Keeping Passover: Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life and Create Your Own Passever Celebration. Three cheers for Steingroot. For all those Jews who have foregone Passover celebrations because they think them too complicated or too arcane, here’s a book that makes the holiday understandable, and more importantly, doable. Oh yes, and guilt-free. Steingroot, a bookseller who presides over one of the world’s largest collections of Passover merchandise, wants readers to know that Passover is for them, whether they choose to celebrate with just a few friends and a bare-bones holiday table or whether they want to make Passover a Kosher (pun intended) affair. Among the many topics covered are the Passover food, table settings, Haggadahs, music, and ways to involve children in the festivities. More esoteric topics are also addressed, including women and Passover, holiday traditions in other countries, and creating your own Haggadah. An extensive bibliography and glossary are included. See details
Posts Tagged ‘Hasidism
Keeping Passover
Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America. Dressing entirely in white is normal practice on a five-block stretch of Robertson Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Western men and women, garbed in white from their turbans to their Keds, traverse the busy streets surrounding the Sikh Temple. Further north, you have to wait until Friday afternoon to see white-clad young men in yarmulkes gathering outside the Kabbalah Learning Centre greeting each other with hugs, the spaces around them filled with women and children wearing multi-colored garments. Beyond this city street, one hears of the popularity of Kabbalah in the tabloids, as celebrities such as Madonna claim Kabbalah as their new “religion.” How have the obscure and offensive ideas of medieval Jewish mysticism, expressed in doctrines like the demonic power of women’s menstrual blood or the soulless bodies of Gentiles, been made palatable for so many from all stripes of life? With KLCs in cities such as Boca Raton, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego, Houston, and Las Vegas, the reach of this mystical tradition can be said to be nationwide. But how did its beliefs and practices become as fashionable as they are now? What do the KLCs teach so that adherents stay on? Is it a cult, a religion, or simply a system of universal wisdom as its leaders purport? Determined to uncover the secrets of this esoteric faith, the author embarked upon three 10-week Kabbalah classes among other learning opportunities, examined Kabbalah publications from the 1970s to the present, listened to KLC audio tapes, and interacted with adherents. This book presents her experiences and findings, and offers an overview of the history of the Kabbalah in this country, its beliefs and practices, its positions on health and healing of both the self and the world, its structure and outreach, and its views of men and women. She traces the origins of Kabbalah, offers a glimpse into its world, its relationships to Judaism, its place in American society, and its future. See details
Learning From the Tanya: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary on the Moral and Mystical Teachings of a Classic Work of Kabbalah. Learning from the Tanya offers a key for unlocking the mysteries of one of the most extraordinary books of moral teachings ever written. A seminal document in the study of Kabbalah, the Tanya explores and solves the dilemmas of the human soul by arriving at the root causes of its struggles. Though it is a classic Jewish spiritual text, the Tanya and its commentary take a broad and comprehensive approach that is neither specific to Judaism nor tied to a particular personality type or time or point of view.
The internationally celebrated Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who has dedicated his life to the study, teaching, and writing of books that explain Jewish scripture, religious practice, spirituality, and mysticism to Jews and non-Jews throughout the world, is the author of this explanation and line-by-line commentary on the Tanya. As relevant today as it was two hundred years ago, the Tanya helps us to understand the many thousands of complexities, doubts, and drives within us as a single basic problem—the struggle between our Godly soul and our animal soul.
The first book in the series, Opening the Tanya, explored the first section of original text of the Tanya. This second volume, Learning from the Tanya, goes on to the next major portion and offers the definitive explanation and commentary that guides the reader toward harmony of body and soul, of earthliness and transcendence. Learning from the Tanya is an extraordinary book that helps us to learn how we can elevate our soul to a higher level of awareness and understanding, until our objectives and aspirations are synonymous with our Godly potential. See details
Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters. Hassidism, its tales, legends, and masters, has always been a source of mystery and confusion. “Souls on Fire” is a journey through Hassidism. Traveling from the source and further development of this unique Jewish religious manifestation is a joy when led by the mind and sould of Elie Wiesel. His personal and emotional input, the tales and legends included throughout the book, and his non-academic but rather humane approach (a typical Hassid) is the most sincere attempt in trying to understand and “speak of the unspeakable,” sparkling light into a religious fervor born out of anguish and despair. The purpose is not to agree or understand, but rather to believe. See details
The Empty Chair: Finding Hope and Joy
This pocketsize collection of pithy quotes and classical Hasadic stories from a mystic rabbi may ironically appeal more to New Age spiritual seekers than traditional synagogue worshippers. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) avoids obscure religious references to any holy book while encouraging readers to “never despair!” and “get into the habit of dancing.”
