Today

Lately, scientists have begun to approach consciousness in more Spinozist terms: as a complex and indivisible mind-brain-body system. And now Dr. Antonio Damasio, the head of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center in Iowa City and leading anti-Cartesian crusader, says that Spinoza was right in other ways as well. In particular, Dr. Damasio argues in his new book, "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain" (Harcourt, 2003), the philosopher anticipated one of brain science's most important recent discoveries: the critical role of the emotions in ensuring our survival and allowing us to think. Feeling, it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but, as Spinoza saw it, an indispensable accomplice. 

"Science is proving Spinoza more current," Dr. Damasio said over tea at his hotel during a recent visit to New York. "He intuited the basic mechanism of the emotions." 

The Hebrew "raz" is loaned from Aramaic. I haven't found it outside the Aramaic part of the book of Daniel (which is believed to have been written in the Hellenistic period after the reign of the Persian Empire).
"Secret" in Hebrew are: "סוד" (sod) and "דבר סתר" (dvar seter).
 believe both meanings of rāz are genuinely Iranian. Persian rāz "secret" is cognate to Skt. rahas-.
Pahlavi rāz "building" appears to be a loan from Parthian and may be related to Pahlavi abrāz "high, superior, height," which is traced to Old Iranian *uparyānk- “above, high.” Arabic rāz "builder, architect" was likely borrowed from Persian.

The Talmud consists of two parts: the Mishnah, and its commentary, the Gemara. The Mishnah, compiled and edited by Judah Hanasi about 200 C.E., was the first Jewish code of laws since the Torah. There are two Gemaras, known as the Babylonian and the Palestinian. The former, completed about 500 C.E., is the record of the discussions of the Palestinian scholars. The Mishnah plus the Babylonian Gemara is known as the Babylonian Talmud; the Mishnah plus the Palestinian Gemara is known as the Palestinian Talmud. The two Talmuds have always been printed separately, and never together. 

Judah ha-Nasi

For sixty years, the study of Kabbalah in secular universities around the world has been dominated by the theories and approach of one man: Gershom Scholem. Scholem, a brilliant, charismatic German Jew, emigrated to Jerusalem from Berlin in 1923, and lived there until his death in 1982. Scholem virtually founded the academic discipline of the study of Jewish mysticism. His historical studies span the entire gamut of post‑Biblical Jewish history, from the Rabbinic age until Hasidism and beyond.

Moshe Idel details how the anonymous, late 14th century Sefer Ha-Peliyah was to have disturbing consequences in the Jewish world three centuries later, interweaving luminaries with the cultural, historical, religious, and philosophical concepts of their day, and demonstrating how cultural agents were inadvertently instrumental in the mid-17th-century mass-movement Sabbateanism that led to the conviction that Sabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah.
Exploring how the tragic misperception of the Jewish Sabbath by the non-Jewish world led to a linkage of Jews with sorcery in 14th and 15th-century Europe, associating their holy day with the witches' 'Sabbat' gathering, Idel brings this wide-ranging study into the present day with an analysis of 20th-century scholarship and thought influenced by Saturnism, particularly lingering themes related to melancholy in the works of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin.

 It is often religious people who most need to see that; they need to know that astronomy is wonderful and that they shouldn't be afraid of it. I often quote John Paul II, when he said [of evolution] that "truth cannot contradict truth." If you think you already know everything about the world, you are not a good scientist, and if you think you know all there is to know about God, then your religious faith is at fault.