Study Of Jewish Mysticism Research Articles

Historicism and/or Phenomenology in the Study of Jewish Mysticism: Imagery Techniques in the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira as a Case Study

Historicism and/or Phenomenology in the Study of Jewish Mysticism: Imagery Techniques in the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira as a Case Study

Paul Summergrad, M.D., 141st President, 2014-2015.

It isaprivilegeandapleasuretobeabletomakethis introduction today. It is also a bit intimidating. Speaking about a colleague or friend is challenge enough, but doing justice to one’s life partner requires just the right balance of honesty and tact. Almost exactly 30years ago, I arrivedon the sceneofPaul’s life, just at the point where his professional life had become solidified and his career was about to take off. We had both justfinished our training in internalmedicine and psychiatry, very much committed to being doctors. I was at the start of 30 years of working on the consultation service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Paul was at the beginning of his career doing medical psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. But his trajectory would bemuch different and much more expansive than either one of us could have ever imagined at that moment. But let me go back for just a fewmoments. Paul grew up in the Bronx—a red diaper baby, forged in the politics of his immigrant family’s activist and Jewish background, wrapped in the bonds of cooperative living and union brotherhoodwith loving parents and a very bright younger brother—not far away from that secular place of worship knownasYankee Stadium. Itwas paradise until he suffered the first glancing blow of his idyllic young life—theymoved to the suburbs. Despite this upheaval, at least it was the 60s, and whatever was lacking in his immediate suburban environment, the larger world on television and radio— news, music, drama—and the wanderings of his own inquisitive mind provided many outlets. His passions—Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Eastern religions and playing the guitar—transported him beyond the suburban borders. The next 10 yearswere spent in the icy incubator of upstate New York. First, college in Buffalo, where taking courses like Guerilla Warfare ultimately gave way to 4 serious years studying Zen Buddhism in Rochester, which eventually led to medical school back in Buffalo, becoming a serious student of the human body and the human mind. The next big chapter of Paul’s life came with the move to Boston, doing medicine at Boston City Hospital and psychiatry at Mass General, where shortly after graduating he was involved in creating the first medical psychiatry unit there. We met in 1985, and by 1986, he had experienced the second and third conversions of his young adult life—he returned to his Jewish roots and the study of Jewish mysticism, and he left his beloved Yankees to become a full-fledged Boston Red Sox Fan. 1986was one of those especially difficult years for the Sox, andwhile someof itmayhave beenhis attachment tome, it was clear that the drama and trauma of that season had captured his imagination. But after the team so tragically lost the World Series that year, he came to realize that rooting for the Red Sox was unfortunately a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. During the next 20 years at Mass General, Harvard and Partners Psychiatry, he consolidated his clinical psychiatric skills and deepened his academic achievements as a consummate medical psychiatrist. But he was also developing his “other sides,”first as the political psychiatrist involved not just in management and finance but in the bigger issues of health policy and the future of medicine and its place in a new and fast changing world. And in his spare time, he managed to finish his psychoanalytic training, knowing that fluency in the knowledge of unconscious processes connects to deeper meanings as a physician and as a person. In the middle of all of this, our children came along, and “father” of course became the most favorite of his titles. But Paul was destined for larger stages—he became the Chair ofPsychiatry atTufts andPsychiatrist-in-Chief atTufts Medical Center, a title he has really cherished. Thenmore titles andmore jobs—Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Tufts Physicians Organization. But it was 2 years ago, when, I believe, he came to the place where he was supposed to be: as the President-Elect and now President of the American Psychiatric Association. All of his life experience, interests, detours, and purposefuldirected journeys could be poured into a job that fit him like a glove. These last 2 years, Paul has devoted himself to the public and political agenda of the APA, promoting the need for strategic planning, while continuing to advance issues that touch the human condition and human spirit. Whether attending the Black Psychiatrists of America Congressional Conference or theWorld Psychiatric Association Congress, Paul has made the APA a part of the process. With his support for legislative reform in our country’s complexmental health system, his advocacy for veterans and suicide prevention, and his pioneering role in recognizing faith-based leaders and the powerful role they play inmental health in our grassroots communities, Paul has been both an innovator and a champion.

