THIS TRANSLATION is a collaborative effort by the Hebrew Institute of Boston. It was my pleasure to translate this book with Samuel Tarlin, Alix Ginsburg, and Aaron Dockser. I would like also to acknowledge and thank my friends, Phyllis Birnbaum, Larry Denenberg, Dan Deykin, Raya Dreben, and Bill Moran, who volunteered to proofread different parts of the translation and whose observations and remarks had a significant impact on the final work. Last but not least I would like to express my gratitude to Connie Webber, managing editor of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, and to Professor Boaz Huss of the University of Beersheba in Israel for entrusting this enormous project to me.

It is hard to imagine the amount of time and work required to complete a translation of an academic text saturated with biblical, talmudic, and cryptic zoharic quotations, as well as statements of rishonim and aḥaronim. When scholars support their arguments by quoting ancient sources, the sources speak for themselves. The translator of these sources, however, is responsible for conveying the allusions, metaphors, style, and meanings that are not always straightforward. This may explain why the most obscure segments of the Zohar were omitted from the Soncino translation.

Huss's narrative is very clear, and he was always available to answer our questions, but the cryptic zoharic quotations posed a real challenge. Our goal was to produce an intelligible translation of the basic meaning of these quotations without losing the biblical and talmudic allusions embedded within them. Towards that end we relied on the best-known and most commonly used translations of the Bible, the JPS New Translation of the Holy Scriptures (1985) and the New King James Version of the Old and New Testaments (1982). Whenever possible we used the Soncino translation of the Talmud and of the Zohar. We also consulted David Goldstein's translation of the Zohar and that of Daniel Matt.

Yet even after Professor Huss approved our interpretations of the zoharic quotations we were still left with the methodological and stylistic question—to what extent should we paraphrase cryptic passages to make them accessible to the reader?