Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism – serie

Hasidism is an influential spiritual revival movement within Judaism that began in the eighteenth century and continues to thrive today. One of the great classics of early Hasidism, The Light of the Eyes is a collection of homilies on the Torah, reading the entire Five Books of Moses as a guide to spiritual awareness and cultivation of the inner life. This is the first English translation of any major work from Hasidism's earliest and most creative period. Arthur Green's introduction and annotations survey the history of Hasidism and outline the essential religious and moral teachings of this mystical movement. The Light of the Eyes, by Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, offers insights that remain as fresh and relevant for the contemporary reader as they were when first published in 1798.

A magisterial, modern reading of the deepest mysteries in the Kabbalistic tradition.Seekers of the Face opens the profound treasure house at the heart of Judaism's most important mystical work: the Idra Rabba (Great Gathering) of the Zohar. This is the story of the Great Assembly of mystics called to order by the master teacher and hero of the Zohar, Rabbi Shim'on bar Yochai, to align the divine faces and to heal Jewish religion. The Idra Rabba demands a radical expansion of the religious worldview, as it reveals God's faces and bodies in daring, anthropomorphic language.For the first time, Melila Hellner-Eshed makes this challenging, esoteric masterpiece meaningful for everyday readers. Hellner-Eshed expertly unpacks the Idra Rabba's rich grounding in tradition, its probing of hidden layers of consciousness and the psyche, and its striking, sacred images of the divine face. Leading readers of the Zohar on a transformative adventure in mystical experience, Seekers of the Face allows us to hear anew the Idra Rabba's bold call to heal and align the living faces of God.

The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope.By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha.Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around establishing a new legal formation—namely, the "duties of the hearts"—which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam.Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law.

In this innovative intellectual biography, Oded Yisraeli offers an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of Rabbi Moses b. Nahman, or Nahmanides (1194ca. 1270), one of the greatest Jewish thinkers and writers of the Middle Ages. Nahmanides' creative energy spanned his long life, covering diverse fields—Talmudic and halakhic exegesis, biblical commentary, Kabbalah, homiletics, polemics, and poetry—that have all individually been the object of extensive scholarly study. This book brings the many facets of Nahmanides' work together, and breaks new ground by relating the circumstances of his life to the long arc of his intellectual career.Yisraeli examines Nahmanides' oeuvre in light of his time and place, reading his writings as a discourse with both movements within the Jewish world of his day and the lively scholasticism of thirteenth-century Western Europe. He takes account of changes over time both in the religious world around Nahmanides, and in his doctrine throughout his career, raising new questions about Nahmanides' work and the influences on his thought. Rooted in deep historical research and attention to social context, this book offers a new historical and biographical perspective that illuminates Nahmanides' religious and intellectual world.

While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish history were in fact necessary steps toward redemption.Lachter argues that these works, mostly composed between the early 14th century and the generation affected by the Spanish expulsion in the early 16th century, enabled Jewish readers to make sense of the troubling misfortunes of their own time. Kabbalah and Catastrophe uncovers the remarkable variety of ways that kabbalists deployed esoteric tradition to argue that God had not abandoned the Jews to the inscrutable forces of history. Instead, they suggested to readers that Jews are history's primary actors, and that despite their small numbers and lack of military power, Jews nonetheless secretly push history forward. For scholars of Jewish mysticism and medieval Jewish history, Lachter articulates how premodern mystical texts can be crucial sources of insight into how Jews understood the meaning of history.

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.

Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ṣimṣum. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ṣimṣum ultimately morphed into religious and social schism. These debates confronted the meaning of being and forged the animating ethos of Chabad, the most dynamic movement in modern Judaism. Chabad's distinctive character and self-image, Rubin shows, emerged from its spirited defense of Hasidism's interpretation of ṣimṣum as an act of love leading to rapturous reunion. This interpretation ignited a literal conflagration, complete with book burnings, denunciations, investigations, and arrests. Chabad's subsequent preoccupation with ṣimṣum was equally significant for questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession, as for existential questions of being and meaning.Unfolding the story of Chabad from the early modern period to the twentieth century, this book provides fresh portraits of the successive leaders of the movement. Innovatively integrating history, philosophy, and literature, Rubin shows how Kabbalistic ideas are crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.

