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Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism

Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism

“A crucially vital work in the long history of Jewish esoteric spirituality. Aside from its intrinsic importance, the book’s influence has been enormous, and is likely to continue all but indefinitely.”–Harold Bloom, Yale University

“Major Trends [is] the canonical modern work on the nature and history of Jewish mysticism. For a sophisticated understanding, not only of the dynamics of Jewish mysticism, but of the exquisite complexities of Jewish history and tradition, Major Trends is a major port of entry through which one must pass.”–Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Another Five Star Appreciation
Murder in Moab It has been said that Judaism is a religion that became a people. If so, then God must be at the very center of the Jews’ psyche. Their history with G_d has been a tortuous journey and the orthographic G_d acknowledges that He is, finally, unknowable. Then, also, His ways, and His timing, must be inscrutable.

The First Temple was destroyed in the year 560 BCE; most of the Jews exiled to Babylonia and ten tribes disappeared. In the year 70 CE all but the west wall of the Second Temple was pulled down by the Romans and the Jews scattered to the winds, ethnographic remnants found in modern times as far away as South Africa and Burma. According to Jewish tradition G_d himself did these disasters, in anger at His chosen people for broken covenants.

How does one understand a god who is at once indescribable, one whose name you cannot even speak, but one who manifests Himself so disastrously in the lives of the Chosen? How does one dare approach the unapproachable? After all, only three humans, Adam, Eve, and Moses have, or ever will, stood or ever will stand in His presence. What could someone so small and insignificant as a Jewish philosopher named Ibn Gabirol in eleventh-century Spain hope for? How could he find a way to pierce the veil, to understand the unknowable?

The worst feeling in the world is of being lost. Even worse is that of being purposely abandoned. Imagine the terror of a child suddenly finding itself separated from its parents at a crowded mall. Many know the desperate pain of divorce or, worse, the death of a loved one. But only Jews have known the unimaginable divorce of themselves from G_d. And that twice.

Now we imagine reconciliation. Try to image a man, Gabirol or some other Jewish mystic, on a night meditation in eleventh-century Spain. There are some large beeswax candles throwing lemon-and-apricot colored light on his ritual phylacteries and shawl. The scent of orange blossoms waft through Moorish arched window to where he sits, rocking, his chin held tightly to his chest, tears flowing freely as he gulps spasmodically in a meditation practice already more than three thousand years old.

His conscious mind scatters with the pain of a longing for communion. He begins to fall, float, fly above the chaos, then falls into the center of it! This is his mind, his very psyche where he is whirling, is being tossed uncontrollably. It is the madness of a second intentional abandonment by G_d, one that has lasted seven hundred years. This is the horrifying psychic chaos Zim Zum.

Then, in this abstract world, down the rabbit hole, the sensitive soul sees spheres begin to coalesce into a pattern. Almost as the Creator began his world out of nothingness, ten aspects of G_d begin to reveal themselves as a tree: Malkuth, or its feminine equivalent Shekkina, is the trunk, then the canopy makes itself up of Yesod/foundation, Hod/majesty, Netsah//endurance, Rahamim/compassion, Gevurah or Din, Hesed/love and mercy, Binah/intelligence, Hokhmah/wisdom, Kether Elyon/the crown.

Kabbalah, and its diligent study with a master, can lead a student through a life journey that promises a psychic state in Jewish mysticism equivalent to the better-known Nirvana of the Hindus and the Enlightenment of the Buddhists.

That is the briefest outline of the Kabbalah. Now where do you go to get the real history and a text to study this mystic tradition of the Jews? Recognized by just about everyone since its publication in 1960 as the place to get a comprehensive view of the history of Kabbalah is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Read the other reviews here to get real, substantive, appreciations of the book. As for me, when I was researching a main character, a rabbi, for my novel Murder in Moab I needed material on the Jewish culture. This book proved invaluable for a comprehensive look into that fascinating world. You will also be mesmerized by this history, unhappily brief as it is.

