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 In my essay “The Mysterious Origin of the Monthly ‘Sanctification of the Moon,’” I showed that the practice is based on an ancient fear that the moon that had disappeared and is now seen as only a sliver, might disappear entirely. To forestall this disaster, those who recite this [...]
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 [...]
