Lurianic Kabbalah

In this paper, I seek to present the range of issues involved in the efforts of sixteenth-century kabbalists to understand the nature of selfhood, and the paths prescribed for the formation of an ideal life. I reflect on the mystical writings of Moshe Cordovero, Eliyahu de Vidas, and Hayyim Vital-probing their conceptions of core identity, the polarity between body and soul, and the ethical guidance for a life well lived. In so doing, I consider the following additional themes, and their relation to the matrix of self-formation and religious identity: reincarnation and rebirth; the virtue of humility and self-effacement; the cultivation of wisdom; ideals of piety and prophetic experience; asceticism; and the spiritual transcendence of desire. In presenting this wide range of constituent themes, I argue that sixteenth-century kabbalists understood the soul to be the ultimate marker of personal identity (nuanced and complicated by the doctrine of reincarnation), and that they formulated a vision of an ideal ethics in which the human being functions as an earthly vessel for the divine presence. What is more, the preparation of that vessel required a degree of humility so extreme that the attainment of ideal personhood ultimately involved the effacement of that very identity.

Born in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, Moses Zacuto (Moshe Zacut) belongs among the most prolific Jewish figures of his time. He is best known for a wealth of creative work in a wide variety of fields: poetry and drama, halacha, as well as extensive Kabbalistic writings. Zacuto also had a special interest in magical manuscripts and the uses of divine names, which he collected into a lexicon known today as Shorshei HaShemot. Zacuto left Amsterdam while young and lived in Eastern Europe before moving to Italy. In this article, we demonstrate that Zacuto had already begun to construct this vast lexicographical project in Amsterdam, and that those beginnings are best understood against the background of the magical and Kabbalistic manuscripts available in early seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

The ontologic framework of Fundamental Awareness proposed here assumes that non-dual Awareness is foundational to the universe, not arising from the interactions or structures of higher level phenomena. The framework allows comparison and integration of views from the three investigative domains concerned with the understanding nature of consciousness: science, philosophy, and metaphysics. In this framework, Awareness is the underlying reality, not reducible to anything else. Awareness and existence are the same. As such, the universe is non-material, self-organizing throughout, a holarchy of complementary, process driven, recursive interactions. The universe is both its own first observer and subject. Considering the world to be non-material and comprised, a priori, of Awareness is to privilege information over materiality, action over agency and to understand that qualia are not a “hard problem”, but the foundational elements of all existence. These views fully reflect main stream Western philosophical traditions, insights from culturally diverse contemplative and mystical traditions, and are in keeping with current scientific thinking, expressible mathematically.

The paper attempts to reassess the fundamentally paradoxical position of Ernst Bloch in 20th century philosophy in the light of the Marranic condition. Indebted, among others, to Jewish heritage and Christian tradition, Bloch considered himself primarily a Marxist. Bloch's uniqueness consists in the stunning equiponderance of the currents he drew from. Contrary to a classic model of modern Jewish philosophy, inaugurated by Hermann Cohen, Bloch's thinking does not allow of easy juxtaposition of " sources " with languages into which they were translated. In this sense, Bloch cannot be easily compared to Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas or even Walter Benjamin (although he bore some striking similarities with the latter). His position at least partly stems from a specific form of directness with which he often used these languages, composing his philosophy in quite an anachronist manner. For this reason his thinking—in itself " die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen " , as one of his key concepts theorises—is a very modern, internally incoherent space of cross-fertilising inspirations. The paper demonstrates two levels on which Bloch's indebtedness to Judaism might be analysed and then reassesses his Marxist affiliations as a kind of modern faith which, in a specifically Marranic manner, seals the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

