Book Review: The Way of Kabbalah

Everyone is searching for something. Some pursue security, others pleasure or power. Yet others look for dreams, or they know not what. There are, however, those who know what they seek, but cannot find it in the natural world. For these searchers many clues have been laid by those who have gone before. The traces are everywhere, although only those with eyes to see or ears to hear perceive them. When the significance of these signs is seriously acted upon, Providence opens a door out of the natural into the supernatural to reveal a ladder from the transient to the Eternal. He who dares the ascent enters the Way of Kabbalah.

from the Way of Kabbalah
by z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi

You could call this book "timeless" in the sense that it was first published in 1976 and yet, presents in a manner totally accessible to the reader 35 years later. Halevi offers his audience a guided tour and an introductory lesson into the world of Kabbalah.

Structurally, the book is quite linear. It starts off with a basic introduction and definition of what Kabbalah is and what it means at it's core. It then proceeds to lead the reader through a series of chapters on personality and social theory. This part of the book reads like many of the texts I studied when I was in graduate school and pursuing my Masters degree in Counseling Psychology. There are a number of different theories or models of how a human personality is structured and Halevi offers yet one more as conceptualized by Kabbalah. This is important to understand because Kabbalah is the journey of taking a person as they enter into the discipline and, through the guidance of a maggid in a structured group, assists the person in achieving higher spiritual and mystic levels of functioning and awareness.

From understanding the individual personality, the book proceeds to describing the dynamics of a study group in Kabbalah. Beyond that, different but equally valid approaches to accessing the higher levels of existence and accessing God are described. The last chapter being simply "Ascension"; the ultimate goal of the mystic.

Most people seem to believe that Kabbalah is the Jewish Mystic tradition, but as I said in my review of Gershom Scholem's Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah is only one of those traditions, albeit, the most well-known.

Kabbalah uses a diagram model called the Sefirotic Tree of Life. This isn't really a static diagram because a number of different concepts can be illustrated using the basic tree structure including the seven levels of heaven, the seven levels of teaching, and interestingly enough, the seven deadly sins (and as you can see, Kabbalah isn't afraid of borrowing from other traditions and religious conceptualizations).

When I was asked to read this book, I was expecting a fully Jewish treatment of the topic, since Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical discipline, but the author makes good use of Christian symbols, including that of Jesus, in expressing different ideas. Halevi refers to Jesus as "Joshua ben Miriam" the "Maggid of Nazeret" as a great Kabbalist in his own right and offers up a number of his teachings from the Gospels as Kabbalistic in nature, this despite the fact that Kabbalah is thought to have originated in 13th century Spain. I don't criticize the author for this, since most Jewish mystic forms can trace at least some of their history back to earlier eras and practices and Halevi isn't the only one to state that the Gospels read like Jewish mystic writings.

The caveat to my last paragraph is that the author also compares Jesus and Buddha as equals and at once recognizes Jesus as a renowned maggid or religious teacher while denying he is the Messiah. Given that Halevi is rather liberal in quoting from the Christian Bible and attributing the quotes to a "maggid", I wonder if, as a Jew, he is really that generous with his praise toward the "Christian Messiah" or if he is casting his net, so to speak, to catch the largest number of "fish" (readers and potential neophyte Kabbalists, in this case)? There's no way for me to tell if inclusion of "Joshua ben Miriam" in Kabbalistic teachings is common or unique to this author, at least not without reading other Kabbalah related books or sources, so don't draw too much from the appearance of Jesus here.

If I had to pick a textbook for a course called "Introduction to Kabbalah", I might consider Halevi's book. The chapters are short, the book is short (only 216 pages), and the content, which could easily be extremely complex, is fairly easy to take in. I'm not enthralled with the book, although by reading other reviews, I can see others are, but it did give me a concise introduction into "the way of Kabbalah." If you're looking for a similar introduction, Halevi's book is can give you that.

Remember though, this is only an introduction. Actual techniques and practices, while mentioned, are not described in detail. The book recommends group study of Kabbalah under a qualified maggid. This is not a guidebook for a "do-it-yourself" mystic journey to discover the higher realms.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne)
The Matrix (1999)