That’s why Leeches, the newly translated novel by David Albahari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), reads at first like a kind of throwback. First published in Serbia in 2006, the book is fully stocked with Jewish mystical props: not just the golem and the 10 Sefirot, but portals into higher dimensions, ancient manuscripts that rewrite themselves, cosmic sexual rites, souls that are reincarnated in every generation, and so on. Yet at the same time, Albahari—a Serbian Jewish writer who now lives in Belgrade, and the author of the acclaimed Holocaust novel Götz and Meyer—allows his text to be haunted by more interesting and unusual ghosts.

Most obviously, Leeches is dominated by the specters of the Holocaust and of resurgent anti-Semitism. The novel’s narrator—we never learn his name—is a columnist for a Belgrade newspaper, Minut, and as he befriends a few members of the city’s Jewish community, he becomes increasingly aware of the threat posed to Jews by Serbian nationalism. “This is one big pile of nonsense … and there is no point in paying attention to it,” he declares after reading a pamphlet about “the Aryan origins of the Serbian people and the need to preserve their racial purity.” But his Jewish acquaintances aren’t so sure: “We paid no attention to another pile of nonsense, said Jakov Svarc, and look where it got us.”

As another Jewish character points out, however, “The same thing would have happened … even if we had paid all the attention in the world”; and the more the narrator denounces anti-Semitism in his newspaper column, the more vicious and violent the response becomes. A Jewish cemetery is defaced, an art exhibition vandalized; graffiti is scrawled on the narrator’s front door, feces left on his doorstep. Finally, the threats become murderous: “We will impale you, and display you on Terazije so that everyone can see how our enemies fare.”

This constant drumbeat of violence is only one of the sources of the novel’s rising tension. The other, more mysterious unease comes from the narrator’s growing conviction that he has stumbled into a bizarre and intricate conspiracy. Leeches opens with a scene reminiscent of Blow-Up or The Conversation, those classic movies of voyeurism and paranoia: The narrator is walking by the banks of the Danube, eating an apple, when he notices a man and a woman having an argument. Suddenly, the man slaps the woman in the face and then turns and runs off.

The narrator, his interest drawn, finds himself following the woman through the streets: “I wasn’t thinking at all, I didn’t pause to wonder what I was up to, I didn’t say to myself that I should follow her, I simply put one foot in front of the other, and followed her.” He loses track of her in the maze of streets, but as he continues to search, something even odder happens. He picks up a button lying on the sidewalk and finds that underneath it someone has drawn a symbol, a circle containing two triangles. Nothing he has seen is inherently unusual—a fight between strangers, a bit of graffiti—yet he is convinced that there is more at work than meets the eye. “The longer I chewed on this, the more convinced I became that the explanation for the events on the quay and the woman’s disappearance lay in these mathematical relationships, and that if I were to penetrate their secret, they would lead me straight to her door.”

At first, the reader is not sure whether Albahari wants us to trust the narrator’s paranoid theories. In a nice touch, he makes clear that the narrator is a dedicated stoner—he is constantly smoking joints with his friend Marko—and marijuana is not known for promoting clear thinking. But then the narrator starts to see the mysterious symbol everywhere, and it seems there must really be a conspiracy at work in Belgrade. (Here Albahari’s allusion is to Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, where a certain graffiti symbol reveals the existence of the Tristero, an underground postal service.)

Albahari weaves the magic net of the conspiracy tighter and tighter. The narrator is convinced that an anonymous classified ad in the newspaper is addressed to him; when he replies to it, he is given a copy of a manuscript titled “The Well,” which seems to be a history of Belgrade’s Jewish community. But each time he opens it, the text seems different, and he keeps finding passages that describe a mystical figure named Eleazar, who seems to reappear in Belgrade throughout the centuries. The woman from the riverbank turns up again; it turns out that she is Jewish—and has a connection with the manuscript. The narrator turns to an old high-school friend, now a mathematician, for help decoding the symbol, and he too seems to be in on the plot. Even his best friend Marko starts to give him a bad feeling.

“All I want … is to understand what’s going on,” the narrator says. But it is easy to grow impatient with Leeches’ woozy, over-plotted mystery. No matter how it is eventually explained—and Albahari does explain it, sort of—it has all clearly been arranged, as in a book by Umberto Eco or Dan Brown, to give the reader a conspiratorial frisson. Juxtaposed with the real danger of anti-Semitism, the kabbalistic game seems rather indulgent.

Much more interesting are Albahari’s occasional attempts to link the Serbian predicament with the Jewish one, in provocative ways. At one point, Albahari seems to suggest that the international odium inspired by Serbia’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo led the Serbs to become a pariah people, a scapegoat, like the Jews in Christian Europe: “The horror of identity is that it can’t be sloughed off the way a snake sheds its skin, and there is no dungeon worse than an identity that one doubts or that others have proclaimed to be bad or evil. I experienced this myself many times in the years of ethnic strife, facing the prejudices about Serbian identity, and I could only assume how that must have seemed from the perspective of being Jewish or of an identity that had permanently been branded as negative.”

It’s not entirely clear how Albahari means this to be read, but it sounds like a damning statement of Serbian self-pity. If the world had a negative view of Serbia during the 1990s, it was not because of “prejudice,” but because of the Serb concentration camps that murdered thousands of people. The ambiguities in Albahari’s understanding of his Serb and Jewish identities are deeper, and more interesting, than any of the carefully contrived mysteries in Leeches.