L’article a pour sujet la personnalité extraordinaire du kabbaliste le Rabbin Levi Isaac Krakovsky (1891–1966), un des étudiants oubliés du Rabbin Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1955). Krakovsky diffusait l’enseignement de son maître en Amérique en anglais, écrivait des douzaines de livres et essayait d’établir des yeshivot de Kabbalistes. Contrairement à son maître, il présentait un enseignement exotérique et une vision de diffusion de la Kabbale dans le monde entier. Son influence était minime, mais un de ses élèves était Shraga Philip Berg qui continuait son chemin et le complétait de plusieurs points de vue. L’article se base sur de riches matières archivales, parmi lesquelles de longues essays de l’auteur en manuscrit qui sont décrits ici pour la premiere fois. D’une telle façon, nous décrivons le dévelopment de la Kabbale en Amérique du début du vingtième siècle jusqu’ aujourd’hui.

In the following article we will examine at length some of the dynamics by which R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad—the renowned Ben Ish Hai (1834–1909) - integrated Kabbalah into daily life, and the complex way that he combined the teachings of the Rashash with simplified, esoteric practices meant for the general public. Needless to say, the relationship between the Kabbalists of Jerusalem and R. Yosef Hayyim illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Kabbalah in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

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One of the more astounding books produced by Bratslav Hasidism is Liqquṭei tefilot (1822–1827), composed by R. Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, which established a whole new genre in Bratslav literature. This article discusses the book's genesis, publication, and primary goals, as well as the controversy it generated. The new Bratslav theology that emerged after the death of Rabbi Naḥman led to disputes, both internal and external, over the role and character of R. Nathan. Examining this particularly obscure chapter in the early history of Bratslav Hasidism sheds light on the movement as it exists today in all its diversity, both ideological and social. Keywords Bratslav Hasidism – Hasidism – Jewish mysticism – Kabbalah

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The article explores the relationship between the symbolic and religious valorization of the feminine principle and the emancipating ideas of Sabbatean and Frankist messianism (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Without minimizing the influence of the surrounding cultures or the role played by the social upheaval affecting the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, it provides evidence to support the thesis that these ideas, unusual or even revolutionary for their time, were rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition. Critical elements of that tradition were : its aspiration for the liberation of the divine female element ; soteriological equality between the masculine and feminine principles ; and,the feminization of the Messianic figure.

So it is that on a Night Filled with Distant Thunder, and during a Cryptic Morning Hidden within a Subtle Kiss of Dew, I found myself upon a Path wherein I Sought to Discover an Answer, to Extract a Seed of Reasoning from some Enigmatic Clue, for such is both the Task and Duty Required of Truth... Please! If you would, my Mother of Temperance and Daughter of Providence, my Sister of Fortitude and Bride of Justice, those Holy Ones who Dwell in the Palace of Virtues, Please... Reveal to me what it Truly Means when Our Lord Above Asks of Every Living Soul Below to, "Set Me as a Seal upon your Heart!"  Come and See!

This paper proceeds from the concurrent interpretation of two distinct, apparently unrelated disciplinary contexts, at the crossroads of the positivism of archaeology and the imaginary world of literature. The character of the reciprocal relationship between megalithism in Neolithic Portugal and the writings of the twentieth-century author, James Joyce, is transfigured through the introduction of a third element of interpretation, a deeply paradoxical current of Jewish thought, with messianic dimensions, antithetical to the forces of mythic reconciliation present in Joyce's fiction and in archaeological conceptions of 'symbolic systems' in antiquity, which tend to erase the innumerable singulars of experience. Applying a cryptotheologically-inflected exegesis immanent to the materials of text and archaeology in the light of their respective orientation to the same astral phenomenon, I seek to generate insights unanticipated within interpretations restricted to the disciplinary boundaries, theories and methodologies of archaeology and literary criticism as discrete entities. Within allegorised readings of archaeology and an archaeologicised reading of Joyce's texts I bring into play non-synchronous elements which both disrupt the idealised harmonies of social and religious conformity and illuminate hitherto unseen connections between diverse, seemingly incommensurable contexts, beyond the discursive conventions of detached objectivity, without relinquishing irreduceible remnants to a totalising synthesis.

