» must provide a univocal account of God, man, and the world, that «truth» is «absolute» and not continually subject to radical revision, and that the truth of propositions in philosophy and theology excludes the truth of their opposites and contradictions. Readers of Kabbalah and Postmodernism will be exposed to a comprehensive mode of theological thought that incorporates the very doubts that would otherwise lead one to challenge the possibility of theology and religion, and which both preserves the riches of the Jewish tradition and extends beyond Judaism to a non-dogmatic universal philosophy and ethic.

Download or read book Madame Blavatsky on the history and tribulations of the Zohar written by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and published by Philaletheians UK. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European Occultists see in the Jewish Kabbalah alone the universal well of wisdom and find in it the secret lore of nearly all the mysteries of Nature. For them the Zohar is an Esoteric Thesaurus of all the mysteries of the Christian Gospel. The Esoteric language used by the Alchemists was their own, given out as a blind necessitated by the dangers of the epoch they lived in, and not as the Mystery-language, as used by the Pagan Initiates, which the Alchemists had re-translated and re-veiled once more. Some believe that the substance of the Kabbalah is the basis upon which Masonry is built, since modern Masonry is undeniably the dim and hazy reflection of primeval Occult Masonry, of the teaching of those divine Masons who established the Mysteries of the prehistoric and prediluvian Temples of Initiation. Others maintain that the numerical language of the Kabbalistic works teaches universal truths, and not any one Religion in particular. Those who make this statement are perfectly right in saying that the Mystery-language used in the Zohar and in other Kabbalistic literature was once the universal language of Humanity. But they become entirely wrong if to this fact they add the untenable theory that this language was invented by, or was the original property of, the Hebrews, from whom all the other nations allegedly borrowed it. The writings which pass today under the title of the Zohar of Rabbi Shimon are not authentic. Moreover, the lore found in Kabbalistic literature was never recorded in writing before the first century of the modern era. There was at all times a Kabbalistic literature among the Jews, though historically it can be traced only from the time of the Captivity. Yet, from the Pentateuch down to the Talmud, the documents of that literature were ever written in a kind of Mystery-language, a series of symbolical records which the Jews had copied from the Egyptian and the Chaldæan Sanctuaries, only adapting them to their own national history. Jews and Christians rely on a phonograph of a dead and almost unknown language. There are scholars who do not carry the now-known Hebrew square letters beyond the late period of the fourth century. The real Hebrew of Moses was lost after the seventy years’ captivity and ceased from that time to be a spoken language. The Lost Tribes of Israel is a pure invention of the Rabbis. Not only are there no proofs of the twelve tribes of Israel having ever existed, but Herodotus, the most accurate of historians, who was in Assyria when Ezra flourished, never mentions the Israelites at all; and Herodotus was born in B.C. It is now becoming apparent that the Kabbalah of the Jews is but the distorted echo of the Secret Doctrine of the Chaldæans, and that the real Kabbalah is found only in the Chaldæan Book of Numbers, now in the possession of certain Persian Sufis. Hebrew cannot be called an old language, merely because Adam is supposed to have used it in the Garden of Eden. Linguistic analysis shows that the old Egyptian tongue was only old Hebrew and that the two nations lived together for centuries. Before adopting the Chaldæan for their phonetic tongue, the Jews had already adopted the old Coptic or Egyptian. The Hebrew Scriptures had been tampered with and remodelled, had been lost and rewritten, a dozen times before the days of Ezra. In its hidden meaning, from Genesis to the last word of Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch is the symbolical narrative of the sexes, and an apotheosis of Phallicism under astronomical and physiological personations. The wise King of Israel who succeeded his father, King David, was noticed neither by Herodotus, nor by Plato, nor by Diodorus Siculus, nor by any writer of standing. The Bible as it is now (i.e., the Hebrew texts), depends for its accuracy on the authenticity of the Septuagint, written miraculously by the “Seventy” in Greek, and the original copy having been lost since, our texts have been re-translated backward into Hebrew. So little, indeed, was Hebrew known that both the Septuagint and the New Testament had to be written in Greek, a heathen language, and no better reasons for it given than that “the Holy Ghost chose to write the New Testament in Greek.” The new system of the Masoretic points has made the Hebrew characters a sphinx-like riddle for all. Punctuation is now to be found everywhere, in all later manuscripts, and by means of it anything can be made of a text; a Hebrew scholar can put on the texts any interpretation he likes. The Tower of Babel myth relates to enforced secrecy. Men falling into sin were regarded as no longer trustworthy for the reception of such esoteric knowledge and, from being universal, it became limited to the few. One of the chief Lords or Hierophants of the Mysteries of Yava-Aleim had confounded the languages of the earth, so that the sinners could understand one another’s speech no longer. There are two distinct styles, two antagonistic schools, plainly traceable in the Hebrew Scriptures — the Elohistic and the Jehovistic. The one taught strictly esoteric doctrines, the other theological doctrines. The Elohists identified their Deity, as in the Secret Doctrine, with Nature. The Jehovists made of Jehovah a personal God and used the term simply as a phallic symbol. The original Mosaic text have been tampered with and replaced by that of the later Levites, who practiced degenerate mysteries and veiled Pantheism under Monotheism. The Ain-Soph of the Chaldæans, and later of the Jews, is a copy of the Vedic Deity; while the “Heavenly Adam,” the Macrocosm which unites in itself the totality of beings and is the Spirit of the visible universe, finds his original in the Puranic Brahmā. The Zohar places Ain-Soph, or Absolute Unity, outside human thought and appreciation; and in the Sepher Yetzirah the Spirit of God (Logos, not the Deity itself) is called The One. The true meaning of the compound name of Jehovah (of which, unvowelled, you can make almost anything) is men and women, or humanity composed of two sexes. A Kabbalist traces Jehovah from the Adam of earth to Seth, the third “son,” or rather race, of Adam. Thus Seth is Jehovah male; and Enos, being a permutation of Cain and Abel, is Jehovah male and female, or mankind. Eve stands as the evolution and the never-ceasing “becoming” of Nature. If we call Jehovah by his divine name, then he becomes at best and forthwith “a female passive” potency in Chaos. And if we view him as a male God, he is no more than one of many angels. There are four Adams, one for each of the preceding Root-Races. Thus the Kabbalah, as we have it now, is of the greatest importance in explaining the allegories and “dark sayings” of the Bible. As an Esoteric work upon the mysteries of creation, however, it is almost worthless as it is now disfigured — unless cross-checked by the Chaldæan Book of Numbers or by the tenets of the Eastern Secret Science. We have shown that the “Hebrew Bible” exists no more and hat uninitiated have to content with the garbled accounts and falsified copies of the real Mosaic Bible of the Initiates. The Temple of King Solomon exists to this day as a stupendous living monument of Esoteric records, while the famous temple has never existed outside of the far later Hebrew scrolls. The letters in the Hebrew sacred scrolls are musical notes. In the Sanskrit language letters are continually arranged in the sacred ollas so that they may become musical notes. Thus the Devanagari are the speech of the Gods, and Sanskrit, is the divine language. Sanskrit is the perfect form of the most perfect language on earth; Hebrew, the roughest and the poorest. The six days of the week and the seventh, the Sabbath, are based primarily on the seven creations of the Hindu Brahmā, the seventh being that of man; and, secondarily, on the number of generation. The Sabbath is pre-eminently and most conspicuously phallic. The mystery of the woman, who was made from the man, is repeated in every national religion, and in Scriptures far antedating the Jewish. Genesis does not begin at the beginning. Neither the septiform chronology nor the septiform theogony and evolution of all things is of divine origin in the Bible. The Jews never had more than three keys out of the seven in mind, while composing their national allegories — the astronomical, the numerical, and above all the purely anthropological, or rather physiological key. This resulted in the most phallic religion of all, and has now passed, part and parcel, into Christian theology.