As early as the Roman period, Jews used amulets as a best defense against evils—both real and supernatural—that lurked outside their doors, a practice that continued into the late 17th and 18th century. The amulets could be made on flattened bits of metal inscribed with the names of angels or on small, encased scrolls, much like the mezuzah. But there were other kinds of magic as well. Medieval Jews called out God’s name and those of His angels to smite enemies and to gain affections. In addition, Jews of all ages practiced astrology and looked for omens in the form of animals. Since traditional liturgy made little room for personal prayers, these extra-liturgical means helped people combat what they saw as constant threats.

It was the Jews of the Middle Ages, however, who helped to create a more systematic approach to magic. Mystical writings have always detailed the strange and mysterious levels of heaven, but it was Jewish magicians who provided the correct formulas and rituals needed to pass through the gates. They had to make magic seals (small tokens engraved with Hebrew names), which forced the angel or demon on guard to flee, belying the essential belief that Hebrew letters are filled with divine energy that can be manipulated for various ends, from conjuring demons to making golems. This form of Jewish magical practice, along with mystical and kabbalistic texts, was to be a major influence on later non-Jewish occult practitioners. And this is a phenomenon that really took root during the Renaissance.

What we typically refer to as Western occultism—that is, the body of knowledge related to the supernatural workings of the universe—started in the Renaissance, an era that maintained both an abiding interest in astrology, magic, and alchemy and a growing interest in empirical thought and Greek philosophy. To Renaissance thinkers, the natural world was a reflection, or imitation, of the divine and through certain magical practices—such as communing with spirits and astral projection—a person could achieve true salvation. At the same time, Jewish mystics similarly believed that God is inseparable from his creation, and the non-Jewish Renaissance magicians looked to Jewish mystical texts to map out proof that of that fact and to glean secrets about God through magic; such texts offered very specific instructions, often involving the use of seals and the recitation of angelic and divine names, which were used to try to understand the divine. These ideas and symbols wound their way through the centuries, through fraternal and secret societies, and the Freemasons, theosophists like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, and New Age Wiccans incorporated Jewish mystical and magical elements into their own mythologies.

Among the methods that mystics used in their quest for understanding was gematria, the art of finding hidden meaning by assigning numerical value to Hebrew letters. For non-Jews, performing gematria on Hebrew words that seemed to correspond to occult ideas became central to magical practice. It mattered little whether or not the meaning of the words was understood within the context of the Jewish religion or the Torah. Judaism was irrelevant to what was perceived as mysterious. Even more significantly for non-Jewish occultists, Hebrew letters took on a kind of occult power. Adorn something as simple as a pentagram with the tetragrammaton (the name of God rendered in the Torah as yod, heh, vav, heh) and you suddenly have a symbol that looks like it has great magical power.

Such beliefs persisted at least until the late 19th century, when many Jews became intent on embracing modernity and rationalism. By the time of the immigrant wave to America in the later part of the 19th century, the superstitions of the shtetls—that dybbuks could take possession of the body, or that the demon Lilith would come for misbehaved children, for instance—were largely left behind. Still, American immigrants couldn’t leave it all in Eastern Europe and many Jews in North America grew up tossing salt over their shoulder to ward off the evil eye and avoiding touching themselves when describing the illness of another person lest they contract the same affliction.

As Judaism struggles between assimilation and the preservation of tradition, Jewish magic suggests that Jews are very much like everyone else in so many beliefs. Ghosts, evil spirits, bad luck, and good are a part of a world view that co-exists with an omnipotent God and a complex moral system. And despite how far into the modern world Jews have moved, they continue to hear the echo of Sefer Hasdim, the famous medieval text, which advised, “One should not believe in superstitions, but it is best to be heedful of them.”

Related: Dizzy With Life [Tablet]

Benjamin Moser will be in conversation with Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage on November 8.

A Jewish Mystic Offers Amulets and Predictions, for $180 a Pop [Forward]

When Podwal collaborated with Elie Wiesel on a book about the golem in 1983, his fascination with the city grew, but Communist rule made it inaccessible. It wasn’t until 1996 that he paid his first visit, in advance of “Jewish Dreams,” an exhibition at the local Jewish museum featuring 61 fantastical works he created in loving tribute to the city’s rich Jewish history and folklore. He has since returned more than a dozen times and now has a designated seat in the Altneuschul, or Old-New Synagogue, where the Maharal presided, and the current chief rabbi fondly refers to him as “one of the locals.”

Jewish imagery has dominated Podwal’s ink, pencil, gouache, acrylic, and watercolor works on paper, and he has done numerous Judaic commissions, from an Aubusson tapestry for Temple Emanu-El in New York to a Passover seder plate that is a best-seller in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop. But Prague is central to his art.

This love affair with the city will be in full bloom come April 6, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Podwal’s 12th children’s book, Built by Angels, which recounts various legends surrounding the Altneuschul—the oldest still-operational synagogue in the world—the same day that New York’s PBS affiliate is broadcasting House of Life, a film Podwal wrote and produced (in collaboration with award-winning classical music documentarian Allan Miller) on the storied history of the cemetery that sits behind it. Despite the inherent distinctions between the two genres, both works meld architecture and metaphysics, history and legend, into moving portraits of the Jewish experience that are elegiac but ultimately triumphant.

