Heavenly Powers: Unraveling the Secret History of the Kabbalah

According to Silberman, ""the Kabbalah is and always has been a politically explosive underground tradition that speaks about power, oppression, resistance, and freedom."" In a book that is part detective story and part cultural history, Silberman (The Hidden Scrolls) chronicles the tangled religious and political history that lies behind the Kabbalah. He traces the development of the Kabbalah from the ecstatic mystical visions of Ezekiel to the ""territorial mysticism"" of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who used the lessons of the Kabbalah to establish a political position of power in postwar 1967 Israel. Along the way, Silberman discusses such famous Kabbalists as the 16th-century Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (""The Lion""), who was considered by many of his contemporaries to be the Messiah, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who suggested that the Land of Israel could be seen as an image of the ""revival of the long exiled Shekhinah"" (presence of God). The author also devotes a chapter to Safed, that most mystical of cities, where Kabbalah study reached its height during the 15th and 16th centuries. Silberman argues that the Kabbalah often flourishes during times of great persecution, its messianism and millenarianism offering hope. Despite the interesting subject matter, however, Silberman presents a workmanlike and pedantic history of the Kabbalah written in rather turgid academic prose. (Oct.)