Five Cheers for Jewish Mysticism

...The conflict is not a war of annihilation, for the human being cannot and should not want to destroy the animal part of his essence...

...They spent much of their energies denouncing Jewish mysticism...

...Let us begin with Daniel Mart's translation and commentary on the Zohar...

...A beynoni is a person who lives in the ongoing tension between the two components of the human soul-the animal and the divine...

...The third book that has now appeared in a modern scholarly edition is Opening the Tanya, the masterwork of the Chabad Hasidism, brought to us by the versatile and amazing Adin Steinsaltz...

...Steinsaltz provides, not just a translation, but a clear and full commentary for the modern reader, explaining Hasidic concepts, providing sources, parallels and insights from the writings and the experiences of Hasidic masters of the past and present...

...These are each solid, substantive works of painstaking research, done by scholars who have mastered the methods of modern historians...

...And together, they make available to the English reading public, for the first time, the texts and the meaning of the three classics that are probably most central to Jewish mystical tradition: The Zohar, the work of the Ari, and the Tanya...

...The text is deliberately ambiguous, as all works of poetry are...

...We are no longer embarrassed by our mystical tradition...

...So let the reader be warned in advance, that even with Daniel Mart's incredibly lucid translation, and even with his careful explanatory notes, (which are the work of a master teacher), and even with Arthur Green's very helpful introduction, which clarifies the history of the book and the terms that are crucial to understanding it, this book is still daunting...

...Chabad Hasidism is, or at least it was at its inception, the most intellectual branch of the movement, in large part because of the Tanya...

...Rabbi Jack Riemer is the co-editor of So That Your Values Live On: A Treasury of Ethical Wills, published by Jewish Lights, and the editor of the three volumes of The World of the High Holy Days, published by the National Rabbinic Network...

...And Dr...

...Instead, there is a curiosity, receptivity and awareness that the search for the spiritual is not something aberrant but rather something central to the Jewish tradition...

...The tension is between the part of the psyche that tries to draw us down and the part that aspires upward towards the divine...

...And a great many other Jews could have made the same statement down through the centuries...

...Fine has studied the life and the thought of the Ari, as he was known, with meticulous care...

...It is good to have it accessible to a new generation of Jews who will learn much from it if they are willing to confront it, to wrestle with it, and to engage in the study of it with mind and soul...

...And now, here we have these five books, four of them published by a prestigious university press, that study the classic works of Jewish mysticism...

...482 pp., $25.95 Opening the Tanya Discovering the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classic Work of Kabbalah Adin Steinsaltz San Francisco: Joesey-Bass Publishing Co., 2004...

...A beynoni (the word means a person in the middle) is not some average person, as the name might suggest...

...For the Zohar does not give itself away to the casual reader...

...Moving chronologically, the second work of scholarship is Lawrence Fine's Physician of The Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabhalistic Fellowship...

...T h e pendulum has swung...

...Though he lived for less than forty years, he enriched Jewish life and thought with a complex and bold new cosmology, in which the central claim was that human beings have the power to bring about a tikkun of this broken world...

...it demands that we stay with it, that we engage the text, that we not be satisfied with first layer answers, and that we be willing to discover in it, not only answers to our questions but questions to our answers...

...We come away from this book awed by his scholarship, and with a better understanding of how it is that Rabbi Isaac Luria who wanted his writings to be concealed after his death, nevertheless produced ideas that continue to reverberate in the minds and souls of spiritual seekers until this day...

...To translate the Zohar is a daunting, perhaps even an impossible, task...

...The Zohar is fortunate to be in the hands of a scholar who is both poetic and painstaking...

...Only those facts about his life that can be documented are included in this biography...

...On one page you may move from the hills of Galilee to the stars in heaven, from the sephirot that are the structure of the universe to the way in which the sages derive cosmic meaning from a verse, a word, and sometimes even from a letter of the scriptures...

...Matt has devoted many years of his life to this task: he had to establish the correct text by combing libraries and comparing manuscripts found in many different places...

...They called it superstition, and they insisted that it was not a part of mainstream Judaism...

...It was considered by many pious Jews to be part of the holy triad—along with the Bible and the Talmud—by which they lived...

...Fine takes equally painstaking care in studying the Ari's concepts of tsimtsum, shvirat hakeylim, and tikkun (respectively, The Divine Withdrawal Into Itself in order to make room for the world, the smashing of the vessels that took place when the world was made, and the process through which human beings can heal and reunite the shattered cosmos...

...He studies these concepts painstakingly, in order to determine what they meant in their original context...

...Like Matt, Green and Fein, Steinsaltz is a master teacher, who not only knows enough to establish and translate the text he works with, but who also knows the spiritual questions of today's readers...

...The scholarly world is fortunate that this work is being sponsored by a patron, Margot Pritzker, who, in the style of the patrons of the Middle Ages, has underwritten this project so that a treasure of Jewish spirituality can be made available and comprehensible to the contemporary reader...

...It strives to define the essence of the human being, and to help the person who studies it in his efforts to become a beynoni...

...360 pp., $22.95 JACK RIEMER can't help but wonder what Heinrich Graetz and the other Jewish historians of the early modern period would think if they could see these books...

...Rabbi Shear Zalman of Ladi, who wrote it, was a halachic scholar of such distinction that, because of him, it became impossible to claim that mitnagdim were men of the mind and Hasidism were merely men of the spirit, for he was clearly both...

...This is no hagiography that tells folktales about the miracles or the wisdom or the piety of its hero...

...So far, we only have the first two of what will eventually be fourteen volumes...

...They were embarrassed that such esoteric writings could be found within Jewish literature, and they did their best to explain them away...

...The symbolism is often dense, the terminology unique, the ideas complex, the language multi-tiered, the dialogue enigmatic, and you can never quite pin down for sure a single meaning to a passage...

...The claim at the heart of the Tanya is that the ordinary human being is capable of knowledge of God and perfection of character if only he is willing to engage in the struggle...

...and 460 pp., $45 each A Guide To the Zohar Arthur Green Stanford University Press, 2004.193 pp., $14.95 Physician of the Sout, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luna and His (Cabbalistic Fellowship Lawrence Fine Stanford University Press, 2004...

...Luria is surely one of the most influential figures in all of Jewish thought...

...The Tanya is essentially a work of psychology, or perhaps anthropology...

...Pinchas of Koretz once said that the Zohar saved his soul...

...Instead human life, as the Tanya understands it, is an effort to educate all the parts of the human soul, to create within them a consciousness and a feeling, until their aspirations merge with The Divine Soul so that the person reaches a state of true harmony between body and soul, between the earthly and the divine...

...Matt warns you that if you undertake the adventure of studying this book, stay alert and be prepared to be surprised...

...When you read the Zohar you are entering an enchanted realm...