DREAMS OF BEING EATEN ALIVE

Rosenberg (The Book of David, 1997, etc.) is one of the leading practitioners of New Age Judaism. Here he turns his

attention to the latest flavor of the month—Jewish mysticism. If it's good enough for Madonna and Roseanne (who thankfully are not invoked in this otherwise relentlessly trend-tracing volume), it's certainly good enough for the man who translated The Book of J (1990). Rosenberg likens the Kabbalah to the deep ecology movement, to the search for cosmic consciousness, to Oprah Winfrey—in fact, to just about everything except what it is (namely, a group of sacred texts that were written largely in response to the Hebrew Bible and postbiblical literature like the Midrash). He invokes all the hot-button catchwords of the moment, calling the authors of the Kabbalah "our first postmodern writers." Rosenberg divides his study into four sections, with a new translation of passages from the Zohar (the key work of medieval Jewish mysticism) and other kabbalistic works bracketed by essays that ostensibly put them into an interpretive context. Unfortunately, however, Rosenberg seems to assume a knowledge of Jewish medieval history on the part of his readers, never explaining the circumstances of the embattled Jewish community that produced the Zohar nor the progression of events that created the Christian and Jewish mystical works of the Renaissance in the first place. He is more concerned with linking mystical works to dream interpretation and offering cryptic observations ("Ecosystems also resemble dreams, in that they encompass many worlds") that shed little light upon his murky enterprise. After offering very free translations of apparently random passages from the Zohar, Midrash Rabbah, and Sefer Yezirah, Rosenberg moves on to an interpretive essay that depends heavily upon juxtapositions of texts that are entirely of his own devising. All of this is couched in a ponderous, self-regarding, self-aggrandizing prose that grates on the reader.

A foolish book of no discernible use to any student of the Kabbalah.