‘Son of God. Between Ashkenazi Hasidim and Meister Eckhart’, in: Studies in Spirituality, 27/2017, 91-107. (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Sefer Ḥasidim—Book, Context, and Afterlife
Jewish History
We do not detail all the articles written on this topic since Marcus's collection. For an interim summary see the Jewish Quarterly Review Forum on Sefer H. asidim, Elliot Horowitz, "Introduction: A Splendid Outburst of Spirituality," Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 1 (2006): v-vii, and the articles in that collection. See also the recent publication of all Haym Soloveitchik's work on the topic in the third volume of his Collected Essays (Liverpool, 2020), which includes two previously unpublished essays. As this volume appeared as we were copyediting this article, the essays are referenced but not addressed at length in this introduction. 5 For a discussion of this problem in the context of Jewish studies, see Peter Schäfer, "Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis,"
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Imagining the Jewish God (Graven Images), 2016
This essay focuses on how certain Zoharic and Hasidic texts conceptualize the relationship between what might be termed polymorphous theology—ways of speaking about the Divine that are ornate, elaborate, rich in symbol and myth—and nonduality. I begin by tracing four modes of Jewish theological imagination: henotheism, ethical monotheism, rationalism, and monism. Next, I turn to a small selection of Zoharic and Hasidic texts to explore the surprising ways in which these theological currents are accommodated. Insisting on both a (nearly) heretofore unknown radical monism and a radical explosion of theological polymorphism, Zoharic literature at once retrieves the henotheistic language of myth, and proposes a monism more radical even than that of the philosophers. And later, the Hasidic masters of Chabad at once fashion a rigorous monism and insist that the greatest “unity” occurs in the diversity of manifestation. Finally, I argue that the theological radicalism of those texts, which incorporates the greatest avodah zara of all—polytheism—within a nondualistic framework, does more than merely accommodate earlier mythic conceptions of the Divine. It provides a post-philosophical permission for the overwhelming majority of Zoharic textuality, itself a recovery and perhaps reification of myth. The supercessionist model of one theology displacing another is thus itself replaced by a more permissive and inclusive theological imagination which might, in the contemporary moment, promote a horizontal as well as vertical pluralism.