#117 Kabbalah on the Jewish Bookshelf

David Solomon examines the question: Which books of Kabbalah should a person have when building a Jewish library?

He also speaks for the first time publicly about completing the first-ever full English translation of the cornerstone kabbalistic text, Tiqqunei HaZohar.

David begins his presentation with a broad overview of the foundational texts required for a Jewish library, before narrowing his focus to which books of Jewish Mysticism should also be included. In doing so, he explores the background of each of the kabbalistic texts discussed, including their:

  • historical emergence
  • themes, and
  • importance within the corpus of Kabbalah.

In the final part of the talk, David discusses the background and details of his translation of Tiqqunei HaZohar.

He also provides several images which illustrate the historical development of Tiqqunei HaZohar, including sample pages from the forthcoming publication of his translation.

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#38 A History of Mystical Encounters (part 2)

A Podcast on Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah

It is not only in Tanach (Hebrew Bible) that we find moments of human encounters with the Divine. In this podcast episode, David explores mystical encounters of this kind as described in sacred Jewish texts from the Talmudic to Medieval periods. In addition to examining the nature of these Divine encounters, David also discusses a number of Jewish mystical practices and techniques emerging from these books.

Click here to see the extract from Sefer Yetzirah discussed in this episode.

Hebrew letters as described in the ”Sefer Yetzirah.” Created by PuckSmith on January 7, 2006 with LView Pro 1.D2, Firefox 1.5 and ACDSee 3.1. Public Domain.

 

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#28 Kabbalah ‘in one hour’

De-mystifing the mystical: in this podcast episode David Solomon explores the complex and profound field of Kabbalah to provide an overview of its texts and ideas, together with their historical background. David also explains exactly where popular Kabbalah comes from and provides the one thing that it is missing: context.
Image by Eliak: Version of the Tree of Life based on that which appears in the Bahir, but with the Sephiroth labelled with Latin letters, and showing both Keter and Da’ath (properly, only one would be shown, and the number of Sephiroth would therefore be ten). Public Domain.

 

 

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