Download or read book Alef Mem Tau written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-04-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time."
Download or read book A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking written by Aubrey L. Glazer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking is a search for authenticity that combines critical thinking with a yearning for heartfelt poetics. A physiognomy of thinking addresses the figure of a life lived where theory and praxis are unified. This study explores how the critical essays on music of German-Jewish thinker, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) necessarily accompany the downfall of metaphysics. By scrutinizing a critical juncture in modern intellectual history, marked in 1931 by Adorno's founding of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, neglected applications of Critical Theory to Jewish Thought become possible. This study proffers a constructive justification of a critical standpoint, reconstructively shown how such ideals are seen under the genealogical proviso of re/cognizing their original meaning. Re/cognition of A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking redresses neglected applications of Negative Dialectics, the poetics of God, the metaphysics of musical thinking, reification in Zionism, the transpoetics of Physics and Metaphysics, as well as correlating Aesthetic Theory to Jewish Law (halakhah).
Download or read book Eternity Now written by Wojciech Tworek and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates that Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s teachings regarding time and history enabled Habad’s growth into a mass Jewish movement. The Habad movement, formed in eighteenth-century Belarus, has developed into one of the most influential streams of Hasidic Judaism. Drawing on both mystical sermons and legal writings of its founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), Eternity Now provides the first account of the historiosophical dimensions of early Habad doctrine. Challenging the commonly held view that Shneur Zalman was primarily concerned with supratemporal transcendence, Wojciech Tworek reveals the importance of time and history in his teachings. Tworek argues that the worldly dimensions of Shneur Zalman’s thought were largely responsible for the rapid growth of Habad at the turn of the nineteenth century and fostered its transformation from an elitist circle into a mass movement. Tworek’s readings of Hebrew and Yiddish sources demonstrate the implications of these ideas not only for male scholars but also for non-scholars, Jewish women, and even non-Jews. Philosophical and kabbalistic thought joined together to form a model of religious experience attractive to a broad audience, laying an ideological foundation for the missionary messianism that was to become a hallmark of Habad in the twentieth century. “The description of Shneur Zalman’s teachings as a ‘dynamic and often inharmonious body that changes and adjusts according to temporal circumstances’ is a thoughtful way of approaching the textual mire of Hasidic sources. Tworek draws upon various corpora without attempting to systematize the teachings into a coherent theological system, revealing their vitality through his analysis of this critical theme.” — Ariel Evan Mayse, editor of From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism
Download or read book On Wings of Moonlight written by Barbara Ellen Galli and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007-03-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Wings of Moonlight - a phrase taken from one of the poems - illuminates the poetic and philosophic kinship between Wolfson, Franz Rosenzweig, one of his influences since graduate school, and Paul Celan. Displaying a deep knowledge of the literary, philosophical, Jewish, and feminist traditions informing Wolfson's academic work, Galli argues that his prose cannot be fully appreciated without consideration of its poetic dimensions.
Download or read book Saintly Influence written by Eric Boynton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of her first book, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, in 1974-the first book about Levinas published in English-Edith Wyschogrod has been at the forefront of the fields of Continental philosophy and philosophy of religion. Her work has crossed many disciplinary boundaries, making peregrinations from phenomenology and moral philosophy to historiography, the history of religions (both Western and non-Western), aesthetics, and the philosophy of biology. In all of these discourses, she has sought to cultivate an awareness of how the self is situated and influenced, as well as the ways in which a self can influence others. In this volume, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of Wyschogrod's work in essays that take up the thematics of influence in a variety of contexts: Christian theology, the saintly behavior of the villagers of Le Chambon sur Lignon, the texts of the medieval Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia, the philosophies of Levinas, Derrida, and Benjamin, the practice of intellectual history, the cultural memory of the New Testament, and pedagogy. In response, Wyschogrod shows how her interlocutors have brought to light her multiple authorial personae and have thus marked the ambiguity of selfhood, its position at the nexus of being influenced by and influencing others.
Download or read book Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism written by Brian Ogren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and eternity are concepts that have occupied an important place within Jewish mystical thought. This present volume gives pride of place to these concepts, and is one of the first works to bring together diverse voices on the subject. It offers a multivalent picture of the topic of time and eternity, not only by including contributions from an array of academics who are leaders in their fields, but by proposing six diverse approaches to time and eternity in Jewish mysticism: the theoretical approach to temporality, philosophical definitions, the idea of time and pre-existence, the idea of historical time, the idea of experiential time, and finally, the idea of eternity beyond time. This multivocal treatment of Jewish mysticism and time as based on variant academic approaches is novel, and it should lay the groundwork for further discussion and exploration.
