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Joel David Bakst is a teaching rabbi and scholar of the Kabbalah who, while living in Jerusalem for 20 years, studied and taught in Orthodox yeshivot. Raised in a Southern California Conservative Jewish home, Joel became a ba'al teshuva (newly religious) at the age of 20 bringing full circle his lineage from a long line of Rabbis. Both his grandfather and uncle were Orthodox rabbis, his great grandfather was chief rabbi of St. Louis, MO and his great, great grandparents made aliya to Eretz Yisrael and are buried on the Mt. of Olives. He is the 8th generation of the Rabbi Eliyahu, the famed Gaon of Vilna, whose unique teachings in Kabbalah, have been a focus of Joel's esoteric studies. Joel's spiritual search through comparative religions led him to Israel in 1971 where, upon enrolling in a traditional Eastern European style yeshiva, he became part of the original Ba'al Teshuva movement, the initial great wave of assimilated Jews returning to rabbinical Judaism. For 10 years he pursued a path towards rabbinical ordination and studied Talmud, Halacha (Jewish Law) and mussar (Jewish Ethics). During the next 10 years, while continuing his Talmudic studies, he also began a search into Hassidic and mystical literature. He then studied with Sephardic kabbalists (Moroccan and Tunisian) along with Ashkenazic teachers and colleagues. Uncommonly, Joel has had the honor of having immersed in all four of the great rivers of Kabbalah that flow from the holy Ari (Lurianic Kabbalah): 1) R. Yisrael Ba'al Shem Tov (the Besht), 2) R. Shalom Sharabi (the Rashash), 3) R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (the Ramchal), and 4) R. Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna (the Gra). Joel continued his rabbinical education and continued on a path of intense Torah study and practice as well as teaching both men and women. He has lectured and given workshops in Israel, the United States and India. Joel is the author of numerous works on rabbinical methodology, esoteric Judaism, the prophetic confluence of Kabbalah with the new sciences and the messianic role of the maps and models pouring forth from modern technology. A guiding light for Joel's stimulating approach to Torah teaching is stressed by the Gaon of Vilna, "There can never be a contradiction between the esoteric (sode) and the exoteric (pshat)". Concurrent with his traditional yeshiva training, Joel had always taken a deep interest in the Torah's interface with world religions and Noachides. He has done extensive research into the Talmudic, Midrashic and medieval rabbinical sources concerning Noachides, Christianity and the "Seventy Nations". This investigation includes many obscure and little known Kabbalistic teachings about Yeshu HaNotzri, the role of Christianity and Islam as well as the phenomenon of the role of Oriental religions in our "Final Generation" during the present period of the End Days. "In the Torah world it has always been known that the non-Jew can truly only understand his true essence and mission from an authentic Jewish perspective. As we are currently accelerating toward the Edge of Time the Torah and her ancient sages are beginning to reveal that a key to the mystery of Jewish existence is also to be found in the eternal mystery of Bnai Noach". Continually evolving, the City of Luz web site is the culmination of 35 years from the time he began a systematic study of Torah in search of a coherent interdisciplinary Torah-based system. City of Luz offers the beginner as well as the advanced talmid chacham (traditional Torah scholar) a unique approach and collection of methodological tools that teach both conscious learning and direct experience. The secret of Luz allows for a seamless interface between every field of Talmud, halacha and kabbalah. The City of Luz also interfaces Torah itself with every school of science, theology and mysticism found among the Seventy Nations of the world, both ancient and contemporary. City of Luz is the ultimate interdisciplinary meta-tool for both Jews and Noahides of our generation - known to the Jewish sage-mystics as the Final Generation. Joel currently teaches in his small yeshiva in Manitou Springs (near Colorado Springs), Colorado where he has also been instructing a dedicated group of Jews and Bnai Noach for over the past 4 years.
