Jewish Mysticism Research Articles

Концепция Предвечного Человека (Адам Кадмон) в еврейском мистицизме

Концепция Предвечного Человека (Адам Кадмон) в еврейском мистицизме

The Kabbalistic Alphabet of Libeskind: The Motif of Letter-shaped Windows in the Design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin

The present article attempts to analyse and interpret the structure of windows in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind and constructed in 1989–1999. Elongated, narrow, irregular window openings arranged at different angles like a tangle of cuts and grooves span the entire structure and resemble Hebrew letters and the kabbalistic notion of the “scattered alphabet”, which functions in Jewish tradition as a visual metaphor. The assumption of such a perspective of interpretation, based on the visual form of the building which was, in its principle, meant to partially refer to the Holocaust, leads to the hypothesis that the chosen motifs of letter-shaped windows (the scattered alphabet) is connected to the kabbalistic postulate of the “repair of the world”, known in Jewish tradition as tikkun olam. The characteristic chaotic arrangement of the window openings is not, as it might be assumed, simply a symbol of the civilisational “fragmentation” resulting from the Holocaust. On the contrary, the design manifestly embodies the nostalgia for the mythical (and messianic) times of harmony, order and regularity, as well as the longing for clear structure and symbiosis. This manifests in the kabbalistic interpretation of the motif of letter-windows understood as a mystical (or even theurgical) element of restoration. Concentration, contemplation, perception and consideration of the forms and shapes of the letters is a notion known from the Kabbalah; in this case architectural references to Jewish mysticism are more than just a strategy for interpretation, but a declarative assumption made by the architect himself. Libeskind’s design in Berlin, therefore, involves the matter of language as the elementary material and instrument of salvation, while the context of the Kabbalah ought to be regarded as a certain symptom or a specific modality shaping new meanings manifested by the work of art that this museum undoubtedly is.

Kabbalah, and the Popular Culture Industry: Exploring Identity and Spiritual Satisfaction

Todays popular culture is a part of global culture. Kabbalah, a form of popular spirituality derived from orthodox Jewish mysticism has gained popularity because of its association with the activists and celebrities in the pop culture industries. This paper examines the influence of this organization, which is still mysterious, through the public image of the spirituality of pop culture actors who became followers of Kabbalah and express their identity in the implied meanings contained in music and lyrics of the song and as the media to express those feeling, thought, or social and religious experince, also how popular culture as a criticism of religious institutions. In strengthening and deepening this research, will applies social and phenomenological approach as my theoretical framework to make a deep analysis in this topic. This study is important to give alternative perspectives to pop culture and the media as inseparable linked to identity, culture, politic, religion and gender which is related to common society nowadays.

Yahoel and Metatron. Aural Apocalypticism and the Origins of Early Jewish Mysticism, written by Andrey A. Orlov, 2017.

Yahoel and Metatron. Aural Apocalypticism and the Origins of Early Jewish Mysticism, written by Andrey A. Orlov, 2017.

Sufism and Mysticism in Aurangzeb Alamgir's Era

Mysticism is defined as a search of God, Spiritual truth and ultimate reality. It is a practice of religious ideologies, myths, ethics and ecstasies. The Christian mysticism is the practise or theory which is within Christianity. The Jewish mysticism is theosophical, meditative and practical. A school of practice that emphasizes the search for Allah is defined as Islamic mysticism. It is believed that the earliest figure of Sufism is Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Different Sufis and their writings have played an important role in guidance and counselling of people and peaceful co-existence in the society. Mughal era was an important period regarding Sufism in the subcontinent. The Mughal kings were devotees of different Sufi orders and promoted Sufism and Sufi literature. It is said that Aurangzeb Alamgir was against Sufism, but a lot of Mystic prose and poetic work can be seen during Aurangzeb Alamgir's era. In this article, we will discuss Mystic Poetry and Prose of Aurangzeb's period.

