A Guide to the Book of Zohar / Путеводитель по книге Зогар

Professor Avraham Yitzchak (Art) Green is one of the most important spiritual thinkers of modern Judaism, an American scholar of Jewish mysticism, and a rabbi. Among his numerous publications, the monographs “The Suffering Master: The Life and Teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov” and “These Are the Words: A Dictionary of Jewish Mysticism” have been translated into Russian. The Book of Zohar became one of the sacred books for Kabbalists, and subsequently for a significant number of Jews, alongside the Bible and the Talmud. Although the texts of the Zohar only became widely known in the early 14th century, tradition holds that their true author is the book’s protagonist, one of the most authoritative sages of the Mishnah, the tanna Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (second century CE). A significant part of the Zohar is a collection of interpretations of the text of the Torah, in which the biblical narrative is interpreted as a polysemantic symbolic description of the processes occurring simultaneously in the material and spiritual space of Divine emanation (the world of sefirot), permeating all levels of the universe.