5 Stars The Work of the Chariot and Dreams of Exile
Though some of its conclusions have been questioned or corrected by later scholars like Moshe Idel, this is still the best overall guide for the general reader. It began as a series of lectures, so the presentation is on the dry side, but the contents more than compensate.

It’s ironic that Gershom Scholem became famous as a scholar of mysticism, because he embodied old-fashioned Jewish suspicion of anything mystical, Romantic or high-flown. This points to the puzzle we face here: that Judaism, a religion of the practical and actual, emphasising the distance and disparity between God and man, should even have produced mysticism. Jews extracted their mysticism from the Torah and the Prophets as arduously as Marie Curie extracted radium from pitchblende.

This helps to explain the diversity and near-surrealist strangeness of Jewish mystical spirituality. Shiur Komah mystics visualised the Physical body of God: His arms so many billion miles long, and so on. Hekhaloth visionaries ascended to graduated Celestial Palaces (a practice St. Paul must have been familiar with.) Merkavah mystics concentrated on the vision of the Divine Throne/Chariot in Ezekiel Chapter 1, with its inconceivable Living Creatures and Wheels within Wheels.

The proto-Kabbalah of the Book “Bahir” with its clumsy dream-like myth-making. The full-blown Kabbalah of the vast, untellably strange “Zohar” or “Book of Splendour”, a whole universe reverently explored by generations of pious Jews. Then the new Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, with its (astonishingly) far from omnipotent God who bungles crucial stages of the process of Creation, and (still more astonishingly) needs Jews to help repair His gaffes.

Mystics were always a minority. Most literate Jews were preoccupied with Talmud, ever-more refined discussions of the Sacred Law governing practical conduct. But just as someone’s dreams may tell you more about them than they are prepared to admit out loud, this book is a window on the hidden life of Jews during their centuries of dispersal, expulsions and persecution.

You may be familiar with “magical” pseudo-Kabbalah, the Sephiroth and the Tree of Life torn up from their roots in Torah; or with New Age Kabbalah. Forget all that, read this book, step through the gateway into reality.

5 Stars Informative
Do you want to study and understand kabbalah in details? Are you trapped or met blinds in your studies into mysticism? Are you intrested to know who and who are the true author/authors of the great and renowned book in kabbalah The Zohar? You have met blinds in your kabbalah studies? Here is the one amongst other books that would shead light on your path to the true wisdom of the Ages. You would definately get more than your moneys worth.

5 Stars Still the finest scholar’s introduction to the Kabbalah
When reading Scholem I often feel like I am reading an old testament prophet; his writing and words seem to convey a great dignity and authority and power beyond their age.

Major Trends is basically a set of lectures Scholem gave on Jewish mysticism. Scholem was one of the first scholars to apply scientific methods of criticism to Jewish mystical texts and traditions and their sources, which had been neglected to a large extent in favour of the rational Jews like Moses Maimonides. The age of Reason had little time for religion, myth and mysticism and it was really only in the latter part of the 20th century people began to return to their mystical traditions.

Scholem made many important discoveries, including showing the author of the Zohar (which supposedly came from the 2nd century) was written by Moses de Leon, a 11th century Spanish Jew. Also in this collection are some valuable studies of the relationship between Kabbalah and Christian Gnosticism, and on Isaac Luria’s bizarre theosophic ideas, and of chariot mysticism which influenced early Christianity and many apocryphal biblical books such as the Books of Enoch.

Scholem’s study remains the most important 20th century study of Jewish mysticism.

5 Stars Excellent introduction to Kabbalah
Gershom Scholem was a pioneer in the academic study of Jewish mysticism. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is an excellent introduction to the kabbalah. The book covers the main historical movements and personalities. It explains the basic doctrines, rituals, and texts. The footnotes and referenced authors and texts become an excellent source of further study for both the academician and the spiritual seeker.

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