Sefer Chayei Ha-Olam Ha-Ba by Rabbi Abraham Abulafia- Haroeh. His main work that deals with detailed guidance for prophetic meditation.
Manuscript on paper. Eastern Europe Ca. 1820-1840.
With stunning drawings and captivating wheels.
[2], 2-26,[4]. 51 written sides. 21.8 Cm.
Overall Good condition. stains, first couple pages have small tears at corners, new later binding
Stamp on the first page of the Holy Rebbi Yehoshua of Ostrova (1819-1873) the Rav of Sosnovich and Ostrova, the son of the holy Rebbi Shlomo Yehuda Leib of Lentshno who was a disciple of the Chozeh of Lublin. After his father’s passing, in 1843, was appointed Admor. For thirty years he lead of thousands of Chassidim. Some of his Divrei Torah were published in his Sefer Toldos Adam. His successor was his Son-In-Law the Holy Divrei Binah of Biala.
The author Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (Hebrew: אברהם בן שמואל אבולעפיה) was the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah". He was born in Zaragoza, Spain in 1240 and is assumed to have died sometime after 1291, following a stay on the small and windswept island of Comino, the smallest of the three inhabited islands that make up the Maltese archipelago.
Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father Samuel Abulafia instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258, when Abraham was eighteen years old, his father died, and two years later Abraham began a life of ceaseless wandering. His first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary river Sambation and the Ten Lost Tribes. He got no further than ‘Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the last Crusades; the war that year between the Mongol Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate forced his return to Europe, via Greece. He had determined to go to Rome, but stopped short in Capua, where during the early 1260s he devoted himself with passionate zeal to the study of philosophy and of The Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides, under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel—probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel of Verona.
On his return to Spain he became subject to visions, and at the age of thirty-one, at Barcelona, began to study a particular kind of Kabbalah whose most important representative was Barukh Togarmi, and received a revelation with messianic overtones. He immersed himself in the study of the Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Creation") and its numerous commentaries, which explain the creation of the world and man as based on Hebrew letter combinations. This book, and particularly the commentary and method of the German Jewish mystic, Eleazar of Worms, exercised a deep influence upon him, and had the effect of greatly increasing his mystical bent.
Letters of the alphabet, numerals, vowel-points, all became symbols of existence to him, and their combinations and permutations, supplementing and explaining one another, possessed for him an illumining power most effectively to be disclosed in a deeper study of the divine names, and especially of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. With such auxiliaries, and with the observance of certain rites and ascetic practises, men, he says, may attain to the highest aim of existence and become prophets; not in order to work miracles and signs, but to reach the highest degree of perception and be able to penetrate intuitively into the inscrutable nature of the Deity, the riddles of creation, the problems of human life, the purpose of the precepts, and the deeper meaning of the Torah.
He went to Rome in 1280 in order to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism on the day before Rosh Hashanah. The Pope was in Suriano when he heard of it, and he issued orders to "burn the fanatic" as soon as he reached that place. The stake was erected in preparation close to the inner gate; but Abulafia set out for Suriano all the same and reached there August 22. While passing through the outer gate, he heard that the Pope had died from an apoplectic stroke during the preceding night. He returned to Rome, where he was thrown into prison by the Order of Friars Minor but was liberated after four weeks’ detention. He was next heard of in Sicily.
Abulafia’s literary activity spans the years 1271–1291 and consists of several books, treatises on grammar, and poems, but amongst which only thirty survive.[3] He wrote many commentaries: three on the Guide of the Perplexed – Sefer ha-Ge’ulah (1273), Sefer Chayei ha-Nefesh, and Sefer Sitrei Torah (1280); on Sefer Yetzirah: – Otzar Eden Ganuz (1285/6), Gan Na’ul, and a third untitled; and a commentary on the Pentateuch – Sefer-Maftechot ha-Torah (1289).
More influential are his handbooks, teaching how to achieve the prophectic experience: Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba (1280), Or ha-Sekhel, Sefer ha-Cheshek, and Imrei Shefer (1291).
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