As its title suggests, Built by Angels attributes the creation of the Old-New Synagogue to celestial agents, who constructed it with stones from the Temple in Jerusalem. The angels decreed that the stones were to be returned when the Temple was restored. (One explanation for the Alteneuschul’s name attributes its roots to the Hebrew al tenai, or “on condition.”) Distinguished by its complex subject and Podwal’s skilled, magical tableaux, it is hardly a typical children’s book, and yet it still skirts the city’s darkest chapters. We are told that “whenever flames threatened,” the beating wings of white doves “blew out the blaze,” without mention that pogroms were as great a threat as natural disaster. Similarly, a reference to the golem who is “still locked in the attic” and “must not be disturbed” overlooks that he was activated to defend against anti-Semitic attacks. Rather, it finishes with the hopeful prayer still emanating from the synagogue: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Still from House of Life

House of Life is similarly redemptive, highlighting the conservators who piece together tombstone fragments so epitaphs can be legible once more. It is at its most powerful when resurrecting ancestral ghosts among the 100,000 that some estimate are buried in layers beneath the surface. After a guide points out the oldest of the 12,000 tombstones, belonging to Avigdor Kara, one of the few survivors of the infamous 1389 pogrom, the film’s narrator reads an excerpt from the elegy he wrote at the time that is still recited in the Altneuschul every Yom Kippur. Fact and fable often collide, as in a reenactment of the Maharal’s meeting with Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II on the Charles Bridge in 1583 in order to convince him to repeal an anti-Jewish edict. As legend has it, when mud and stones were thrown at the Maharal by the mob, they turned into flowers.

It is just this sort of “history”—tradition as delivered through fanciful tales—that seems to appeal most to Podwal. This, more than a simple love of Prague, is what ties the film to his broader body of work, an oeuvre rich in both kabbalistic symbolism—from the hamsah, an upturned palm meant to ward off the evil eye, to diagrams on the levels of God’s divinity—and surreal elements: flying Hebrew letters, books growing from trees, fruit forming constellations.

Mark Podwal

This embrace of Jewish mysticism is somewhat surprising given Podwal’s secular upbringing, not to mention his formal training as a physician. After a religious awakening of sorts at a Jewish summer camp, he attended Hebrew school and was bar mitzvahed, though he never became observant. Still, he takes delight in his heritage and sees the Zohar, the principal text of the kabbalists, as a great source of visual inspiration.

At NYU Medical School, Podwal was drawn to dermatology because it was also a visual specialty and would leave time for his drawing. During his internship, in 1971, he published his first book, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which is made up of political drawings inspired by the upheaval of the 1960s. That brought him to the attention of The New York Times, which, in 1972, ran the first of what would be his many contributions, an illustration based on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The leap to children’s books in the 1990s marked a shift from black and white to color, though he has continued to make ink drawings for nonfiction books like Harold Bloom’s Fallen Angels and his own Doctored Drawings, both from 2007.

While Podwal has achieved recognition as a fine and graphic artist, he still maintains his successful Upper East Side medical practice, which has caused Cynthia Ozick to marvel at his ability to be “scientist and dreamer both.” This double life not only imbues him with a unique sensibility, but affords the financial freedom to ignore the advice a prominent, well-meaning curator gave him as his artistic career was taking off to “get out of his Jewish rut.” We, in turn, can accompany Podwal on his mystic journey. For as his repeat-collaborator-turned-friend, Elie Wiesel, astutely observed in the catalogue for “Jewish Dreams,” with his strange but familiar storytelling, Podwal stirs “recollections which without your being aware are part of your collective memory.”

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 class, but all I got out of it was a deep and abiding sense of puzzlement. (Divine emanations? Broken vessels spilling forth holy light? From this you build a universe?)

A little reading later in life didn’t help much. I’ve always identified with the rational, logical side of Judaism; give me a good, old-fashioned, obsessive-compulsive Talmudic argument any day. Ideas like the transmigration of souls and the magical manipulation of words and numbers—those, I just can’t wrap my head around.

I’m not proud of this. Kabbalah has deep roots in Judaism, and it is said to inform even non-mystical, mainstream aspects of the tradition in ways that I am certain never to appreciate. I have had to reconcile myself to this secret shame, this inability to penetrate the deeper mysteries of my heritage. Madonna, I’m not.

Jonathan Keren

But having recently heard the Israeli composer and violinist Jonathan Keren introduce a new, Kabbalah-inspired work, On the Bridge of Words: A Triple Concerto for Narrator, Clarinet, Piano and Chamber Orchestra, I no longer feel quite so bad about my failure to pierce the veil of Jewish mysticism.

Keren is not the first contemporary Jewish composer to address arcane spiritual concepts in his work; the recently deceased Moshe Cotel, for example, incorporated both Torah study and Kabbalah in his compositions. Unlike Cotel, however, Keren is not a rabbi, and the task he set himself might have been daunting even for a scholar: On the Bridge of Words sets to music six different snippets of text by writers and philosophers who were involved with or inspired by Kabbalah, from the 13th century Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia to Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and Franz Kafka. During a pre-concert talk, Keren”a young, bespectacled figure with the kind of unruly hair you’d expect from a professional artist or a serious pothead”explained why he avoided using phrases plucked from actual Kabbalistic texts like the Zohar: they were incomprehensible. So instead of going to primary sources “that, honestly, I tried to read but couldn’t understand,” he decided to crib from people who ostensibly did. Hey, graduate students in the humanities do it; why not composers?