In contrast to previous attempts to establish a direct relation between Freud and Kabbalah, this article argues for an indirect relationship mediated by way of Schelling's philosophy. My claim is that Freud's Oedipus complex partly originated in Schelling's idea of God's contraction, which he arguably derived from the Lurianic doctrine of zimzum. Furthermore, in thinking of the oedipal complex, and of repression more generally, as a late development of the Lurianic and Schellingian imagination of what I call "productive negativity," I suggest that an important conceptual horizon is opened for the Freudian concept, one that transcends the widespread but narrow formulation of repression as a retroactive and regressive mental mechanism.

Recent decades have witnessed a broad scholarly discussion of the cultural influences of the printing press Invention. The core of this revolved around the new technological influence on the concept of knowledge, its methods of dispersion, and on social changes that it engendered in the 16th century, when it became an affordable widespread technology. This article presents the way in which the spread of the printing press influenced conceptual paradigms of Kabbalists in general, and Lurianic Kabbalists from Sarug’s tradition in particular. These Kabbalists exchanged the traditional conception of creation as an act of writing, within the conception of the world as a written text, for conceptions of creation as a printing act and the world as a printed text. I show how the professional term ‘letterpress printing’ entered these Kabbalists’ descriptions of divine emanation, alongside their conceptualization of printing as a divine activity, as writing had been conceptualized previously.

Cosmological descriptions and interpretations of the process of creation in kabbalistic literature deeply influenced various conceptual issues, especially the definition of “history.” Sefer Ha-Temuna, which first appeared in Byzantium over the course of the 14th century, presents a unique concept of history, in which the entire world operates according to a precise and predetermined model: The Sabbatical theory (Hebrew: Torat ha-shemitot). Its approach was criticized by the Safed Kabbalists in the 16th century. This article attempts to present how, despite the harsh opposition to it, this idea continued to influence Eastern European Kabbalists in later generations.
Keywords: Kabbalah, Lurianic Kabbalah, Moshe Cordovero, Byzantium, Eastern Europe, Sefer Ha-Temuna, Reincarnation.
This article is a product of my work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Ludmer International Project on the Jewish Heritage of Galicia and Bukovina, University of Haifa, and was written with the support of the Jewish Galicia and Bukovina Organization. This research was also supported by the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and Eastern European Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I would like to thank Prof. Zeev Gries, Dr. Yoed Kadary, and Mr. Avinoam Stilman for reading a draft of the article and adding their important comments. The article is an expanded and revised version of an article published in Hebrew: “Two Historical Conceptions in Kabbalah: Between Safed and Byzantine Kabbalah,” Judaica Petropolitana 11 (2019): 73–86.

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This article traces the evolution of a kabbalistic prayer supplication that was designed to purify male Jews from pollution caused by improper seminal emission. In doing so, it focuses on the metaphysical rationale behind it, its function, and its metamorphosis from a highly technical practice into a mainstream devotional practice. It addresses how notions of sexual pollution (qeri) were contextualized in Lurianic Kabbalah and how they were later embedded in kabbalistic manuals and prayer books. Furthermore, the article examines Jewish-Christian and inner- Jewish debates that emerged in connection with the effects of spilling semen in vain. Special attention is paid to possible social factors that may have impacted the increased anxiety about male bodily fluids and “misguided” desires. In addition to the available research on the theological and general historical background of the prohibition of wasting seed, the following analysis offers a microhistory of this short yet highly influential text.

Rabbi Sasson ben Mordechai Shandukh was one of the leaders of the renewed Jewish community in Baghdad in the second half of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the literary heritage left by Rabbi Sasson Shandukh, which includes moral literature, liturgical poems, halakhic literature and prominent Kabbalistic literature, are the unique Kabbalistic ilanot (rotuli “trees”) he created. The four long rotuli that he created that have reached us are the subject of this article. The kabbalistic ilanot of Shandukh are distinctive for their great length, their eclectic sources, for their interpretation of the Lurianic theory of emanation, and for their anthropomorphic representations of divine faces, drawn in accordance with the teachings of the famed Safed kabbalist R. Isaac Luria.

