For anyone steeped in Kabbalah, familiar active letters dart into new cosmologies. For anyone steeped in cosmology, the antics of those letters introduce fresh questions about the world. For everyone else, and probably for those mystics and seers too, Malkah’s Notebook will offer nested challenges, like so many matryoshka dolls, ornately painted mysteries lurking inside mysteries lurking inside mysteries. As much is written between the letters and in the spaces inside the letters as in the letters themselves.
Tag: kabbalah
anything, anything but a mystical experience
So. It’s the end of the semester. Students are giving presentations of the projects they’ve been working on all semester long. Or were supposed to be. I know that some of them had struggled mightily with this. Figuring out what to focus on. Figuring out sources, but not necessarily vigorously. Changing their minds. Procrastinating. I’ve…
binah in silence — intro — 1.1.2
The twin sephirot, as their father the rebbe liked to call them, were twenty-four when our story begins. And their younger sisters, like clockwork, manifested themselves each precisely two years younger than the previous, all managing, and despite the vagaries of the lunar calendar, to emerge into the world on the first day of Nisan. …
introduction — the rebbe’s queer daughters — 1.1.1
Tell me the tale, she insisted, and so at last I did. And hungrily she wrote it all down, as she thought she ought. For her daughters, and her daughters’ daughters she dedicates this tale. Il mundo si esta kimando in braza biva, y tu estas durmiendo endriva de’l buz The world is…
the rebbe’s queer daughters
—מגילת מלכה— This post marks the beginning of a new feature at beitmalkut.org and that is the inclusion of a tale that will take, I think, a very long time to tell. This is something I’ve been writing for my father. It started a number of years ago in time for him to read sections…
kaddish, pain, and ascension
I was very moved by Erin’s kaddish for the old Bay Bridge — which, of course, wasn’t about the bridge at all. And I thought, oy, what a can of worms this kaddish has opened. Daily kaddish may well be harmful to the health, I thought. Every day you are in mourning, focusing on that…
war stories
We were holding kabbalah study group tonight at Beit Malkhut, and I don’t know how it came up. But you know how study groups go — one topic leads to another. We started with the Kaddish — the Mourner’s Prayer — since all of us had something to mourn, and it was time to explore…