The Seventh Telling
The Kabbalah of Moeshe Kapan
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Seventh Telling is a journey into the Kabbalah, a spiritual discipline hidden within the folds of Jewish history. Stephanie and Sidney have been studying with Moshe Katan, a kabbalist who shared his learning only when he perceived that a kabbalistic intervention might be necessary to save the life of Rivkah, his wife. What has happened to Moshe and Rivkah we do not know, only that their house is now being used for an extraordinary storytelling, a spiritual discipline to share with those willing to risk examining the very core of their beliefs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spiritual evolution of two menDa rabbinical scholar with a knack for business and a businessman with rabbinical leaningsDand their wives is presented as a series of parables in this ambitious attempt to capture Kabbalah study in fiction. In group storytelling sessions at their house in the hills outside San Francisco, Sidney and Stephanie Lee relate the inspirational history of their mentors, Moshe and Rivkah Katan. Taking turns, they trace Moshe's progress from his childhood as Michael Kayten, through MIT, Vietnam, Israel and suburbia to become a legendary kabbalist. As part of the story, they tell how Moshe deepened his ties to Sidney and Stephanie when Rivkah, having devoted her life to helping cancer patients, faced the dreaded disease herself. In her sessions, Stephanie also recalls her own parents, both Holocaust survivors: a father who disowned her for marrying Sidney, a mother who never answered but secretly saved her letters. As gradually becomes evident, the two couples have more in common than their spiritual missionDtheirs is a personal connection, too. A teacher at institutes and rabbinic conferences, Chefitz knows his subject well, blending reverence for religious traditions with acceptance of new variations. His storytelling shows a lecturer's patience for getting to the point, a rabbi's tolerance for human frailty and a scholar's sense of detail, but his literary abilities are less well developed, his stories too inexpertly bound together to add up to a novel. The book will be of most interest to the creatively devout, and particularly to women forging their own traditions within Judaism, as Chefitz pays special attention to their situation.
