Why Read the Zohar (book review)

BECAUSE IT'S COOL:

Why Read The Zohar?
Demystifying Kabbalah For English Readers
By Alan Brill
Published January 13, 2010, issue of January 22, 2010. (The Forward)

The Pritzker translation of the Zohar into English by Daniel Matt — the fifth volume of which has just appeared — should be greeted as a major cultural event. Yet, the publication of each volume has typically produced tiresome book reviews on the ownership of the word Kabbalah, comparing the academic approach of Gershom Scholem to Madonna’s New Age approach. The reviews do not answer the basic question: Why read parts of Kabbalah like the Zohar? Nor do they explain why the Zohar speaks to our age more than the myriad other kabbalistic works.

The Zohar corpus as published in the 16th century contains many reworked texts of ancient and medieval materials; a large chunk of the Zohar portrays the epic story of Rabbi Shimon and his companions, but there are many segments that do not.

Melila Hellner-Eshed, in her book, “A River Flows From Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar,” provides an indispensible work that, finally, explains why the Zohar is an important and alluring work for our time. Susan Sontag taught readers to ask not what the art means, but rather “how it is what it is.” Hellner-Eshed follows Sontag and seeks to offer an experiential aesthetic of the Zohar.

Hellner-Eshed’s book is comparatively easy to read, despite being a scholarly work that assumes the reader has already read the terse prose of Scholem. Her work nevertheless does offer the nonacademic a chance to see the current state of Kabbalah study at Hebrew University among the students of Yehuda Liebes and Moshe Idel.

[...]

Armed with these books, one can now begin to appreciate a cultural and religious treasure of Judaism. No journalist or book reviewer should write about Kabbalah again without first reading Hellner-Eshed. Her work steers the English reader between the Scylla of Kabbalah as technical knowledge of sefirot and the Charybdis of Kabbalah as personalized New Age spirituality. Hellner-Eshed’s work treats the Zohar as a mystical fantasy in which the Knights of the Round Table are rabbis living in an eroticized Middle Earth and spurred to great deeds by their love of the damsel Shechinah. Then, the beautifully edited Pritzker translation allows the interested reader to travel on these mystical journeys, yet still return home safely.

A nice long book review (giving plenty of reasons in addition to mine). Worth reading in full. For background on the Zohar and Daniel Matt's translation, go here and follow the links.