Word: judaisms
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...down in ancient Aramaic by the Spanish Jew Moses de Leon. Superficially, the book was a mystical novel, a kind of Celestine Prophecy precursor. But initiates knew better. Shrouded in its story lines were the keys to unlock the Hebrew Bible--and hence all existence. Whereas standard rabbinic Judaism sometimes seems to look backward to God's most intimate interactions with his chosen people and forward to a Messiah, Kabbalah stresses the Deity's presence as immediate at all times: an ongoing surge of light or energy communicated from the Unknowable to the material world via a series...
Kabbalah ranged where conventional Judaism would not. The sephirah inspiriting the material world--the Shekinah--was feminine; her hoped-for reuniting with the masculine Holy One introduced both a feminine divinity and frankly sexual imagery to Judaism. Angels and demons struggled in Kabbalistic pages, reincarnation was championed, number codes abounded. Sublime spirituality coexisted with "practical Kabbalah," the use of magic charms or amulets. Such aspects were profoundly embarrassing to the 19th century founders of Reform Judaism. Reform together with the similarly rationalist Conservative movement and modern Orthodoxy came to dominate American Judaism. After the Holocaust wiped out many...
Then two things changed. A postwar Israeli burst of Kabbalah scholarship yielded modern Hebrew translations and annotations of vital texts. And seekers appeared. Many younger congregants yearning for individual spirituality became impatient with American Reform and Conservative Judaism's longtime emphasis on communal concerns such as Israel and synagogue building. Some left; some explored Eastern meditation. And some, notes author Rodger Kamenetz, decided that "Kabbalah is the poetic language of the Jewish soul...
...Festival may revolve around Judaism, but the Festival films are only incidentally Jewish. Certainly they will provoke discussion not only about Judaism but also about more universal subjects: politics, love, family relations...
...opening weekend, Russian Ragtime has perhaps the most tenuous link to Judaism of any film in the festival. It is suggested that the father of Misha, the protagonist, left Misha's mother because she was Jewish. That's it. Ragtime would fit more easily into a Communist or Russian Film Festival than a Jewish Film Festival, and any festival would be glad to have...