Does the Prayer Book teach the Truth? From time to time, I receive excellent questions. I added explanations of Hebrew words in parenthesis. Here is one of them and my reply: In a recent blog you wrote: "The central part of Israelite life after the redemption from Egyptian slavery was [...]
By Israel Drazin The following is the second part of my two-part description of mystical notions with an explanation of the prayer Lecha Dodi. In the first part, I described the mystical belief developed in Safed, Israel, in the sixteenth century, that envisioned God as comprising ten parts that were somehow detached [...]
By Israel Drazin I mentioned Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz in my two-part article on the basic notion of mystics, the sephirot, and the Friday night hymn Lecha Dodi. I will now give some information about this mystic. Alkabetz (c. 1500-1580) wrote several books but is best known as the author of the very popular [...]
Mystics and prayers Part one By Israel Drazin The following two-part description of mystical notions and an explanation of the prayer Lecha Dodi is adapted from my book Maimonides: The Exceptional Mind. The Sefirot The Zohar is one of the most important books of Jewish mysticism. Mystics claim that it was composed during the [...]
