Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah

David Rosenberg warns the reader early on that this isn't a primer on Kabbalah. He isn't kidding: if you have never read anything about Kabbalah, or have only read the most simplistic (and usually misguided) "Kabbalah for Idiots" type of book, save your money and don't buy this book. After you've spent several months reading serious treatments of Kabbalah, then you can come back to this one. As others rating this book have said, Rosenberg presents anything but "what is Kabbalah." His treatment tastes more of a Zen or Sufi master than of most "popular" would-be teachers of Kabbalah. If you approach Dreams of Being Eaten Alive from that point, disconnect your brain, and open everything else, you can get something from the book. He talks a bit about sex and Kabbalah. Don't get all excited about it. In fact, don't even think about it. Just let it be. If the book has one shortcoming, it is that he doesn't make clear that his translations of selections from the Zohar are not the complete Zohar. But, then, if you come to the book from a good grounding in Kabbalah, you know that already. Dreams of Being Eaten Alive is one small piece of the puzzle that is Kabbalah. Keep it in that perspective and you'll gain great benefit from it.

Dreams of Being Eaten Alive is a personal rendering of selections of the Zohar, the central mystery text of the Kabbalah, written mostly by Moses de Leon but attributed to an earlier author, Rav Shimon bar Yohai. The textual trick of claiming authorship for others mirrors, according to author David Rosenberg (a Bible expert, and coauthor with Harold Bloom of the The Book of J), the technique of the writers of the Old Testament in attributing their writings to others or the Other. This is a highly idiosyncratic book and the most idiosyncratic section, Part III, How to Receive the Kabbalah, with its references to Oprah and defense of Derrida's immersion in reading the individual, the author admits was cowritten with his wife, Rhonda Rosenberg. The multiple authorship cloud of attribution (here real, but in the Kabbalah to imaginary) is reminiscent of the literary trickery of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin or Nabokov's quasi-comical critical glosses. Although hardly exhaustive, there are fascinating teasers in this translation and commentary--such as Rav Abba weeping when he sees a fruit turn into a bird and fly off a tree. This is alleged to be more than a metaphor, as birds due disperse trees so perhaps (in some sped up view of theGarden of Eden, say) there is an ecological reality to what at first seems just fantasy or poetry. (This book does a strange move towards what it considers to be evolutionary ecology, or "frontier ecology," probably because they believe in the possibility there for a convergence of truth and myth.) One gets the feeling in this gloss both of protonovelistic technique in the medieval writers of the Kabbalah and of the attempt to reveal their experience by mystics knowing the superior effectiveness of oblique communiques. The book is also racy, with salacious tales of wet dreams and interdimensional miscegenations, as well as violent, with stories of babies being eaten alive and whatnot by their demonic mothers. The sense of play and fun of the kabbalah comes across together with its deep mystery. This book was a nice combination of respectful and irreverent, and seemed to be informed in equal parts by the poetic sense of the artist and the careful analysis of the scholar. At one point the authors remark to the effect that since Gershom Scholem (school and golem?) and Freud there has been a virtual absence of Jewish intellectuals reinvigorating the rich spiritual tradition from which both the Old Testament and the Kabbalah originate.

David Rosenberg book is the first I read which does not explain Kabbalah. Like love, Kabbalah canot be explained.The reader gets help to FEEL what Kabbalah is. The authors, David Rosenberg and Rhonda Rosenberg, use modern day sensations and ideas, accessible to a contemporary. I include Rhonda Rosenberg as an author, as she contributed to the most important chapter of the book, Part III, "How to receive the Kabbalah"The lecture of this chapter is a sufficent reason for buying this book. No other spiritual book I read managed to 'click' more precisely that kabbalistic sensitivities, - from the same root as poetry - that any human being alive must have in various incipient stages.The reader can not be passive. S/he must participate, s/he must execute its own 'applet' (pre-existent computer-program-like soul component)) to respond to that 'click'.The Rosenbergs describe the reader pre-requirements as follows: "an affinity for play and abstraction, along with a sympathy for the necessity of it..."In other words, did you ever dream? Then, after waking up, did you wonder what the dream means? Did you ask - one step further - why does one dream? Why don't we sleep solidly all the nights of our lives? If these questions are significant for you, then you MUST read at least part III of this book.Because "the desire to come upon meanings in disguise is analogous to the wandering of the rabbi companions in Zohar." As we drive cars to work and let the mind wonder for a bit, as we stop a moment to reflect upon anything that happens to us, we realize that that is more to everything we see around us. Someone concealed to our mind meanings. We are so used to see the decor manufactured by ourselves, - cities and countrysides, shopping centres and TV's - that we read a meaning "in a more natural and wild way, unconfined by the human culture " only by surprise, as if by an accident.One starling comparison is the author scrutiny of the spiritual in such TV icons as in an "Oprah Winfrey Kabbalah's show".Because there is spiritual that encompasses everything we are, just as environmental ecology seems to have an intelligence of its own, that will survive long after people, - homo sapiens - will disappear as biological species.Kabbalah, is another way to see life. We received wonderful messages and feelings, not visible by others. To see what this means, just look at the book jacket, with an inset detail of child from picture of Hieronymous Bosch. Is there a child? Or they are two children? One looks at us. The other looks elsewhere. One is terrified. Other is suspicious. Both are innocent. Or , are they? Why Bosch painted it? Why David Rosenberg wrote this book?Can any one answer?

If you're looking for a "Kabbalah 101" book, then this is not the book for you. Rosenberg does a wonderful job of explaining why the Kabbalah is, not what it is. This is a book of mystical truths and archetypes. His interpretations are insightful and provocative. A must read for the seeker of the non-traditional genre.