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Rider and Company of London has already published two books by an author who calls himself Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi. While the second book, Tree of life, has a subtitle, ‘An introduction to the Kabbalah’, the title of the third book: The way of Kabbalah, omits the definite article in English although the Hebrew sub-title still carries it. This characteristic confusion permeates much in The way of Kabbalah. The book has very little to do with the historical Kabbala as it has developed from the times of the Sepher Yetsirah (The Book of Creation) well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The author pays scant attention to historical facts. For him every aspect of Jewish religious experience is Kabbala. One finds grouped together as ‘famous esoteric groups’ Jesus (called by him Joshua ben Miriam of Nazareth) and his disciples, as well as Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, a Tana and his followers in the second century. Halevi uses the Sephirotic Tree in a most imaginative way to establish his own system. He obviously has a good knowledge of the Kabbala and of Jewish history, but he distorts it to present an individual system, a sort of timetable, like a train schedule of how to achieve higher consciousness, a union with the Lord. One can praise the author for rejecting the drug approach when he declares it (the drug approach) not only ‘spiritually illegitimate’ but ‘dangerous’. His reasoning for that is very acceptable, but has little to do with the real Kabbala. This is a book that does not convey any true knowledge of the Kabbala, nor can any individual learn from it how to achieve higher consciousness. The book contains such nonsense as: ‘The Ten Commandments, like all other biblical disciplines, are based on the Sephirotic Tree.’ One wonders how a publisher who is preparing to publish an English edition of Gershom Scholem's The book of splendor can at the same time publish such a pompous and systematically confused book. The reason probably is that many people today, e