Lurianics tells the story of a youngish man – one Isaac Luria (namesake of one of the world's great Kabbalists) – who seeks to create a "true work" which will give his life a meaning that is uniquely beyond label. Set on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the novel anatomizes this unlikely hero's ambivalence-racked relationships with a veritable cast of thousands, all of whom have one thing in common – a craving to derail his every attempt to get on with the job. They include: a smugly go-getting kid brother, a hyper-articulate mystery woman, and assorted bosses, co-workers, composers and filmmakers living and dead, ballet stars, murdered doormen, stuff-strutting sparrows, and honey locusts about to bloom. But chaos does not always reign supreme and in the end every encounter plays its part in forcing Luria to confront the ultimate question: Does he have the guts not just to erect his Valhalla (any fool can do that) but to erect it with the only building blocks worth a damn, i.e., the very things befouling the path?
Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria’s mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria’s students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?
In the sixteenth century, the famous kabbalist Isaac Luria transmitted a secret trove of highly complex mystical practices to a select groups of students. These meditations were designed to capitalize on sleep and death states in order to effectively split one’s soul into multiple parts, and which, when properly performed, permitted the adept to free oneself from the cycle of rebirth. Through an in-depth analysis of these contemplative practices within the broader context of Lurianic literature, Zvi Ish-Shalom guides us on a penetrating scholarly journey into a realm of mystical teachings and practices never before available in English, illuminating a radically monistic vision of reality at the heart of Kabbalistic metaphysics and practice.
The book Redemption in the Lurianic Kabbalah and Its Branches deals with a little known aspect of Rabbi Luria’s mystic teaching, about Redemption. The author of the book is grateful to Prof. Ronit Meroz from Tel Aviv University for her book on this subject which was Prof. Meroz’s doctoral work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988. The author of this book has taught this subject to US students at the University in Prague for several semesters. Rabbi Luria influenced in an immense way not only Judaism, but even some Christian thinkers, as for example the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz and the modern theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Everybody will agree that our world needs improvement, and the teaching of Rabbi Luria offers a sort of hope for a better world.
Kabbalah of Creation is a new translation of the early Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria, founder of the most influential Jewish mystical school of the last 400 years. Living in relative obscurity in Northern Galilee, Luria experienced a powerful epiphany that influenced his lyrical, influential text. Poetically and meditatively described, the range of subjects includes the revelation of the Godhead's light in the world and its relationship to every aspect of the human life cycle, including lovemaking, conception, gestation, birth, and maturation.
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.
This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).
Some four hundred years before Albert Einstein proposed his theory of relativity of the outer universe to the scientific community, a rabbi named Isaac Luria (1534–1572) passed his theory of the inner universe and its evolution to his students. With vision given only to the most gifted of kabbalistic mystics, Luria explained the inner worlds of the spirit and of the evolution that led to the ultimate birth of our cosmos. In a selection of passages from Luria’s Kabbalah that is both universal and stand-alone in transcendental value, Professor James Dunn presents, for the very first time, the essence of the great rabbi’s teachings. According to Luria, the ultimate calling in this lifetime or in future lifetimes is to reharmonize (and hence remove) inherent imperfections through proper heart, and the teachings presented here have just this aim: to help “heal the broken vessel of the world” (tikkun olam). We all long to be healed and whole, and here scholars and lay people alike will find the wisdom they seek.
In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in 16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising solutions to perennial theological problems.
An anthology of primary texts on meditation and contemplative prayer from a wide range of religious traditions. This is the first theoretically informed and historically accurate comparative anthology of primary texts on meditation and contemplative prayer. Written by international experts on the respective texts and corresponding traditions, Contemplative Literature provides introductions to and primary sources on contemplative practice from various religious traditions. The contributors explore classical Daoist apophatic meditation, Quaker silent prayer, Jewish Kabbalah, Southern Buddhist meditation, Sufi contemplation, Eastern Orthodox prayer, Pure Land Buddhist visualization, Hindu classical Yoga, Dominican Catholic prayer, Daoist internal alchemy, and modern therapeutic meditation. Each introduction to a contemplative text discusses its historical context, the associated religious tradition and literature, the method of contemplative practice, and the texts legacy and influence. Volume editor Louis Komjathy opens the work with a thoughtful consideration of interpretive issues in the emerging interdisciplinary field of contemplative studies. Readers will gain not only a nuanced understanding of important works of contemplative literature, but also resources for understanding contemplative practice and contemplative experience from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective. We have not seen anything this bold and this global since Friedrich Heiler wrote his classic study on the typology of prayer over eighty years ago. Komjathy and his essayists have vastly expanded the scope, depth, and sophistication of this project here. In the process, they have struggled with all of the critical questions around religious pluralism, tradition, and religious authority, and have emboldened the comparative project itself. Contemplation and comparison, it turns out, go very well together. Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms Teachers and scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in contemplative practice will cherish a book like this. Im happy that Louis Komjathy has done this great work. It will undoubtedly be hailed as a milestone. Ruben L. F. Habito, author of Healing Breath: Zen for Christians and Buddhists in a Wounded World
