Kabbalah's Tree of Life
The Diagrams That Illuminate Jewish Mysticism
5 Mondays from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. ET
May 11 - June 15
All classes will be recorded and sent to registrants.
Perhaps you know the image: The Kabbalistic tree of life, a diagram of ten networked medallions. It has been reproduced on book covers, album art and celebrity tattoos.
It is, in its way, inescapable — but it is also just the beginning.
Ilanot (“trees”) — parchment diagrams that kabbalists produced across the Jewish world for over 500 years — took that familiar diagram and expanded it into something of an entirely different order: Instruments for learning Kabbalah, for organizing its vast and intricate body of knowledge, and for the ritual work of tikkun, the kabbalistic practice of cosmic maintenance and repair.
In this unique five-session online course — led by Prof. J. H. (Yossi) Chajes of the University of Haifa, author of "The Kabbalistic Tree" and founding director of the Ilanot Project — we will cover the earliest experiments in medieval kabbalistic manuscripts through the great classical scrolls of the Renaissance and the genre's intersections with Christian Kabbalah, magic and modern art.
Along the way, Prof. Chajes will introduce and use his new interactive ilanot digital tool, which will allow us to zoom in to see previously unseen aspects of Kabbalah tree documents that are hundreds of years old. The tool pairs high-resolution images with transcriptions, translations, and searchable visualized concepts, enabling users to study, compare, and teach these complex works in entirely new ways.
And don't worry if you haven't heard any of these terms before — no prior Kabbalah knowledge is required to enjoy this course!
Have questions about the course? Email community@myjewishlearning.com
Purchases of this course are non-refundable. By registering, you'll also begin receiving an events email each Sunday from My Jewish Learning featuring free and paid classes and events offered by our 70 Faces Media brands.
About Your Teacher
J. H. (Yossi) Chajes is Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. A former recipient of Fulbright, Rothchild, Wexner, and Hartman Fellowships, Chajes has also been a visiting professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a three-time fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. Chajes’ research focuses on the intersection of Kabbalah, magic and science in Jewish cultural history. His first book, “Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism” (2003), was listed by the Wall Street Journal as among the top five books ever written on spirit possession, alongside Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun.” His book “The Kabbalistic Tree” was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies. For the past decade, Chajes has directed the Ilanot Project, an ambitious and unprecedented attempt to research the history of kabbalistic diagrams and the ilanot genre in particular.
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