Reincarnation and Judaism: The Journey of the Soul

Buried beneath the abstruse jargon of this esoteric treatise lies a rabbi's labored effort to explain reincarnation. Pinson, a follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, relies on Jewish mysticism to validate his view that Jewish thinkers who rejected reincarnation failed to follow the Kabbalah, Judaism's central mystical text. In supporting his thesis, Pinson displays remarkable erudition, citing many rabbis as well as Freud, Jung, Tolstoy, Shelley, Hawthorne, Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. Pinson's bewildering array of categories includes three souls with ten states of consciousness, various compartments, divisions and levels as well as ""three types of reincarnations."" Circular reasoning abounds, as in Pinson's argument about the dybbuk, the evil spirit that possesses another person: since it is impossible to prove that the dybbuk does not exist, we should rely on the sages who say that the dybbuk does exist, thus eradicating doubt. Child prodigies are ""proofs"" of reincarnation because they inherited their talents ""from their previous lifetimes."" Such tautologies are hardly persuasive. Additionally, Jewish feminists may be antagonized by Pinson's assertion that the ""souls of women do not reincarnate."" Jewish tradition restricts study of the Kabbalah to married men over 40, yet men and women, under or over 40, married or single, will have trouble deciphering this book's arcane mysteries. (Sept.)