"In a little more than a hundred pages, Dan races through more than a thousand years of Jewish religious texts, explaining a vast, amorphous body of beliefs and practices that have influenced Freemasons, Hasidim, Carl Jung, New Age gurus and, more recently, Hollywood celebrities. It's quite...
dvar, and gallery pages. I’m not a rabbi, but I’ve always been a mystic and seeker. I care about how I live and how we treat one another. I have a strong set of spiritual beliefs and practices. If these kinds of thoughts
Kabbala,esotericJewishmysticismas it appeared in the 12th and following centuries. Kabbala has always been essentially anoral traditionin that initiation into its doctrines and practices is conducted by a personal guide to avoid the dangersinherentin mystical experiences.EsotericKabbala is also “tradition...
Normative Judaism consists of a faith in a sole God who created the universe and who chose to reveal himself to a select group by means of a rule of life he imposed on it—Torah. According to traditional Judaic beliefs, the earthly destiny of the chosen nation, as well as the eternal ...
“philosophical” equipment of the Franco-German Jewish scholar consisted essentially of aHebrewparaphrase, dating perhaps from the 11th century, of the treatiseBeliefs and OpinionsbySaʿadia ben Joseph(the great 9th–10th-century Babylonian Jewish scholar and philosopher) and the commentary on the...
and even the letters of thesynagogueprayers. These speculations, however, had no greatrepercussionson the subsequent course of Jewish esoterism; the only exception is the mysticism ofprayerand demonology, which was sometimes influenced by the beliefs of the Christian environment and was fully developed...