The Culture of Victimhood
The Hagar Complex
In rejecting Hagar’s tears, biblical consciousness speaks with great power to the epidemic of victimhood that threatens to cripple much of what is great and good in Western society. Hagar is abused. She is hurt. She is a victim. And Hagar has power. She has options. She can turn fate into destiny. She can embrace the desert. Her tears become not the ritual bath of her purification but the swamp of her drowning. She falls prey to the Hagar complex of victim identity.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Naftali of Ropshitz, a Hassidic Zen master of sorts, was once called upon to attempt an intervention with the son of a Polish nobleman.
For some reason, the boy has been crying nonstop. He refuses to be comforted. No one is quite sure what is the source of his pain. Days have gone by, and he simply continues to cry. All the great physicians and healers have been brought in to stop the boy’s crying and restore him to the land of the living—what we moderns like to call functionality.
None succeed.

The aim of this article is to explore the evolution of the concept of ‘mutual responsibility’ from the biblical and Talmudic eras to medieval Kabbalistic literature, and to analyse the notion of arvut and its implications through the prism of gender. I suggest that whereas in the Bible and in rabbinic literature the ‘negative’ aspect of mutual responsibility was emphasized, with a focus on one’s obligation to take responsibility for another’s sins or for his soul, in Kabbalistic literature metaphysical and ‘positive’ aspects of mutual responsibility were developed. Since the Godhead is fashioned as an anthropomorphic image, both men and women carry the burden of mutual responsibility in the celestial realm. Yet, despite the theosophical development that strengthened the theurgic place of women in mystical life, it appears that oppressive aspects of the notion also appeared in Kabbalistic thought. These aspects claimed that arvut existed only between the members of the male group, although ‘all Israel are limbs [evarim] of one another’ and ‘parts of one body’. In the course of the article, I discuss the connection between arvut and the doctrine of gilgul, and other practices such as the Pilgrimage Festival, which illustrates the metaphysical idea of responsibility.

The Tears of Hagar.
“Hear my cry. Do not respond to my tears with silence.” —Psalms 39:13
The second voice we turn our attention to in the crying symphony of Rosh Hashanah is that of Hagar. The context of her tears is crisis and motherhood. Her tears are bound up with her child. As the stories of our symphony unfold, we will discover that this is a context shared by many of the key players in our drama. Hagar, Sarah, Rachel, Chanah, and, of course, Sisera’s mother, with whom we danced in the previous chapter. Each of these women represents a different face of the Shechinah; each is a mother struggling with family drama that takes place in the cracks between the generations. This is not accidental, as family is the crucible of our lives. It is there, in the arena of family, that we touch most intensely the primal world of tears.
Unlike the story of Sisera’s mother, the story of Hagar crying is not one that transcends the personal for the transpersonal, but rather it is a story at whose core stands a rejection of Hagar’s own story; a rejection of the personal and a reversion to the pre-personal that is born of Hagar’s radical alienation and pain. It is a rejection that is rejected by biblical consciousness itself, and which therefore invites, even demands, that Hagar rise to claim her story.

