What is jewish mysticism

The Zohar is a commentary on the Torah, concerned primarily with understanding the divine world and its relation to our world.

However, God can be understood and described as revealed in ten mystical attributes, or sefirot. Much of all future Kabbalah, including the important 16th-century Kabbalah of Isaac Luria —whose intricate theology of creation describes how God contracted to make room for the world—concerns itself with the sefirot.

Abraham Abulafia was the most important of the medieval intensive mystics. He tried to achieve a state of prophecy through methods of experiential Kabbalah. Hasidism, a religious movement that emerged in the 18th century, spread mystical thinking and living to the masses of European Jewry by teaching that all people could have an experiential connection with God.

In addition, the academic study of Jewish mysticism has flourished in recent decades, due primarily to the work of a single scholar, Gershom Scholem. Scholem discovered and interpreted a wide range of mystical manuscripts and shed light on the origins and development of Jewish mysticism.

Overall, this is a wide-ranging, thoughtfully constructed, user-friendly introduction to kabbalah. Libraries serving Judaica and religion programs will want to purchase it. Lower-level undergraduates through graduate students. Nefsky, emerita, University of Lethbridge ; Choice , October This is the first book in the post Kabbalah is chic era that does not sacrifice personal meaning for intellectual depth. David Ariel has found that very special place from which to teach Kabbalah. He is analyst and participant, objective scholar and passionate believer and thus speaks to our minds and hearts.

The experiential dimension of Kabbalah involves the actual quest for mystical experience: a direct, intuitive, unmediated encounter with a close but concealed Deity.

In their quest to encounter God, Jewish mystics live spiritually disciplined lives. Although neither formal nor informal monasticism is sanctioned by Jewish mysticism, experiential Kabbalists tend to be ascetics. The practical dimension of Kabbalah involves rituals for gaining and exercising power to effect change in our world and in the celestial worlds beyond ours.

The true master of this art fulfills the human potential to be a co-creator with God. Historians of Judaism identify many schools of Jewish esotericism across time, each with its own unique interests and beliefs. As noted above, Jewish mystics are not like monks or hermits. Kabbalists tend to be part of social circles rather than lone seekers. From these mystical works, scholars have identified many distinctive mystical schools, including the Hechalot mystics, the German Pietists, the Zoharic Kabbalah, the ecstatic school of Abraham Abulafia, the teachings of Isaac Luria, and Chasidism.

She hovers over them. She protects them. She is the feminine divine presence, the feminine emanation of the godhead. They have no idea that Judaism has a concept of a feminine godhead!

The week after the class on the Kabbalistic sources for the Shekhinah, we read many contemporaneous poets who write about the Shekinah. We read Marge Piercy. We read Alicia Ostriker. We read Joy Ladin. These are contemporaneous poets who are working with this material. Similarly, when we look at some of the early notions of secrecy within the Kabbalah and the connection of this secrecy to the development of modern psychology, the students flip out.

You know, Freud and Jung were very much in touch with Jewish mystical sources. So, the idea of looking for something that is somehow buried or hidden, what we would more familiarly today refer to as the unconscious, runs parallel with mystical knowledge. Search Enter the terms you wish to search for.