The Golden Thread
·S1 E167
The Man Who Knocked on the Pope's Door: Abraham Abulafia and the Light Beyond the Mirror
Episode Description
In a small room in Barcelona in 1271, a restless Jewish scholar named Abraham Abulafia sat alone with the Hebrew alphabet and decided that the sacred was not as far away as the institutions of his world insisted. He founded the school of Prophetic Kabbalah, marched to Rome to convert a Pope, was condemned by his own community, exiled to a tiny island in the Mediterranean --- and never stopped writing. This episode follows his extraordinary life and asks a question that still burns today: when the mirror of our faith grows cloudy, do we abandon the light it was meant to reflect, or do we find a truer angle?