20. The Zohar | Dr. Daniel Matt

J.J. and Dr. Daniel Matt become wiser and gain understanding while discussing the Kabbalistic ideas of The Zohar .



Daniel Matt is a prominent scholar of Kabbalah and the Zohar. He has been featured in Time and Newsweek and on National Public Radio. His books include The Essential Kabbalah (translated into eight languages), Zohar: Annotated and Explained, and God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality (revised edition, 2016). In 2022, his biography of Elijah the Prophet (Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation) was published by Yale University Press in their series Jewish Lives. This book was awarded the inaugural Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Book Prize, established by Yeshiva University. Some years ago, Daniel completed an 18-year project of translating and annotating the Zohar. In 2016, Stanford University Press published his ninth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, concluding the Zohar’s main commentary on the Torah. For this work, Daniel has been honored with a National Jewish Book Award and a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Koret award hailed his translation as “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.” Daniel received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and for twenty years served as professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel lives in Berkeley with his wife Hana. He currently teaches Zohar online. For information about these ongoing Zohar courses, see his website: danielcmatt.com

likely the best jewish podcast out there... in spite of the host

don't get me wrong... jj gets the job done. he coaxes lots of good information out of his guests, asks decent questions, mostly manages to keep up with them along the way, and, mercifully, he stops talking to allow them long, interrupted stretches of time, to share their wisdom. perhaps he speaks the way he does because he is sharing these conversations with such consistently brilliant people. perhaps he is intimidated by them, and the resultant anxiety is responsible for his cadence and tone. perhaps he is simply trying to cram his contributions into the fewest breaths possible in order to give them more time to speak. perhaps he's simply afflicted by being terminally british. either way, he is, unfortunately, utterly insufferable. on the one hand, i wish he would slow down. on the other hand, that would likely result in a larger amount of each episode's runtime being filled by his tragically awkward attempts to joke with guests, utterly pretentious word choice, and frequently quite inane remarks. he's probably a lot more clever than he comes across, but as it is, his deficits clash so horribly with each other, it makes him come off like an anxious space alien who's spent their entire life getting bullied at eton. or maybe he just reminds me too much of myself as a teenager, before i realised that conversations were not races, and you didn't need to try so hard to win them in order to prove you were smart enough to be, like... exist.

that said, i tune in for almost every episode - so he's obviously doing something right, even if that's just managing to consistently wrangle really, really excellent guest to highlight. it really is a treasure trove of jewish intellectuals.

i hope this podcast is successful enough for jj to afford a good therapist - he really sounds like he could use one.