The Practice of Musar (original) (raw)
The Middle Way: The Emergence of Modern-Religious Trends in Nineteenth-Century Judaism, Volume I
The Middle Way: The Emergence of Modern-Religious Trends in Nineteenth-Century Judaism, Volume I, 2014
This book in two volumes is devoted to examining the first encounter between traditional Judaism and modern European culture, and the first thinkers who sought to combine the Torah with science, revelation with reason, prophecy with philosophy, Jewish ethics with European culture, worldliness with sanctity, and universalism with the particular redemption of the Jews. These religious thinkers of the nineteenth century struggled with challenges of the modern age that continue to confront the modern Jews to this day. This objective work of scholarship, neither simplistic and isolationist nor destructive and arrogant, will be of interest to the modern thinker and to scholars of the history of religions. It is relevant to comparative study between Judaism and the various denominations of Christianity and other faiths that seek to find a middle way between their traditions and modernity.
Judaism: Contemporary Expressions
Michael D. Palmer and Stanley M. Burgess, eds. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 2011
Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2004
From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period testifies to the great variety of religious practices that characterized Judaism in the twelve hundred years between approximately 600 C.E. and 1800 C.E. Although this vast span of time has often been regarded monochromatically, scholars have increasingly come to speak of this period's enormous complexity. The more that we learn about Judaism during this period of time, the more we recognize the dimensions of this complexity, as we will see below. One of the many ways in which this anthology differs from earlier collections of primary Jewish source materials is in its focus on religious practice and religious experience-in keeping with the series of which it is a part. Older sourcebooks have tended overwhelmingly to be interested in either the political, social, and economic history of the Jewish people as a minority community under Islam and Christianity, or in documenting the intellectual religious achievements of medieval and early modern Jewry. There are thus a number of anthologies having to do with medieval Jewish philosophy, mystical thought, and religious poetry, but virtually nothing of scholarly consequence that seeks to encompass the broad range and variety of Jewish religious practice. That this is the case is a matter of considerable irony, in light of the fact that Judaism has historically been regarded as essentially legal, that is, practical in nature. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have come to explore with increasing sophistication the embodied nature of Jewish religion. As the contents of this volume will demonstrate, the ways in which Judaism has been practiced can hardly be isolated from the historical and political experiences of Jews, or from their many different constructions of faith and theology. Nevertheless, a fuller appreciation of the dimensions of religious practice in Judaism requires that they be studied not merely as an appendage to treatments of Jewish history or Jewish thought but on their own terms, as well. The chapters in this book illustrate many different approaches to the analysis of ritual and practice, including literary, anthropological, phenomenological, and gender studies, as well as the methods of comparative religion. Rather than encompass the entire history of Judaism, this sourcebook focuses on the medieval and early modern periods. There are several vantage points from which to construe the emergence of medieval Judaism. From a political point of
The pietistic current in Lithuanian Jewry known as the Musar movement has recently begun to attract the serious attention of Jewish historians. The work of Immanuel Etkes on Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founding father of Musarism, and of Shaul Stampfer on the Lithuanian yeshivas of the nineteenth century are two important scholarly contributions which have appeared of late in this area.1 The revival of scholarly interest in Musarism, after many years of neglect, is richly deserved. Musarism shares with Hasidism the distinction of being an original pietistic movement which was unique to the East European Jewish milieu. Like the latter, it produced in the course of one or two generations an impressive array of original religious personalities, each with his own distinct school of thought. And like Hasidism, Musarism grew and flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; that is, at the very time when secularizing cultural and political movements exerted increasing influence in Jewish society. But whereas modern scholarship has lavished a good deal of attention on Hasidism-its doctrines, history, and confrontations with modernity-the analogous work on Musarism has only just begun. One focal point of the recent scholarship has been the relationship between Musarism and modernity; specifically, its relationship to the complex of social and cultural changes which overtook European Jewry in the nineteenth century. Etkes has suggested that, to no small extent, Salanter's religious ideology was born out of a sense of crisis and alarm at the decline in religious sensitivity and punctilious halakhic observance among Lithuanian Jews. For Salanter, the growth of Haskalah circles in Vilna and Kovna which he witnessed during the 1840's was an ominous symptom of a greater spiritual crisis facing Jewry. As an antidote to the growing process of spiritual decay he proposed the institutionalized study of musar (moralistic) literature; not as an intellectual discipline, but as an emotional experience of spiritual regeneration. The study of musar in a dark shadowy room, with a melancholy melody, and passionate repetition of key phrases and verses, would cultivate one's religious self-awareness,