Elliot Wolfson Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Institution beckons as a way for social theorists to configure society without assuming an ordered, coherent, consensual whole, a bounded collective entity. Institution beckoned to me as a religious phenomenon. I first figured institutional logics as polytheistic phenomena while working in Jerusalem in 1983-1984. Within its crenellated stone walls, the Israelite Temple once stood, with its veiled and heavily gilded cubic "Holy of Holies," one of the fullest empty spaces in the world. I am not an observant Jew, but wherever I walked in the city, that razed platform on which al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock now stand, that no-longer and not-yet there, was my point of orientation. For the Israelites the Temple had not been a representation of divinity; it was a site, a dwelling-place, for its absent presence to be available as invisible, unspeakable, unmeasurable, inaccessible in an empty stone box of possibility, uniquely filled with divine being. Pilgrims claimed they could see His fibrillating light there. In the main, if they could, people listened to liturgy. They saw nothing. The Holy of Holies, into which only the high priest was allowed to enter once a year on Yom Kippur, the "day of atonement," the day Jews asked God for forgiveness for their personal sins, was kept in darkness, just as Moses encountered God in a dark smoky cloud that blanketed Mt. Sinai. As the earliest Kabbalist Iyyun sources from the 13th century declared: "infinite light lies hidden within the mysterious darkness" (Mayse, 2014: 13). One can never know the oneness of God without seeing the unseeable blackness.