The chapter attempts to examine philosophically the ambiguous status of the concept of tsimtsum in modern Jewish philosophy. On the one hand, the tsimtsum – despite its considerable influence both within and outside the Jewish world – seems to be just one of many notable ideas in the history of Jewish thinking; its origins and development might be reconstructed with great precision, as demonstrated by Christoph Schulte in his book Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung. On the other hand, for many thinkers (with the key example of Gershom Scholem) the tsimtsum was an idea whose content bore an uncanny resemblance to the position and emergence of modernity. Withdrawal of divine presence and “the void of revelation”, identifiable as features of the modern era, could be easily linked with the concept of tsimtsum in its atheological interpretation. In this regard the tsimtsum is not just a historical concept, but primarily a powerful and thought-provoking symbol of relations between modernity and Jewish philosophy.
The chapter enquires into this twofold functioning of the tsimtsum as part of a broader problem, namely the relation of modern philosophy to its inherent crisis triggered by the discovery of historicity. It might be argued that continental modern philosophy is split into two approaches: the first one actively refers to history as a part of philosophical riddle (this approach is best exemplified by Hegel and Heidegger), whereas the second one abstains from speculating on meanings of history and prefers perceiving history as neutral framework within which different philosophical ideas have origins and development (this approach emerged in opposition to Hegelianism and gave rise to history of ideas). Both these approaches are also reflected in modern Jewish philosophy: one can either treat the development of Jewish thought in the modern, secular era as a philosophical riddle (like Scholem did) or perceive only factual relations between various Jewish philosophies created in modernity.
In this sense, in the deadlock between the not-so-much-explaining, but sober historical approach and the quasi-metaphysical (however implicit and cautious) assumption of some affinity between the tsimtsum and modernity, Jewish philosophy would share the fate of general modern philosophy. The chapter attempts to demonstrate both inherent limits of both approaches and their mutual entanglement, using the Freudian term of Traumnabel (“dream’s navel”). Tsimtsum functions as the Traumnabel of modern Jewish philosophy, namely as an obscure negative joint of history and thinking.

Using the concept of Traumnabel, I present this affinity as a threshold of differentiation between the concept and its history. Tsimtsum is an idea which, once conceived, deforms the very dimension of history in which we would like to perceive it. It is neither just a theological and philosophical concept nor a description of an event which might stand at the dawn of modernity. It is. When we ‘use’ it, history becomes real in all contradictory meanings of this word.

The concept of tsimtsum is the most significant concept of recent Jewish thought, both within literature addressed to Jews and within philosophy more generally conceived. Yet it is all too often construed in contemporary work in a misleading way because of the influence of Gershom Scholem.  I argue that Scholem’s proposal that “tsimtsum” be translated as “withdrawal” and that the kabbalists inverted the meaning of the term in its midrashic use is tendentious. There is no reason to abandon the standard translation of “tsimtsum” as “contraction” in the sense of concentration, and the scriptural-midrashic tradition remains essential background for understanding the concept.  To accept Scholem’s translation proposal is to close oneself to much of the concept’s significance, and to close oneself, not only to the mainstream of Jewish thought over the last four centuries, but also to the most explicit version of tsimtsum in the post-Kantian tradition, which is to be found in the work of Schelling.

The Stormy Life of Am Ha'arets, or How Jacob Won the Virgin. Jacob Frank's Words of the Lord as a Picaresque Novel The aim of this essay is to present Jacob Frank's Words of the Lord as the first (and perhaps the last) Polish picaresque novel which abounds in semi-fantastical, kabbalah-inspired stories, depicting a stormy life of a protagonist who calls himself an "am ha'arets" (a man of the land or a village idiot in Hebrew) and brags of his infinite and supranatural vitality that helps him to overcome all adversities. The essay considers a hypothesis formulated by Yirmiyahu Yovel, according to which the picaro novel emerged in 16th century Spain, in the milieu of the Marranos or conversos, i.e. the Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity, but usually retained some elements of their Judaic faith undercover. This hypothesis seems to fit perfectly well to Jacob Frank's gadki (stories) as he himself can be regarded as the paradigmatic Marrano: a willing convert to Catholicism, whose aim was to "messianize" the Christian religion from within. The essay ends with a comparison of Frank's messianic ambitions to Jacques Derrida whose messianicite operates on a similar Marrano basis.