The excerpts Keren chose all related to language or music, and he tried to evoke their content in his compositions. Those intended connections were lost on me—do dissonant, stabbing piano chords and sustained string notes really conjure the “steel bridges over still waters” of Bialik’s The Explicit and the Allusive In Language?—but I enjoyed the music for its own sake. Keren is a modernist with a gift for dramatic gestures, and On the Bridge of Words commanded attention, even if it didn’t quite seem to fulfill its programmatic agenda.

Daniel David Feinsmith

In a different musical take on Kabbalah, California-based composer Daniel David Feinsmith doesn’t wade around the edges of Jewish mysticism; he dives right in and rolls around in it. A former Zen monk who has cobbled together his own brand of “meditative Judaism” from both Jewish and Buddhist sources, Feinsmith sees music as a “magical tool” that can be used to affect, and to improve, the world around us. He achieves this musical tikkun olam using techniques that are straight out of the Kabbalistic playbook; his works are intended, through a careful balance between contrast and repetition, to foster a trance-like state among listeners.

Drawing on the Sefer Yezira (“Book of Creation”), a 1000-year-old work of speculative philosophy that ascribes the creation of the world to the divine manipulation of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Feinsmith generates his tones and rhythms using the numerological values of the names of God and of select biblical passages. The piece “Yahweh,” for string quartet and handbell choir, was created using the numerical sequence 10, 5, 6, 5, which corresponds to the letters in the Tetragrammaton. A medieval Kabbalist would recognize this as a form of gematria, which reveals the hidden meanings of words through their numerical equivalents, while a modern composer would see in it a compositional algorithm that turns numbers into music. (Come to think of it, mystics and “serious” composers have a lot in common: both tend to attract small groups of fanatical devotees, and no one really understands what they do.)

Abulafia in particular might have admired Feinsmith’s method: According to Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah, Abulafia advocated a particular brand of textual manipulation, or hochmat ha-zeruf (“the science of combination”), that used the letters making up the names of God for meditative purposes. He even compared this technique to music, “which too could conduct the soul to a state of the highest rapture by the combination of sounds.” That seems like something the Hasidim, who have done more than any other group to popularize Kabbalah, would appreciate: their wordless chants, or niggunim, are intended to induce a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Feinsmith’s music might not have quite the same effect, but it is powerful stuff nonetheless, and his hypnotic melodies and driving rhythms can be appreciated without understanding the arcane processes through which they are derived. That in itself seems rather Kabbalistic: After all, the goal of all this mind-bending mysticism is not to win the gold medal for the most complex intellectual gymnastics, but to achieve a closer union with the divine. For a rational secularist like me, a transcendental musical experience is about as close as I’ll ever come.

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 legend of the dybbuk first took hold, and how it reflects the values and fears of its time. Elior argues that for women, dybbuks could be a means to escape the demands of a confining society. Once possessed by a dybbuk (or at least claiming to be), women were no longer considered responsible for their own actions, and were exempt from arranged marriages and relieved of wifely duties. Thought to be the souls of sinners, these spirits gave a certain degree of power to the powerless, freeing them from the norms of routine life and its conventional ordering.

Elior, a native Jerusalemite, has been a professor of Jewish mysticism for over thirty years, and currently teaches at Hebrew University. The recipient of the 2006 Gershom Scholem prize for the study of kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, she has written extensively about Jewish mysticism and Hasidism, and edited the 2004 book Men and Women: Gender, Judaism and Democracy.

What exactly is a dybbuk?

“Dybbuk” is the Jewish name for the spirit of a dead person that enters and possesses a living body. Significantly, the spirit is always male and the body is nearly always female. Being possessed by a foreign spirit makes a person’s body and soul behave in uncontrollable ways. In Jewish folklore—deriving from kabbalistic theories of the soul and mystical literature—the spirit of a dead sinner often finds refuge in the bodies of weak, fragile women, women who are not able to handle the expectations of society. Those who are possessed are always from the margins of society—maids, orphan girls who have been set up to wed elderly widowers, or young females whose marriages have been arranged against their will. In today’s etiology we would define this possession as acute depression or socially deviant behavior. Previously it was defined as hysteria.

Dybbuks and possessed souls are very different from the rational Judaism that I grew up with. How large of a following did these mystical trends have in Jewish history?

You were not growing up in the medieval Europe of the eighteenth century. It might sound like a contradiction, but it is a fact that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rural Eastern Europe was totally medieval, in the sense that there was no distinction between the spiritual and the mundane. The belief in the presence of angels, demons, and spirits in everyday life was common. While the Enlightenment did not reach Eastern European villages, mystical literature, folk legends, and possession stories did. The majority of the Jewish population lived in the shtetl where they heard very little about Freud and Mendelssohn, but quite a lot about the popular mystical literature concerning demons and transmigration of souls, golems, and angels. Dybbuks served as a link between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

In your book, you argue that dybbuks provided women a means of escape from the expectations and demands of society. Are there contemporary parallels to dybbuks?

