Monday Book Nook: Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship By Lawrence Fine

Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship By Lawrence Fine

This academic book uniquely takes a look at the cultural context in Safed, Israel, and the Mediterranean which supported and gave rise to the Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria. Mr. Fine goes a few hundred years back, and a hundred or so years forward, to lay out connecting lines between Kabbalistic masters, authors, and ideas to set the groundwork for Luria’s very personal fingerprint on the subject. Included are also many of the teachings themselves, albeit presented in an academic sense (and therefore lacking a great deal of the spirit of the actual teaching).

Does this book inspire me (as in the framework of the Monday Book Nooks)? Well, yes, in an unexpected way. Fine leads one to understand that these areas, especially Safed at the time of Luria’s living and teaching there, were a meeting point of great masters of Kabbalah and some of the great Jewish thinkers of the time… a bit akin to Paris in the 1920’s for artists. What that has inspired in me is an understanding of the importance of communities, salons, and studying together, and how doing so begins to compound upon itself bringing each student/teacher to new ideas and levels of understanding. And to that I ask: Where, today, does this culture of firey, impassioned, mystical teaching exist? Does it? And if the answer is no – how do we build it?