The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah, Paperback/Leo Schaya

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Description Third Edition God, the Universe, and Man-their essential unity and fundamental attributes as seen through the eyes of Jewish esoteric tradition-is the subject of Leo Schaya's masterly study of the Kabbalah. Unlike most works on the subject, which focus on the history of the Kabbalah or the Kabbalah as literature (not to mention countless 'new age' rants), this penetrating text expounds the universal teachings of the Kabbalah on the relationships of all things to their supreme archetypes, the ten Sephiroth, or principial aspects of God. In addition to the Old Testament and the Talmud, Schaya draws on one of the classical sources of Jewish mysticism-the Zohar, or Book of Splendor-fromwhich he extracts an all-embracing synthesis of the numberless degrees of All-Reality, to which correspond the multiple states of human being, from earthly individuality to essential identity with the Absolute. This work, acclaimed by reviewers and scholars alike, fittingly concludes with an illuminating chapter on the Name of God, which saves 'all those who invoke him in truth.' Students of comparative religion will find an abundance of information here, for striking parallels both with the Hindu cosmological doctrines and the metaphysical insights of the Vedantic sages are among the surprises interlaced in this account of Judaic esoteric wisdom. In this, Schaya carries on the extraordinary work of three great 20th-century metaphysicians of the philosophia perennis: Ren Gu non, Frithjof Schuon, and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. This book will be extremely useful to anyone who is, in the words of Maimonides, 'perplexed' by the Bible in the sense of having exercised his best thinking about it and who now stands 'broken' before its apparent contradictions and its overwhelming emotional authority. The Kabbalah, or esotericism, is the communication to man of what Schaya calls principial ideas, ideas that are to thought and actions what the sun is to its rays. Standing between metaphysica