Gabriel's Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales

by Howard Schwartz

Book Overview

A vast bounty of tales recounting mystical experiences among the rabbis can be found in the Talmud, the Zohar, Jewish folktales, and Hasidic lore. Now, in Gabriel's Palace, scholar Howard Schwartz has collected the greatest of these stories, sacred and secular, in a marvelously readable anthology.
Gabriel's Palace offers a treasury of 150 pithy and powerful tales, involving experiences of union with the divine, out-of-body travel, encounters with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195093887
• ISBN13: 9780195093889
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Gabriel's Palace, where Sacred Revelations and Mystical Tales are set

"We narrate unto thee the best of narratives" (Qur'an, sura 12:3). "At the same time, such (mystical) tales bring with them the power of the story, making them far more accessible than most mystical texts." introduction Sacred Narratives: Our descriptive language should be altered, writes John C. Reeves in the Society of Biblical Literature, "we should perhaps speak of 'biblically allied,' biblically affiliated,' or 'biblically related' literatures. As we enter the twenty-first century, biblical scholars are in the process of gauging the significance and assessing the implications of a vast treasure-hoard of primary texts which shed a penetrating light on the very centuries surrounding the emergence and production of what eventually becomes the canonical form of the Hebrew Bible. The evidence supplied from such diverse resources as the Cairo Geniza, the Nag Hammadi corpus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls has stimulated a number of intriguing questions regarding the possible relationships of one text or group of texts to another, both within and across religious boundaries. Is a proto-gnostic ideology visible at Qumran? Do the Scrolls attest Christian concepts in nascent form? Can one speak intelligibly of a Jewish Sufism in Fatimid Egypt? And just who copied, studied, and eventually deposited documents like the Qumran Damascus Covenant or the Aramaic Levi apocryphon in a medieval synagogal rubbish heap over one thousand years after the time period of their original composition?" Jewish Mystical Tales: In his informative introduction, Schwarts gives a compelling overview of history, psychology, and the symbolic meaning of allegorical Jewish tales recounting the mystical experience of key figures in those circles. He starts with comparing them to tales about Zen and Sufi masters, and Christian Mystics, and delves in the next paragraph into Jewish mystical tales, starting with a famous tale of the sages who upon entering paradise, one lost his life, another his mind, the third his faith, a warning about the dangers of mystical contemplation. Like fairy tales, fables, and parables found in every phase of Jewish literature, and the teaching of Yeshua of Nazareth, which emanated revealing the Jewish hope of the coming of the Kingdom. The author takes you in a tour of the mystical worlds which started with the early Kabbalists who developed mystical consciousness in Judaism. Moshe de Leon's Zohar became the central text of Jewish mysticism in the thirteenth century when Kabbalistic tradition was established. And, in spite of the numerous anecdotes about talmudic sage Rashbi, or Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, who lived in the second century was not the author of Zohar, still his model together with Rabbi Issac Luria, Schwartz' favorite, with Baal Shem Tov, and those who follow their path are formed by tales drawn from their impressive legends. Gabriel's Clusters of Mystics Tales: The body of the text presents spell binding tales from the Talmud, Zohar, the

mystical tales

Howard Schwartz is an extremely prolific story teller, both for children and adults. Gabriel's Palace: Jewish Mystical Folktales is a very good collection of stories involving Jewish mysticism. Many of them are suspenseful and leave you thinking about the true meaning and implications. It is also interesting to compare some of the stories with non Jewish folk tales. I found a number of the stories somewhat dark, but not terrifying. It is interesting to try to determine what reality led to the initial establishment of such ledgends.