Trained in the Secrets of Kabbalah

Not really secrets, they're available to (almost) everyone

They are not secrets. They’re actually a continuation of the philosophical tradition. “We stand on the shoulders of the philosophers” — one of our teachers.

In the beginning, there were four of us. We sat with Dr. Lehman every Tuesday night and learned. We began with the Zohar. Bahir. Yetzirah. We sat with him for four years. There were sometimes three, sometimes four of us (one of the students I would later marry).

We read commentaries as well as the texts, Dr. Lehman unlocked all sources for us. He was trained as a Semiticist and suggested I learn Arabic. I took a year of Arabic with Dr. Yerushalmi and soon we were reading Saadya ben Yosef (known in Arabic as Sa'id ‘ibn Yusuf al-Fayyumi, tenth century) on Bahir in the original Arabic.

Dr. Lehman repeated this often: "you have to promise that when you leave here, you will teach what you have learned. There is vision here, it is an imaginative literature and your students will be hungry for it. Promise me you will teach."

We all nodded our heads and promised him that we would teach what he had opened for us.

I have a picture of Dr. Lehman and our little class at ordination. He looks proud.