(This post is the fourth of a series. To begin the series, click here.) Imagine: we're Jewish mystics of the sort that Gershom Scholem called the "merkabah mystics"--fascinated, or maybe obsessed, with the divine Chariot (merkabah) that's described in the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. … [Read more...]
The Mystery of the Merkabah – How Real Is “Real”?
(This is the second post in a series. For the first post, click here.) "Now, friend, return to the study of the descent to the merkabah. I have been instructing you in it: how one goes down and how one comes up; what the character of the First Palace is; how one gets angels into his service and … [Read more...]
The Mystery of the Merkabah – “What Was That Paradise?”
Sometime around the beginning of the 11th century, an Iraqi Jewish academician named Hai Gaon had to field a query from a puzzled reader of the Talmud: "With respect to that which our rabbis taught, 'Four entered Paradise, Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, the "Other One" and Rabbi Akiba'--what was that … [Read more...]
“The Color of Electrum”–Ezekiel Visits the 60s
Novelist and poet Valerie Nieman, author of Blood Clay, did me the honor last month of "tagging" me for a writers' blog hop on the theme of "My Next Big Thing." Val posted on her current project, a gripping, suspenseful novel called Backwater, about a young girl’s coming of age and her encounter … [Read more...]
Satan, the Holocaust, and the Madness of Ezekiel – Some Thoughts on Paradigms
Ah, paradigms. Can’t live within ’em. Can’t live without ’em. Or, more exactly, we can and must live within them. We couldn’t begin to think about scientific or other questions without the framework of our intellectual paradigms to sustain us; it’d be like trying to get our footing in … [Read more...]
