2007-07-10 ILLUMINING THE BOOK OF ILLUMINATION

Aryeh Kaplan's life work seems to have been to make the mysteries of the Kaballah accessible without cheapening or symplifying them. His other works - MEDITATION AND KABALLAH, SEFER YETZIRAH - go together with this to make a tritych of Kaballistic writing which is full of inisght and illumination. A truly liberating vision of religion which frees us from the dry, confining aridity of so much mainstream faith.

The Bahir is not as well known or as famous as the Zohar. Kaplan has therefore done us a service in translating it here. The text is clearly and lucidly rendered into English. Obscure and baffling as it is at first, Kaplan provides and exhaustive commentary but also shows us how to read it - non linearly, like a lattice, with passages referring and echoing off each other everywhere. The Bahir is a beautiful book, full of the joy, wisdom and divine humanism of the Kaballah. A real book of hope.

My only regret is that Kaplan never did a version of the Zohar itself. It would have been so helpful!