Customer Reviews

Kabbalah: The Untold Story of the Mystic Tradition

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A very good book on Kabbalah. This is a must read for anyone wishing to learn about this very old and complicated subject. This is the place most should start their study as Kenneth Hanson does a great job of the history and beginings of Kabbalah.

Dr. Kenneth Hanson has put together a concise guide to the history and development of Kabbalah, beginning with it's roots in Merkabahism and ending with a look at modern-day Hasidism. I liked his simple, easy-to-follow style of each chapter being a follow-up to the previous in history. He really helps trace the development and dispersion of Kabbalah throughout the ages in a way that makes sense from both a historical and emotional perspective.

I found his chapter on relating Kabbalah to modern astrophysics a bit of a stretch - his relations between Turner's explanations of cosmological origins with passages from the Kabbalistic texts not always coinciding with each other. It reminded me a bit of Capra's "The Tao of Physics", where Capra attempts to show that the quantum-mechanical worldview supports the ideas of Eastern mysticism. The problem with such is often a case of throwing away Occam's Razor in favor of forming connections that are tenuous given the changeable nature of scientific inquiry and discovery. Identifying religious & spiritual thought with current scientific theories is a dangerous proposition, for if the theory changes all that is left is for the mystic to attempt to re-explain the experience and ignore the prior attempts.

Overall, I liked this book for it appears to be a much more simplified and reader-friendly version of Gershom Scholem's "Kabbalah". I recommend it for anyone who is interested in the history and development of Kabbalah, whether or not they choose to begin a Kabbalistic practice (which the author does not delve very deeply into, in case any readers wish to seek such). Unlike what the subtitle declares, there is not much in here that is "untold", though it is delineated into a more easily understood progression for the layperson and scholar alike.