Background
Wolfson, Elliot Reuben was born on November 23, 1956 in Newark. Son of Wilfred Joseph and Zelda (Meisel) Wolfson.
(Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two po...)
Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two poems spanning several decades. Like paintings that attempt to render visible the invisible, the poems reflect Wolfson's interests in philosophy, the history of religions, and, in particular, the mystical dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Although explicit references to the divine are rarely found in the poems, they issue from an encounter with the mystery of transcendence, performatively embodying the dialectic of concealment and disclosure.Seeking to articulate the unsaying that makes possible all saying, a response always on the way, a word as yet unspoken, these poems can be imagined in liturgical terms. They do not utter words of conventional prayer but are a contemplative gaze at what eludes contemplation-a present that comes to be in the future awaiting its past. For Wolfson, the poem is an opening to time, which is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death. friday's hymnpour oil on my head,before the burning ends,let us rise to count the minutes,to dot the hours,let us rise to wake the childrenwho must bury the dead.night approaches day,neither black nor white,her sun is my moon.
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(These essays and poems by a leading scholar of Jewish mys...)
These essays and poems by a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism explore the connections between sexuality, divinity, and textuality, working with topics such as the gender of the Godhead, Apocalypse in the Kabbalah, the suffering of God, the hermeneutics of visionary experience, and other controversial features of Jewish thought. The poems and essays reverberate with and shed light on one another, creating a resonance that reinforces the depth and originality of Wolfson's thought.Wolfson has discerned that the poetic mode is more than a stylistic accessory to his Kabbalistic texts, for the poetic way opens modes of logic inaccessible to traditional philosophizing. Rather than maintaining strict dichotomy between philosophy and poetry, Wolfson offers a fruitful convergence. Here, as always, this brilliant thinker and master of paradox steeps his readers? minds in the glistening depths of Jewish mystical waters.-Barbara E. Galli, McGill University
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(Are mysticism and morality compatible or at odds with one...)
Are mysticism and morality compatible or at odds with one another? If mystical experience embraces a form of non-dual consciousness, then in such a state of mind, the regulative dichotomy so basic to ethical discretion would seemingly be transcended and the very foundation for ethical decisions undermined. Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism is an investigation of the relationship of the mystical and moral as it is expressed in the particular tradition of Jewish mysticism known as the Kabbalah. The particular themes discussed include the denigration of the non-Jew as the ontic other in kabbalistic anthropology and the eschatological crossing of that boundary anticipated in the instituition of religious conversion; the overcoming of the distinction between good and evil in the mystical experience of the underlying unity of all things; divine suffering and the ideal of spiritual poverty as the foundation for transmoral ethics and hypernomian lawfulness.
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(This book deals with the issue of gender in Jewish mystic...)
This book deals with the issue of gender in Jewish mysticism showing the thematic correlation of eroticism and esotericism that is central to the kabbalah. "A tour de force in terms of historical range, analytic boldness, textual sources, and interpretive constructions. An important contribution in every sense to Jewish thought and interpretation." -- Michael Fishbane, University of Chicago "Wolfson has a knack for selecting particularly difficult texts and elucidating them for the reader." -- Daniel Matt, Graduate Theological Union This book deals with aspects of the gender imaging of God in a variety of medieval kabbalistic sources. It provides the key to understanding the phenomenological structures of mystical experience as well as the thematic correlation of esotericism and eroticism that is central to the kabbalah. The author examines the role of gender utilizing current feminist studies and cultural anthropology. He explores the themes of the feminization of the Torah, the correlation of circumcision and vision of God, the phallocentric understanding of divine creation as a process of inscription mythologized as an act of sexual self-gratification, and the phenomenon of gender-crossing in kabbalistic myth and ritual. Collectively, the studies explore in great depth the androcentric phallocentrism that is characteristic of medieval Jewish mysticism.
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(This book explores the fundamental issues in Jewish mysti...)
This book explores the fundamental issues in Jewish mysticism and provides a taxonomy of the deep structures of thought that emerge from the texts.
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( A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in so...)
A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.
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( Renowned as one of the world’s most astute interpreters...)
Renowned as one of the world’s most astute interpreters of Kabbalistic texts, Elliot Wolfson offers an illuminating and original presentation of Kabbalah. Combining its wisdom with Western philosophical heritage from Plato to Heidegger and beyond, synergy guides his elucidation of the fundamentals of Jewish mysticism and shapes his taxonomy of Kabbalistic thought. An insightful collection of seminal essays written between 1986 and 1998, Luminal Darkness reveals the unmistakably poetic nature of this important scholar’s creative process, and delineates the evolution of his thinking on the role and importance of the Zohar in Kabbalistic tradition. Author Elliot R. Wolfson is the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew Studies at New York University. He is currently the Editor of the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and the author of several award-winning books on Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.
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(This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blen...)
This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole.Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom.Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism.Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson:Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field.-Speculum
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( This highly original, provocative, and poetic work expl...)
This highly original, provocative, and poetic work explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, Elliot R. Wolfson draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. 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. The framework for Wolfson’s examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of timepast, present, and future. By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be takenbetween, before, beyond.
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Wolfson, Elliot Reuben was born on November 23, 1956 in Newark. Son of Wilfred Joseph and Zelda (Meisel) Wolfson.
Bachelor, Master of Arts in Philosophical, Queens College, 1979. Master of Arts in Jewish Mysticism and Philosophical, Brandeis University, 1983. Doctor of Philosophy in Jewish Mysticism and Philosophical, Brandeis University, 1986.
Post-doctoral Mellon fellow Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1986-1987. Abraham Lieberman professor Hebrew and Judaic studies, professor Hebrew and Judaic Studies New York University, since 1987. Adjunct professor Columbia University, New York City, since 1989.
Visiting professor in Jewish Studies, Divinity School, University Chicago, 1992. Visiting professor Jewish Theological Seminary American, New York City, 1990-1992, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1992, Russian State University in the Humanities, 1995, Humanities Center John Hopkins University, 2005. Shoshana Shier Distinguished visiting professor, University Toronto, 1998.
Crown-Minnow visiting professor Theology and Jewish Studies, University Notre Dame, 2002. Brownstone visiting professor Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, 2003. Lynette S. Autrey visiting professor, Humanities Research Center, Rice University, 2007.
Professor Jewish Mysticism, Shandong University, Jiana, China, 2005. Also taught at Cornell University, Queens College, Princeton University, Jewish Theological Seminary American, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Hebrew Union College, Bard College and Columbia University.
(This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blen...)
(These essays and poems by a leading scholar of Jewish mys...)
(Are mysticism and morality compatible or at odds with one...)
( A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in so...)
(This book deals with the issue of gender in Jewish mystic...)
( Renowned as one of the world’s most astute interpreters...)
(This book explores the fundamental issues in Jewish mysti...)
( This highly original, provocative, and poetic work expl...)
(Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two po...)
Member Association for Jewish Studies, American Academy Religion (co-chair study of Judaism section since 1994), American Academy Jewish Research, World Union Jewish Studies, Medieval Academy American. Fellow American Academy Arts & Sciences.
Married Elizabeth Shapiro, September 24, 1978. Children: Elijah Gabriel, Josiah Abraham.