The Work of the Kabbalist (Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi)
The Work of a Klueless Kabbalist
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Work of the Kabbalist” by Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi.]
Everybody makes mistakes, but unlike most spiritual teachers, I freely admit mine. In my first book, “Beyond the Power of Now,” I included “The Work of the Kabbalist” on my recommended Spiritual Reading List, but after rereading it, I realize that I made a mistake.
How did I make this mistake? When I first read “The Work of the Kabbalist” many years ago, I was just starting to study the Kabbalah, and lacked a basis for judging author Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi’s various Tree of Life Maps and Sephirot attributions; so I gave him a pass on his theosophical Kabbalah, and focused on just his mystical Kabbalah, which, properly, emphasizes receiving the Divine Radiance, and ultimately beholding oneself as the “Self of the Unlimited.”
However, even though Halevi pointed to the Goal (“Bhagavan beholding Bhagavan”), the “work of the kabbalist” he recommends—various imagination, meditation, and contemplation exercises—fails to point directly to the Divine. Nonetheless, I included his book on my Recommended (though not Highly Recommended) List simply because it was the best of an endlessly bad bunch of books on the Kabbalah (and the Qabalah), and I wanted at least one Kabbalah book on my Spiritual Reading List. Well, now there are none, because aside from Moshe Idel’s purely academic text “Kabbalah: New Perspectives,” I can’t find a good one.
Shortly before rereading “The Work of the Kabbalist,” I reread P.D. Ouspensky’s classic text “In search of the Miraculous,” which is about Gurdjieff’s teachings. It is obvious, from all sorts of indicators, that Halevi is very familiar with Gurdjieff’s teachings; and, like Gurdjieff, he describes the spiritual path as “the work,” and attempts to impress the ignorant with cosmology (kabbalistic in his case) that is, in a word, crap. Now, many years after first reading Halevi, I am an expert on the theosophical (as well as the mystical) Kabbalah, and, in my opinion, Halevi is clueless regarding the Tree of Life, and the “creative” attributions he superimposes on the Sephirot have no basis in reality. Two stars for this book (instead of one), just because Halevi properly identifies the goal of the mystical kabbalist: beholding the radiant Divine as one’s Self-nature.
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Work of the Kabbalist” by Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi.]
Everybody makes mistakes, but unlike most spiritual teachers, I freely admit mine. In my first book, “Beyond the Power of Now,” I included “The Work of the Kabbalist” on my recommended Spiritual Reading List, but after rereading it, I realize that I made a mistake.
How did I make this mistake? When I first read “The Work of the Kabbalist” many years ago, I was just starting to study the Kabbalah, and lacked a basis for judging author Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi’s various Tree of Life Maps and Sephirot attributions; so I gave him a pass on his theosophical Kabbalah, and focused on just his mystical Kabbalah, which, properly, emphasizes receiving the Divine Radiance, and ultimately beholding oneself as the “Self of the Unlimited.”
However, even though Halevi pointed to the Goal (“Bhagavan beholding Bhagavan”), the “work of the kabbalist” he recommends—various imagination, meditation, and contemplation exercises—fails to point directly to the Divine. Nonetheless, I included his book on my Recommended (though not Highly Recommended) List simply because it was the best of an endlessly bad bunch of books on the Kabbalah (and the Qabalah), and I wanted at least one Kabbalah book on my Spiritual Reading List. Well, now there are none, because aside from Moshe Idel’s purely academic text “Kabbalah: New Perspectives,” I can’t find a good one.
Shortly before rereading “The Work of the Kabbalist,” I reread P.D. Ouspensky’s classic text “In search of the Miraculous,” which is about Gurdjieff’s teachings. It is obvious, from all sorts of indicators, that Halevi is very familiar with Gurdjieff’s teachings; and, like Gurdjieff, he describes the spiritual path as “the work,” and attempts to impress the ignorant with cosmology (kabbalistic in his case) that is, in a word, crap. Now, many years after first reading Halevi, I am an expert on the theosophical (as well as the mystical) Kabbalah, and, in my opinion, Halevi is clueless regarding the Tree of Life, and the “creative” attributions he superimposes on the Sephirot have no basis in reality. Two stars for this book (instead of one), just because Halevi properly identifies the goal of the mystical kabbalist: beholding the radiant Divine as one’s Self-nature.