B”H Miriam Ben-Yaacov has been writing and teaching Torah for many years. Miriam was born in the state of Washington into a Southern Baptist family. Her father was in the US Army until 1965, when he went into the ministry and began pastoring churches. The family lived in many places as she grew up. Within the church Miriam taught "Old Testament," including the Prophets' promises to Israel for ingathering to the Land and Redemption for the world. Having lived in Germany for so many of her formative years, she was particularly influenced by the gravity of the Holocaust. In 1985 she became involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. Inspired by the challenge to understand the Jewish roots of Christianity, Miriam studied books on Jewish history and practice of Judaism, which greatly affected her teaching and writing. In 1988, she converted to Orthodox Judaism. In July of 1990, Miriam and her family moved to Israel. During the thirteen years there, they lived in various communities in Judea. Her older daughter, Amira, became a Hebrew teacher and the younger, Yael, served in the Israeli army. Miriam studied Torah with various teachers in the Jerusalem area and Safed. In the year 2001 she began traveling in Asia (India, Thailand, and Cambodia) and the US on what she calls her spiritual journey. Meeting people of other cultures, she came to a new view of the Noahide Covenant (based on the Seven Universal Laws of the Torah that apply to the non-Jewish nations). Encountering Israelis traveling after the army, she came to see the journey of the secular Jew, searching for his Jewish identity. The idea of the Redemption took on a new dimension. Miriam’s Torah classes focus on prayer and repentance necessary for complete healing—transformation of the soul. She became a practitioner of an energy healing method called Shefa (a Hebrew word meaning "abundance" or “radiance”), which is becoming increasingly popular in Israel. Shefa is similar to the more commonly known method of Reiki, however, it is completely based on Torah methods. As she progressed in the work, she began developing a new method that she calls “Metatronic Healing,” integrating the Shefa method with Kaballah teachings. Miriam returned to the United States at the end of 2003. She worked with the Vendyl Jones Research Institutes (http://vjri.purpleguy.com/ and www.bnainoah.net/), where she also taught in the online school, Virtual Yeshiva (www.virtualyeshiva.com). She taught and served as the Educational Director for Noahide Nations (www.noahidenations.com). She currently lives in the Colorado Springs area. Upon encountering the teachings of Rabbi Yoel David Bakst on the City of Luz, Miriam was amazed to recall an experience at age nineteen, of which she had struggled for years to make sense… Each night, when I went to bed, night after night, I dreamt of the same place. It began in a cave, dark, with almost an icy feeling on the rough walls. There were other people in the cave with me, and we were moving toward a place of light in the ceiling. When we got there, we helped each other climb up. There was a golden city of light. As I walked through this place, I felt peaceful and happy. At that time, my life was very unhappy, so I found myself deeply yearning for this place and not ever wanting to leave. That dream seemed so real that it was more like a memory. For a while, I asked people if they had ever heard of such a place. Of course, no one had, and some thought the question a bit crazy. At that time, I had no experience with Jewish literature, so I was quite surprised years later when I discovered very similar accounts. As I meditated on various aspects of the dream, I saw a beautiful vision of swirling, heavenly light. I understood that sometimes revelation first comes without definition, but later the meaning unfolds. Years after the dream, I was in India, where I heard the legend of people, who have been sitting in caves for hundreds of years, elevating and purifying their souls. One of the stories told of a young couple who journeyed to the caves and found one of the people. When the girl looked into the face of the guru, she fell to the ground dead. After I returned to Israel from India, my teacher of years told me about a man in Jerusalem’s Old City who had actually found these people himself. He told me to go talk to a rabbi who had related the story to him. I went with my map of the places I had been in the Himalayas. After he related the story to me, I asked him, “Rabbi, from a Jewish perspective, what is the significance of these people? Aren’t they Hindus?” When I told Rabbi Bakst about my dream of the cave and city, and of the vision of the light swirling in the night sky, he said to me: “Miriam, that was the cave of Luz and the City of Luz. The light that you saw was emanating from the City of Luz.” Then I knew that this is a real place that my soul knew quite well, albeit on another dimension. Indeed, it is the very place that has propelled the direction of my life, bringing me to discover the whole purpose of my being in the world. The light—the light of Luz-- is the light that I have concentrated on during Shefa prayers--the light of Creation that brings down healing into the world. I had tried to find the cave sitters, only to ultimately discover that I was one. Miriam has since joined the work of Rabbi Bakst in bringing the teachings of City of Luz into her own classes and writings at Well of Miriam (www.wellofmiriam.com). You may contact Miriam at: miriam@wellofmiriam.com
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