Reddit reviews The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism

You probably saw the Pritzker edition of the Zohar. It’s a multi-volume text translated by Daniel C. Matt. Matt is a well respected scholar of Jewish mysticism. The text isn’t really for beginners. It’s a critical edition of the Zohar for more academic study.

However, Matt has published some small collections of passages from the Zohar which he thinks can be understood by beginners and are of interest. Here is Matt’s book The Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment. Matt has also published some selections from the Zohar along with some annotation, which can be found here. For a general introduction to Kabbalah, I’d recommend Matt’s text The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism which can be found here. The Essential Kabbalah is a collection of different passages from a variety of Kabbalistic texts which Matt has selected in order to explain some different concepts in Kabbalah. Thus by reading The Essential Kabbalah you are able to learn about Kabbalah from the primary sources themselves. All of these books are, of course, beautifully and engagingly translated by Matt himself. Feel free to start with those books.

> Russian Jew raised secular want to learn about my people but not be
> indoctrinated.

This pretty much won’t happen no matter what you read. Judaism has been a non-proselytising religion for getting on to 2,000 years now.

Among the Orthodox, the standing rule is to turn those looking to convert away at least three times before you even begin to start talking about the process and whether it’s something they should undertake.

Among the Conservative and Reform and Reconstructionist, things aren’t quite so daunting, but the basic underlying theology — that one’s relationship with divinity (assuming there is one: Reconstructionists are atheists, for example) is not dependent in any fashion on whether you are an MoT or not — still informs the process. Conversion is, of course, possible, but it’s not considered necessary in any sense.

Even in Judaism’s ancient sort-of-proselytising days it was mostly a ‘give it a try, you might like it’ kind of sales pitch.

> Book recommendations?

Oi, where to start?

Jews aren’t called ‘the people of the book’ for nothing. We’ve been writing everything down for thousands of years. So there’s a lot of history to explore and there are literally thousands of histories out there to read.

The list below is not in a particular order. And it is idiosyncratically chosen. It is, quite literally, a list of what I can see on my shelves from where I’m currently working that immediately makes me think ‘oh, yeah, that’s got something for the new reader’.

The story of the Jews: finding the words (1000 BCE – 1492 CE)
Simon Schama, 2014.

The story of the Jews: when words fail (1492 – present day)
Simon Schama, 2015.

The Talmud — a biography: banned, censored and burned. The book they couldn’t suppress
Harry Freedman, 2014.

Pirkei Avot (the sayings of the fathers): a modern commentary on Jewish ethics
Leonard Kravitz & Kerry Olitzky (eds), 1993.

The essential Kabbalah: the heart of Jewish mysticism
Daniel C Matt, 2009.

Engendering Judaism: an inclusive theology and ethics
Rachel Adler, 1999.

Hillel: if not now, when
Joseph Telushkin, 2010.

The new joys of Yiddish
Leo Rosten, 2003.

Other lists to meander through:

A best world Jewish history books list on GoodReads.

The top 100 Jewish books according to Rabbi Miriam Spitzer.

The 18 essential texts every Jew should read as put together for Huffington Post back in 2011 (and chosen by people who are relatively eclectic but entirely American).

Hope this is at least diverting, if not helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Kabbalah-Heart-Jewish-Mysticism/dp/0062511637/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

That for starters

Well, for mahayana the book I have is this one. However, I don't remember how good it is. What I did for buddhism was simply go through various online resources. The reason being that western misconceptions about the connotations of buddhism are so deep that the only way to balance them out is by reading a lot of different sources, and trying to ignore the obviously interpretive parts. The main misconceptions revolve around ignoring or hand-waving that the Buddha post enlightenment was seen as divine, and that this and the system in general were meant to be very literal.

> I also wanted to ask, do you know of any theistic views that are different to classical and personalist theism that you consider intelligible and consistent?

Well, if you want a book on tillich, this one is good.

You already know about process theism, but I can give you some good reads. The iep page for whitehead is a good place to get the basics down. The important ting to note about process theists is that some of them hold to some of the general points, but not others. And so its a good general basis to explore a general idea that can be taken in different ways. For instance, whitehead's specific ontology of events is obviously a little more specific than someone today would be likely to profess. But the general format of the system is still top of the line. I would also say to read this book written by the first big process theist after whithead who turned it into a distinctly theological project instead of just a philosophical system.

