Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi

Kabbalistic work

Halevi first began studying Kabbalah at the age of 25 as a self-taught student, believing that he was directed by spiritual helpers. He began teaching in 1969, having placed notes on notice boards in places such as the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he was a sometime tutor (together with Keith Critchlow), inviting individuals interested in philosophy to contact him (then a Gudjieff tradition tactic employed on the advertising hoardings of the London Underground). He then began a series of weekly group meetings at his flat in Holland Park, believing that he was carrying on an old Dutch Kabbalist tradition known as the Bretheren of the Common Life (which may have been a misunderstanding of a Pietist tradition of the same name in Netherlands in the 14th century). He expressed zero interest in modern philosophy.

Halevi later visited nearly all the old major centres of Kabbalah in Europe, North Africa and Israel, while specialising in the Toledano Tradition, a form that derives from the Sephardi Kabbalah which developed in early medieval Spain and France and which included among its focal points the towns of Lunel, Posquières, Girona and the city of Toledo.^[4]

These and other centres flowered, producing among their practitioners of mysticism and Kabbalah Isaac the Blind, Azriel of Gerona, Ezra ben Solomon, and Nachmanides. During this period Kabbalists incorporated into their expositions and exegeses a degree of Neoplatonic emanationism, first introduced into Spain by Solomon ibn Gabirol, that conformed to the requirements of Jewish theology and philosophy. To some extent, in medieval times, it conflicted with the Aristotelian approach to Jewish philosophy by Maimonides and his followers.^[5] As defined by the Provencal/Catalan Kabbalists, emanationism was concerned with how the transcendent God, called Ein Sof by Kabbalists, caused potentialities to flow into Existence via what became named as the 10 Sephirot in order to bring about Creation.

A fellow of the Temenos Academy, UK, instituted by the poet, Kathleen Raine, Halevi regularly lectured there. Archived 5 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine He taught groups on every continent, including at Interface Boston, the New York Open Centre; The Centre for Psychological Astrology, UK; Omega Institute; New York Kabbalah Society; the Jungian Institute of Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Karen Kabbalah, Atlanta, as well as in synagogues and at rabbinical colleges. He was the Director of Tutors for the Kabbalah Society and for many years ran a series of Kabbalah courses at Regent's College in London.

He traveled widely and ran a continuing series of Way of Kabbalah courses and lectures held in many countries, including America, Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Scotland and Spain, though few of his lectures have been published and fewer still are online; similarly with his articles.^[6] Over the years, he also took part in a series of interviews for various media.^[7]

Halevi was as well known a writer as he was a teacher of Kabbalah, having published 18 books, including a kabbalistic novel and books on astrology and kabbalistic astrology. Contemporary astrologers such as Judy Hall refer to the work he has done on the latter. In the earlier part of his career he wrote a number of books on stagecraft. Both he and his work on the Toledano Tradition are publicly recognized,^[8][9] and his work has now been translated into sixteen languages, to date, including Hebrew.

He also set up an annual Summer School, aided by his wife, which regularly included students from around the world, and he started up an annual series of workshops in London. At his home, he also held regular weekly meetings, during term time, of the London Kabbalah Group. This part of his work continued for many years.

Halevi was one of the founder members of the Kabbalah Society, which was set up to encourage the study of late C12th and early C13th Kabbalah in Provence and Spain.

Influence

King Charles III

In an introduction to the Sacred Web Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, 23/24 September 2006 at the University of Alberta in 2006, King Charles III, a Patron of the Temenos Academy, said, when talking of the tension between Tradition and Modernism:

This dilemma is captured in ancient notions of balance and harmony; notions that are, for example, expressed in many guises in that wonderful Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life. As the Temenos Fellow, Warren Kenton, so beautifully explains in his lectures to the students of the Academy, the teaching of the Tree of Life is that the "active" and the "passive" aspects of life, which on their own may lead to imbalance and disharmony, must be, can only be, brought together in harmony by the influx into our lives of the Divine and the Sacred. Whether or not we interpret this image as an explanation of an outer or an inner orientation, it is in this way, and only in this way, that the forces, or characteristics, of expansion and constraint can be brought into balance. Archived 3 November 2010 at the Wayback Machine

There is a DVD that includes this portion of the King's talk on the World Wisdom website. Archived 20 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine

Kathleen Raine

The poet, Kathleen Raine, had this to say about Halevi's work:

A feature of this author's system not found in others (although doubtless it is traditional though not universally taught) is the beautiful way in which the interfaces of each 'world' overlap with the one above (or below). Thus, the highest experiences of the physical world overlap the lower part of the next world (the psychological]: and again psyche's highest experiences of the individual soul coincide with spiritual regions of the transpersonal world of universal forms. So from illumination to illumination we reascend the 'ladder' by which each of us 'came down to earth from heaven'. The awe-inspiring sublimity of the Kabbalistic universe at once convinces and comforts. It is our destiny to descend and to fulfil some task, learn some lesson in the natural world; as it is to follow the path of return, to reascend from world to world, no matter how many lifetimes this may take us before we return to our true home, 'the kingdom of Heaven'. Kathleen Raine, Light Magazine, Spring 1989.

Sinéad O'Connor

Singer Sinéad O'Connor wrote in the inner sleeve notes to the album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, "Special thanks to Selina Marshall + Warren Kenton for showing me that all I'd need was inside me."

Charles Thomson

Artist Charles Thomson said, "I studied Kabbalah under a teacher called Warren Kenton, who said there was a lot of humour at the spiritual level, and I think that's true." Archived 10 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine

Criticism

A professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem^[who?] has bemoaned the hijacking of kabbalah by various New Age authors and gave Halevi as an example. Joseph Dan, in his work The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, wrote in footnote 57 to the introduction:

Another distressing phenomenon is connected with the numerous books concerning kabbalah, its history, nature, and traditions, as instruction for modern living, published by "Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi" who is a nice English gentleman from Hampstead who does not know any Hebrew. His books were used as authentic, scholarly source by many, including Simo Parpola.^{[full citation needed]}