Brian Cherney’s Illuminations

Brian Cherney’s Illuminations for string orchestra, composed in 1987, reflects ideas related to Jewish mysticism. Descriptions and accounts of meditation techniques that ultimately lead to visions of light, and even an encounter with the divine, so inspired the composer that he decided to write a piece that re-enacts a meditative cycle. Illuminations is thus a dramatic staging: the listener, as if granted special insight into the mind of someone who is meditating, witnesses how the mind is transformed as it approaches light (or the divine). The composition expresses light and the divine in multiple ways, from the layout of the instruments on stage, to the formal plan of the piece, to the variety of pitch collections heard throughout the work. This article unveils some of the subtle intricacies that make Illuminations so powerfully evocative, and why it remains one of Cherney’s signal achievements.

Mystical techniques, mental processes, and states of consciousness in Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah: A reassessment

This article reevaluates the mystical techniques and experiences peculiar to Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah and attempts to offer an alternative approach to their dominant understanding, which largely depends on Moshe Idel’s work. Current scholars of Jewish mysticism have a habit of highlighting the “unique character” of Abulafia’s mystical practices while asserting that they cannot be compared with the induction techniques and the psychophysical phenomena typical of hypnosis. While generally agreeing with the scholars discussed that the hyperactivation of the mind found in Abulafian Kabbalah contrasts sharply with the mental relaxation attained through the mystical practices of other religious traditions, the present study takes issue with the current view of Abulafian Kabbalah’s relation to hypnotic procedures, processes, and states. This work addresses the issues present with the current view and offers a more inclusive model for interpreting Abulafia’s Kabbalah, drawing from psychiatrist Roland Fischer.

Arendt, Scholem y la respuesta del mundo judío al problema del antisemitismo

In 1941 Schoken Books published Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem, which included the lectures he delivered throughout 1938 during his stay at the Jewish Institute in New York. These lectures unveiled some of the most relevant aspects of the evolution of Jewish mysticism. We know, through their correspondence, that Arendt was impressed by this book even though she wrote sparsely about the subject. In this article, we dig into the motives behind these interests and follow the leads to try to draw a wider picture of the problem of assimilation and the history of the Jews in Europe. To accomplish this, we will explain Scholem’s main theses about the evolution of Jewish mysticism and discuss some of the ideas Arendt extracts from them. We will focus specifically on the opportunity, in Arendt’s view, that the Sabbatai Zevi movement represents for rethinking Jewish history and its place in European culture.

Book Review: Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss

Tzahi Weiss. Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 196. $59.95. ISBN: 9780812249903. The Hebrew text known as the Sefer Yeṣirah , or Book of Formation , has piqued the interest of scholars of early medieval Jewish philosophy and those of central- to late-medieval Jewish mysticism and magic for centuries. In Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices , Tzahi Weiss extends interest in this text to scholars of early medieval Jewish mysticism, magical praxis, and Jewish-Christian relations. Through an exploration of Sefer Yeṣirah ’s specific methods of letter speculation, grammar, and textual reception, Weiss presents a two-pronged argument. First, he contends that the much-debated compositional context of the Sefer Yeṣirah was most likely 7th-century Christian Syria. And, second, that early readers of the Sefer Yeṣirah understood it as a mystical and magical treatise long before the late 12th century, as is commonly assumed. Weiss divides his slim volume into an introduction, five chapters, an epilogue, and two appendices. The first appendix addresses scholarly arguments that the Sefer Yeṣirah originated in the Abbasid world and was influenced by Arabic grammar; the second appendix provides a Hebrew transcription of an 11th-century recension of the Sefer Yeṣirah (Ms. Vatican 299/4) that Weiss bases his arguments on, accompanied by Peter A. Hayman’s English translation. Along with a review of scholarship treating the text and a statement of Weiss’ departure from, indebtedness to, and contributions to the field, the Introduction provides a quick summary of the contents of the Sefer Yeṣirah as a treatise describing God’s formation of the world from numbers …

Book Review: Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference edited by Ryan Szpiech

