Dr. Daniel C. Matt

Dr. Daniel C. Matt is the author of “God And The Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality,” and one of the world’s leading authorities on Jewish mysticism. Dr. Matt received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and for over twenty years served as Professor of Jewish Spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Matt has published a total of eight books, including: the best-selling The Essential Kabbalah (translated into six languages); Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment; Zohar: Annotated and Explained; as well as others. He has received fellowships and awards from various academic sources, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the John M. Templeton Foundation, the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. From 1998-2002 Dr. Matt lived in Jerusalem, where he worked on the first phase of an immense project: a 12-volume, annotated English translation of the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah. This is the first translation ever based on a critical Aramaic text of the Zohar, established by Daniel Matt from numerous original Zohar manuscripts. The first two volumes of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition were published in 2004 by Stanford University Press. For this work, Daniel was recently honored with the Koret Jewish Book Award. Among the many topics we will be discussing with Dr. Matt will be the relationship between cosmology and spirituality.