by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
ISBN: 0-7679-2412-6
$17.95 / $23.95 in Canada
A Morgan Road Books Hardcover
(an imprint of the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group)
www.morganroadbooks.com
Also available at Amazon



Sometime, somewhere, someone is searching for answers...

... in a thirteenth-century castle
... on a train to a concentration camp
... in a New York city apartment

Hidden within the binding of an ancient text that has been passed down through the ages lies the answer to one of the heart's eternal questions. When the text falls into the hands of Rabbi Kalman stern, he has no idea that his lonely life of intellectual pursuits is about to change once he opens the book. Soon afterward, he meets astronomer Isabel Benveniste, a woman of science who stirs his soul as no woman ahs for many years. But Kalman has much to learn before he can unlock his heart and let true love into his life. The key lies in the mysterious document he finds inside the Zohar, the master text of the Kabbalah.

Click here to read an excerpt from the novel.
Click here for a Reader's Guide.

Reader's comments on
Kabbalah: A Love Story by Lawrence Kushner

"...A mystical experience in the shape of a novel: a remarkable achievement by master story-teller Lawrence Kushner."

- Anita Diamant
author of THE RED TENT and GOOD HARBOR

"This book manages to be a sweet mystery about mystery, space, time, love, and authorship. It reiterates Kabbalah, and brings the subject to life, not as a scholarly or esoteric pursuit, but as the most immediate and constant human question: "What in the world is going on here...?"
"...It is not only about the Kabbalah, it, effectively, is the Kabbalah. I think it is funny, and bizarre, and very very of the moment. Books about mysticism, millennialism, transmigration, as we know, are the hugest phenomenon in the history of publishing. I don't think there's been one yet, about the Kabbalah. And I think this one could be it... I think this one is a gem."

- David Mamet, playwright

"The Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, is a medieval experiment in fiction. Now Lawrence Kushner thickens the plot--interweaving centuries, revolutionizing our understanding of God, and showing how we discover our true nature by opening ourselves to love."

- Professor Daniel Matt
translator,THE ZOHAR, PRITZKER EDITON

"Part damn-good storytelling, part mind-bending magic, THE ZOHAR isn't really a novel; it's an experience of Jewish Mysticism-seductive, cerebral and humorous, told in a wholly unique and beautiful voice."

- Debbie Danielpour Chapel
teaches fiction at Harvard University

"Like all creative spiritual thinkers, Rabbi Kushner skirts the edge of heresy as he fashions an unusual tale, which blends humor, suspense and the sublime in a contemporary amalgam of magical realism and the traditional religious fable."

- Professor Bernard Horn
author, FACING THE FIRES:
CONVERSATIONS WITH A. B. YEHOSHUA

"Now, through an aesthetic door, Kushner teaches the emerging contemporary Kabbalah. Enjoy!'

- Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Aleph network for Jewish Renewal

"Zohar, the Kabbalah's greatest work, has been called 'a mystical novel.' Now Kushner, a well-known rabbi and writer on Kabbalah has responded to it by writing his own! A whirlwind journey through centuries of Jewish history and levels of the mystic's mind."

- Professor Arthur Green
author and scholar of Jewish Mysticism,
founder Hebrew College Rabbinical School

"Like the multilayered nature of Kabbalah itself, Kushner's imaginative novel weaves a tapestry of mystical theology, cosmological speculation, astronomical science, and the mysteries of text and language. Kabbalah: A Love Story is an exquisite and radiant meditation on nothing less than the very meaning of life and death, the unrealized capacity of human awareness, and, above all, the centrality of human love.

- Professor Lawrence Fine
author and scholar of Kabbalah, Mount Holyoke College