Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi
Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi (English name, Warren Kenton) is an author of books on the Toledano Tradition of Kabbalah, a teacher of the discipline, with a worldwide following, and a founder member of the Kabbalah Society.
Early life
Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi was born, on the 8 January, 1933, into a Jewish family in London, England, where he continues to live and work, along with his wife, Rebekah. [1] On his father's side of the family, he descends from a rabbinical Sephardi line with roots in Bessarabia which was, at the turn of the C20th, a province of Russia. On his mother's side, he is descended from a Polish Ashkenazi family. [2]
He attended St Martin's School of Art and The Royal Academy, studying painting during his time there. After college his jobs included working in general and psychiatric hospitals, as well as in a theatre workshop and at the Royal Opera House. Besides theatre work and practising graphic design, he also taught at RADA and the Architectural Association. He ran workshops for the Wrekin Trust and has lectured at the Theosophical Society, the Royal College of Art and the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture.
Kabbalistic work
He has been a student and tutor of the Kabbalah for more than 40 years and has taught it since 1971. During this time he has visited nearly all the old major centers 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 and Girona and the city of Toledo.
These and other centres flowered, producing among their practitioners of mysticism and Kabbalah Solomon ibn Gabirol, Isaac the Blind and Nachmanides. During this period Kabbalists incorporated into their expositions and exegeses a degree of Neo-Platonism's theory of emanation, called Ein Sof by kabbalists, that conformed to the requirements of Jewish theology and philosophy, though, to some extent, in medieval times, it conflicted with the Aristotelian approach to Jewish philosophy by Maimonides and his followers [1].
A fellow of the Temenos Academy, UK, instituted by the poet, Kathleen Raine, Halevi regularly lectures there. [3] He has 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 is 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 travels widely and runs 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.[2] [4].
Halevi is as well known a writer as he is a teacher, 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. [5], p.22. 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 recognised.[3] [4] and his work has now been translated into over thirteen languages, including Hebrew.
Many of his publications are issued under his Hebrew name, Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, a contraction of his full family name of Z’ev ben Shimon ben Joshua Haham-Halevi. Both of his families were Levites, according to family records. When his grandfather migrated to England in 1900 the name Haham was recorded as Kaufman; it was later changed to Kenton.[6]
Influence
- Charles, Prince of Wales
In an introduction to the Sacred Web Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, September 23rd/24th, 2006 at the University of Alberta in 2006, the Prince of Wales, 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.[7]
(There is a videoclip that includes this portion of the Prince's talk on the World Wisdom website. A link to the clip follows this.)[8]
- 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."[9]
Bibliography
- Early books
- Stagecraft
- Introducing Stagecraft, (as Warren Kenton), Drake Publishers, c.1971
- Play Begins: A Documentary-Novel upon the Mounting of a Play, (as Warren Kenton), Elek Books. 1971
- Stage Properties and How to Make Them, (as Warren Kenton), Pitman, 1978
- Subsequent books
- Kabbalah
- An Introduction to the Cabala: Tree of Life, Rider, 1972; Samuel Weiser, 1991
- Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, Rider, London 1974
- A Kabbalistic Universe, Samuel Weiser, 1977; Gateway, 1988
- Kabbalah: A Tradition of Hidden Knowledge Thames and Hudson, 1979
- Kabbalah and Exodus, Rider, 1980, Samuel Weiser, 1988 and Gateway Books, 1993
- The Work of the Kabbalist, Gateway, 1984; Samuel Weiser, 1993
- The School of the Soul, Gateway Books, 1985
- Psychology and Kabbalah Samuel Weiser, 1986; Gateway, 1991
- The Way of Kabbalah, Gateway Books, 1991
- Kabbalah: The Divine Plan, Harper Collins, 1996
- Introduction to the World of Kabbalah, Kabbalah Society: Tree of Life Publishing (UK), 2008
- Astrological works
- As Above so Below: A Study in Cosmic Progression, (as Warren Kenton), Stuart and Watkins, 1969
- Astrology: The Celestial Mirror, (as Warren Kenton), Thames and Hudson, 1974
- Astrology and Kabbalah, pub. Urania Trust, 2000: formerly published as The Anatomy of Fate, Gateway Books, 1978
- Kabbalistic novel
- The Anointed, Penguin Arcana, 1987.
- Audio CDs
- Way of Kabbalah Meditations, Tree of Life Publishing (UK), 2004
References
- ^ Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by Lenn Goodman, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992
- ^ Kenton, W., Kenton, Kabbalah, Circles: Magazine of the Theosophical Society, Spring, 1990
- ^ Prince Charles' speech, Sacred Web Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, September 23rd/24th, 2006
- ^ Kathleen Raine, Light Magazine, Spring 1989