Study Of Kabbalah Research Articles

“To Know Everything”: Encyclopedias and the Organization of Kabbalistic Knowledge

Abstract The (re-)organization of knowledge concerning kabbalistic concepts constituted an important literary activity for authors, beginning with the late medieval through the early modern periods. The examination of the anonymous Ma‘arekhet ha-Elohut, Meir ibn Gabbai’s ‘Avodat ha-Qodesh, and Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim, help to re-focus scholarly attention on the literary genre of kabbalistic encyclopedias that served four interrelated objectives. One, to create order in divergent, sometimes contradictory theories of kabbalistic doctrine. Two, to delineate the contours of legitimate kabbalistic knowledge. Three, to provide theological guidance as prerequisites and as ultimate goals for the study of Kabbalah. Four, to generate a pedagogic outline for acquisition of kabbalistic wisdom. The organizational adjustments adopted in these works offered a treatment of teachings, texts, and theories that had accumulated in geographically disparate Jewish communities. At the same time, systematization conferred authority in the world of Jewish mystical ideas laying the framework for a kabbalistic curriculum.

Robert Duncan, Kabbalah, and “The Dominion of the Poetic Mind”

What leads poets into mystical, hermetic and occult studies? How do these traditions shape their poetic practice, and conversely, how do their poems deepen our understanding of the enduring power of these bodies of thought, belief, and ritual? In response to these questions, this paper focuses on Robert Duncan’s study of Kabbalah, especially Kabbalistic language mysticism, which he reads as “the description of the process of a poem.” For Duncan, the language magic of Kabbalah is an important model of poetic language – which is in itself magical. “By associations, by metaphor, by likeness of the part, by fitting as part of a larger figure, by interlinking of members, by share, by equation, by correspondence, by reason, by opposition, by pun or rhyme, by melodic coherence,” Duncan, as he writes in The H.D. Book, seeks to take us to a place “where the image becomes informed, from above or below, and takes over as an entity in itself, a messenger from a higher real.” Situating Duncan as the heir to nineteenth-century occult organizations and the rethinking of hermetic traditions in groups such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, I then proceed to a brief reading of his poem “Roots and Branches,” in order to demonstrate how Duncan’s kabbalistic vision of the “imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines” awakens “transports of an inner view of things,” and secures the poetic imagination as the supreme vehicle of mystical experience.

Tikkun (Divine Repair) and Healing in a Kabbalistic Yeshiva: Using Sacred Texts as Healing Devices

While the study of Kabbalah is expanding in non-Orthodox circles both around the world and in Israel, Kabbalah is also studied in Orthodox (mainly Sephardic) yeshivot concerned with tikkun (divine repair) of the world and of the individual. Tikkun of the world involves a special kabbalistic prayer method, while tikkun of the individual involves methods of healing and treatment of personal problems. This article, based on participant observation conducted for a year in a Jerusalem kabbalistic yeshiva, is a response to the appeal for an ethnographic study of those immersed in Kabbalah in the traditional locale. The fieldwork findings reveal that the yeshiva, the traditional institution of study, also serves as a place of healing and personal therapy in which the sacred text occupies a central place. In the yeshiva, instrumental use is made of the text as object. From a configuration of symbols subject to many alternate interpretations, the text is transformed into a pattern of icons and signals with only one meaning. The kabbalists as therapists use texts to create personalized symbols that assist their supplicants in coping with their personal hardships. This ability is a powerful cultural tool that provides support and solace to the community of believers, and is simultaneously a powerful instrument in the hands of the yeshiva institution. We conclude that a community whose members adopt a mystical worldview, also gradually attribute iconic significance to its texts.

