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File Format | PDF
File Size | 2.98 MB
Pages | 259
Language | English
Category | Judaism
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Description: The oxymoronic title of Moshe !del's dense but lucid study of Kabbalah and of what Arthur Lovejoy called the Great Chain of Being is an epitome of !del's lifelong enterprise. Never a formal student of Gershom Scholem (though they had some conversations about Kabbalah), Idel has developed into Scholem's leading revisionist. I recall Robert Alter (no more a scholar of Kabbalah than I am) angrily chiding Idel, in a book review, for having had the audacity to deviate from Scholem's Kabbalah. Doubtless, some of Scholem's own students have also expressed their displeasure with Idel. Chained by Scholem's strong enchantments, his more conventional disciples have sought to build a hedge around what they consider to be his Torah.
Born exactly half-a-century after Scholem, Idel was too young to have been a
student of the sage, who became an Emeritus Professor in 1965, when Idel was scarcely eighteen. I wonder how they would have been together, which I say from the stance both of a Scholem idolator and a fierce Idel admirer. The relation between these 'strong poets' of Kabbalah is governed by what I have termed the revisionary ratio of Tessera, or antithetical completion. Idel quests, in his Kabbalah, for the origins of an archaic Hebrew religion, of which Gnosticism may be only a belated shadow. In a number of encounters with Scholem - in Jerusalem, New Haven, and New York City - I listened in fascination to his speculations, which ranged from Walt Whitman to a denial of Platonic and Egyptian influences upon any phases of the religion of the Jews. Though early Kabbalah seems as Neo-Platonist as does Philo, Scholem regarded this as a misfortune, even as he seemed irked by the Platonic influx into Second Century Judaism.
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Enchanted chains: techniques and rituals in Jewish mysticism
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