Download or read book Suffering Time Philosophical Kabbalistic and asidic Reflections on Temporality written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.
Download or read book Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Kocku Von Stuckrad and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing discourses of perfect knowledge in Western culture between 1200 and 1800, this book integrates the study of Western esotericism in a larger analytical framework of European history of religion.
Download or read book New Directions in Jewish Philosophy written by Aaron W. Hughes and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking with strictly historical or textual perspectives, this book explores Jewish philosophy as philosophy. Often regarded as too technical for Judaic studies and too religious for philosophy departments, Jewish philosophy has had an ambiguous position in the academy. These provocative essays propose new models for the study of Jewish philosophy that embrace wider intellectual arenas—including linguistics, poetics, aesthetics, and visual culture—as a path toward understanding the particular philosophic concerns of Judaism. As they reread classic Jewish texts, the essays articulate a new set of questions and demonstrate the vitality and originality of Jewish philosophy.
Download or read book And They Shall Be One Flesh On The Language of Mystical Union in Judaism written by Adam Afterman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In “And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism, Adam Afterman offers an extensive study of mystical union and embodiment in Judaism. Afterman argues that Philo was the first to articulate the notion of unio mystica in Judaism and is the source of the henōsis mysticism in the later Neoplatonic tradition. The study provides a detailed analysis of the Jewish medieval trends that developed different forms of mystical union and mystical embodiment through the divine name and spirit. The book argues that the development of unitive mysticism in Judaism is the fruit of the creative synthesis of rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic and Arab philosophy, and a natural outcome of the theological articulation of the idea of monotheism itself.
Download or read book The Occult Mind written by Christopher I. Lehrich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Given the historical orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to suggest a wider cast of the net into the deep waters of magic? By encountering magical thought as theory, we come to a new understanding of a thought that looks back at us from a funhouse mirror."—The Occult Mind Divination, like many critical modes, involves reading signs, and magic, more generally, can be seen as a kind of criticism that takes the universe—seen and unseen, known and unknowable—as its text. In The Occult Mind, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the history of magic in Western thought, suggesting a bold new understanding of the claims made about the power of various belief systems. In closely interlinked essays on such disparate topics as ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magical practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its parts as an intellectual object that requires interpretive zeal on the part of readers/observers. Drawing illuminating parallels between the practice of magic and more recent interpretive systems—structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics—Lehrich deftly suggests that the specter of magic haunts all such attempts to grasp the character of knowledge. Offering a radical new approach to the nature and value of occult thought, Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and executed book posits magic as a mode of theory that is intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth. In elucidating the deep parallels between occult thought and academic discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult philosophy often touched on issues that have become central to philosophical discourse only in the past fifty years.
Download or read book The Christian Invention of Time written by Simon Goldhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With trademark flair, Simon Goldhill shows how Christianity transformed humanity's relationship with time in ways that resonate today.
Download or read book Judaism written by Oliver Leaman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Judaism is a story of paradox. It is the story of how a small cluster of desert tribes gave birth to a monotheistic doctrine that profoundly shaped the history of human civilization. It is the story of how that initially obscure desert doctrine came to be codified into the Hebrew Bible, one of the world's greatest works of literature. It is the story of how a small minority came to be viewed by the majority as disproportionately powerful and, following pogrom and Holocaust, were driven to the edge of extinction. And it is the story of how a displaced people, globally dispersed throughout other nations for two-and-a-half millennia, came to forge a modern, secular Israeli state which many Jews believe to have been granted an explicitly divine mandate. Oliver Leaman carefully and creatively explores the nature of these apparent contradictions. He discusses the origins of the Jewish Bible; recounts the history of the Jewish people from the era of Patriarchs and Prophets through the Middle Ages up to the contemporary era; outlines the Jewish liturgical calendar and its major rites and modes of worship; and, considers the great variety of Jewish literatures (including modern post-Holocaust writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel), art, food and culture. Further chapters examine such topics as mysticism and kabbalah; modern Hebrew; interfaith relations; and, the highly contested question, 'Who is a Jew?'
