Aestheticism, Rationalism, and Esotericism: Medieval Scholarship and Contemporary Polemics

Abstract

Menachem Kellner. Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Pp. xix. +343.Melila Hellner- Eshed. A River Issues Forth from Eden: On Language of Mystical Experience in Zohar (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers Ltd., 2005. Pp. 462.Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Ita Philosophical Implications. Trans. Jackie Feldman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 200.I.A perennial desire: aspiration to chart map of Jewish religiosity at a precise moment, a map that would exhibit competing and often intertwining paths traced by a generation - perhaps inevitable in any tradition in which heterogeneous perspectives have long flourished and contended. Such maps have often been composed to portray range of responses to a crisis, to turmoil from within or without, that has rendered tradition problematic in some way.In early fifteenth century, for example, Catalan writer Profiat Duran composed what was to become a well-known sketch of his contemporaries' competing understandings of Judaism as introduction to his grammar, Ma 'aach efod. After arguing that can only have its beneficent effect when approached with kavanah (proper intention), he embarked on a concise description of various ways members of his generation sought to infuse their religious practice with meaning. While they all sought inner wisdom of Torah (hokhmat hatorah),1 they disagreed about its content and source. In a classification whose pertinence has endured for centuries, Duran divided his contemporaries' quests for meaning into three categories: talmudic, kabbalistic, and philosophical. Duran commented both sympathetically and critically about each of these approaches and then presented his own contribution to quest - calling for a greater focus on biblical text, which he judged to be underemphasized by all other approaches. One aspect of Duran's biblical focus which is of particular interest to present essay is his argument in favor of attentiveness to aesthetic dimensions of texts, beauty of their illuminations, pleasing forms of their letters, quality of their bindings, and attractiveness of rooms in which they are studied, since the contemplation and study of pleasing forms, beautiful images and drawings broaden and stimulate soul.2 For Duran, significance of aesthetic qualities and power of texts was relatively autonomous from content of their ideas.3It is significant that Duran portrayed these four competing paths as responses to a common quest, desire that religious practice should be meaningful and not mere rote. This common quest suggests that Duran's description of these paths reflects a set of responses to a pervasive spiritual crisis besetting Jewish community, a shared anxiety about loss of religious meaning - and it is this feature that gives his description its coherence as a generational map of Jewish religiosity at turn of fifteenth century. To this internal crisis, we can also add that Duran was writing at a time of external persecution and forced conversion, of which he had personal experience.4In our own time, radical proliferation of approaches to tradition would render quite difficult task of comprehensively mapping Jewish religiosity. Nonetheless, I propose to discuss a range of books each of which delves into medieval heritage in order to present a path to tradition suited for today. This perspective also helps to identify generational crisis that these three books perceive as demanding a response. This crisis, unlike that of Duran 's age, does not seem for these writers to be a loss of religious meaning, but rather, a lethal melange of religious excess and religious ossification - a combination referred to by these writers as haredization (Kellner), fundamentalism (HellnerEshed), and intolerance (Halbertal). …