Today we would say an unhappy bride is depressed, or under great stress. Saying that the bride was possessed by a dead spirit—meaning she lost control of her body and soul—is not so different. When you say that one is depressed, there is not much you can do about it, though one might attempt to treat it medically. But when a traditional society declared that a person was possessed by a dead spirit, the community would try to exorcise it. Whether we take Prozac or perform an exorcism, the common denominator is that human beings often fail to live up to the expectations of their society, and need to react to this tension somehow.

One should take into consideration that many, if not most, remarkable women known to us in recent centuries were unmarried women, or women without children—women who chose to live alone for various reasons. In the American context, you may think of Emily Dickinson. In the Israeli context, the poet Rachel was single, the poet Zelda never had children, Leah Goldberg was never married. It is striking that many great female writers and poets are women who chose—or were forced—to live single or childless lives in defiance of conventional family expectations.

Your expertise is in Jewish mysticism, yet many of your books and articles focus on issues of gender. What drew you to writing about these topics?

I was studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I found a text where it was explicitly written that women are not allowed where angels are present. It drew my attention to the fact that women were not welcome in places of holiness, which signified purity, eternity, and divine presence. This translated later on to synagogues and study houses. In the National Jewish Library in Jerusalem, from the beginning of printing until the nineteenth century, we have more or less one hundred thousand titles and not a single book authored by a woman in either Hebrew or Aramaic. I wanted to know why. How did the library of the People of the Book become the library of half the People of the Book?

For centuries, there were always a very few gifted women who knew how to read, but they were taught to read at home—they were daughters of either scribes or rabbis. We know, for instance, that Rashi’s daughters were taught to read because he didn’t have sons. There were other examples in later centuries, but these female scholars were the exception and not the rule. Most women were denied any form of formal education. I wanted to understand how that came about in a community that revered scholarship. Because of this, I have focused on the presence and absence of women in the Hebrew language, and in Jewish culture as well as in Israeli life today.

You write about the patriarchal lens through which Jewish law and society developed. Do you see this reflected in the present day?

I try to show how our present is heavily informed by our past. The boundary lines between past and present are less firm with regard to social history in general, and relations between the sexes in particular, than they are with regard to other areas of history. I was asking this question: Should men and women of the twenty-first century let biases from the past affect our daily experiences of the present? In Israel there is no option for non-Orthodox marriage. Orthodox marriage laws reflect a culture of thousands of years ago when women were illiterate and totally dependent on their fathers or other males. Nowadays, when women are not dependent or illiterate, why should they do this? I don’t want to be bought or sold by anyone or feel like a possession. I find it remote from modern sensibilities of equality and human dignity, and would like to see the concepts reworked so as not be offensive to anyone, while still keeping within the tradition as much as possible.

Do you believe in dybbuks or the supernatural?

No. I believe profoundly in the infinite, creative force of the human mind that creates the unnatural in order to explain natural phenomena that cannot be easily explained. In particular, anything that has to do with the exceptional—such as unusual genius, or unusual cruelty, or unusual tragedy—will always be explained with the help of the unnatural.

However, I do not exclude unnatural powers. I believe in the limit of human knowledge today. We may find in the next century that there are powers that are not yet known to us, just like we found out in the last century about lasers and X-rays. In the meantime, I have tried in this book to evoke silenced voices, and explain the circumstances underlying a myth.

As happens in walk-ups, one day I passed the woman—petite, beautiful, black-haired—on the stairs four times. We finally introduced ourselves; Carole warmly welcomed me to the building. I met her husband shortly after that. Yitzhak Buxbaum is a small, wiry 63-year-old with a close-cropped beard. He usually wears a beret and jogging shoes, and has an odd air about him—at once intense and distracted. In our hallway chats, I learned that he had written several books about Judaism and spirituality (among them The Life and Teachings of Hillel, A Person Is Like a Tree, and The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov), and that he has a commercial website—jewishspirit.com—that bills itself as a “gateway to spirituality, mysticism, and kabbalah.” Most interesting to me was the fact that he was a maggid, an ordained storyteller. I’d never met one before, and I was curious about how and why he came to be one. Luckily, Yitzhak loves to talk.

We met in the second-floor apartment, which is full of books and decorated with exquisite religious paintings—Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian as well as Jewish. This is where Yitzhak does his teaching and writing, and Carole gives yoga lessons.

On your website, you mention in passing that you used to be an atheist. That surprised me.

When I went away to college, that was the first time I was required to put religion on a form, and I put “none,” because like many people of my generation—maybe yours, too—after the bar mitzvah that was the end of it. I happily call myself at that period a fastidious atheist: philosophically hardcore and strict. My mother was an atheist. My father believed in God, but not in a very active way.

I was studying biology and zoology—that was my field of science. There is an inclination in science, of course, to be materialistic: not in a greedy sense, but in terms of spirituality, needing proof. I didn’t have any belief in a big person in the sky. That was my scientific attitude, coming through my rationalism.

But as far as I can tell, your life now is devoted to the religious and mystical. Something clearly changed. What happened, and when?

Because of the crisis of the Vietnam War I was depressed, like many people, and I had to decide what the meaning of life was. So I started to explore, just a little bit, religion, which was very strange for me. I was influenced by Tolstoy, who at the age of fifty became totally religious. His Confession is amazing. It’s a seventy-page book that explains how he came to believe in God. And I read Kierkegaard; his idea of the leap of faith was also influential for me. I had to figure out how one departs from rationalism.