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem

A Novel Look at Moshe Idel’s East-West Problem David N. Myers Moshe Idel.Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336. For many of us in the field of Jewish studies, but not in the field of Kabbalah studies, our first encounter with Moshe Idel came in 1988 with the publication of his major work in English, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. Although he had been working in the field for more than a decade, from the time of his 1976 dissertation at the Hebrew University on Avraham Abulafia, it was Kabbalah: New Perspectives that brought Idel to wide public attention, announcing his own substantial methodological and substantive disagreements with the towering figure of modern Kabbalah studies, Gershom Scholem. Since then, Idel has gone on to attain a position of international distinction, publishing at a staggering rate in Kabbalah studies, and many fields beyond. In the process, he—like Scholem before and Wolfson and others after him—has used the study of Kabbalah as a gateway of inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, hermeneutical, philosophical, and historical questions. This leads us to the book at hand, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, which is indeed an inquiry into important methodological, theoretical, philosophical, and historical questions. It reflects Idel’s brilliant, capacious, probing, and wildly imaginative mind, as it ranges over terrain somewhat less familiar to him and his usual readers, but of critical significance to his overarching intellectual and cultural Weltanschauung. What I propose to do in these remarks is to undertake three tasks: first, to sketch out briefly the structure of the book and point to a major argumentative strand in it; second, to identify two central motifs that surface in the book—and that make for a surprising, counterintuitive, [End Page 289] and even troubling read; and finally, to adopt a literary conceit to read the book against the analytic and stylistic grain, as a way of getting at some of the intriguing psychodynamics involved in it. I Old Worlds, New Mirrors is a collection of previously published essays on modern Jewish thought divided into four parts. The first section deals with a number of renowned Central European scholars and intellectuals who belong to what Idel calls in the introduction to the book “a new Jewish elite” (p. 6). The second section contains three of Idel’s papers on one of the chief figures of that new elite, his own long-standing master, foil, and nemesis: Gershom Scholem. The third section offers up a wideranging assembly of pieces that deal with the place that Kabbalah played in the thought of a number of other members of the new cultural elite including Kafka, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Celan. The fourth and final section of the book deals with modern scholarly views of Hasidism, which since the late eighteenth century has been the most important site of ongoing kabbalistic activity and practice. Although disparate in focus and length, the four sections and thirteen chapters do betray a consistent theme. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to state that they present a consistent set of oppositions that add up to a theme and in fact, spell out a decided cultural stance on the author’s part. Among the recurring oppositions in the book are: i. Eastern European vs. Central European Jewish cultures ii. tradition vs. innovation iii. continuity vs. rupture iv. rootedness vs. cosmopolitanism v. homeland vs. galut (exile) vi. Jerusalem vs. Athens (or perhaps in its more modern incarnation, Hebrew vs. German) These oppositions, all of which circulate throughout the book, lend considerable weight to Idel’s critique of “the new Jewish elite”—the largely Central European Jewish intellectuals whose most famous constellation arose in Weimarera Berlin but which continued to exert itself up to the present through figures like the French literary critic Jacques Derrida and the arch cosmopolitan Jewish elitist (and diasporist, to boot) George Steiner. In casting his gaze on these figures, Idel positions himself as their cultural opposite, recalling his own origins in a small shtetl in northern [End Page 290] Romania that was “largely untouched...

