By Gershom Scholem
Reviews
"Along with Scholem's significant developments in Jewish Mysticism, this can be the traditional paintings in its field." -- Choice
"Comprises a few of Scholem's such a lot widely conceived highbrow efforts, facing such common concerns as creativity and culture, Scripture and its interpretation, faith and delusion, and the character of spiritual authority." -- Arthur eco-friendly, Brandeis University
"Makes the complicated and interesting global of kabbalistic image and delusion available to a much broader viewers, rendering it in phrases which are of curiosity to modern readers." -- Elliot R. Wolfson, long island University
Info
In "On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism", Gershom Scholem publications the reader throughout the important topics within the difficult heritage of the Kabbalah; clarifying the kinfolk among mysticism and proven spiritual authority, the mystics' interpretation of the Torah and their makes an attempt to find the hidden that means underlying Scripture, the strain among the philosophical and the paranormal thoughts of God, and the symbolism hired in mystical religion.
About the author
Gershom Scholem, who died in 1982, is still the largest gun in kabbalah scholarship, and "On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism" could be his such a lot available booklet at the topic. It includes definitive essays at the relation of the Torah to Jewish mysticism, the mythology of the kabbalah, and where of Jewish mystics within the Jewish group. This e-book helped reinvigorate 20th-century Jewish experiences with an expertise of the dwelling fact of God, after the nineteenth century's extra astringent scholarly emphasis on legislation and philosophy. It indicates how Jewish mystics were much less fascinated about adherence to orthodoxy than their Christian opposite numbers, and freer of their expression of the divine features of eroticism. in addition, Scholem bargains nice perception concerning the ways in which kabbalah has not just threatened the authority of institutional faith, but in addition served as a resource of its energy.
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Extra info for On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
Example text
For as man's body consists of members and parts of varying rank, all acting and re acting upon one another so as to form one organism, so is it with the world at large: it consists of a hierarchy of created things, which, when they properly act and react upon each other, together form one organic body. 2 Another metaphor for the same idea, this time based on the image of the tree, occurs elsewhere in the Zohar3 and is expressed still more strikingly in one of the Hebrew works of Moses de Leon, whom I regard as the author of the main part of the Zohar.
On the other hand, the intentional ambiguity of such writings has caused them, time and time again, to be suspected of mystical nihilism. For want of the original sources of second-century gnostic 2. 4 What interests us here is the way in which the mystical experi ence of man's contact with the primal source of life could find its expression in a symbol implying the negation of all authority. An illumination concerning Messianic freedom in redemption crystal lizes around the symbol of Life. In his mystical experience the mystic encounters Life.
3 Cf. my article, 'Le mouvement sabbataiste en Pologne,' Revue de l'histoire des religions, CLIII-CLIV (1 953-4), especially the last section, CLIV, pp. 42-77· 1 Cf. the detailed account in my two-volume Hebrew work, Shabbelai Zevi, Tel Aviv, 1 957. z8 RELIGIOUS AUTHO R ITY AND MYST I C I SM mystic descends into the abyss in which the freedom of living things is born; he passes through all the embodiments and forms that come his way, committing himself to none; and not content with rejecting and abrogating all values and laws, he tramples them underfoot and desecrates them, in order to attain the elixir of Life.