Download or read book Renaissance and Rebirth written by Brian Ogren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metempsychosis was a prominent element in Renaissance conceptualizations of the human being, the universe, and the place of the human person in the universe. A variety of concepts emerged in debates about metempsychosis: human to human reincarnation, human to vegetal, human to animal, and human to angelic transmigration. As a complex and changing doctrine, metempsychosis gives us a well-placed window for viewing the complex and dynamic contours of Jewish thought in late fifteenth century Italy; as such, it enables us to evaluate Jewish thought in relation to non-Jewish Italian developments. This book addresses the problematic question of the roles and achievements of Jews who lived in Italy in the development of Renaissance culture in its Jewish and its Christian dimensions. "Throughout the book, Ogren demonstrates the scholarly pertinacity and intellectual and linguistic versatility that crosscultural intellectual history requires. He finds and digests the essential studies and obscure remarks, in modern scholarship as well as from the fifteenth century, that substantiate the argument, and he constantly strives to discern larger patterns. This research will reward scholars who follow his leads." - Arthur M. Lesley, in: Renaissance Quarterly 63.3 (2010)
Download or read book Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism written by Sarit Kattan Gribetz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the rabbis of late antiquity used time to define the boundaries of Jewish identity The rabbinic corpus begins with a question–“when?”—and is brimming with discussions about time and the relationship between people, God, and the hour. Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism explores the rhythms of time that animated the rabbinic world of late antiquity, revealing how rabbis conceptualized time as a way of constructing difference between themselves and imperial Rome, Jews and Christians, men and women, and human and divine. In each chapter, Sarit Kattan Gribetz explores a unique aspect of rabbinic discourse on time. She shows how the ancient rabbinic texts artfully subvert Roman imperialism by offering "rabbinic time" as an alternative to "Roman time." She examines rabbinic discourse about the Sabbath, demonstrating how the weekly day of rest marked "Jewish time" from "Christian time." Gribetz looks at gendered daily rituals, showing how rabbis created "men's time" and "women's time" by mandating certain rituals for men and others for women. She delves into rabbinic writings that reflect on how God spends time and how God's use of time relates to human beings, merging "divine time" with "human time." Finally, she traces the legacies of rabbinic constructions of time in the medieval and modern periods. Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism sheds new light on the central role that time played in the construction of Jewish identity, subjectivity, and theology during this transformative period in the history of Judaism.
Download or read book The Sabbath Soul written by Eitan Fishbane, PhD and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enter into the mystery of the Sabbath, into the wonder and light of the seventh day. "We live in a world dominated by speed and distraction, with demands for our attention at every turn.... We frequently forget the restorative blessing of stillness, our desperate need for rest ... a rest that brings us back to the center of existence, a calm that allows us to reconnect with the divine breath at the soul of All." —from the Introduction Enrich your spiritual experience of Shabbat by exploring the writings of mystical masters of Hasidism. Drawing from some of the earliest teachings in the family of the Ba'al Shem Tov through late nineteenth-century Poland and the homilies of the Sefat 'Emet, Eitan Fishbane evokes the Sabbath experience—from candle lighting and donning white clothing to the Friday night Kiddush and the act of sacred eating. Fishbane also translates and interprets a wide range of Hasidic sources previously unavailable in English that reflect the spiritual transformation that takes place on the seventh day—one that can shift your awareness into the realm that is all soul. Personal prayers of the Bratzlav (Breslov) Hasidic tradition express the spiritual dimension of Shabbat in the language of devotional and individual yearning.
Download or read book Jewish Virtue Ethics written by Geoffrey D. Claussen and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is good character? What are the traits of a good person? How should virtues be cultivated? How should vices be avoided? The history of Jewish literature is filled with reflection on questions of character and virtue such as these, reflecting a wide range of contexts and influences. Beginning with the Bible and culminating with twenty-first-century feminism and environmentalism, Jewish Virtue Ethics explores thirty-five influential Jewish approaches to character and virtue. Virtue ethics has been a burgeoning field of moral inquiry among academic philosophers in the postwar period. Although Jewish ethics has also flourished as an academic (and practical) field, attention to the role of virtue in Jewish thought has been underdeveloped. This volume seeks to illuminate its centrality not only for readers primarily interested in Jewish ethics but also for readers who take other approaches to virtue ethics, including within the Western virtue ethics tradition. The original essays written for this volume provide valuable sources for philosophical reflection.