Kitaj’s Napkin Map

THE JEWISH PAINTER R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) was one of the most interesting of Jewish travelers m recent times. Not only did he live a life full of adventurous journeys. He also delighted in traversing, and transgressing, boundaries, particularly those between well-established genres and media. For example, while best known for his explosively colorful canvasses, Kitaj also developed a large audience of admirers - and critics - owing to the wild and erudite texts that accompanied his paintings. In writing these commentaries, Kitaj, who described himself as secular, became increasingly cognizant, and proud, of his place as a fellow traveler in the long history of Jewish interpretation. Embodying the famous principle (of Heine and Steiner) that the text had become the portable homeland of the Jews, Kitaj was a restless interpreter and an inveterate Diasporist. If for Gershom Scholem (one of his great heroes) the discovery of the vitality of Zionism went hand in hand with the study of Kabbalah, for Kitaj the Jewish interpretive imperative and the condition of Diaspora were inextricably entwined. In fact, he amply affirmed this connection throughout his two major works of Jewish writing, the Fintt Diaaporut Manifesto (1989) and the Second Duuporut Manifesto (2007).After nearly forty years as an American expatriate in London, Kitaj returned to this country in 1997 and settled in Westwood, a few blocks from the UCLA campus. He commenced his day with a 5:30 walk to the neighboring Coffee Bean, where he would sit and write. Beset by a writerly obsession that rivaled his daily painting regimen, Kitaj would engage in ruminations large and small in his clear, block handwriting - Wittgenstein and kabbalistic speech theory mixed in with forgettable aphorisms or angry tirades against his London critics. Some of the more weighty musings made their way into published form, most prominently in the Second DiaaporLft Manifesto. Those of a more ephemeral nature were recorded on the small square napkins dispensed at the Coffee Bean, hundreds of which have been preserved in the Kitaj Papers at the UCLA Department of Special Collections.Among these jottings is the particularly revealing one from the last years of Kitaj 's life reproduced here, a sort of autobiographical map charting the important stations of his peripatetic existence. Peripateticism was, for Kitaj, not merely a condition - both his own and his fellow Jews' - but also a virtue, the font of Jewish cultural and textual innovation. Toward the end of his life, he memorialized his own geographic - and by extension, intellectual and artistic - peripateticism in this cartographic napkin.In the upper left-hand corner is Ohio, where he was born (in a suburb of Cleveland) in 1932. Moving immediately to the right, we find Troy, New York, where Kitaj went to high school, graduating in 1950. To the immediate right of Troy is the phrase High Seas, a reference to the fact that Kitaj joined the merchant marine right after high school, making his way, among other stops, to Cuba, Mexico, South America, and Europe. …

Lurianic Kabbalah and Its Literary Form: Myth, Fiction, History

The academic study of Kabbalah has largely been limited to myth and symbol as the two viable forms of kabbalistic discourse. In this essay, I resist those limitations and explore two other possible literary forms: history and fiction. I do not mean history in any positivistic sense but closer to Steven Greenblatt's description of new historicism as cultural poetics. This suggests that literature not only reflects a historical setting but also creates that setting, constructing reality in its own image and directing it toward its desired ends. In looking at Lurianic Kabbalah as fiction, I raise the issue of the real and the true as it relates to fictive narratives more generally. This essay does not claim that the kabbalists in question did or did not intend to write cultural poetics or fiction. Rather, I use cultural poetics and fiction as possible lenses through which a nontraditional interested reader (i.e., one not invested in the literature as authoritative) can read these texts in a way that can speak to the contemporary world in which we live and think.

Kabbalah: A Medieval Tradition and Its Contemporary Appeal

AbstractPopular culture today is suffused with kabbalah, an elitist, intellectual strand of medieval Judaism that claimed to disclose the esoteric meaning of the rabbinic tradition. While rooted in esoteric speculations in late antiquity, kabbalah emerged in the tenth century as an internal debate among Jewish theologians about the ontological status of divine attributes. At the end of the twelfth century speculations about the nature of God emerged among the Pietists of Germany and the ‘masters of kabbalah’ in Provence. During the thirteenth century kabbalah flourished in Spain where its self‐understanding as redemptive activity was expressed in two paradigms – the ‘theosophy‐theurgic’ and the ‘ecstatic‐prophetic’. Kabbalah continued to evolve in the early modern period, shaping both Jewish and European cultures. The modern period saw the rise of the academic study of kabbalah, but it was employed in two conflicting manners: in the nineteenth century scholars associated with the Enlightenment used historical analysis of kabbalah to debunk Jewish traditionalism, but in the first half of the twentieth century, the academic study of kabbalah was used to generate a secular, collective Zionist identity. Although scholarship on kabbalah has flourished in the twentieth century, kabbalah has become a variant of New‐Age religions, accessible to all, regardless of ethnic identity or spiritual readiness.

