Thanks to the Puddletown Publishing Group in my old hometown of Portland, Oregon, USA, a new and improved edition of The Oracle of Kabbalah is now available.

You can purchase it through the iTunes Store, at Amazon.com, or at Barnes and Noble.

For more information, visit www.oracleofkabbalah.com.

The preface to this revised version of the book begins:

This edition of The Oracle of Kabbalah is a revised and expanded articulation of the mystical teachings of the Hebrew letters first published in 2001.

I wrote the original edition between 1997 and 1999. Since 1999, much has changed for me personally and, of course, for all of us who were alive back then.

Just three days after The Oracle’s publication, “9/11” took place when the two towers of the World Trade Center in my hometown of New York City were destroyed by terrorists. The book found its way into the world during this time of collective trauma and sorrow, and then during the violent reaction of the misguided war in Iraq, which proved once again Martín Prechtel’s point that grief, un-metabolized, inevitably turns to violence.

I remember the people who have passed away during these past thirteen years. There’s an African proverb that elders are wise because they know more dead people. By that standard, I have gained in wisdom since the original publication.

My mother, Phoebe Seidman, died in August 2008. My brother and I and our wives were blessed to be with her as she took her last breath. Her final words to me were, “Have a good trip.”

A few months later, a friend from early childhood took his own life.

And a few months after that, Rabbi Aryeh Hirschfield, the main inspiration for my book and my connection to Jewish mysticism, drowned, leaving hundreds of students and friends and congregants, as well as his family, suddenly bereft.

Even though I wasn’t young in the 1990s when I wrote the first edition, when I look back to that period of my life, I seem to myself naïve, acting as if I had all the time in the world. Now, with both of my parents dead and my beloved rabbi no longer in this world, and my being closer to eighty years old than to thirty, I have a more acute sense of the passage of time and of the strangeness and preciousness of life.

It’s a great honor to share with you, in the midst of the strangeness and preciousness of life, my musings on the Hebrew letters and how they might influence and inform our lives today. I hope you enjoy the new and improved Oracle.