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If you mention the word kabbalist, the picture that would come up would probably be some kind of heavily hirsute rabbi, his eyes looking firmly into a heavenly distance and his body clothed in an all-white kapota and shtreimel. Well, we've had Rabbi Meir Yehuda Getz and Rabbi Menachem Froman in the recent past, who conformed to such a picture. But now we have a new generation of rabbis and scholars who look very un-kabbalistic, if one can use such a term. Such a one is Dr. Daniel Matt. Clean-shaven Dr. Matt is a retired professor of Jewish Spirituality and a world expert on Kabbalah and the Zohar.
Matt is part of a surge of modern religious Jews who have made the arcane world of Jewish mysticism available to a wider public. His translation and annotation of the classic text of Kabbalah, Sefer HaZohar (the Book of Radiance) has put him at the forefront of those rabbis and scholars who believe that this rabbinic book should be accessible beyond the relatively small groups of Kabbalah specialists. The translation of this mainly Aramaic text took 18 years of work and came out gradually, the final volume (number 12) being published in 2016, as the Pritzker Edition, named after the family from Chicago who financed this enormous task. (Matt composed nine of the twelve volumes and served as General Editor of the entire series.) He received prizes for his work. The Koret Jewish Book Award hailed his translation, entitled The Zohar, as "a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought."
When we met him in Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Report asked him first about other translations that have appeared on the market in recent years. We were referring in particular to that of the Kabbalah Center's translation of Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag's monumental annotation of Sefer HaZohar.
"It's based on Ashlag's Hebrew translation," says Matt. "In my opinion they did it too quickly, hiring various people, including some Israelis to do the translations, some of whom didn't know enough about Kabbalah. They sometimes mangled Ashlag's Hebrew (written in the middle of the 20th century), occasionally misunderstanding some phrases as modern idiomatic Hebrew. Often, though, the English translation is good because Ashlag's Hebrew translation is superb. But sometimes Ashlag's...