Editor's Introduction: History and Mysticism

SURVEYING THE DEVELOPMENT of Jewish studies over the past century, one can hardly avoid being struck by the increasingly prominent role played by research into the various forms of Jewish mysticism. Of course, the towering figure in blazing new pathways in, and actively promoting, the study of Jewish mysticism was Gershom Scholem (18971982). Although Scholem overstated his nineteenth-century predecessors' neglect of the material, it remains the case that the predilection of Ww?en?chaft de? Judentu/nj for rabbinics and philosophy gave way to a new scholarly interest in Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century.The impressive staying power of the field into the twenty-first century owes partly, but only partly, to Scholem 's extraordinary talents. Research into Jewish mysticism continues to attract some of the most linguistically adept and theoretically sophisticated scholars working in Jewish studies. Both the challenge of cracking a complex code of language and meaning and the rich symbology of the mystical universe have served to lure generation after generation of students to the task. It should be added that one of Scholem 's great accomplishments was to make that world of Kabbalah sufficiently comprehensible to capture the attention of scholars, authors, and artists (e.g., Jung, Borges, Eco, Kitaj) outside of Jewish studies.The dominant (some would say domineering) nature of Scholem 's presence in the field for a half century has generated a good number of methodological, ideological, and conceptual rebellions among subsequent generations of scholars. In light of the rich diversity that has resulted from this pushback against Scholem, it is curious to note that some of the key questions remain the same. To wit, the issue of how and in what ways to contextualize the appearance of Jewish mysticism from ancient to modern times still vexes those engaged in its study. Should mysticism be seen as an autonomous, internalist current within the long flow of Jewish history? Is it reducible to the discrete local contexts in which it appears? Or does it somehow defy the logic and tools of the historian, yielding more easily to a less contextually bound phenomenological analysis?As a way of gauging the orientation of the field today, the editors of the Jewiah Quarterly Review invited three scholars to participate in a forum on the interrelationship between history and mysticism in contemporary research. Their three offerings address different time periods and bodies of mystical literature. Moreover, they represent a range of methodological approaches and points of departure. All urge a redoubled focus on the complex temporal and spatial contexts in which the corpora they study were crafted. Although this appears to be a simple and even banal claim, the three participants present a complex web of arguments that challenge a pair of ahistorical tendencies that can be inhibiting to further research: first, the tendency to mystify mystical literature by depositing it within a hazy cloud of timeless Jewish literary development; and second, the tendency to regard mysticism in its modern guise as terminal, no longer susceptible to the ceaselessly dynamic forces of historical change.In the forum's opening essay, Ra'anan Boustan seeks to find a new contextual and analytic space in which to understand the relationship between rabbinic and Hekhalot literature in Late Antiquity. This attempt requires navigating among a trio of scholarly currents, none of which is sufficient to grasp the complexity of the relationship. The first is what Boustan calls perennialism, which treats Hekhalot as autonomous and prior to rabbinic Judaism. …