A World of Piety examines the historical aspirations of kabbalah to prompt a revival of ancient rabbinic piety in medieval Castile.What were the aims of the celebrated works of rabbinic wisdom fashioned during the reigns of Alfonso X and Sancho IV of Castile, including the formative Book of the Zohar? In pursuit of this question, Judaica scholar Jeremy Phillip Brown turns to the Hebrew and Aramaic writings composed by Todros ben Joseph ha-Levi Abulafia of Toledo, Joseph Gikatilla of Medinaceli, and especially Moses de León of Guadalajara. These writings set out to disseminate the secret patrimony of ancients: a knowledge of divinity comprised of essentially Jewish attributes as a basis for human emulation. According to these texts, God models a pious form of life—not merely a life of Torah and the commandments, but a program exceeding the norms of religious obligation. Midnight vigils for prayer and study, guarding the eyes and tongue,sexual austerity, spiritual poverty and concern for the materially poor—the texts affirm that God exemplifies these and other modes of piety, prompting their imitation as a penitential means of individual and even socialtransformation. Bymeans of their writings, the Castilian authors sought to form penitents as "other people" created anew in the Judeomorphic image of God.A World of Pietysheds light on the core motivations of a discourse that would emerge as a major domain of religion and thought by reconstructing the socio-historical ambitions of a little-known cadre of medieval rabbis active in a Christian milieu.

The Kabbalistic literature, with its enigmatic secrets, vivid mythical depictions, and profound mystical content, along with its exhortations and admonitions to study its contents with great caution, is acknowledged as a cornerstone of the medieval Jewish intellectual tradition. The sudden appearance of this unique body of literature at the outset of the thirteenth century captivated scholars as early as the nineteenth century, establishing itself as a central inquiry within the historiography of the Kabbalah. With this book, Tzahi Weiss reassesses the legitimacy of 'Kabbalah' as a term altogether.In his seminal work Origins of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem articulated the sudden appearance of this literature as a fundamental question in the history of the Jewish religion. Weiss returns to Scholem's question, offering a comprehensive historiographic account of the beginning of the Kabbalah for the first time since Scholem. To correct the ahistorical use of the term 'Kabbalah' to describe this important body of Jewish thought, Weiss proposes that scholars of this literature focus on the more definitive and concrete phenomenon of the systems of the Sefirot. Along the way, he sheds light on the intricate tapestry of early 13th-century Jewish religious thought, unveiling a nuanced spectrum beyond the conventional dichotomy of 'Kabbalah' and 'philosophy.'

This groundbreaking study reveals a remarkable and largely unfamiliar dimension of Jewish history: the ways in which classical mythology became part of Jewish life and erudite culture in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. From vibrant civic processions and rabbinic sermons to kabbalistic treatises, folk tales, and messianic heretical performances, figures such as Bacchus, Pan, the Sibyls, Amazons, and Prometheus entered the Jewish cultural landscape in surprising and illuminating ways. Tracing the Jewish encounter with classical myth through two waves, influenced by Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment critique, Maoz Kahana argues that these encounters were not superficial borrowings. Rather, classical myth served as a medium through which Jews reimagined their textual heritage and expanded the intellectual horizons of their tradition.Kahana's work illuminates a previously unexplained boom of classical mythological elements in Jewish literature beginning in the early modern era, providing new insight into the intersection of Jewish, Christian humanist, and pagan traditions. In this new portrait of Jewish mysticism in early modernity, Kahana argues that kabbalistic thinkers, leaders, and ritualists can and should be explored within a wider cultural and intellectual landscape. Through vivid case studies, the book shows how Greek and Roman mythological materials opened new avenues for rethinking the distant past, ongoing tradition, revelation, hidden knowledge, and the nature of the self. Putting Nachman of Breslov in conversation with Giambattista Vico, this book offers a sweeping account of the creative Jewish engagement with classical mythology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.