I had been going to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Then, because of the war, and the turmoil connected to it, science seemed irrelevant. And my interest in animals seemed irrelevant. I learned about rich and poor, and the suffering in the world, and oppression. I dropped out. I was in my early twenties. I was this wild radical, with what I called a Hebro, the Hebrew version of the Afro.

If you weren’t a student, it was a matter of going to the Army, going to jail, going to Canada, or teaching. I followed a friend, a Harvard guy, back to Cambridge and I started teaching high school, but it meant nothing to me. I had to discover the meaning of life, or else I was going to lose myself. I spent weeks and months thinking. I’d sit in the Pamplona Café for hours. People thought I was doing nothing, but I was the most intensely focused I had ever been in my life.

Then one night I was walking down the street, and I realized that the deepest thing I knew was that I had to do good. If I felt obligated to do good, what was obligating me? It was not from my parents, it was not from the culture; it was something very, very deep. Half a year later I realized it was God.

Was your search for the meaning of life always tied up with Judaism?

At about the same time that I had that realization, I was also thinking about being Jewish, which had previously seemed of no interest or relevance. I reflected on my Jewishness along the lines of the “black is beautiful” and women’s movements, and recognized that I was ashamed of who I was due to an internalized anti-Semitism. I opened up to investigate Judaism. I read Martin Buber, and then went to see Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, my great rabbi.

The first time, I went with a friend to Brandeis, where Shlomo was appearing in the student union building. He spoke and sang so beautifully. Forty-five minutes into the event he jumped up, and all the people around us jumped up—and started to jump up and down to the music. I said to my friend, “Let’s get out of here. This is a worship service!” I wasn’t ready for worship. I was dipping my toe in, and someone shoved me in the pool—but I didn’t know how to swim. But after some months I was so attracted by the perfume of Shlomo’s holy presence that I just had to see more of him.

I started going to the Hillel at Boston University regularly. Shlomo was teaching there. After some time of attending, I came up with the correct question for him. I realized that God is not an object, so we can’t ask, “Does God exist?” the way we ask, “Does a table exist? Does the building exist?” A person from a rationalist perspective thinks they can just cogitate, “Is there a big person in the sky?” God is something different. So at a question-and-answer session, I said, “Shlomo, I’ve never met God.” And Shlomo said, “Brother, I would like to introduce you.”

What happened next?

Well, I left Cambridge, came to Brooklyn, and went to Lubavitch yeshiva. I studied with them for half a year. I grew payes and a beard. I always have to be a radical.

What did your mother and father think of all of this?

My mother was a very tolerant, nonjudgmental person. She wondered why I did this, but she was okay with anything that I did. My father was thrilled, because he had been trying to tell me for years and years and years how Judaism is the meaning of life. He was a businessman, and he hadn’t been very articulate, but he was sincere. But he couldn’t bear the fact that I had long payes, these sidelocks. I learned in Lubavitch that you can make a deal—a business deal—about religious things, which, from a secular point of view, seems totally bizarre. I said, “Dad, if you’ll put on tefillin, I’ll cut the payes.” So he put on tefillin every morning and I cut the payes. And it had an amazing effect, because he came back to religion.

Well, from the beginning, it was the center of my life. Once I decided what the meaning of life is, I didn’t go back to a relaxed attitude. In fact, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous rabbi, said, “If God is not the most important thing, He is nothing.”

When you decided to make God the center of your life, did you go through any emotional or psychological changes?

In one sense your personality changes. In another sense, it doesn’t; I am the very same person I was when I was an atheist. One thing that happened was I ceased being interested in music other than religious music. I am not proud of it, or think this is the correct way to be. I just lost an interest in secular music, because music speaks emotionally—and emotionally I am tuning into God all the time.

How did you figure out how to combine your religious life with a way to exist in the material world? You didn’t want to be in academia anymore, you weren’t a businessman like your father.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidism showed me the kind of lifestyle that I admired: people who were tremendously devout and religious, but had friends and family. So as I started to read more and more the Jewish stories, I started a little group. I would read a story and we would discuss it. And that evolved into my becoming a maggid, meaning an inspirational speaker and storyteller. I received s’micha, the ordination to be a maggid, from Shlomo.

And then I started writing books. I was constantly reading all these texts that presented high ideals, religiously and spiritually, in Judaism. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” But I didn’t know how. So when I encountered nitty-gritty, practical ways to attain something spiritually I would note them down. And then I realized, “Gee, this stuff is not available.” And that’s when I produced my first book, my gigantic book, Jewish Spiritual Practices.

What happened after you published this gigantic book?

I became a teacher of Judaism. I taught for many years at the New School. I taught Jewish mysticism, and also ecumenical courses, like “Spiritual Stories from Around the World.” I taught at Makor for a number of years. I have taught at, like, five hundred synagogues.

After I had been doing this for about twenty-five years I decided it was time to train other people. I started a program to train people to be maggids. Twice a year people come for an intensive. I have ordained ten people already over the last two years.

How do you decide whether they are ready to be ordained?

I am not trying to put impediments in people’s way if someone wants to spread God’s light. If they go through it with some attention I generally give s’micha. My wife, Carole, went through the program, and she had no aspirations to become a maggid. But I gave her ordination as a baal misapair ruchani, a master spiritual storyteller.

If God is the center of your life at every moment, how do you also have a marriage?