Martin Buber from the Perspective of Gershom Scholem

In an oft-repeated remark, Martin Buber once said: 'We all have disciples; some of us have produced schools; but only Scholem has created an academic field.' This 'academic field' is the study of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah in particular, which Scholem 's immense philological labours rescued from the hostility of scholars inside Judaism on the one hand and from the obloquy which dabblers in kabbalism had brought upon it outside Judaism on the other, inaugurating in the process a golden age of Jewish mystical studies. Few appreciated Scholem's achievement more than Buber, whereas Scholem 's appreciation of Buber's was, at the least, ambivalent. To contemplate the perspective of Gershom Scholem on Martin Buber is, then, to plunge into the deep end of the Judaic soul at its most complex and, in the case of Scholem, its most combative. But it is impossible to read Scholem's attacks on Buber without sensing that something fundamental in relation to the truth of the Judaic soul is being fought for, even if too admixed with those psychological factors which seem always to be a necessary trigger to expression. In fact, Scholem's attacks on Buber were, in terms of the accomplishment of his task, unnecessary and, in the case of his 'Martin Buber's Interpretation of Hasidism', ill-timed for Buber was old and ill when it appeared (in Commentary , 1961). Maurice Friedman, Buber's biographer, writes of the controversy between Buber and Scholem that it 'touches on the soil of tragedy'.1 I will attempt to suggest some reasons why this was so. And then I will look at three pieces on Buber by Scholem, first, 'Martin Buber's Conception of Judaism', second, Scholem's tribute given 'At the Completion of Buber's Translation of the Bible', and third, 'Martin Buber's Interpretation of Hasidism'. I shall begin by giving some account of the early years of each which provides the background for the conflict between these two great but incompatible men.

Lawrence Fine. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xiii, 480 pp.

It is perhaps unorthodox to begin a book review by citing something from the acknowledgments. In this case, however, I think it is quite apt. Describing his early foray into the study of Jewish mysticism, Lawrence Fine writes, “It was [Alexander] Altmann who said to me, in one of the earliest conversations I had with him after I arrived at Brandeis, that ‘nobody understands Lurianic Kabbala, not even Scholem,’ referring, of course to the preeminent historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.” It is a comment, I imagine, that Scholem may have even agreed with! In any case, Fine's book is an attempt, and one of the best to date, to try to make sense of the labyrinthine world of Lurianic Kabbala. Scholem argued that Lurianic metaphysics was a system developed as a response to historical phenomena, that is, the Jewish expulsion from Spain, and was largely a creative interpretation of, and commentary on, the Zohar. Neither Scholem nor his student Isaiah Tishby devoted any significant space to the historical context of Lurianic Kabbala or its particular cultural milieu, or the possibility of external influences on this mystical circle. Both assumed Luria had historiosophic and not cultural/historic concerns. This trajectory has, until recently, been the accepted framework of Lurianic scholarship.

Qabbalah and Academia: The Critical Study of Jewish Mysticism in France

No doubt because of the interest of French intellectuals in Qabbalah, it is significant that at the turn of the century it was upon French soil that the first translation of the Zohar appeared in a modern language. In addition, during the bourgeoning of the historical-critical study of Jewish mysticism in the last century, French scholarship played a major role. Leaving aside the occultists' tendencies, the present article examines the development of Qabbalistic studies in France in the academic context, dividing it into two periods. The first, historically oriented, is that inaugurated by the trail-blazing work of Adolphe Franck (1809-1893), while the second, dealing with speculative systems, is marked by the prodigious activity of the modern historian of Jewish philosophy, Georges Vajda (1908-1981) and his school. An account is also given of certain French intellectual trends which manifested an interest in Jewish mysticism.

Alexander Altmann's Contribution to the Study of Jewish Mysticism

Alexander Altmann's Contribution to the Study of Jewish Mysticism

Some methodological reflections on the study of Jewish mysticism

(1978). Some methodological reflections on the study of Jewish mysticism. Religion: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 101-114.

Some Contextual Variables in Student Response to University-Level Study of Jewish Mysticism

This study seeks to offer some data that may illuminate the relationship of academic courses in Judaica and the American Jewish search for identity. Student response to a course on Jewish Mysticism given as a regular part of the curriculum is analyzed. This response is correlated to the respondent's relationship with his family, his campus involvement, and his Jewish involvement at the college. A summary of responses shows three types: (1) those who perceive the course as a conservative force reestablishing ties to traditional Judaism; (2) those who perceive it as a revolutionary force which criticizes society; and (3) those who perceive it as catalyst for a transformation of personal religious behavior. By correlating these responses with the backgrounds of the students as obtained in questionnaires and interviews, it is suggested that the differences between the students' perceptions reflect the differing needs revealed in their contexts.