More in ‘mysticism’

While some Jewish families see Halloween as a pagan holiday that should not be observed, the fact is, Jewish tradition is itself no stranger to the otherworldly, with its own history of golem-makers, sorcerers, and demon wranglers, and throughout the centuries Jews have been as afraid of evil spirits as anyone else.
As early as the ...

Long before the late Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector became a beloved literary figure there, she was Chaya, the third and last daughter born to a poor family in a Ukrainian shtetl. Her journey from Eastern Europe to South America and from indigent refugee child to celebrated, eccentric author—with a stint along the way as a ...

According to The Forward’s Michael Casper, one Rabbi Chaim Yosef Sharabi, scion of a family of Yemeni mystics, has set up shop at the back of an optician’s store in Borough Park, Brooklyn, where he tells fortunes and dispenses paper amulets for $180 a pop. Casper reports that the rabbi’s predictions aren’t very good—the reporter’s ...

For those who believe couplings can be bashert, it would seem that New York artist and illustrator Mark Podwal was predestined to depict Prague’s Jewish relics in his ethereal drawings and paintings. The city captivated him as a teenager growing up in Queens in the 1950s, from the moment he stumbled upon a photo of ...

I don’t know much about Kabbalah, the recently fashionable realm of Jewish mystical and esoteric thought. And what I do know, I don’t really understand.
I had a brief introduction to the subject in high school, when a chain-smoking Israeli expat who dabbled in amateur theater attempted to explain the Sefirot to my ninth grade ...

Dybbuks—disembodied spirits that inhabit the bodies of the living—have long been a part of Jewish history and myth. Like golems, these fantastical, folkloric creatures may seem foreign to contemporary Judaism, but their stories still capture our imaginations.
In the new book Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism, and Folklore, Rachel Elior examines how ...

The Brooklyn building where I live is populated mostly by big Yemeni Muslim families; on special occasions, celebratory ululating travels up the air shaft, and often you can hear the teenagers arguing with their parents in Arabic. But now and then I hear the chanting of prayers in Hebrew. When I moved in, my boyfriend, ...

Daniel Matt
In 1997, before Madonna and Monica Lewinsky started flaunting red string bracelets, Daniel Matt began work on the first complete English translation of the Zohar, an esoteric biblical commentary central to the kabbalah. Matt can hardly be accused of dabbling in Jewish mysticism; thanks to the patronage of philanthropist Margot Pritzker, he was able ...