One of the things about Judaism is that it is nothing crazy, you know? Camus said that he didn’t want to be more godly, he wanted to be more human. And I think that’s the Jewish attitude. Carole is religious, but not as “fanatical” as me. I think it has become more central to her, but my secular interests are limited. It sounds bad, but it isn’t, I hope. She’s a big outdoors person. She has more interest in the world and seeing things. I go along and have a great time, but I am less motivated. It’s like Rabi’a, this great Muslim mystic in the early days. Her assistant told her to come outside and see the wonders of God, and Rabi’a told her to come in and see God Himself.

Why do you feel it’s your job to teach people about God and Judaism and mysticism?

You know that Muslim group called Tablighi Jamaat? They are worldwide, but they are more based in Pakistan. They are proselytizers, and the Western intelligence services feel they are providing a pool for the Jihadists. But ten or twenty men go out to another country or a remote area of their own country, and proselytize for a month. The Mormons do something similar. And Lubavitch has it built in, too. But I feel that the other branches of Judaism have to come up with some radical way to institutionalize proselytizing among the Jews. Nobody is ashamed to stand out on Court Street and pass out literature about environmentalism or politics. So why should people be ashamed to pass out spiritual literature?

The idea of proselytizing rubs many people the wrong way.

I feel that the Jews have to get over this. So many of our people are unconnected religiously.

Have you had any doubts since all this started? Any dark or confused days?

I don’t have any doubts. For my intellectual integrity, I have to allow that there is, like, a one percent chance there is no God. But I don’t operate that way. And if there wasn’t a God, it would be some kind of glorious mistake, just about the noblest mistake possible. I am not a seeker; I am a finder. People too much glorify this questioning in Judaism.

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 to resign his post at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and devote his full attention to a text that scholars believe was composed by Moses de Leon in 13th-century Spain. Stanford University Press just published the first two volumes of Matt’s labors, with the remaining ten to be completed over the next 20 years—so he’ll finish just in time for Uggs to come back into style.

The term kabbalah comes up everywhere from People magazine to Larry King, but that wasn’t the case when you started this project.

In a sense it’s even a sharper contrast than when I first started studying Zohar in 1970. Then it was the most esoteric, unknown aspect of Judaism perhaps. Now, you find it all over. The Hollywood connection has certainly made it widely known. In some ways, it has made me more committed to doing translation in a very accurate, scholarly way to balance the superficiality you find in some dimensions of kabbalah today. I want to give readers what the Zohar really is—a commentary on the Bible.

The Zohar constantly wrestles with the text and shows new possibilities of meaning in an imaginative and fantastic way. For example, God says to Abraham, “Go forth.” The Hebrew is “Lech Lecha,” which literally means, “Go to yourself,” and that’s how the Zohar takes it. It’s not a geographical journey. It’s saying, “Go deep within and you’ll discover the Divine.”

The Zohar is written in Aramaic. I always thought that was an ancient language that was dead by the 13th century.

When the Zohar appears, hardly anyone in the Jewish world spoke Aramaic. They studied it because the Talmud was written in Aramaic, but in part the Zohar was written in Aramaic to make it look ancient. Moses de Leon never admitted he was the author. He said, “I’m just a scribe, and I’m copying it out from an original second-century text.” He claimed it went back over a millennium, and the original had been composed in the land of Israel in the second century by a famous Talmudic teacher.

Why would he do that?

So that it would be accepted as authoritative. He presents very radical ideas: that God is feminine, equally feminine and masculine; that the ultimate name for God is simply infinity, Ein Sof; and that God needs the human being, is in some sense incomplete without our active participation. Those are among the three most important innovations of kabbalah. If he had said, “I have an idea that God is a woman,” he might have been thrown out of town. But he presents ideas as ancient wisdom. People were naïve enough that the Zohar was accepted as ancient, which paved the way for the acceptance of kabbalah.

If you compare it to what happens in Christian mysticism—one of the great Christian mystics at the same time, Meister Eckhart, he was denounced by the Church. And some of the great Sufi teachers in Islam were condemned. It’s remarkable how easy a way kabbalah had.

Why were there traditionally restrictions on studying the Zohar—mastery of the Bible and the Talmud, reaching a certain age, being married?

Those have to do partly with the material—there’s a very strong erotic element to the Zohar. The goal of the whole system is to unite these two halves of God, the masculine and the feminine, and although the Kabbalists insist that’s just a symbolic mode of thought and shouldn’t be taken literally, the text reads very erotically. God’s inner romantic life is being described graphically. That may have been part of the hesitation. The other is the fear that people would be so attracted to the material—to the beautiful poetry and imagery, and to its intense spiritual nature—that it might lead them away from responsibilities of the family, of making a living.

When did it become acceptable to approach it without a certain level of erudition?

It’s been gradual. Kabbalists would say kabbalah goes back to Adam and Eve, or Abraham, but kabbalah as a movement within Judaism goes back about a century before the Zohar, in Provence. It spills over the Pyrenees into Spain and crystallizes. But in the first couple of centuries, it’s very small groups of kabbalists, studying together, meditating, sharing secrets. Over the next several centuries, it starts to spread to larger groups. Hasidism is really the popularization of kabbalah. Hasidism spread it to the masses. Some of the fiercest opposition to Hasidism came on the part of Kabbalists who agree with the ideas but don’t think they should be spread so widely.

Because they’ll be abused?