“Always remember: joy is not merely incidental to your spiritual quest,” warns Nachman, a Hasadic leader in Ukraine during a turbulent time of religious persecution. “It is vital.” Nachman’s inspirational quotes, often given in imperative sentences, focus on the need to liberate yourself by maintaining hope and secluding yourself daily.
Adored by his followers, many modern readers will find his extremely optimistic assertions questionable. “When troubles come, as they will, take comfort in your faith that whatever happens is for the best,” advises Nachman. This soothing advice, especially in light of the Holocaust and suicide bombers, remains a very difficult task for contemporary adults. See details
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Gershom Scholem was President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a Professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his death in 1982. He wrote the standard collage textbook on Jewish mysticism (‘Major Trends…’). He is also the author of ‘Origins of the Kabbalah’, ‘Kabbalah’, ‘On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism’, ‘On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead’, ‘The Messianic Idea in Judaism’, and ‘Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah’. Every book is a treasure in and of itself. Mr. Scholem put the Kabbalah back on the 20th century map. His studies on the ‘Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation)’, The Bahir (Bright)’, and ‘The Zohar (Splendor)’ show the brillance of this unique individual.
‘Major Trends…’ is broken down into nine lectures. He covers everything from the beginings of Jewish mysticism up to modern times. He traces its origen from the Second Temple era, through the apocalyptic/pseudepigrapha period, and right into Jewish gnosticism with the Thrown (merkabah) mysticism. The ‘Hekhaloth Books‘ (hekhaloth: the heavenly halls or palaces the visionary passes through on his way to the seventh heaven where there rises the thrown of divine glory) are well known for the their similarity to standerd gnostic works. The caves around Khirbet Qumran are another (Dead Sea Scrolls). He covers all aspects of this; the ‘Song of Songs’ and its mystical meaning (it was banned until a man reached 40 years old), the Shi’ur Komah (Measure of the Body of God), and all the magical elements that encompassed this, also theurgy, and so on.
All of this, of course, was several hundred years before the epoch ‘Sefer Yezirah’ was conceived of. The Jewish nation had to suffer through the loss of their Second Temple, the messianic revival of the infamous Bar Kokhba (the Star of Jacob) and Rebbe Akiva’s endorsment of him, the loss of their country to the Romans, the loss of their ‘restablished’ country under Mar Zutra (in their ‘new’ capital of Mahoza, near Bagdad) in 502, and so on.
He covers the mystic Abraham Abulafia and his prophetic Kabbalism (and how it broke Kabbalism in two), the Zohar and Moses de Leon, En-Sof (the hidden God), the ten Sefiroth (numbers) and Sefirotic development through the years (from Sefer Yetzirah to the Zohar), also the Shekhinah (the female side of God), Isaac Luria (the Lion) and his students (his Cubs), and the stunning impact the exile from Spain had on the Kabbalah in general.
The last two lectures cover Sabbatai Sevi and the disaster he brought on the Jewish people. He very nearly destroyed Judaism itself for 250 years afterwards. The impact is still felt to this day. He also shows the modern Hasid’s (the Ultra-Orthadox Jews) and how the Kabbalah and the Zohar influance their teachings and beliefs. He also shows why regular Orthadox Jews avoid the Kabbalah (calling it Jewish witchcraft) and why they considear the Hasid’s to be cultists of a sort (even though the Kabbalah WAS Orthadox Judaism for 300 years before the advent of Sabbatai Sevi – which Mr. Scholem painfully points out).
For those of you who want to understand where and how the major trends in Kabbalism developed, look no further. This book covers all of the major ideas in their proper historical context, from Gnosticism to Hasidism.
The author’s concept or purpose is to dispel many of the misleading, and speculative notions on the nature of Jewish mysticism. In the process, taking the mystical/magical portions for the most part out of the equation. See details
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