Comprising well over a thousand pages of densely written Aramaic, the compilation of texts known as the Zohar represents the collective wisdom of various strands of Jewish mysticism, or kabbalah, up to the thirteenth century. This massive work continues to provide the foundation of much Jewish mystical thought and practice to the present day. In this book, Pinchas Giller examines certaing sections of the Zohar and the ways in which the central doctrines of classical kabbalah took shape around them.

The Jerusalem kabbalists of the Beit El Yeshivah are the most influential school of kabbalah in modernity. The school is associated with the writings and personality of a charismatic eighteenth-century Yemenite Rabbi, Shalom Shar'abi, considered by his acolytes to be divinely inspired by the prophet Elijah. Shar'abi initiated what is still the most active school of mysticism in contemporary Middle Eastern Jewry. Today, this meditative tradition is rising in popularity not only in Jerusalem, but throughout the Jewish World.

Pinchas Giller examines the characteristic mystical practices of...