Ryan Szpiech, ed. Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean , New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 329. $55; ISBN 978-0-8232-6462-9. Ryan Szpiech’s volume contains thirteen essays on different aspects of medieval exegesis in the context of religious disputation, polemic, and co-existence. Some essays focus on the points of intersection between exegetical traditions, others on specific polemics, and still others on individual authors’ strategies in negotiating conversion, disputation, or coexistence. The essays are grouped into four thematic sections. The first section, “Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam,” contains essays on individual Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors writing in the Islamicate world and how they negotiate the relationship between the three exegetical traditions. Sarah Stroumsa, in “The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus” (29-39), presents two Andalusi views of Abraham as a paragon of the scientist. Both draw on material from outside the religious tradition of the author; the Muslim Ibn Masarra uses ideas from Jewish mysticism of Abraham as a bearer of special knowledge, while the Jew Maimonides borrows Islamic historiographical traditions of Abraham as a man of science. Sidney Griffith’s “Ibn al-Mahrumah’s Notes in Ibn Kammunah’s Examination of the Three Religions : The Issue of the Abrogation of Mosaic Law” (40-57) is a fascinating study of a polemic study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam authored by a Christian exegete and glossed by a Jewish scholar. They provide two different views (Jewish and Christian) on the question of the abrogation of Mosaic law as a basis for Christian theology. In “Al-Biqa’i seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic relationship with the Bible” (58-70), Walid …

Call for Papers: <em>Nashim</em> No. 38: Women in Jewish Magic and Mysticism

Call for Papers: <em>Nashim</em> No. 38: Women in Jewish Magic and Mysticism

Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, trans. Allan Arkush with a new foreword by David Biale. Princeton Classics, 38. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, pp., xxi, 487.

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) liked to tell the story of a visit he once made to the Berlin rabbi famed for his knowledge <?page nr="404"?>of Jewish mysticism. Scholem was still a young man and was just beginning to read books on the subject. When he saw a shelf of books on Kabbalah, he asked enthusiastically about them. “Dieser Quatsch?” the rabbi asked. “I should waste time reading nonsense like this?” Scholem raised his eyebrows, thinking, as he would later say, “Here was a field where I could make an impression.” He went on to write a doctoral dissertation (Munich 1922) on the Sefer ha Bahir (“Book of the Brightness”), traditionally dated to the first centuries of the Common Era. He moved to Jerusalem in 1923, two years before the Hebrew University was officially opened there. He became its librarian and then its first professor of Jewish mysticism, a post he held for more the next four decades. He wrote many influential books and articles on aspects of Jewish culture, but arguably the most ambitious and significant was Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (1962), of which the English translation was first published in 1987. In the introduction to this second reprinting, David Biale, Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Davis, calls it “a maximum opus.”

Jewish Mysticism from Borges to Cirlot: a Transatlantic Approach to the Possibility of a Non-Subject Subjectivity

Jewish Mysticism from Borges to Cirlot: a Transatlantic Approach to the Possibility of a Non-Subject Subjectivity

Solovyov’s Metaphysics between Gnosis and Theurgy

This article provides a reading of Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy as expressed in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ and ‘The Meaning of Love’. It seeks to unpack his eclectic thought in order to answer the question of whether there is a Jewish Kabbalistic influence on the Russian thinker amidst his usual platonic, gnostic, and Schellengian tropes. Interested as a young man in Jewish Mysticism, Solovyov fluctuates in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ between a platonic reading of Schellengian Gnosticism and some elements of Kabbalistic origin. In ‘The Meaning of Love’, he develops a notion of love that puts him very close to what Moshe Idel calls ‘theosophic-theurgical Kabbalah’. Showing how ‘The Meaning of Love’ completes the narrative of ‘Lectures’, we can affirm that there is a certain Christian Kabbalistic line in Solovyov’s thought that culminates in his theurgical understanding of love. In this sense, Solovyov might be called a philosophical Marrano as he is certainly a heterodox theosopher that fluctuates between Christian Gnosis and Christian Kabbalah, never assuming a solid identity.

Divine contractions: theism gives birth to idealism

AbstractThe first part of the article presents three little arguments from theism to idealism. The second part employs these arguments to make sense of a puzzling doctrine of Jewish mysticism: the doctrine of divine contraction (Heb. tzimtzum).