Torah Study, Feminism and Spiritual Quest in the Work of Five American Jewish Women Artists

��� While most contemporary American Jewish women artists (of the “second wave”) have expressed their Jewish identity in art by engaging with historical and social issues (anti-semitism, the Holocaust, assimilation, immigration, ethnicity, etc.) this article focuses on the works of two groups of Jewish women artists who have an advanced knowledge of Torah and Hebrew, and whose works engage profoundly with Jewish texts. Helene Aylon, Bruria Finkel and Gilah Yelin Hirsch have been immersed in Jewish studies since childhood whereas Ruth Weisberg and Cheselyn Amato pursued their learning somewhat later in life, as Jewish teachings became more available to women. All of these artists are feminist creators and activists and have been participating in various aspects of the feminist movement and the women’s art movement in the U.S. This article explores the differences in their expressions of Jewish identity, and, primarily, the ways in which the teachings of Torah and knowledge of Hebrew (including the study of Kabbalah) have produced innovative Jewish insights in the work of feminist artists who are steeped in the Jewish canon.

Science and Kabbalah Evolution

This article describes how Science and Kabbalah complement each other and reveals modern ways of presenting the original concepts of the Kabbalah wisdom. This article also presents a scheme of personal growth through creation of freedom of choice, and provides a Kabbalist's road map. Kabbalah studies the evolution of the universe, our life purpose, and the ascension to higher planes of existence through knowledge attained and presented by great Kabbalists over centuries. Their presentation took different forms at different times. This article offers a scientific approach to the study of Kabbalah, to enhance our appreciation and understanding of this wisdom.

The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The "Mixed Multitude" ( Erev Rav ) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital's Ets Ha-Daat Tov

Where there is no narrative, there is no history. Benedicto Croce Sometimes legends make reality, and become more important than the facts. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children The historian's function must be to understand myths that people live by, because these myths have often a tenuous link to reality, though they are placed within reality. George Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism New Historicism and the Study of Kabbalah: An Introduction While Much Has Been Written on the nature and history of Jewish biblical exegesis, less has been done on the nature and agenda of the kabbalistic interpretation of Scripture, especially after the Middle Ages.1 [End Page 625] I make a distinction here between kabbalistic hermeneutics more generally and the more focused enterprise of scriptural commentary. The first refers to the way kabbalists read and interpret all texts; the second to how the kabbalists as biblical exegetes offer new and sometimes daring readings of biblical narratives through the lens of their metaphysical and cosmological systems. At stake here is not simply how kabbalists interpret Scripture as an intellectual or spiritual exercise but also how this interpretation functions as a critical tool to address issues and events in their contemporary world. This article will address the extent to which biblical exegesis by one kabbalist is used as a vehicle to convey a stance on a contemporary cultural and religious issue in the sixteenth century. I will explore an early and largely unexamined work entitled Ets ha-daat tov by Rabbi Hayyim Vital (Calebrese) of Safed (1543–1620).2 Vital is most widely known as the disciple of the mystic R. Isaac Luria (d. 1572), whose kabbalistic system became canonical in postmedieval Judaism. Before meeting Luria, Vital, then a student of the kabbalist R. Moses Corvodero (d. 1570), authored numerous works, including a commentary to the Torah, Psalms, and various rabbinic dicta. This work was later collected and published under the title Ets ha-daat tov.3 Given Vital's later compilation of Lurianic Kabbalah collected in Ets ha-hayim and the [End Page 626] "Eight Gates," it is likely that the title of this earlier work is a play on Vital's later writings, the former viewed in retrospect as a prelude to the latter. Here I will focus on one trope in Vital's early commentary to the Torah; his understanding of the erev rav or "mixed multitude" (the Egyptians who accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt, Ex 12.38) who became, in the rabbinic and later zoharic imagination, a thorn in Israel's side throughout the desert narrative. I argue that Vital's idiosyncratic depiction of the erev rav, essentially advocating their case and defending them against classical Jewish tradition, is intended as a biblical mirror of the conversos who were immigrating, or had recently immigrated, to Safed during the first third of the sixteenth century in hopes of being re-absorbed into the Jewish community. Vital's portrayal of the erev rav as simultaneously problematic for the Israelites yet ultimately necessary for redemption uses the erev rav to make a case for re-absorbing the conversos back into the Jewish community at a time when the hope of redemption was heightened. As is the case with most kabbalistic and exegetical works, Ets ha-daat tov does not mention the conversos or any contemporary issue. My assertion, therefore, is based on a literary reading of the text within a particular context, coupled with Vital's own likely relationship to the converso community. My speculative leap linking textuality and history, or what Walter Cohen calls "[a] commitment to arbitrary connectedness,"4 is based on three factors, two literary and one methodological. The first is that the erev rav appear in Vital's text in peculiar places. One would expect to find...

