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Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi | |
|---|---|
| Born | Warren Kenton (1933-01-08)8 January 1933 London, England |
| Died | 21 September 2020(2020-09-21) (aged 87) London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Saint Martin's School of Art, London, England |
| Occupation(s) | author, teacher |
| Known for | Kabbalah books and teachings |
Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi (English nameWarren Kenton; 8 January 1933 – 21 September 2020) was an author of books on the Toledano Tradition ofKabbalah, a teacher of the discipline, with a worldwide following, and a founding member of theKabbalah Society.
Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi was born, on 8 January 1933, into aJewish family in London, England, where he continued to live and work, along with his wife, Rebekah. On his father's side of the family, he was descended from a rabbinicalSephardi line with roots inBessarabia which was, at the turn of the 20th century, a province of Russia.[1] On his mother's side, he was descended from aPolish Ashkenazi family.[2] HisAshkenazi great-grandfather was Zerah Barnet, who helped found theOrthodoxMea Shearim district, just outside theOld City of Jerusalem, and a Hebrewyeshiva inJaffa.
Many of his publications are issued under hisHebrew name, Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, a contraction of his full family name ofZ'ev ben Shimon ben Joshua Haham-Halevi. The nameHaham is applied to a lineage of teachers inSephardi culture; it means "wise one." Both his paternal and maternal families wereLevites, according to family records. When his grandfather migrated to England in 1900 the surname Haham was recorded as Kaufman; it was later changed to Kenton.[3]
When World War Two began, he and his family moved to a small village just beyondBeaconsfield. He attended primary and secondary schools in the town, but he later moved back toLondon as a student atSaint Martin's School of Art and theRoyal Academy, studying painting during his time there. He remained in London for the rest of his life. After college he kept up his artwork, some of which was commissioned. Further work included working in general and psychiatric hospitals, as well as in a theatre workshop and at theRoyal Opera House.
Besides theatre work and practising graphic design[4], he also taught atRADA and the Architectural Association. He ran workshops for theWrekin Trust and lectured at theTheosophical Society, theRoyal College of Art and thePrince of Wales Institute of Architecture.
He first started studying Kabbalah at the age of 25 and was a student and tutor of Kabbalah for more than 60 years, beginning to teach in 1971. During this time he 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 theSephardiKabbalah which developed in early medieval Spain and France and which included among its focal points the towns ofLunel,Posquières,Girona[5] and the city ofToledo.[1]
These and other centres flowered, producing among their practitioners ofmysticism andKabbalahIsaac the Blind,Azriel of Gerona, Ezra ben Solomon,[6] andNachmanides. During this period Kabbalists incorporated into their expositions and exegeses a degree ofNeoplatonic emanationism, first introduced into Spain bySolomon ibn Gabirol, that conformed to the requirements ofJewish theology and philosophy. To some extent, in medieval times, it conflicted with theAristotelian approach toJewish philosophy byMaimonides and his followers.[2] As defined by the Provencal/Catalan Kabbalists, emanationism was concerned with how the transcendent God, calledEin Sof by Kabbalists, caused potentialities to flow into Existence via what became named as the 10Sephirot in order to bring about Creation.
A fellow of theTemenos Academy, UK, instituted by the poet,Kathleen Raine, Halevi regularly lectured there.[7] 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 theKabbalah Society and for many years ran a series of Kabbalah courses atRegent's College in London.
He traveled widely and ran a continuing series ofWay 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.[3] Over the years, he also took part in a series of interviews for various media.[4]
Halevi was as well known a writer as he was a teacher ofKabbalah, having published 18 books, including a kabbalistic novel and books onastrology and kabbalistic astrology. Contemporary astrologers such as Judy Hall refer to the work he has done on the latter.[8] In the earlier part of his career he wrote a number of books onstagecraft. Both he and his work on the Toledano Tradition are publicly recognized,[5][6] and his work has now been translated into sixteen languages, to date, includingHebrew.
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 theKabbalah Society, which was set up to encourage the study of late C12th and early C13th Kabbalah inProvence andSpain.
He died at his home in London, 21 September 2020, after a short illness.
In an introduction to the Sacred Web Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, 23/24 September 2006 at theUniversity of Alberta in 2006,King Charles III, a Patron of the Temenos Academy, said, when talking of the tension between Tradition andModernism:
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 theTree 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.[9]
There is a DVD that includes this portion of the King's talk on the World Wisdom website.[10]
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.
SingerSinéad 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."
ArtistCharles 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."[11]Archived 10 October 2007 at theWayback Machine
A professor of Kabbalah atHebrew University of Jerusalem[who?] has bemoaned the hijacking of kabbalah by variousNew Age authors and gave Halevi as an example.Joseph Dan, in his workThe Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, wrote in footnote 57 to the introduction:
Dan, Joseph,Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, pub. J. Aronson Inc., 2nd edition, 1977
Dan, Joseph,The Early Kabbalah, pub. Paulist Press, 1986
Gerzon, Gila,Kabbalah: Gates of Knowledge, pub. Aur Tiferet, 2020
Goodman, Len, ed.,Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, pub. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992
Halevi, Z'ev ben Shimon,A Kabbalistic Universe, pub. Bet El Trust, revised edition, 2016
Scholem, Gershom,Origins of the Kabbalah, pub. Princeton Paperbacks, 1991
Scholem, Gershom,ha-Qabbalah be-Gerona, ed. J. Ben-Shlomo, pub. Jerusalem, 1964
