Kabbalah

August 1, 2006
Although Kabbalah has become one of today's pop-cultural buzzwords (yo, Madonna!), neither this mystical branch of Judaism nor its masterwork, the Zohar, a mystical commentary on the Torah, are well understood. In his first novel, Kushner bypasses the instructive tone used in his nonfiction and plunges into the heart of Kabbalah, opening up the topic so that stories about time, history, and love come swirling out. On one level, this is the story of Rabbi Kalman Stern, a failure, certainly, in love; deserted by his wife, he has not opened himself to a woman in 20 years. The most important thing in his life is a 1697 printing of the Zohar. A letter hidden inside the book, which offers startling insights into creation, heightens his search for meaning both in the outside world and in his own life, where an astronomer, Isabel Benveniste, is pecking at his shell. But Stern's is not the only story unfolding in this multileveled novel. A Kabbalastic scholar in thirteenth-century Spain meets an inspirational woman of intellect and beauty. A young man on a train to a concentration camp learns from an authority on the Zohar. Everything circles back on itself, paralleling the way the Zohar suggests the world is structured. As much meditation as mindbender, this is a book that one experiences rather than merely reads. Not everything works--the ending is predictable, bordering on hackneyed. But Lawrence poses many challenging questions, and the answers will be as individual as the readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)