The Many Faces of Kabbalah

Along with such scholars as Yehuda Liebes and Elliot Wolfson, Professor Moshe Idel of the Hebrew University has helped reconfigure the field of Jewish mysticism. Indeed, a person who returned to the scholarly study of kabbalah after a twenty year hiatus would barely recognize the field. Where once Gershom Scholem loomed magisterially over the terrain, the reader now confronts a profusion of skilled authors and a growing corpus of published primary and secondary sources. Enriching (some would say, complicating) matters further, is the fluid nature of the field. Over recent years a debate has been taking shape over the nature of Jewish mysticism, the sources worthy of careful study, the respective merits of historical versus phenomenological inquiry and, digging even deeper, the very nature of Judaism. No single work has been more central to that debate?has been richer, more provocative, or more hotly contested?than Idel's KabbalahA

Solov'ev's Androgynous Sophia and the Jewish Kabbalah

The revival of Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the century coincided with a wave of anti- Semitism, and many Russian intellectuals of the time, following Vladimir Solov'ev, understood the defense of the Jews as their Christian duty. For Solov'ev, however, interest in the Jews went beyond ethical considerations and ran deeper through his philosophy than even his Utopian vision of a theocracy based on Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the expression of what may be Solov'ev's central concept–the Divine Sophia–achieved clarity through his selective reading of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The argument that follows does not seek to prove influence, for Solov'ev approached the study of Kabbalah with well-formed philosophical convictions. Rather, Solov'ev's fascination with Jewish mysticism arises from affinity and recognition, as the Russian theologian sought a vocabulary with which to explain his own mystical intuitions.

Kabbalah: New Perspectives.

In this prizewinning new interpretation of Jewish mysticism, Idel emphasizes the need for a comparative and phenomenological approach to Kabbalah and its position in the history of religion. Idel provides fresh insights into the origins of Jewish mysticism, the relation between mystical and historical experience, and the impact of Jewish mysticism on western civilization. book is studded with major insights, and innovative approaches to the entire history of Judaism, and mastery of it will be essential for all serious students of Jewish thought.-Arthur Green, New York Times Book Review Moshe Idel's original, scholarly, and stimulating study of Kabbalah contains the promise of a masterwork.-Elie Wiesel Moshe Idel's book can help the nonspecialized reader to reconsider the whole of Kabbalistic tradition in comparison with many aspects of contemporary thought.-Umberto Eco There can be no dispute about the importance and originality of Idel's work. Offering a wealth of complementary insights to Gershom Scholem and his school, it will command a great deal of attention and serious discussion.-Alexander Altmann

On the History of the Interdiction against the Study of Kabbalah before the Age of Forty

The paper reviews briefly the relevant views on the age of forty as found in the Talmud and in the Arab tradition, views which are the background of the later development in the Middle Ages. Afterwards the philosophical discussions on the age of forty found in the writings of Moses ibn Ezra, Jehuda ibn Abbas, Shem Tov Falaquera, Levi ben Abraham, Nissim of Marseilles, Prat Maimon and Isaac Aboab are analyzed. The views of authors like Falaquera and ibn Abbas might have influenced the first kabbalistic restrictions against divulging secrets to students who had not yet reached the age of forty. Such restrictions occur in a work of R. Moses ben Simeon of Burgos and in the school of Abraham Abulafia. Special emphasis on the interdiction against revealing certain kabbalistic secrets can be found in the works of R. Shem Tov ibn Gaon who related it to his teacher R. Solomon ibn Adret. A number of kabbalists of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries knew about this interdiction and it was influential also among pupils of R. Isaac Luria. Two last important occurrences of the subject discussed above appear in a document dictated by a court of the rabbis of Frankfurt to R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto and signed by him, during the polemics against the Frankists.The appendix deals with some kabbalistic commentaries on the talmudic dictum “Restrain your children from higgayon” (Berakhot 28b).