Demonstrates how the Sefer Yetzirah's GLGL-Wheel is derived mathematically from clues encoded in the ancient text. The Wheel is composed of 231 'gates' and 462 'paths'. Within the Wheel exists a spiral pathway consisting of 441 paths that are referred to as the Teli Serpent spiral. The remaining 21 paths constitute a central mandala called the LB Heart mandala.

The article reinterprets 'The Iron Tracks' by Aharon Appelfeld as a work of Lurianic Kabbalah adapted to the world after the Shoah. It is a reality of collapsed transcendence in which no divinity or ethics hold universal validity. As in Lurianism, this world contains entrapped sparks of former transcendence: dispersed Jewish survivors, artefacts of Jewish life and a Jewish Communist organization. Appelfeld portrays a post-survival world based on permanent repetition and unrepented guilt. The gist of his novel, however, lies in the slim possibility of redemption which the main protagonist, Erwin Siegelbaum, opens up with an act of vengeance on a war criminal.

In the first part of the paper the author focuses on the way the great historian and thinker Gershom Scholem understood the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum (i.e. divine contraction as the first act of creation) as the key category of Jewish theology. Next, he combines the conceptual structure emerging from the Scholemian understanding of tsimtsum with Jacques Derrida's analysis of space. He suggests that the Platonic notion of khora as read by Derrida can be identified with the idea of tehiru, i.e. the void that comes into existence as a result of divine contraction. In the second part of the paper the author extends the equation even further by pointing out how the notion of khora-tehiru can be fruitfully combined with the idea of the "Freudian void," the space created by the separation of the mother from the child in Freudian analysis of the emergence of the human subject. One of the benefits of such a conceptual merge is that the Scholemian/Derridean/Freudian space thus understood can be seen as permeated with a complex affective and libidinal dynamic. Drawing on various post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists (Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Green), the author proceeds to analyze this dynamic, focusing on the notions of mourning, anxiety and desire.

The Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment,” is often considered to be a secularizing trend within modern European Judaism. Yet as recent studies have begun to show, this characterization ignores the Romantic and religious attitudes of many Haskalah authors (maskilim). This article reassesses the Haskalah’s relationship to esotericism and Kabbalah by analyzing the life and work of Elyakim Getzel Hamilzahgi (1780–1854), a Galician maskil with a deep commitment to Kabbalistic study. Hamilzahgi’s pioneering textual criticism of Kabbalistic texts, particularly the Zohar, countered the attitudes of Western European scholars and Eastern European Hasidim alike. His scholarship aimed to purify Kabbalah from corruption and to render it a source for a renewal of Jewish religious culture.

This article reexamines the origins and significance of the concept of the Dybbuk. The conclusions are that it begins in Safed and is related to the question of Rabbi Issac Luria's religious authority. The subsequent history of the concept is problematic and a majority of the later stories may be literary constructs that need further study.

Beinhaltet der Deutsche Idealismus einen " heimlichen Antisemitismus " , wie Michael Mack behauptet, oder ist er einem kabbalistischen Erbe verpflichtet, wie Jürgen Habermas meint? Beide Behauptungen enthalten ein Körnchen Wahrheit. Vom christlichen Anti-Judaismus übernehmen Kant, Fichte, Schelling und Hegel den Gebrauch des Begriffs " Judaismus " , um zunächst einen maximalen Span-nungsmoment der Dialektik zu bezeichnen – dem geschichtlichen Gipfelpunkt verlockend nahe, aber zugleich frustrierend fern. Erst in zweiter Linie bezeichnet " Judaismus " eine lebendige post-biblische Religion. Solche Urteile über den Judaismus können einzig und allein auf das Alte Testament gegründet und unmit-telbar auf zeitgenössische Juden angewendet werden. Somit interpretieren auch Kant, Fichte, Schelling und Hegel den Judaismus mit Hilfe ihres spezifischen Kon-zepts von Dialektik. Während Schelling und Hegel einen Augustinischen, relativ milden Anti-Judaismus vertreten, ermöglicht Kant eine neo-markionistische Eli-minierung des Judaismus – eine Möglichkeit, die Fichte, den Antisemitismus vor-wegnehmend, dann realisiert. Eine aufmerksame Betrachtung des rabbinischen Judaismus lässt die Kritik der Deutschen Idealisten indessen als fragwürdig erscheinen. Ihre Ansicht des Absoluten als einer selbstverneinenden Negativität ist der lurianischen Kabbala verpflichtet. Allerdings werden kabbalistische Ideen in der christlichen Kabbalistik üblicherweise entweder ins biblische Altertum zurück-versetzt oder als christlich vereinnahmt. Philosophen, die sich mit der Tradition des Deutschen Idealismus befassen, sollten auf die Notwendigkeit einer Revision sol-cher Urteile reflektieren, um die Fallstricke des Anti-Judaismus zu vermeiden und die fruchtbare Beziehung der Philosophie zum Judaismus anerkennen.

