Rabbi Lawrence Kushner‘s Kabbalah: A Love Story is the best Kabbalah book I read for a long time. It just is a great combination of teachings embedded in a simple, yet attractive story line. OK, the story line is not simple. There are vignettes from most the last ten centuries, each with its specific characters and geographic locations. Sometimes these segments are just a paragraph long, so you have to work your mind to connect it to the rest fo the book. But they all worked out, that’s one magic of the book. (And by magic I don’t mean ritualistic magick.) Then, even the events in the life of the main character, Kalman Stern a divorced scholar in New York, are presented in chronological order and an event is written up multiple, times Rashomon style. Except that in Rashomon we get different perspectives of the same events, while here we get different understanding of the same event from the same perspective. Yes, there is a classical love story in it as well, along with a love story that only existed in the jealous husband’s mind.
The beauty of this book is the simplicity of the complexity, just like Kabbalah’s itself. Every element of the book is simple and complex at the same time. You can read it, just on the top level and get a straightforward romantic story of two intellectuals. Or you can dig deeper and excavate layers of meanings. This goes well with the tradition of the four layers of textual analysis in Jewish tradition: PaRDeS.
Asfar as I know this was the first original fiction written by Rabbi Kushner. He wrote plenty of books on Kabbalah and spirituality. (See his list of publications.) Being an expert and master of the topic he had no difficulties to infuse his first novel with lessons from this discipline. If his intenion was to teach Kabbalah to w ide range of people he found the best way to do so. From my perspective he is one of the mist authentic teachers of our times, who is driven by motives that I have more sympathy for than the Bergs’ or Laitman’s.