The Power of PaRDeS - Managing your personal environment for Sanity
Environment, milieu, ambiance, setting, surroundings all refer to what makes up the atmosphere or background against which someone or something is seen.
The PaRDeS Experiment
The PaRDeS Experience
In Hebrew “pardes” means
orchard, while the notion of Heaven is rendered by the phrase Gan Eden (Garden of
Eden). However, when the Tanach was translated into Greek, the translators used the
word Paradise (deriving from the Persian Paradesha), from which there was a backward
linkage to the Hebrew word “pardes”. Thus, the notions of Pardes and Gan Eden, originally
different, came to explain or amplify each other. The dangers associated with Gan
Eden [the angel with the flaming sword] were transferred upon the Pardes and the dangers
associated with the Pardes were transferred upon Gan Eden: both came to represent
dangerous ideals and idea dangers. The Pardes story thus became the story of
Paradise. It became a common effort of medieval commentators to explain what happened
in Paradise by means of the Pardes story. But the connection operated in the
opposite sense as well. Entering the Pardes became one and the same thing with entering
Paradise, i.e. returning to the primordial place and implicitly to the original state. At
this point we should recall the kabbalists’ preoccupation to restore the initial order, to
complete the Tikkun Olam and also the Tikkun Nephesh.
Edenic Paradise And
Paradisal Eden
Moshe Idel’s Reading
Of The Talmudic Legend Of
The Four Sages Who
Entered The Pardes
Journal for the Study of R eligions and Ideologies, 6, 18(Winter 2007): 79-87
Felicia
Waldman,