Yeah, they’ll be diluted or abused or misunderstood or taken too literally. That’s in the 18th century.

What about contemporary interest with kabbalah?

In the last 20 years or so, in America and in Israel, there has been this fascination with kabbalah, first in the Jewish community and then in broader circles. Certainly it’s part of the general interest in spirituality since the sixties, but I ask myself, why specifically kabbalah, why do some of these Hollywood folks get drawn to this rather than to Zen or Hare Krishna? There are a couple of things that I have been able to identify.

Kabbalah is fairly unique: It’s a spirituality that doesn’t flee from the material world. It doesn’t demand that you go off to a cave and meditate for 20 years. On the contrary, it demands that you engage the world, that you try to discover the divine spark in the material world, and thereby transform it. So it may appeal to people like Madonna, who have made it to the heights of materialism. She even defined herself in those terms. Somebody who does that will very naturally feel that there must be something else—and yet they’re not willing to give up everything they’ve received. It’s spirituality that doesn’t demand you jettison all of the material, and yet it does demand that you look more deeply and search for some spiritual core.

The other factor is that kabbalah is simultaneously strange and familiar. It’s supernatural and exotic in some ways, but based on the most familiar text there is in the entire Western library: the Bible. The Zohar will say, well, Abraham stands for this quality of God, and Sarah stands for this. It enables you to engage in a spiritual search but still be anchored in something familiar. In some ways it’s almost not what the Zohar says but how it says it that’s especially relevant for a contemporary reader. It’s a celebration of the imagination.

Have there been earlier periods when the kabbalah was in fashion?

Yes. In the Renaissance there was a fascination with kabbalah in the Christian world. Key figures in the late 15th and 16th centuries—people like Johannes Reuchlin in Germany, and a little before him, in Italy, Pico della Mirandola—were attracted to kabbalah because they also thought it conveyed ancient wisdom and saw parallels with Christian theology. They created what became known as Christian kabbalah. In the feminine half of God they saw some parallel with Mary. And in the symbol system of kabbalah, the ten sefirot—aspects of God’s personality, you could say—are also grouped in triads they thought were similar to some Trinitarian structure.

Are talismans like the red string bracelet, or the Kabbalah Mountain Spring Water sold by the Kabbalah Centre, bona fide parts of the tradition?

Things like that are part of folk tradition, which some people who are drawn to kabbalah may have also been drawn to. I don’t know in detail that particular custom of the string, but I doubt it has a specifically kabbalistic origin. It may even be non-Jewish, like the hamsa. That’s really an Islamic tradition which then was adopted by Jews in Islamic countries, and then people think it’s authentically Jewish.

As a scholar, do you feel the work you’re doing is trivialized by endeavors that reduce it to a piece of red string?

Certainly. I’m bothered by the commercialization, the hard sell. I know someone who was going for an operation, and she was told, “Buy this set of Zohar and it will go well.” That seems worlds away from my interests.

On the other hand, kabbalah is a broad term, and many things are included under it. There certainly are superstitious elements. You can find discussions of amulets and things referred to as magic or numerology that I’m not particularly interested in, but I can’t deny that they’re part of a kabbalistic universe.

Most names you hear—Madonna, Stella McCartney, Britney Spears—are women. Why do you think women in particular appear to be drawn to kabbalah?

It may be partly because the feminine has such a large role in the kabbalah. It’s not that Kabbalists gave equal rights to women or encouraged women to participate in Jewish life. But they did make the feminine prominent within the divine world, and that probably resonates today. A lot of Jewish feminists have made use of that to promote a social transformation of Judaism. You know, seeing God as father in heaven definitely makes you feel excluded as a woman. And seeing God as equally male and female is empowering.

What makes your translation unique?

There are standard Aramaic editions of the Zohar, and usually that’s the basis of translation. But I had access to the original 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts of the Zohar, which are scattered around various European libraries.

Over the centuries, every scribe or editor that handled the Zohar doctored the text; he would put in a word of exclamation or he would correct what seemed to him to be mistakes in the original. I decided to try to recover those original readings. I have a research assistant who goes through all the manuscripts and lists the differences, the variant readings, between the manuscripts and the printed edition. As I’m going, I can see what manuscripts have what I feel is a better reading, and I translate from that superior reading, rather than from the printed text.

So what we’ve done is to create what you might call a new ancient version of the Zohar that’s closer to the original, and that’s what I’m translating from. That we are making available on Stanford’s website.

How did you get involved with kabbalah?

It goes back in part to my father. He was a rabbi, genuinely spiritual, and I felt drawn toward that dimension of Judaism. I was really searching for that dimension within Judaism, the spiritual dimension, and felt attracted to Martin Buber and Hasidism, and explored kabbalah to discover the roots of Hasidism. That’s the simple answer.

Does your interest in kabbalah go beyond the scholarly?

I’m trying to balance the two approaches: the spiritual and the academic. I think they each have something to offer. If you subscribe to it totally as ultimate truth, you miss some of the historical perspectives which enrich it, and if you look at it just academically, then you stay at such a distance that you don’t allow the power to have an effect on you. I try to navigate between those two.

What form does your spiritual interest take?

Well, certain techniques of meditation, and then the regular mitzvot, the observances of Judaism. In kabbalah those become in a sense mystical techniques, because you’re doing them with certain intention in order to gain intimacy with the Divine.