12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Need for Any Serious Zohar Student!, March 15, 2010
This review is from: A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Hardcover)
The initial reviewer was very succinct in describing this book, so I'll just state that I like this book so much I feel it is a necessary new tool for your studies of the Zohar. As well, surprisingly, for what seems to be another entry in the slowly expanding bookshelf of academic works on the kabbalah, its personages, ideas and canon, this book is a very entertaining read, even with what is obviously a primarily academic endeavor.
This might sound puerile and sentimentalist, but I sense the author's love for her subject and feel her joy in brightening up some of the dullness a reader encounters in the kabbalah's foundational work.
To me there are now 3 basic books in English for the serious student who attempts to receive fruits from the magnum opus of the kabbalistic canon: they are Arthur Green's
A Guide to the Zohar, Pinchas Giller's
Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah, and now this recently published work of Melila Hellner-Eshed. {Please note, this references the English translation of her Hebrew original, which I have not seen of this date.}
It is a rarity for me to go almost non-stop reading a newly acquired book whose primary subject is a sole kabbalistic work. More often than not they are as dense, convoluted and intense, sentence-structure-wise, as the subject to which they intend clarification. To me, this book was very easy to read, and before I knew it I finished it, coming away with a clearer sense of the Zohar's dramatis personae, as well as receiving a refreshed and clearer sense of some very important concepts therein.
I'm on my third reading of Hellner-Eshed's book (I received it barely a week ago), taking it with me as I walk along the paths of the Zohar, and, like watching a favorite movie a few times, each time I find another fruit or nugget I never noticed. It is my guide book now for the garden which is the Zohar.
If there's just one book you could get to guide you along the journey of R. Shimon bar Yochai & his "Companions" you would do well to acquire this one. It gives flesh to the characters and unmuddles the personalities one meets in their Zohar reading, in the same manner one is afforded understanding Isaac Luria and his contemporary followers in Lawrence Fine's brilliant "
Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C)".
Another plus is the book's 'feel': everything from the quality of the paper, the font, the boards for the binding and the terrific illustration of the dust-cover all combine to give the process of reading this wonderful work sweet pleasure for this reader. It is a splendid production, in my opinion.
NB: I am not a very good, nor busy, reviewer but I liked this book so much I just had to come on to trumpet its praises.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptionally lucid account of the Zohar, January 27, 2010
This review is from: A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Hardcover)
The author provides a useful precis of the book in the Introduction:
Excerpt: When I was twenty years old I received as a gift, in honor of my forthcoming overseas trip, a copy of Gershom Scholem's Zohar, The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah. Sitting in distant Norway, I read in English a passage from the Zohar's opening to Genesis. I did not even know then in what language the Zohar had been composed. All I knew was that I wanted more. Since then--and now for many years, both within the gates of the Hebrew University and without--I have been blessed with the opportunity to study the Zohar with wonderful teachers and students alike. Like many other readers across the generations, I too have been seduced by the charm of this book. Indeed, as the years go by, I have become more and more at-tuned to the music of the wondrous world that emerges from its pages.
The Zohar is the jewel in the crown of Jewish mystical literature. It is unparalleled in terms of its acceptance, sanctity, and influence on the consciousness of generations of Jews--and all this despite its apparently sudden appearance toward the end of the thirteenth century. Its mysterious style, and the unique mystical-religious dimension it offered Jewish life, quickly captured the hearts and minds of its readers. The mythical-erotic creativity that burst forth from its pages turned the Zohar into a world unto itself. Its surprising interpretations of biblical verses resonated in the souls of many, along with its deep insights into the human psyche--in both joy and grief.
Yet perhaps above all else, it was the worldview of the Zohar--through its establishing a reciprocal relationship between the world of humanity and the world of divinity--that left an indelible impression on the hearts of its readers. In this ever-changing, constantly evolving relationship, the divine flow seeks to be revealed and to saturate the world of humanity; and humanity, for its part, seeks to attain, to take part in, and to cleave to the divine world. Indeed, the Zohar created a view of reality that bestows upon humanity the ability and the responsibility to rectify, constitute, and beautify over and over again the figure of the Godhead--and in so doing, itself and the world.
The Zohar invites the reader on a journey through diverse secret worlds, a complicated game of hide-and-seek--pleasurable to be sure, yet requiring from the reader great effort to reveal its moves. Indeed, this invitation accounts in no small part for the Zohar's charm.The hero of the composition--Rabbi Shim'on barYohai--became, both in the consciousness of the Zohar's readers and in Jewish popular consciousness, a mythological figure. His image as the great teacher, the mysterious man of God who reveals the light of secrets to the world, has served as a source of inspiration for creative minds, and for lovers of Torah and God alike.