“Spirit to Spirit”: The Imagery of the Kiss in theZoharand its Possible Sources

AbstractThe study explores the character and meaning of the imagery of the kiss in theZoharas an expression of dynamic union. In order to demonstrate the formation of a specific structure of ideas and their dynamics within Kabbalistic theosophy, theZoharicimagery found in the pericopeTerumahhas been situated here within the context of numerous sources, from which theZohar, through direct or indirect transmission, could have drawn its key elements. The metaphor of the kiss, which allows the Zoharic homily to embrace several central Kabbalistic concepts of love, presents love as a universal power, being comprised of two Neoplatonic notions, the hypostatic relation and the principle of “being contained in each other.” The analysis of the various sources across ancient Greek, medieval Islamic, and Christian traditions amounts to a different characterization of the meaning adduced thus far in scholarship regarding eros in Jewish mysticism and suggests a more plausible trajectory of influence of Greek sources in the early Kabbalah.

RUSSIAN, JEWISH OR HUMAN? JEWISH MYSTICAL THOUGHT IN THE POETRY OF BULAT SHALVOVICH OKUDZHAVA

While looking at the literary output of Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava from the perspective of imagology, one can see that the image of “the Other” in the poems of the Russian bard was created, paradoxically, just by this “Other”, and it was not constructed by the images (imagines) intrinsically present in the consciousness of the ethnocentric “Self” or “The Same”. In other words, in the case of Okudzhava’s poetry, the image of “the Other” stands on the basis of some ideas of Jewish mystics and the ones of Jewish philosophers of dialogue (Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Lévinas). Therefore, the aim of this article was to present the motifs stemming from Jewish mysticism in the poems-songs by Okudzhava which, as it seems, influenced theological, anthropological and ethical views of the bard. The distinctive feature of Okudzhava’s philosophical approach is perceiving every person, regardless of their ethnic or cultural origin, as a being responsible for themselves in the process of constituting themselves in their humanity. The same person is also responsible for other people, for the world of nature, and even for an impersonal and non-anthropomorphic godhead who does not intervene in human affairs. Therefore, Okudzhava – similarly to Jewish mystics – regards the human being as a co-creator of reality, obliged to perform ethically positive acts and respect an old Kabbalistic postulate tikkun ha-olam - “to mend the world”.

The Temptation of Pedagogy: Levinas's Educational Thought from His Philosophical and Confessional Writings

In this paper I analyse the current trends in educational philosophy which utilise Emmanuel Levinas's thought. An ever-growing number of scholars have articulated many different aspects of his thought for educational purposes. I propose that there is a general split between these scholars, those who favour Levinas's philosophical writings and those who favour his confessional writings. I analyse the variegated theories presented by both of these trends and offer a critique largely based on the need for the incorporation of Levinas's complete writings in order to better understand what may be called his ‘educational thought’. Lastly, in order to demonstrate this approach, I offer a reading of his seminal lecture ‘The Temptation of Temptation’ with a focus on the pedagogical features of the Sinaitic revelation, while also demonstrating the proximity between his thought and different aspects of Jewish mysticism.

ŚLAD MISTYKI ŻYDOWSKIEJ W TRANSCENDENTALNEJ ANTROPOLOGII KARLA RAHNERA

This principal aim of deliberations in this paper was to verify the hypothesis that Karl Rahner’s anthropology operates on premises which dovetail with fundamental ideas originating with medieval Jewish mystics. In order to argue the hypothesis, the author relies on comparative methodology to discuss essential anthropological concepts advanced by K. Rahner and M. Buber.

Rabbi Elazar, Son of Rabbi Shimon: Transformation from Misanthropic Ascetic to Humanitarian

Talmudic stories are a method used by the ancient sages to teach us about ethics and morality. This paper examines the life of Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon b. Yochai. The most important and famous work of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), the Zohar, is attributed to Rabbi Shimon (with some assistance from his son) when living in a cave for 13 years. The Talmudic stories demonstrate Rabbi Elazar’s transformation from a misanthropic ascetic to a humanitarian willing to suffer for others.