Book

Rabbi Isaac Luria: The Lion of the Kabbalah

Isaac Luria, the Ari, reshaped Kabbalah in sixteenth-century Safed and died at thirty-eight, leaving no books of his own. Baal Kadmon's study explains why the Lion of the Kabbalah matters and what his system actually says. After a brief history of Kabbalah, the book recounts the Elijah tradition that shaped Luria's childhood, his journey north to Safed, and the miracles his students attributed to the saint. The teaching chapters then introduce his core concepts and the basics of Lurianic meditation, closing with the unifications of the Name, the practice of binding divine names that Lurianic prayer became. Kadmon keeps the famous cosmology of tzimtzum, shevirat hakelim, and tikkun inside the biographical frame, so the reader meets the system as the man's students received it. Part of the author's Jewish Mystics series, this volume pairs with his books on the Names of God and gives a readable doorway into the most influential school of Kabbalah since the Zohar.

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