When I was a child, growing up in Israel and sharing the room with my sister, my mother used to read bible stories to us, every night before we fell asleep. She used to sit on one of the beds, holding in her hand one of the five books of Moses, that my father received as a bar Miztvah present and read for us.
Each book was the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the upper part of each page there was the core text of the Torah, and beneath it were the interpretations of Rashi, spelled in his coded writing.
When my mother read for us, I had the feeling that these stories unfolded such an immensity of imagination which carried me far away from the little room and my immediate surrounding.
In the first year at school known as Kita Alef, we learned to read and write Hebrew. In the second, known as Kita Beit, we started reading and learning Torah. Since we learned in a secular school, our Torah reading books were ‘adapted to our level’, and most of the text was missing. ‘To make our lives easy’ the editors decorated it with sketches. However, even as a child I felt these well-meaning attempts to “sweeten” the bible could not make up for the lack in depth and imagination I had come to known while listening to these stories at night.
It was this feeling of “it’s so much more than that” which determined my relation to the bible through the decades, eventually leading to the study of the Zohar, the Midrashim and the Kabbalists with the help of various teachers and authors.
Through the years I became more and more aware of the hidden aspects of the bible and its stories. Not unlike peeling an onion, layer after layer revealed new understandings, and I soon found myself writing my own little interpretations and commentaries.
For about two years I have been publishing some of these thoughts on my English and Hebrew blogs. Some of these articles were very well received by my readers, but I felt there was so much more to say, so I decided to take my writing to the next level and publish some of it in an ebook format as little bite-sized portions.
The first release in this series entitled “Bible Stories as Blueprints of the Soul” is based on a short essay (previously published on my blog) which I extended and unfolded in such a way that it (hopefully) stand as an independent whole.
If you are interested in this essay called “The Secret Of Cain & Abel“, I would like to invite you to download it for free [Sorry, this offer has expired. Subscribe to our newsletter to grab the goodies faster next time.] within the next 48 hours by clicking here or on the Amazon link of your choice: US | UK | DE | FR | ES | IT
As usual, I’m looking forward to your feedback and kindly ask you to leave a review (here’s how), so that we can make the next part even better!
Shavua Tov,
Eti Shani
P.S.: please feel free to share this with your friends!
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