The Structure of This Book
This book seeks to understand the special mystical dimension of the Zohar. Mysticism is a general term used for phenomena found in all the world's religions (and indeed outside of them). It refers to the human endeavor to develop ways of life and special practices in order to make present in one's life the unmediated experience of the holy or of God. In mystical documents from different religions, we encounter the conscious effort to experience dimensions of reality unattainable through the ordinary states of consciousness in everyday life. These modes, and the experiences that accompany them, are not usually the norm in the religious culture to which the mystic belongs. Jews who live according to the norms of their religion--like Moslems, Christians, or Hindus--are not obligated by this more intensive form of religious life; the decision to adopt this life has been the heritage of individuals alone. In the Jewish tradition, this trend is known as the "secret way," the "way of truth," and it is hidden under the shroud of mystery. Yet Jewish literature has bequeathed us testimonies, from the Bible to our own day, about special people who in their lives fulfilled the desire for a special intimacy with the divine, and who left us accounts of their experiences.
The Zohar is not a theoretical book about the essence of Jewish mysticism. Rather, the Zohar is a mystical composition, parts of which were surely written in heightened states of consciousness, and parts of which seek, to my mind, to awaken the reader to a change in consciousness. The Zohar does not present us with a systematic presentation of mystical consciousness and mystical language. No invisible hand appears to guide the reader systematically through the chambers of divine wisdom. Nor can a teacher direct the new reader to a particular page of the zoharic text so as to learn "the mystical teaching of the Zohar." The mystical aspect of the Zohar is made manifest among a collection of literary forms and expressions. It shines among them. In order to enter gently into the zoharic world--un-paralleled in its richness and complexity--this book is divided into four parts, each of which endeavors to answer one of the following questions:
Who are the heroes of the Zohar?What do they do?Why do they do it?What is the nature of their mystical experience?Part I presents the world of the heroes of the Zohar--the great teacher Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai and the circle of students around him. Together they are known as the Companions--in Aramaic, Hevraya. These chapters explore the way in which the Zohar depicts them, and also the way that they understand themselves as figures who together constitute the ideal mystical society.
Part II describes the life of the Companions and explores their distinctive lifestyle. Here we encounter the fact that in the Zohar the mystical dimension transpires and is experienced in the context of a group--not of a lone individual. We also analyze the Companions' two main spiritual practices: walking together on their way, with the special scriptural exegesis that accompanies such travels; and also the creative Torah study undertaken from midnight to dawn. Additionally, we explore the meaning of the appearance of wondrous characters as a means of generating mystical experience, and the collective journey of the entire mystical circle into different dimensions of reality and consciousness.
These first two parts, taken together, familiarize us with the heroes of the Zohar and with their unique life-style and practices. Only then will it be possible to turn to the major questions that this work seeks to explore.
Part III deals with the heart of the zoharic enterprise and with its essential aims. Three main issues are discussed here:
1. The "secret" and its diverse meanings in the zoharic world. Here we explore the structure of the zoharic homily that grants access to the "secret" dimension, and the nature of creativity from within this dimension.
2. Awakening and arousal. The greatest wish of the Zohar is to awaken the sleeping consciousness of humanity, and to arouse it to a more expansive and divine perception of reality. Such awakening in the Zohar is presented in various terms: as erotic arousal, as a longing to know the divine reality and to take part in (and to influence) this reality, and as the founding logic of the interrelationship between the human and divine worlds. Here we describe the means employed by the Zohar, both implicit and explicit, to call the reader to awaken.
3. The zoharic understanding and interpretation of one biblical verse, "A river flows from Eden to water the Garden . . ." (Genesis 2:10). This verse, I suggest, is a zoharic code, encapsulating a conception of the dynamic structure of divinity and consciousness. The purpose of this code is to signify to the reader how to awaken the special consciousness that the Zohar seeks to generate.
Part IV focuses on mystical experience itself and the language of its expression in the Zohar. Here I offer a detailed exposition of the language of mystical experience, the emotional and physical phenomena accompanying such experiences, as well as powerful testimonies of these extraordinary events. I discuss the main forms, metaphors, and symbols employed by the Zohar to describe mystical experience, the sources of this descriptive language, and their place and function within this experience. This analysis focuses on the expression of the experience as well as a discussion of its essence, out of the assumption that language and experience influence each other in a dynamic way.'
This part builds to a climax: a model of the three main states of consciousness that underwrite zoharic mysticism and language, and that consttute the building blocks for the Zohar's experiential world.
I conclude the book with two chapters on related themes. One chapter explores the (im)possibility of expressing in language a personal encounter with aspects of divinity. The last chapter engages the zoharic dialectics around the question of writing, and on the constraints when moving from an oral world of mysteries into writing.
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