Both R. Isaac Luria and R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson visited the graves of their respective "spiritual mentors." In the case of Luria it was R. Simeon bar Yohai. In the case of Schneerson it was his father-in-law. In both cases the motivation was similar.

In my reading of sections of this book, Chaim (Hayyim) Vital’s superior soul-type, (which he refers to as the neshomah hadasha or neshoma elyonah)  seems similar to the tragic hero of the Hellenic and Elizabethan theater. Both the tragic hero and Vital’s master soul are larger-than life daring personalities, who are beset by a major flaw that sometimes brings about their downfall.... Vital’s conviction that the Kabbalist is responsible to redeem God, the cosmos, the Jewish people, and his own soul through bold, strenuous, dangerous acts of contemplative activity imbues his writing with a tone of epic heroism.

Resumen: Este artículo trata de los contemporáneos movimientos de creencias cuya piedra angular se basa en la tradición de la Kabbalah, considerando las transformaciones que los mismos han vivido en nuestra alta modernidad. Analizamos estos movimientos como sujetos productores de los actuales procesos de globalización, en la medida que el mundo global e interconectado constituye una de las principales justificativas tanto de sus actuales características como de sus acciones. Desde esta mirada, se indaga el movimiento cabalista Bnei Baruch y su singular recorrido, considerando su relación con la tradición de la Kabbalah y su actual puesta en escena por medio de las narrativas generadas en espacios virtuales y reales.
Palabras claves: Modernidad. Globalización. Kabbalah. Bnei Baruch.
Abstract: This article deals with the contemporary movements of beliefs whose cornerstone is based on the Kabbalah tradition, considering the transformations they have experienced in our high modernity. We analyze these movements as producing subjects of the current processes of globalization, to the extent that the globalized and interconnected world constitutes one of the main justifications both of their current characteristics and their actions. From this viewpoint the Kabbalist movement Bnei Baruch and its singular journey are analized, considering its relationship with the Kabbalah tradition and its actual staging through the narratives generated in virtual and real spaces.
Keywords: Modernity. Globalisation. Kabbalah. Bnei Baruch.

Gershom Scholem in Deutschland
Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit
Hrsg. v. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok u. Matthias Morgenstern

Die Biographie des in Berlin geborenen und ab 1923 in Jerusalem lebenden Kabbala-Forschers Gershom Gerhard Scholem ist von den Katastrophen und Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt. Im Horizont des für Scholem ambivalenten deutsch-jüdischen Verhältnisses nehmen die Autoren des Bandes seinen Werdegang im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik in den Blick sowie die Bedeutung, die er als israelischer Gesprächspartner für die Zeitgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland hatte. Die Beziehungen zu Walter Benjamin und Hannah Arendt, zu dem Theologen Otto Michel und dem Verleger Siegfried Unseld dokumentieren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Scholems Verbindung zu Deutschland, die ihn auch bei persönlicher Lyrik und sogar bei seiner wissenschaftlichen Prosa zur jüdischen Mystik begleitete.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