Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi - Kabbalistic Work

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 Neoplatonic emanationism, 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.

A fellow of the Temenos Academy, UK, instituted by the poet, Kathleen Raine, Halevi regularly lectures there. 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. . Over the years, he has also taken part in a series of interviews for various media.

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., 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. 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.