Download or read book Visions of the End of Days written by Ariel B Tzadok and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Bible many dreams and visions forecast the distant future and the coming of the Messiah. Dreams and visions are part and parcel of the experience of the prophet. Yet, more than prophets have experienced them. The Biblical Daniel was one such seer. What he saw and recorded in his book has mystified readers and scholars for many centuries. Once the Hebrew book of Daniel was embraced in Gentile hands, many of its hidden teachings became out of reach to those not trained in the Biblical way of prophetic reception (Kabbalah). The secrets concealed in Daniel have thus remain hidden, until now.This book discusses the path and way of the Biblical prophet and seer; how they were trained to understand the symbolic metaphorical language of picture imagery that is the form and essence of every dream and vision.This book brings to the English-speaking audience exposure of the ancient Biblical prophetic ways, and even gives guidance how some of these ancient practices may still be used today.Going beyond Daniel there are many other Biblical and later Judaic and Kabbalistic teachings about the coming of the Messiah. Some of these issues, such as Gog and Magog, are also addressed here.As a special bonus, there is included an essay that many might find to be controversial. The topic is: Can a Torah-faithful, Orthodox Jew believe that Jesus was (or will be) the Messiah of Israel? Written from the perspective of Torah Judaism, this essay addresses the topic in a non-polemic manner, in the hope that it might serve as a bridge of understanding between Jewish and Christian communities.All in all, this book reveals secrets, both ancient and modern, that once you have been enlightened by them, you will never look at Biblical prophecy or Kabbalistic revelations in the same light of simplicity again.Prepare to see what you have not seen before!

Download or read book Roots of Faith and Devequt written by Mordechai Pachter and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Kabbalistic Visions written by Sanford L. Drob and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, C. G. Jung experienced a series of visions which he later described as "the most tremendous things I have ever experienced." Central to these visions was the "mystic marriage as it appears in the Kabbalistic tradition", and Jung’s experience of himself as "Rabbi Simon ben Jochai," the presumed author of the sacred Kabbalistic text, the Zohar. Kabbalistic Visions explores Jung’s 1944 Kabbalistic visions, the impact of Jewish mysticism on Jungian psychology, Jung’s archetypal interpretation of Kabbalistic symbolism, and his claim late in life that a Hasidic rabbi, the Maggid of Mezhirech, anticipated his entire psychology. This book places Jung’s encounter with the Kabbalah in the context of the earlier visions and meditations of his Red Book, his abiding interests in Gnosticism and alchemy, and what many regard to be his Anti-Semitism and flirtation with National Socialism. Kabbalistic Visions is the first full-length study of Jung and Jewish mysticism in any language and the first book to present a comprehensive Jungian/archetypal interpretation of Kabbalistic symbolism.