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.
An exciting scholar at the Hebrew University, Yoni Garb seeks to modernize Kabbalah scholarship. As he says in his recent article in Modern Judaism “There is no time like the present for calling attention to the emergence of a new field of scholarship, that of the modernization of Kabbalah.” To put it pithily: Kabbalah is modern. How? Isn’t Kabbalah a medieval and early modern system of theological (or theosophical and ecstatic) speculation? Isn’t it at least a “family resemblance” of stuff that, if it isn’t anti-modern, sure feels old?
From its inception, Chakira has devoted inordinate energy to the idea that paradigm shifts are overrated. Why not have actual insights rather than methodological coups de grace? Why conquer Iraq with shock and awe only to get ground down in a civil war? That kind of thing.
Antinomianism used to be able to draw a crowd. Just look at the pile up of books in Jewish Studies devoted to the topic from Shaul Magid’s Hasidism on the Margin (2003) to Elliot Wolfson’s Venturing Beyond (2006) in the middle years of the oughts, ending approximately with Lazier’s God Interrupted and the advent of global economic crisis. Nowadays, there are new buzzwords to buzz about like Books (The Scandal of Kabbalah, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory) or, more importantly, Secularization (Hebrew Republic, Not in the Heavens) although curiously, not belatedness.
In any case, if antinomianism, hypernomianism and other relationships to nomos seem to be played out, no one told the Satmar Hasidim. They put a nice example of hypernomian conduct right on page 46 of the Mahzor Yom Kippur Divrei Yoel (2007) which is presumably still practiced today.
Red herrings of metaphysical bugbears—this idiomatic whirlpool describes somewhat too well the back and forth sallying of paradigms in the human sciences. One recent addition to paradigm shifting, mind-blowing books (as a genre, not an adjective) , On Deep History and the Brain begs us to reexamine the presuppositions of History and to include a long longue durée within its precincts. This long addition to history will be “deep history” beginning in Paleolithic time and measured by changes in human consciousness and an ambitious archeology of the Brain. The opening part of the book, where we reexamine the presuppositions of all history, contains fascinating hermeneutical expositions and yes, red herrings of metaphysical bugbears, which deserve our consideration.
Many recent kerfuffles have no compelling reason to be a kerfuffle, and even less to be recent. Among these we can count the reigniting of the controversy over the blessing of Shelo asani isha. Last month, a Rabbi in LA shocked the world by revealing that he no longer finds himself able to recite this ancient benediction for having not been made a woman. Rabbi Asher Lopatin hastened to make the blowup even less timely and relevant by bringing in the ghost of the Rav. Religious extremist bourgeois blogs were quick to take umbrage and make bad jokes about the latest assault on God, his Torah etc. Some of us watching at home wondered who says all the prayers anyway and why someone would go out of their way to tell you something like that unless they were a bit sanctimonious or holier-than-thou.
The reconstructive method anchors many contemporary philosophical attempts to deal with the history of philosophy. The goals of reconstruction are distinct from the goals of intellectual history, on one side, and philosophical argumentation, on the other. Reconstruction allows for a bridging between the disparate goals of these two disciplines, but on the side of the latter: we need to get the arguments right and see if they’ll then inflect the timbre of more contemporary discussions. One exemplary reconstructive work is Paul Frank’s All or Nothing. Luckily for us, he gives a definition of reconstruction which is tripartite (but really, it has another half-piece). I wonder what you, the reader think. Can we attain any or all of these reconstructive goals?
In 2009, very little had been said in English on the Schmitt/Blumenberg correspondence. Standing on the opposite shore of 2011, we have a superabundance of scholarship about this unique intellectual relationship. A newish article in New German Critique adds to our understanding of the correspondence with the assertion that Blumenberg and Schmitt somehow needed each other to flesh out the normative dimensions of one anothers’ work. Thus, Pini Ifergan writes:
Chakira 