Note that (well, obviously after you'll read them you can note that) the idea of a social conception of god is compatible also with tillich. Both tillich and some of the process theists explore the idea that the living aspects of god should be seen as a collective / social organism by nature of the summation of all the values of individual entities relating together through the absolute. Another way they tie them together is that john b cobb who you mention points out that the process theological concept of "creativity" parallels closely tillich's concept of the power of being. Process theism has a bit more metaphysics than tillich's minimalistic form, but they are very compatible ideas.

Another important person to look into is Carl Jung (yes, the psychologist carl jung). Because interestingly for his profession he actually provides a pretty substantial idea of a pantheist system. Which in short has to do with the idea that gods have a kind of quasi existence since they exist as abstract archetypes in the world at large, and are given form by human consciousness. But that once you properly frame into context what human consciousness even is you begin to see why that despite them being psychological images that they are also real. (its not easy to describe how, but basically it has to do with the fact that people aren't discrete, and the images are images of things external to the mind to begin with, so the mediated form exists as a submind encoded across multiple beings, and the world at large). Its a bit hard to get how it work until you intuitively grasp it, and it helps to know some relevant philosophy of mind that would make it seem more real. But a good book for seeing jung in a religious light is this one. It starts off a little slow, but in the middle it has a metaphorical religious text written by jung itself, and then it picks up in analysis of his real beliefs from it. As a psychologist he talked about the collective uconscious as a human psychological phenomenon, but it seems he really thought it was a kind of world soul relation between entities and the world itself.

Now, I must admit that tillich, the process theists, and jung are the three best modern things to look into. But there's a few more notable things to look at.

this book by the physicist schrodinger is about an idea called open individualism, which is basically a modern secularization of the hindu idea of brahman. He points out at the beginning that he is not a philosopher himself, but merely expressing the idea in an easy to read way. (Which is fortunate, since the actual philosophy textbook I want on the idea is $110). The gist of the idea is that there are no actual metaphysical borders between people, and so all people are abstractions of a super-identity that you can identify with god.

this book by fechner is a quasi religious book that argues for a secular reason to think life exists in a sense after death. The book is 150 years old, so it might have parts that seem overly idealistic, but the general idea and its arguments are something that's relevant even today. There's pantheistic elements in it too, but they are sidelined.

The kyoto school in japan blends modern metaphysics, zen metaphysics, and pantheism into a modern system. I haven't read anything from it, but hear that this anthology is good.

Here is a well-rated anthology of panentheistic writings from many authors in general. Including many I haven't read. You can look into it to see if any of them look like interesting areas of interest to branch off into.

Also, of course there's any number of old traditions one could look into even if one doesn't consider them totally literal to frame into context ways of looking at things that could carry over to a more transtheistic system. Kabbalah and stoicism are good places to look. here Is a book written by a psychologist and stoicism scholar that details their beliefs and how to engage in the practice in modern day. (Though obviously one can disagree with the virtue ethic framework). And here is one of the best kabbalah books. Obviously kabbalah is way too specific for me to consider literal, but it does have beautiful work and ways of looking at things to frame religious experience into context.

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For a few closing remarks, I'd point out to remember that these ideas are not necessarily all competing. Many of them (perhaps all at once depending on how strict you are) are compatible. You'll probably also notice that they all have similar tones of panentheism. That's because that's my general area of interest. The reason for this being that ultimately I think tillich is correct. There may be sentient godlike distinct beings out there, but we need to make religious experience revolve around things we have more of a definite concrete justification for. And the values of the religious experience pervade our world anyways, and so we don't need to rely on the literal existence of these independently sentient beings. Via jungian ideals we can even abstract the idea of gods to positive useful archetypes, and if they exist as concrete instantiations as well, all the better. If you ask me, the universe is likely tremendous in size. Bigger than we can even dream. There's probably more complex segments of it somewhere that very much have tangible sentient entities we would consider godlike. But there doesn't seem to be evidence of them interacting directly with us. So like epicurus says, belief in gods isn't an excuse for belief in superstition. They exist "elsewhere." Its better to focus on the transtheistic absolute.

Talmud is a lot less interesting than Kabbalah though. It's mostly laws and the Rabbi's reasoning for how best to carry out those Jewish laws and why that is. Also reading it can get confusing because there are A TON of rants throughout conversations because one thing leads to another before they finally come back full circle to finish what they were talking about. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting but just very different from Kaballah.

The only thing is the Jewish mysticism isn't that accessible. If you could find a good, accessible book on it though then you'd be golden.

Maybe start your research here and see what else comes up through your exploring. Also obviously look into The Zohar - the number one book on Jewish mysticism.