Hasidic Commentary on the Torah

Ora Wiskind-Elper is the author of Wisdom of the Heart: The Teachings of Rabbi Ya’akov of Izbica-Radzyn (2010) and Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1998). She is associate professor in the Graduate Programme in Jewish Thought at Michlalah Jerusalem College and at Ono Academic College, Israel.

Reviews 'Hasidism, for Ora Wiskind-Elper, is the crucible into which the whole world flows: creation, revelation, redemption; hermeneutics, epistemology, Freudian psychology, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, autobiography (which she calls “self-perception”), art history, Hebrew fiction, social history, the challenge of modernity, and the major catastrophes that befell the Jewish people in the twentieth century. In order to produce this definitive, synoptic work on Hasidic Torah commentary, she has mastered the entire corpus of critical scholarship; the different schools of Hasidic thought from master to disciple; the relevant methodologies of reading and interpretation; and last but not least, a social-historical guide to the early and later masters and their disciples, down to the present day. Hasidic Commentary on the Torah is magisterial; unique in its scope, pedagogy, clarity and original insight.'David G. Roskies Sol & Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture Jewish Theological Seminary, New York

• Note on TransliterationIntroduction 1. Dimensions of Collective Self-UnderstandingBeginnings Receiving, Revealing‘When Your Wellsprings Will Flow Forth’ To Create New Worlds with Words‘They Made Their Souls Anew’To See and to be Seen‘Well said, Moses!’2. Modes of Reading Metaphors We Live ByA Parable in WaitImagining the World The Essence of Being Human Bread-Eaters and DreamersKnow Me in TranslationConclusions So Far How to Teach, How to Learn To Know or Not to Know Finding the Words The Secret of Exile The Secret of Redemption Summing Up 3. Responses to a Shifting LandscapeIntroductionThe Space in the Middle‘For the Times They are A-Changin’ ’Reason for HopeThe Inward TurnModernity and Its Discontents‘God is in the Detail’ Prophets of the Past, Prophets of the FutureDeep Blue Sky and Yellow StarsSong of Dust and AshesPostscriptBibliographyIndex