Leore Sachs-Shmueli - Böcker

Scholars have long argued that early Hasidic teachings introduced a psychological dimension to kabbalistic traditions and revitalized modern Judaism. Focused on the inner soul, Hasidism encouraged worshippers to experience joy and delight through their enthusiastic practices. In this new work grounded in the historical study of emotions, Leore Sachs-Shmueli shows that Hasidic teachers and preachers also nurtured and even promoted the negative emotions of yirah, an emotional cluster that encompasses fear, apprehension, anxiety, and awe.Exploring their roots in classical texts of Kabbalah, including the Zohar and works of Safed Kabbalah, Sachs-Shmueli demonstrates how early Hasidic masters like the Baal Shem Tov, the circle of the Maggid of Mezhrich, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, and R. Nachman of Bratslav deliberately cultivated a tense emotional culture through the mental guidelines in their texts. Through an emphasis on God-fearing and the fear of sin, they motivated followers of the new movement to attain the mystical ideal while simultaneously fostering a social community devoted to divine worship according to Jewish law, in the face of persecution and secularization. For readers interested in Jewish mysticism and Hasidism, Sacred Emotions argues that negative emotions serve as crucial catalysts for intensifying religious devotion and shaped the rise and cohesion of the Hasidic movement.

Offers a comprehensive and nuanced treatment on the topic of reincarnation in Judaism, covering a wide range of kabbalistic and philosophical sources.The Life of the Soul surveys the wide-ranging theories Jewish mystics have offered to the vexing question – what precisely transpires after we die? A common element in their theories is that human life is a part of a larger ecosystem of being which also includes plants, animals, and inanimate things, like rocks. They further maintained that the soul does not perish with the demise of the body, but is rather renewed and recycled into new forms of embodied existence in the lower world. Each essay highlights how reincarnation, also known as metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, is not a marginalized concept but is instead central to understanding a variety of perplexing issues in Judaism, including catastrophic events in Jewish history, theodicy, the rationale for biblical commandments, the complex identity of biblical figures, and the issues of sin, punishment, and redemption. Just as the concept of reincarnation is inherently about boundary crossing, its investigation similarly bridges diverse epistemic fields and disciplines-religion, philosophy, psychology, history, ritual, gender, and cultural studies. Weaving together kabbalistic speculations and Jewish philosophical ideas drawn from distinct geographical regions and historical periods, this book is poised to serve as a point of departure for future comparative investigations on the life of the soul in Judaism and Eastern religious traditions.