Customer Reviews

Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America (Religion, Health, and Healing)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The only scholarly study of the Kabbalah Centre, Jody Myers's superb monograph is a fair and detailed analysis of this growing spiritual phenomenon. Myers hasn't written a hit piece of a flattering bit of puffery; she's even-handed and fair, with an ultimately positive attitude towards the controversial Centre. Those who only know Kabbalah because of Madonna would do well to read this book.

I have been following the Kabbalah center for a number of years (it's close to my home), with a great degree of scepticism and not a little dislike. Dr. Myers' review forced me to reconsider my approach. While the book is clearly academic, it is also approachable. I recommend it highly for anyone interested in furthering their understanding of this new trend.

I'm not sure what book the previous reviewers were reading, but Myers is anything but sympathetic to the Kabbalah Centre. It's true that this isn't a "hit piece" and strives for (and achieves) a necessary scholarly neutrality. Myers is non-judgmental and employs the phrasing of a "new religious movement" for what most everyone else in the world calls a cult. Which is appropriate: Myers is a professor of religious studies and has approached her subject the way a neutral researcher ought to, suspending value judgements and reporting the facts.

But the facts are devastating. Myers very clearly sets out how the Centre started with door-to-door selling of copies of the Zohar commentaries and other home-brewed works of "kabbalah" and grew into a multinational juggernaut that takes no prisoners. Her stories, carefully sourced and documented, of Centre acolytes living in the group house and working round the clock on Centre business without pay is disturbing, all the more disturbing to hear that there are financial bonuses for recruiting new members. It's obvious that the Centre is far closer to a multilevel marketing enterprise than a house of worship.

This is a book not to be missed by anyone who fancies themselves literate in contemporary American Judaism. The Kabbalah Centre is by far the most important development of the 20th Century in American Jewish life and this is the first and only book to give it the careful appraisal that it deserves. Myers places the Centre in the context of Baby Boomer spirituality and also gives accurate backgrounding for the real kabbalah from which the Centre purports to derive.

This is an excellent, well done, thoroughly researched look inside the Kabbalah Centre. Jody Myers does an excellent job of examining the roots of the movement, its founder, its current manifestation, its followers and where the movement is headed.

I actually have to agree with some of the other reviewers in that I believe this book shows the Kabbalah Centre in a more positive light than most people would like to accept. Myers research shows the genuine Kabbalistic roots behind many of the more controversial trademarks of the Centre such as the red string, the water, and allowing of non-jews to study Kabbalah. While the material and approach is obviously and necessarily neutral and of a scholarly nature, Myers book shows that the Kabbalah Centre is not the money hungry cult most wish to write it off as.

An excellent read overall.