In praising Mitt Romney’s Liberty University speech, Meir Soloveichik has done the impossible. He has bridged the incommensurable gap between religions, rendering knowledgeable verdicts on the status of Mormonism vis a vis Christianity. Of course, it’s slightly easier to do the impossible if you only proclaimed the thing impossible earlier in the article.
I’m posting on Lucan’s Civil War in conjuction with my friends at waggish.
Goethe’s apophthegm “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse” was a major preoccupation of Hans Blumenberg. One way to explicate this enigmatic remark is historically. For one god to have the room to exist, another god sometimes needs to go away. So, on the simplest level, one god sometimes has to supplant another god. The project of genealogy would be to show the artificial nature of these transitions. Lucan, in book 3 of the Civil War, undertakes just such a genealogy. Presaging Caesar’s accession to the divine pantheon, Lucan details his deforestation of a sacred grove “because it is in his way.”
Carl Schmitt famously interrupted the workaday realities of politics with the hierophany of “the political.” Ensconced within the mysterious realm of the definite article, Schmitt’s political offered a stormy rejoinder to the processual sterility of liberal politicking. This Romantic alternative politics has resurfaced in an illiberal post in the Forward which shows a disdain for politics. Jay Michaelson, channeling the POTUS, rises above petty horse trading for the sake of revelation.
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Recently, the New Yorker discussed a peculiar American institution. Jill Lepore’s article on the second amendment yokes a sickening feeling over our bristling-with-arms culture to a history chronicling the Amendment’s recent miraculous growth. The analysis is anything but dispassionate. Of her trip to a gun school, Lepore has this to say.
Reading my new Haggadah, I am struck by how it depicts Hasidism as an attempt to bring Jewish popular practice into the ambit of traditional Jewish metaphysics and Kabbalah. Haggadah Siach Tzadikim (2010) collects “beautiful words of jest from the mouths of saints” on the supposition that these puns and funny stories contain holy allusions.
I am going to occasionally blog on the Zohar in conjunction with the Zohar Haburah I am running here in Boston. If you are interested in joining the group, feel free to reach out to me. Text available here, and here page 1:15b
Today’s section of Zohar highlights a conception of the text and hermeneutical activity which is (or should be) alien to modern people. In describing the relationships between the letters, the vowels and the ta’amim of the Torah, the Zohar indulges in a series of beautiful metaphorical constructions that might lead us to ignore the completely strange way it ends up talking about Torah.
The Pardes Yosef Hachadash suggests at least eleven possible interpretations of the “earth” and “heavens” in the initial verse of Parshat Haazinu. All the cases obviously identify a yawning gap—from that between the tzaddik and the man on the street to that between the soul and the body. In any case, Yohanan Petrovsky Shtern in his now (in)famous article on “Hasidei de’ar‘a and Hasidei dekokhvaya’” in AJS attempts to add a 12th—social vs. religious historians of Hasidism.
