Light and Letters: A Beginner's Book of Kabbalah

No Hebrew required. Nothing taken on faith.

Kabbalah has a reputation for being impenetrable. Most of that reputation is vocabulary. Clear the words away and what remains is surprisingly practical — and this book is written for someone starting from zero.

Inside are thirty-eight verses that Jewish tradition has recited for centuries over money, work, health and healing. Each one is given four ways:

The Hebrew, fully vowelled, as it has always been written

A phonetic spelling you can read aloud immediately, with the stressed syllable marked

A clear translation, kept close to the original word order

A plain explanation of what the tradition sees in it — and when people actually say it

What you also get

All twenty-two Hebrew letters, their sounds, and the numbers they carry

The vowel marks, explained one at a time

The Tree of Life — ten stages, drawn and described in everyday language

The names of God, and what each one is used for

Ana BeKoach, the forty-two letter name, with a line for each day of the week

Psalm 67, the menorah psalm, recited for prosperity for centuries

The seventy-two names, shown in full

A practical order of recitation, including the forty-day practice

Written plainly, and honestly

Every verse comes from the Hebrew Bible. Every translation is original to this edition. Where the old sources disagree, the disagreement is named rather than smoothed over — and where a popular modern claim does not hold up, the book says so.

It makes no promises about your money or your health, and says