San Antonio College Library

Introduces the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, examines its history, explains some of its teachings, and offers instruction in meditative, mystical, magical, and devotional practices.

Considers the Jewish mystical doctrine of the Kabbalah, and also the perennial and universal aspects at the very heart of Judaism itself. This title reveals that beyond their outer forms, religions draw from one great mysterious Source.

"In the late 19th century, a brilliant mathematician languished in an asylum. His greatest accomplishment, the result of a series of leaps of insight, was his pioneering understanding of the nature of infinity. This is the story of Georg Cantor: how he came to his theories and the reverberations of his work, the consequences of which shape our world." "Cantor's theory of the infinite is famous for its many seeming contradictions: for example, we can...

One of the most important scholars of our century, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) opened up a once esoteric world of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, to concerned students of religion. The Kabbalah is a rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God: its twelfth-and thirteenth-century beginnings in southern France and Spain are probed in Origins of the Kabbalah, a work crucial in Scholem's oeuvre. The book is a contribution...

"In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism." "The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine...

"Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Though he lived only briefly in the Galilean city of Safed, his name became synonymous with the great renaissance of mystical community that took place there in the sixteenth century. Luria's powerful religious imagination and personal charisma...