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Gabriel's Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales

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Howard Schwartz is an extremely prolific story teller, both for children and adults. Gabriel's Palace: Jewish Mystical Folktales is a very good collection of stories involving Jewish mysticism. Many of them are suspenseful and leave you thinking about the true meaning and implications. It is also interesting to compare some of the stories with non Jewish folk tales. I found a number of the stories somewhat dark, but not terrifying. It is interesting to try to determine what reality led to the initial establishment of such ledgends.

"A vast bounty of tales recounting mystical experiences among the rabbis can be found in the Talmud, the Zohar, Jewish folk tales, and Hasidic lore. ... , sacred and secular, in a marvelously readable anthology. Drawn from rabbinic, cabalistic, folk, and Hasidic sources, these collected tales form a rich genre all their own. In Gabriel's Palace, the powerful tradition of Jewish mysticism comes to life in clear, contemporary English."


Jewish Mystical Tales:
In his informative introduction, Schwarts gives a compelling overview of history, psychology, and the symbolic meaning of allegorical Jewish tales recounting the mystical experience of key figures in those circles. He starts with comparing them to tales about Zen and Sufi masters, and Christian Mystics, and delves in the next paragraph into Jewish mystical tales, starting with a famous tale of the sages who upon entering paradise, one lost his life, another his mind, the third his faith, a warning about the dangers of mystical contemplation. Like fairy tales, fables, and parables found in every phase of Jewish literature, and the teaching of Yeshua of Nazareth, which emanated revealing the Jewish hope of the coming of the Kingdom.
The author takes you in a tour of the mystical worlds which started with the early Kabbalists who developed mystical consciousness in Judaism. Moshe de Leon's Zohar became the central text of Jewish mysticism in the thirteenth century when Kabbalistic tradition was established. And, in spite of the numerous anecdotes about talmudic sage Rashbi, or Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, who lived in the second century was not the author of Zohar, still his model together with Rabbi Issac Luria, Schwartz' favorite, with Baal Shem Tov, and those who follow their path are formed by tales drawn from their impressive legends.

Gabriel's Clusters of Mystics Tales:
The body of the text presents spell binding tales from the Talmud, Zohar, the Hasidic masters, and an enormous range of other sources. Starting with stories of Shimon bar Yohai, alleged author of the Zohar; Isaac Luria, known as the Ari, a central figure among the Safed mystics (16th century); Israel ben Eliezer, or Baal Shem Tov, who founded Hasidism; made famous by Martin Buber, Elimelech of Lizensk, the mystical powers; and Nachman of Bratslav, the avid storyteller with a wandering protective spirit. Drawn from rabbinic, kabbalistic, folk, and Hasidic sources. These tales paint a vivid virtual picture of "a world of signs and symbols," where everything taking place had internal meaning, of Philonic allegory, "A world in which the spirits of the dead were no longer invisible, nor the angels,..." where the labor to repair the world for the Jewish Messianic hope, in John the Baptist's own words, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord."

Sacred Narratives:
Our descriptive language should be altered, writes John C. Reeves in the Society of Biblical Literature, "we should perhaps speak of 'biblically allied,' biblically affiliated,' or 'biblically related' literatures. As we enter the twenty-first century, biblical scholars are in the process of gauging the significance and assessing the implications of a vast treasure-hoard of primary texts which shed a penetrating light on the very centuries surrounding the emergence and production of what eventually becomes the canonical form of the Hebrew Bible. The evidence supplied from such diverse resources as the Cairo Geniza, the Nag Hammadi corpus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls has stimulated a number of intriguing questions regarding the possible relationships of one text or group of texts to another, both within and across religious boundaries. Is a proto-gnostic ideology visible at Qumran? Do the Scrolls attest Christian concepts in nascent form? Can one speak intelligibly of a Jewish Sufism in Fatimid Egypt? And just who copied, studied, and eventually deposited documents like the Qumran Damascus Covenant or the Aramaic Levi apocryphon in a medieval synagogal rubbish heap over one thousand years after the time period of their original composition?"

A Unique Narrator for a Treasury:
This vast treasury of Jewish folktales, recounting mystical experiences selected by Schwartz, a foremost Jewish anthologist has collected a vast treasury of clusters of sacred and secular fables, Rabbinic, Kabbalistic, Hasidic tales, and mythical folklore, in his mystical tour de force. Gabriel's Palace, a marvelously engaging anthology, presents amazing experiences involving encounters with angels and demons, out-of-body travel, possession by holy and demonic spirits, even of union with the divine, selected from the Talmud, the Zohar, and Hasidic lore. Howard Schwartz, the contemporary mystical troubadour, is Professor of English Literature at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, author of collections of Jewish folklore that include Elijah's Violin & Other Jewish Fairy Tales , Miriam's Tambourine: Jewish Folktales from Around the World, and Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural. He has also edited other modern Jewish anthologies. "We narrate unto thee the best of narratives" (Qur'an, sura 12:3).