Book

The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah

Leonora Leet, a Renaissance literature scholar who studied the Sefer Yetzirah for fifteen months in Aryeh Kaplan's Brooklyn class, presents here the theoretical core of her four-volume project on the Kabbalah. The book recovers what she calls the Hebraic sacred science in three modes. The science of language decodes the Tetragrammaton through its expansions, the vowel-letters and the covenant of number, and derives from it a practice of vowel intoning that maps the sefirot onto the body's centers. The science of geometry, her distinctive contribution, reconstructs the hexagram of creation from the Zohar's account of Genesis, derives the Tree of Life diagram from first principles, and solves the enigmatic Sefer Yetzirah diagram, reading the Lurianic partzufim out of its structure. The final part sets the sacred science beside secular physics, drawing parallels between kabbalistic cosmology and particle models, and weighing Tzimtzum against the Big Bang. Dense, technical and ambitious, it is scholarly kabbalah addressed to readers who want the system's geometry taken with full seriousness.

Included with membership.